What led to the FSM?
by Michael Rossman
(How we approach this history
here.)
Though it flared like a sudden,
isolated nova in the mass media, and is too often treated so in histories, the sudden
flowering of the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley was an organic climax to seven years of
conflict between a newly-developing movement of student activism and an often-constraining
university administration. In this development, the rise of the New Left was exemplified;
and the crucial moment of the FSM announced its mutation into the diversity of movements
developing during the next decade. In this historical moment also, long-developing changes
in the institutions and character of American higher education, and long-brewing conflicts
with personal and social needs, were brought to open crisis, initiating complex movements
of attempted reform. Even broader and deeper views of what was involved and at stake in
the FSM have been advanced.
[The FSM's political
history]
The FSM itself prepared a history of the
conflict leading to this crisis, in a massive, collective study titled
"Administrative Pressures and Student Political Activity at [Berkeley]." Though
unashamedly selective, APSPAB was nearly comprehensive, and presented the strongest
objective evidence for the FSM's case. In effect, the study called on the collective
memory of the activist community to recount the history of its political grievance with
the university's administration. In doing so, since the conflict was so fundamental, it
necessarily recounted most of its own history -- which is to say, that our sprawling study
retold nearly the whole story (or familial myth) of the rise of the New Left at Berkeley,
in the seminal cradle of the Bay Area and its progressive traditions.
Since APSPAB was produced in seventeen frantic
days, as a research project under battle conditions, its findings amount simply to the raw
ore of history, with many substantial nuggets. Seen at this distance, our study's
perspectives seem even more narrowly political than they seemed then -- not simply because
its purpose was so, but because it was conceived and executed early in the conflict, in
the very moment that we were awakening to our educational discontents but had not yet
voiced them; and in the pregnant historical instant in which our grasp of what was
"political" began to broaden dramatically.
We present APSPAB here not only as an historical
document, but as a way of organizing a fuller account of the FSM's traditional political
history and the heritage of social activism at Berkeley. To its documents on each theme,
we mean to link others that flesh out the details of local history and their consequence,
from differing perspectives; and others that relate this local history to the broader
story of political and social movements in America. In this effort, our patchwork of local
story is meant to join online with many other growing patches of story from political,
social, and cultural movements, in a collective tapestry of collective history. We will
welcome advice in selecting documents beyond those we so far offer, and help in making
them accessible.
[The FSM's educational
history]
We have no way of our own, so natural and
detailed, to present the educational history of the FSM -- the history of the developments
and tensions in institutional education, focussed on the Berkeley campus, that equally
prepared the FSM, and were profoundly affected by its consequence. A host of official and
scholarly studies were inspired by our discontent, as the subject came to be taken up
nation-wide; and many interpreters construed their own accounts of the educational
pressures behind the FSM's explosion. Some reports focussed in useful detail on the
institutional dynamics of the Berkeley campus, to prepare reforms. Yet even these spoke in
generalities, as did the rest. There exists no report of our collective educational
experience as concrete and detailed as the record of our political experience preparing
FSM -- indeed, hardly any concrete testimony at all, save in scattered, personal traces.
Our pages here will offer references and links
to these studies and reports, and an introduction to the broader literature and history of
educational analysis and reform, which developed dramatically after the FSM. Here also, we
will welcome help in selecting work and making it accessible, and connecting our patch in
the collective tapestry of change.
[The FSM's cultural history]
Some interpreters saw the FSM also as a crisis
surfacing from broader and deeper streams of cultural development, which in turn were
profoundly affected by the culture-wide consequences of our youthful challenge of paternal
authority. As a class, the studies of the cultural history preparing the FSM are less
comprehensive than the studies of its educational and political history; more diverse and
juicier than the educational studies; and more indirect than either -- for few observers
then phrased the FSM conflict as a crisis of culture, and none considered its history
systematically in such terms. Many of the relevant accounts of cultural developments were
written in or deal with the era before the FSM. Nearly all the rest look back from much
later to much earlier, reviewing the FSM briefly (when they mention it at all) from the
perspectives of a changed landscape of culture and cultural vision. A very few consider
this perplex of change in the moment of the FSM.
Our pages here will offer documents and accounts
of the cultural developments that influenced Berkeley students and prepared the FSM, and
links and references to others. Necessarily, this coverage extends to accounts of cultural
history embracing the FSM and its consequent developments, to the present day.