ARCHIVAL (11-30-23):
COLUMBIA STUDENT PROTESTERS: Free, free Palestine! Free, free Palestine! 

NARRATION: The Israel-Hamas War sparked months of protest on college campuses. Criticism of some administrations’ response led to high-profile shakeups at three of the country’s most prestigious universities last year.

ARCHIVAL (CBS, 8-15-24):
NEWS REPORT: After months of controversy, Columbia University’s president says she is resigning.

ARCHIVAL (NBC, 1-2-24):
NEWS REPORT: The president of Harvard University resigned today.

ARCHIVAL (ABC, 12-9-23):
NEWS REPORT: The University of Pennsylvania president has resigned.

NARRATION: Police raided several campuses where demonstrations had reached a fever pitch…

ARCHIVAL (NEW YORK POLICE DEPARTMENT, 4-30-24):
POLICE OFFICER: If you refuse to disperse, you will be placed under arrest.

NARRATION…and exposed deep divisions among students.

ARCHIVAL (4-30-24):
COLUMBIA STUDENT: Why are you tearing apart our school?

NARRATION: How does this moment compare to the movement that made political protest a fundamental right on college campuses 60 years ago?

BETTINA APTHEKER (CO-FOUNDER, FREE SPEECH MOVEMENT, UC BERKELEY, 1964): Our position was you can protest, but allow somebody to speak. You want to hold that as a principle because it can come back and bite you. If you suppress somebody’s speech then somebody else can suppress your speech.

NARRATION: In the early 1960s, the University of California, Berkeley rarely allowed students to hand out political pamphlets or hold demonstrations. The restrictions on political expression stemmed from a fear that one particular ideology might spread.

ARCHIVAL (“FREEDOM TO LEARN,” 1954):
Communism? Teaching communism in our schools! 

NARRATION: In the 1940s and 50s, politicians like Senator Joseph McCarthy warned that Communists were infiltrating the nation’s universities. 

ARCHIVAL (1952):
SENATOR JOSEPH MCCARTHY: One communist on the faculty of one university is one communist too many.

NARRATION: But to a new generation of students, the university was a place to debate diverse ideologies, not suppress them.

BETTINA APTHEKER: The university itself, it’s about the freedom to learn, the freedom to think, the freedom to explore, the freedom to be wrong and then change your mind about something. 

NARRATION: Bettina Aptheker was a student at Berkeley and a civil rights organizer in 1964. She and other students protested discriminatory hiring practices in San Francisco. Some even went to Mississippi for Freedom Summer. Now they started a movement on campus, the Free Speech Movement, that began with students setting up tables to hand out political pamphlets.

BETTINA APTHEKER: Whoever was sitting next to you, or whoever else was in the meeting, it didn’t matter what their political affiliation might be, and that’s what gave it its breadth.

ARCHIVAL (KRON, 1964):
BERKELEY STUDENT: There’s been a coalition from Youth for Goldwater all the way over from the Young Socialist Alliance, and usually these two groups don’t even speak together.

BETTINA APTHEKER: We were all trying to find a path here that would ensure a victory for this principle of freedom of speech.

NARRATION: But in response to the students’ political organizing, campus police brought in a squad car and arrested a member of the movement, Jack Weinberg.

BETTINA APTHEKER: With Jack in the backseat, the officer was about to drive off. He looked up, and he saw thousands of us sitting down, because someone yelled sit down. 

ARCHIVAL (WBAI, 10-1-64):
UNKNOWN VOICE: When he gets up, sit down. 

BETTINA APTHEKER: Various people started to give speeches from the top of the police car. We held the car for almost 36 hours. A lot of students brought us food, brought us blankets, brought us sleeping bags because we were just sleeping out on the ground in front of the car. And so you could feel some swelling of support. 

NARRATION: Mario Savio, a charismatic philosophy student, would capitalize on that swelling support. 

ARCHIVAL (KRON, 12-2-64):
MARIO SAVIO: There’s a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can’t take part, you can’t even passively take part. 

NARRATION: Savio would lead more than 1,000 students in an occupation of a main campus building, putting pressure on the university to grant their free speech rights. 

BETTINA APTHEKER: It was a very organized sit in, but the police came and declared that this was an illegal assembly. They threw people down the stairs. They beat people with clubs. A police officer saw me and identified me as part of the leadership and said, grab her. I went limp. He kicked me in the stomach with his, with his boot.

NARRATION: Facing a crisis, the administration set up a university-wide meeting to call for compromise in hopes of ending the protests. But no students were scheduled to speak. 

ARCHIVAL:
ROBERT SCALAPINO (POLITICAL SCIENCE CHAIR): The departmental chairmen believe that the acts of civil disobedience were unwarranted.

NARRATION: Then Mario Savio approached the podium. 

ARCHIVAL (KPFA, 12-7-64):
NEWS REPORT: The police have got Mario! They are pulling him away! 

BETTINA APTHEKER: It’s so symbolic, you know, I mean, he’s the leader of the free speech movement, throttled at the throat. 

