Student Power   

SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE FILE PHOTO BY PETER BREINIG

Tikkun Magazine, January/February 2010

Student Power

FREEDOM'S ORATOR: MARIO SAVIO AND THE RADICAL LEGACY OF THE 1960S
by Robert Cohen
Oxford University Press, 2009

Review by Bettina Aptheker

Just before Thanksgiving 2009, regents of the University of California, in defiance of unanimous faculty and student opposition, voted to raise fees for admission to University of California schools by 32 percent. Even with financial aid programs proposed by the UC President's Office, this fee increase will force many students to withdraw from school and many others to never seek admission. As is so often the case in such situations, it is students of color who will be particularly impacted in a state in which 57.4 percent of the population -- an absolute majority -- are people of color. The regents' actions precipitated rolling waves of protests, including sit-ins, by thousands of students on five campuses. At UC Berkeley, police in full riot gear were particularly and gratuitously violent, and several students were seriously injured.

Students in today's protests draw upon a rich history of student activism in the 1960s, some of which is described in this excellent biography of Mario Savio, who led the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley in 1964. This biography could not be more relevant or more prescient in its historical sweep and in the issues galvanizing student activists a generation ago.

On December 2, 1964, more than a thousand students under the leadership of the Free Speech Movement occupied Sproul Hall, the administration building at the University of California, Berkeley. They were protesting restrictions on freedom of speech that the regents had enforced to prevent student participation in the civil rights movement, especially in the San Francisco Bay Area. The previous spring, students had successfully mobilized massive protests against the widespread racial discrimination in hiring practices in the hotel industry, auto sales, and banking. Within two weeks of the December 2 sit-in, the regents reluctantly passed a resolution stating that henceforth their regulations "would not go beyond the purview of the First and Fourteenth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution." They were forced to do this after an overwhelming majority of UC Berkeley faculty voted to support the Free Speech Movement, and graduate students and staff went out on a strike sanctioned by the Labor Council. Twenty thousand students attended the consequent victory rally.

The Free Speech Movement sent shock waves through campuses across the country and the world, resulting in changes in university regulations and educational access, teach-ins against the war in Vietnam, and (within three years) the historic, pro-democracy student uprisings in Paris and Prague, Mexico City and Santiago. Among the UC Berkeley students who led and participated in the Free Speech Movement were Jack Weinberg, who is now an international leader of Greenpeace; Jackie Goldberg, who until her recent retirement was a member of the California State Legislature; Rabbi Michael Lerner, now editor of Tikkun; and Susan Griffin, feminist author of a dozen best-selling books. Hundreds of others, steeled in the movement's fires, have gone on to distinguished professional careers in every imaginable field and have become partisans for progressive and radical social change. Although this was very much a collective, democratic movement fashioned after the participatory democracy of the Southern Civil Rights Movement, our acknowledged leader was Mario Savio, a twenty-one-year-old philosophy major and veteran of the 1964 Mississippi Freedom Summer Project.

In this book Robert Cohen has written a definitive biography of Mario Savio. He accomplishes the complex task of interweaving Mario's personal story with that of his political engagements, and deftly ties both to the history of the peace and social justice movements that followed. Among Cohen's many strengths as a biographer is his almost uncanny ability to understand Savio's motivations, to see the goodness of his heart, and to honestly consider the psychological demons Savio worked so hard to overcome.

Mario was wounded in childhood by, among many things, sexual abuse. He stammered so badly that he required years of speech therapy. He was a lapsed Catholic who had left the church but deeply believed in the compassion of Jesus and the most radical traditions of liberation theology. As Cohen accurately shows, Mario shunned ideological dogma and celebrity and rebuked administrative incompetence and arrogance during his leadership of the Free Speech Movement. He went on to become a brilliant theoretical physicist for whom a theorem was named. He was a loving husband, an adoring father, and a devoted friend. He died tragically and prematurely in November 1996, well before his sixtieth birthday, while campaigning to stop a proposed hike in student fees at Sonoma State University, where he was a lecturer in mathematics, physics, and philosophy.

In courageously discussing issues of child sexual abuse, Cohen exemplifies a feminist awareness of the ways in which the personal and the political are intertwined. And when Savio engaged in a political or personal struggle, as Cohen demonstrates, he studied relevant experiences, spiritual practices, theories and laws, legislative mandates, and university regulations all with uncommon attention, perceiving the logic behind them and analyzing their personal, political, economic, and social implications. Mario's eloquence, his belief in goodness and redemption, his personal horror at the suffering he saw in pictures of the Holocaust from his post-World War II childhood, and that he witnessed in the Mississippi in the 1960s, Vietnam in the 1970s, Nicaragua in the 1980s, and Latino/Chicano immigrant communities in California in the 1990s, shaped his life. Cohen includes one hundred pages of Mario's speeches and writings, and we come to appreciate them as a model of passionate intelligence. They also educate us so that we can see the ways in which systems of domination, hierarchy, greed, and aggression are intertwined.

Robert Cohen's biography of Mario Savio is earnest, comprehensive, and written as a compelling narrative that does justice to its subject. For this we can all be profoundly grateful.

Bettina Aptheker co-led the Free Speech Movement as a member of its steering committee. She is Distinguished Professor of Feminist Studies and History at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her most recent book is a memoir, Intimate Politics: How I Grew Up Red, Fought for Free Speech, and Became a Feminist Rebel. (Seal Press, 2006).

Source Citation

Aptheker, Bettina. 2010. Student Power. Tikkun 25(1): 62.