Students: To Prison with Love

“Have love as you do this thing,” cooed Folk Singer Joan Baez, “and it will succeed.” It was a battle cry, not a ballad. Marching behind their Joan of Arc, who was wearing a jeweled crucifix, a thousand undergraduates of the University of California at Berkeley stormed four-story Sproul Hall, the school’s administration building. For 15 hours they camped in the corridors, whanged guitars, played jacks, watched Charlie Chaplin movies. Stairwells be came “freedom” classrooms. An alcove was a kitchen where coeds made thousands of sandwiches for the all-night siege. The school had locked the bath rooms, but students with screwdrivers lifted the pins from hinges. For communication with the outside world, they used walkie-talkies.

Then, on orders from Governor Pat Brown, 400 policemen swept into the building. The students sprawling over the littered floors offered no defiance. They went limp, and for the next 13 hours police dragged them along hall ways, pushed them into elevators or bumped them down stairs, and shoved them into buses backed up at the rear entrance. “This is wonderful, wonderful!” shouted Protest Leader Mario Savio, 21, a red-haired philosophy student, just before police took him away. Girls were carted off to the city jails; boys were hauled to the Santa Rita prison farm, where tough criminals in blue denims watched dumfounded as guitar-laden, bearded students were herded in.

A Battered Police Car. In the end, 814 were arrested, and it all grew out of a plot of campus property 26 ft. wide and 60 ft. long outside the Sather Gate entrance to the campus. That was the traditional spot where students recruited funds and followers for off-campus activities such as civil rights demonstrations and political campaigns. When school opened Sept. 21, the university barred any more solicitations, in part because of complaints from politicians that university property was being used by partisan groups in the presidential campaign. Thousands of students responded by staging a protest that trapped a police car summoned to arrest a defiant recruiter. While police and their prisoner huddled for 32 hours inside the patrol car, students and off-campus agitators battered it, rocked it, used the roof as a speaker’s rostrum. Stunned, the university vacillated over its next move, then suspended eight ringleaders of the demonstration.

The move backfired. A faculty committee set up by Berkeley Chancellor Edward M. Strong deplored punishing eight students among thousands, censured the administration for acting without customary hearings and due process, and criticized the vagueness of university rules governing political activity. Meeting last month, the university regents adopted recommendations made by President Clark Kerr. They rescinded the rules barring political recruiting on campus but insisted on the right of the university to discipline or expel any students who might be arrested in consequence of political activity.

Castro Tactics. The regents’ concession was probably sweeping enough to have ended student protests, although undergraduates protested that as individuals they should be free to organize politically and risk arrest without the added jeopardy of university punishment. But the university promptly reopened the dispute by threatening to discipline four student leaders, including Savio, who had organized the demonstration around the police car. Shouted Savio: “This factory does unjust things, and we’ll have to cause the wheels to grind to a halt.” Then he led the investment of Sproul Hall.

The arrested students were freed on a mass bail bond of $85,000, which a faculty group helped to guarantee. Within hours, the intransigent undergraduates, since October organized in a self-styled Free Speech Movement dominated by civil rights militants, Trotskyite groups, and members of a Communist front, called a strike on the 27,500-student campus at Berkeley. “We have promised that this university shall not run,” said Savio, “and we shall keep that promise.” One-third of the Berkeley faculty signed a telegram to Kerr and Strong urging amnesty for the four students who face punishment, and 5,000 students staged a rally outside Sproul Hall to hear speeches, strike appeals, and a final folk song in Portuguese by Joan Baez.

Kerr, who conceded that the F.S.M. at first reflected an “understandable concern” over student political rights, assailed the dissidents as “an instrument of anarchy and political aggrandizement.” Even before the sit-in, he had concluded that a handful of activists in the demonstrations “have been impressed with the tactics of Fidel Castro and Mao Tse-tung.”