From Free Speech to Free Palestine: Six Decades of Student Protest

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An American college student looked out at a sea of protesters and spoke of a machine that had grown so "odious" that it had left people of good will little choice. There must be protest.

"You've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop," he said. Soon the students would flood into a campus administration building.

That scene played out 60 years ago at the University of California, Berkeley. The words were directed at the university leadership, and referring to its restrictions on campus political activity. But the speech, from the student leader Mario Savio, and the sit-in that followed could have happened yesterday.

The protests against Israel's war in Gaza that have erupted on college campuses around the United States are merely the latest in a tradition of student-led, left-leaning activism dating back at least to the civil rights and anti-Vietnam War protests of the 1960s.

Often, the protests have played out on college campuses, and sometimes in the same building as previous years: Hamilton Hall at Columbia University, was taken over by students in the protests of 1968 as well as this past week and at least four times in between. Sometimes the protests have seemed to be off-campus adaptations, like the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations of 2011 or the racial justice demonstrations of recent years.

Like today's protests, most of the older movements were highly polarizing. Some observers at the time praised protesters for their courage and idealism, while others criticized them for being misguided, self-indulgent or guilty of flirting with — or embracing — irresponsible and even dangerous rhetoric and ideas.

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