2/ "Barely a month old, the new college semester has brought a bevy of new rules that limit the time or place or manner of protests — not much different from what University of California leaders were doing in 1964 — or add potentially chilling requirements for would-be demonstrators to register. Some have banned outdoor encampments all together. Some prominent schools have threatened protesters, or even would-be protesters, with harsh punishment."

3/ "Risa Lieberwitz, a Cornell labor law professor who’s also general counsel for the American Assoc of University Professors union, told me that U.S. campuses are seeing a wave of repression unlike anything since the pitched battles of the 1960s. “University administrators seem to be responsive to external pressures to crack down on actions by student and faculty,” she said, “as opposed to university administrators considering the fundamental principles of academic freedom and free speech.”

4/ "On the afternoon we spoke, the University of California board of regents, overseeing the sprawling system that includes Berkeley, approved a request from its Los Angeles campus, UCLA, to gear up for the new semester by purchasing three drones, 3,000 rounds of pepper bullets, and eight munitions launchers for its campus police."

5/ "Easy to blame current mess on unique situation that triggered it: Israel’s war in Gaza in response to Hamas’ bloody attack on Oct 7, & web of polit landmines around issues like religion, race,, colonialism that it touched off. Some have spoken of Palestinian Exception to campus free speech bc of sensitive accusations that incl both antisemit & Islamophobia. But experts who focus on academ freedom say probs brewing well before last Oct7, speaking to 60 yrs of radical change in US higher educ"

6/ "The 1964 Berkeley Free Speech movement didn’t happen in a vacuum. At the start of the 1960s, Black college students, later joined by a number of their white peers, protested off campus for civil rights. But back on campus, these young people remained under the thumb of their paternalistic institutions as the “Red Scare” of McCarthyism made university leaders wary of overt politics. Student activists began to recoil against rules that treated them as children.."

7/ "Reagan’s 1966 campaign for governor — in which he famously said a Berkeley “hippie” is someone “who looks like Tarzan, walks like Jane and smells like Cheetah” — launched him on a path toward the presidency. There, he signed off on a 1980s’ era of college privatization as tuition rose, government support shrank, students became more reliant on loans, and universities became more reliant on billionaire donors and trustees, as well as corporate support for research."