NARRATION: The spectacle took place just one day before the faculty were set to vote on whether to grant students their free speech rights.

ARCHIVAL (12-8-64):
ANNOUNCER: Mr. Chairman, the vote is 824 aye, 115 nay.

ARCHIVAL (KRON, 12-8-64):
NEWS REPORT: Several thousand students have gathered in what has been billed as a victory celebration as a result of yesterday’s action by the academic senate. 

NARRATION: Student protests on campus would become a defining feature of the movement against the war in Vietnam and apartheid South Africa.

CAROL CHRIST (CHANCELLOR, 2017-2024, U.C. BERKELEY): The Free Speech Movement was about, what seems so mild now, was really the ability to hand out political pamphlets within the university boundaries. Now free speech is often seen as – my free speech means I can shout out your free speech.

NARRATION: That change didn’t happen overnight, according to Greg Lukianoff, whose organization monitors free speech on campus.

GREG LUKIANOFF (PRESIDENT AND C.E.O., FOUNDATION FOR INDIVIDUAL RIGHTS AND EXPRESSION): For most of my career, students had been the best constituency for free speech on campus, definitely better than administrators, and also even better than professors. And that really changed dramatically in 2013, 2014. We saw this huge uptick in demands for deplatforming. 

ARCHIVAL (10-30-13):
STUDENT PROTESTORS: Ray Kelly, you can’t hide!

NARRATION: Case in point: In 2013, students at Brown University lobbied their administration to block N.Y.P.D. Commissioner Ray Kelly from speaking because of the department’s stop-and-frisk policies. 

When Kelly’s event was allowed to proceed, they wouldn’t let him speak. 

GREG LUKIANOFF: Students showed up, they shouted so much that the speech couldn’t go on.

ARCHIVAL (10-30-13):
MARGARET KLAWUNN (VICE PRESIDENT FOR CAMPUS LIFE AND STUDENT SERVICES AT BROWN UNIVERSITY): There has to be a basic principle at this university that we allow free speech.
PROTESTOR: How many people do not want to hear Ray Kelly?

GREG LUKIANOFF: And then in 2017, the number of petitions students started joining to get professors fired or at least punished in many cases for what they said was unlike anything we’re familiar with in history.

NARRATION: At Berkeley, in 2017, news cameras captured tensions boiling over when a conservative student group invited a far-right provocateur to campus…

ARCHIVAL (ABC NEWS, 2-2-17):
PROTESTOR: He’s a fascist and Berkeley did not welcome him! 

NARRATION: Opposition to his speech got out of hand, fueled by outside agitators. 

GREG LUKIANOFF: It was much worse than a shout-down at Berkeley. It was a full on, you know, riot with Molotov cocktails and everything.

ARCHIVAL (ABC NEWS, 2-2-17):
NEWS REPORT: At least six people were injured, the university canceling the speech.

NARRATION: Carol Christ became chancellor of Berkeley shortly after the riot. Six years later, she watched as campuses across the country were engulfed in protest over the war in Gaza, much of it amplified on social media. 

ARCHIVAL:
You support genocide. You’re f***ing disgusting.

ARCHIVAL:
You support genocide of my people.

ARCHIVAL:
Is somebody recording this? Are you recording this? This is 100 percent assault, what is your name?

CAROL CHRIST: In earlier times of political protest, for example, about the Vietnam War, the student body often was very united against the administration, but often very united. But this time, it’s student against student, it’s faculty member against faculty member. 

NARRATION: Pro-Israel and pro-Palestine student groups charged that campus protest sometimes crossed the line into anti-Semitic and anti-Arab and anti-Muslim harassment, and that their universities failed to protect them.

ARCHIVAL (FOX NEWS, 1-12-24):
NEWS REPORT: Harvard students suing their university for discrimination.

ARCHIVAL (CBS NEWS, 4-26-24):
NEWS REPORT: Pro-Palestinian students have now filed a civil rights complaint against Columbia University.

NARRATION: In 2024, at the height of the protests, the Department of Education received nearly nine times the previous year’s reports of discrimination based on ethnic or religious ancestry. Then, after graduation, some universities instituted new, stricter speech policies. 

ARCHIVAL (ABC NEWS, 9-19-24):
NEWS REPORT: A new school year is beginning at Stanford with new rules around protesting on campus. 

ARCHIVAL (WRTV, 7-29-24):
NEWS REPORT: A new policy at I.U. is putting rules in place when it comes to protests on campus.

NARRATION: But Bettina Aptheker says there’s a danger in rolling back the victories of the Free Speech Movement. 

BETTINA APTHEKER: Once you abandon the principle of freedom of speech you are on a slippery slope. It cripples democracy, chills speech, makes people fearful of saying the wrong thing, and it stunts education because one of the things you have to do with teaching is you have to allow students to say what they think.

NARRATION: In 2025, the conflicts on campus continued. In March, Homeland Security officials attempted to deport a leader of the pro-Palestine protests at Columbia University, recent graduate student and legal resident Mahmoud Khalil. His detention is being challenged on free speech grounds, but President Trump said it was the first of many to come.

(END)