Assignment for the Free Speech Movement:

1. Part One: Using your memory of Berkeley in the Sixties, take no more than 5 minutes to answer the following:
   • What were the goals of the Free Speech Movement?
   • Which of these goals were achieved?
   • What goals were not achieved?
2. Part Two: Take no more than 5 minutes to read the abridged excerpt - found below - from the Free Speech Movement's 1964 statement, FSM: Moral Impeturs, The Factory, and the Society. Then take 5 minutes to answer the following:
   • According to this statement, what were the goals?
   • How do these goals compare and contrast with those you learned about in Berkeley in the Sixties?

Excerpt:

"Our stand has been moral. We feel, that to a great extent, our movement has accomplished something which so many of the movements of the past few generations have failed to accomplish. We have tried, in the context of a mass movement, to act politically with moral justification. We have tried to be sensitive to each of our supporters and the individual morality he has brought to the movement. This is what has been unique about our movement. Although our issue has been free speech, our theme has been solidarity. When individual members of our community have acted, we joined together as a community to jointly bear the responsibility for their actions ... By being willing to stand up for others, and by knowing that others are willing to stand up for us, we have gained more than political power, we have gained personal strength. Each of us who has acted, now knows that he is a being willing to act.

No one can presume to explain why so many thousands have become part of the Free Speech Movement. All we can say is what each of us felt: something was wrong; something had to be done. It wasn't just that student political rights had been abridged; much more was wrong. Something had to be done about political rights, and in actively trying to cope with political rights we found ourselves confronting the entire Berkeley experience. The Berkeley campus has become a new place since the beginning of the semester. Many are trying to tell us that what we are trying to do may destroy the university. We are fully aware that we are doing something which has implicit proportions so immense as to be frightening. We are frightened of our power as a movement; but it is a healthy fear. We must not allow our fear to lead us into believing that we are being destructive. We are beginning to build a great university. So long as the students stand united in firmness and dignity, and the faculty stands behind us, the university cannot be destroyed ...

We challenge the faculty to be courageous. A university is a community of students and scholars: be equal to the position of dignity you should hold!! How long will you submit to the doorkeepers who have usurped your power? Is a university no more than a physical plant and an administration? The university cannot be destroyed unless its core is destroyed, and our movement is not weakening that core but strengthening it. Each time the FSM planned to act, it was warned that to act was to destroy. Each time, however, the campus community responded with new vigor. Too many people underestimate the resilience of a community fighting for a principle. Internally, the health of the university is improving. Communication, spirit, moral and intellectual curiosity, all have increased. The faculty has been forced to take the student body more seriously; it has begun to respect students. Furthermore, it has gained the opportunity to achieve a profound respect from the students. Those professors at Cal and other universities who love to teach, should be looking to Berkeley as the nation's greatest reservoir of students who embody the vital balance of moral integrity and high intellectual calibre. If the university community can maintain its courage, stand firmly together in the face of attacks from without, it will survive. Those who fearfully warn that we are destroying the university, are unwittingly weakening the FSM and the university. In the final analysis, only fear destroys!"