Lesson Plan: Students Led a 1960s Free Speech Movement. Colleges Are Grappling With Its Legacy.
Grades 9-12
This video compares recent protests over the Israel-Hamas War with student protests in the early 1960s. Student activists at the University of California, Berkeley, inspired by their work with civil rights leaders, started a movement in the 1960s to expand students’ right to free speech. At the time the Berkeley administration restricted political advocacy on campus amid rising Cold War fears about communist infiltration of the nation’s universities. The student activists, an ideologically diverse group that included some campus conservatives, challenged Berkeley’s longstanding speech policies, facing arrest in the process.
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