By Mel Freilicher
Freedom’s Orator: Mario Savio and the Radical Legacy of the 1960s by Robert Cohn on Oxford University Press, 2009
One of the most iconic photographs of Mario Savio, leader of Berkeley’s momentous Free Speech Movement, features his back to the camera. Standing atop a police car in the middle of Sproul Plaza, Savio is holding forth to thousands of students all around him (someone in the crowd had yelled “sit down!”). This spontaneous sit-in blocked the police car from moving for thirty-two hours.
Mario, who was careful to take his shoes off before climbing on top of the car, was the first and last speaker. At the end, he announced a temporary understanding had been reached with the police, and said, “I ask you to rise quietly and with dignity, and go home.”
A marked acceleration, but hardly the first skirmish in the Free Speech Movement. Berkeley’s regulations barring political advocacy on campus date back to the West Coast Red Scare. That couldn’t stop activists from promoting civil rights campaigns—from Birmingham, to the march on Washington to Mississippi Freedom Summer—on the 26 foot brick sidewalk, the Bancroft strip, thought to rest on city property. In September of 1964, the Berkeley administration tried to close down that Free Speech area, making it impossible to recruit new civil rights workers.
This fight was personal for Mario, having learned on the Strip that past year about a massive sit-in, which generated 167 arrests: San Francisco’s Sheraton Plaza Hotel was excluding blacks from all non-menial positions. Joining with hundreds of Berkeley students and black activists and students from other key Bay Area campuses, this protest represented a turning point in his life. “In the process of changing things we saw, we were changing ourselves,” he wrote.
While in jail, he’d been told about Mississippi Freedom Summer which Mario joined with his girlfriend, gaining invaluable strategizing experience, especially under the tutelage of Robert Moses, head of SNCC. Mario was “convinced that in terms of civil liberty, the FSM was another phase of the struggle raging in the South.”
Mario was one of a number of experienced activists in civil rights groups who at first were trying to publicly lobby and patiently negotiate with the administration. Jackie Goldberg, a campus leader active in Women for Peace and in her sorority--later to become a Board of Education member of the LA Unified School District, City Councilwoman, then a member of the State Assembly—initially was taking the lead.
The administration’s position was intractable: students could participate in demonstrations as citizens, “so long as they did not use the campus as base for such activism, since the university had to preserve its political neutrality.” The Regents were even worse: obstinately refusing to listen to any arguments at all.
Somewhere along the way, the administration tried what they viewed as a modification of their policy: students could provide information but not advocate for any activity that might result in illegal actions. Since that included civil disobedience, the main tactic of the era, that proposal was summarily rejected. The conservative Oakland Tribune discovered the Bancroft Strip was actually on campus, not city, property, and threatened to expose the university’s laxity.
Things heated up. FSM leaders decided to move protests back onto campus. When approached, students manning tables refused to leave; the administration responded by taking the first five names of these students, telling them to report to the Dean for discipline. Others immediately took their place, and a petition of complicity was quickly signed by hundreds of students, stating they, too, had violated the ban.
In a further display of solidarity, hundreds of students marched to the Dean’s office accompanying the five cited students, and staged a sit-in. Before the day ended, three more students prominent in the FSM, were suspended, including Mario, a sophomore philosophy major. Playing so central a role in this march on Sproul Hall, “the Dean assumed he had organized the crowd.” “Savio was truthful, not merely modest, in claiming that he did not single-handedly organize the sit-in,” Cohn points out. Many civil rights leaders, and at least 20 Campus CORE members helped provide tactical leadership.
Fearing, yet inadvertently stimulating, further escalation, the administration next decided to arrest Jack Weinberg, the non-student protestor who had set up his organization’s table at the Plaza. A former Berkeley grad student in math, he had dropped out to help lead campus CORE and its civil rights protests.
Going limp, Weinberg was dragged into a police car parked in the middle of Sproul Plaza, the most crowded spot on campus shortly before noon--the busiest time of day. That decision quickly backfired: this October 1 attempt to arrest Weinberg sparked the largest student protest the campus had ever experienced. The image of leaders orating on the roof of the blockaded police car sparked student activism all over the country.
The most serious threat of violence came not from the protestors, but from their critics. At midnight, as more than a thousand students continued the blockade, 50 to l00 angry fraternity members began heckling them and hurling eggs, lighted cigarettes, fruit and vegetables. Finally, “an impassioned speech by a priest urging nonviolence” defused the situation.
On the following day, the threat of came from the hundreds of police gathered on campus “in what appeared an imminent use of force to break up the protest. The only hope of avoiding violence was negotiation.” Thanks to the faculty and Governor Pat Brown, UC’s administration had become willing to begin negotiations. Savio consistently proved “tough-minded” in his interaction with Clark Kerr, former President of UCB, and first Chancellor of the entire UC system when that position was established in 1952.
Going the way of so many professors who become top-level administrators, Kerr started out as a liberal undergrad at Swarthmore, where he converted to Quakerism, got a Ph.D. in economics at Berkeley, and worked for the New Deal, partly as labor mediator. However, once he became Chancellor, Kerr laid down some draconian laws about what UC students couldn’t do off campus: regulations almost universally disregarded.
Opposed to negotiating with the students, in Uses of the University—Kerr’s “classic defense of the cold war research university”—he envisioned the academic world as a central part of “the knowledge industry,” celebrating the university’s service to the corporate world. “What the railroads did for the second half of the last century,” he wrote, “and the automobile for the first half of this century may be done for the second half of this century by the knowledge industry”—serving as the focal point of national growth.
This unfortunate vision of the university as a knowledge factory was attacked repeatedly by Savio and others (especially “public intellectuals” like Paul Goodman) insisting students were not “raw materials” to be turned into technocrat/managers. Mario viewed Kerr’s position “as an American nightmare subordinating individuality, free speech and the pursuit of truth to profit making—serving the elite instead of the disenfranchised and social justice.”
He feared undergraduates in particular would be “vocationally trained and politically tamed for the corporate world without ever having a chance to think for themselves or to reflect critically on corporate America and their place in it,” as Cohn remarks.
Believing the university’s mission to be the pursuit of truth via teaching, learning and research, undertaken by faculty and students, not bureaucrats,” “The proper role of the administration,” Mario wrote, “was that of servant to the university, not dictator over it.”
Cohn thoroughly explicates the many complicated ups and downs of negotiating with and challenging the administration. Finally, when the president of the Associated Student Body attacked FSM (graduate students and TAs, generally supportive throughout, had been severed from that organization), the Steering Committee decided to up the ante with a major sit-in. At the scheduled rally beforehand, Savio explained it would include an alternative Freedom School which would hold “real classes.”
Joan Baez was introduced after Savio’s speech, singing, among others, Bob Dylan’s “The Times They Are a-Changin.” Students “followed the amplified sound of Baez’s angelic voice” into the administration building. Indeed, this most massive act of civil disobedience ever seen at a United States college campus “resulted in the largest number of arrests in the history of American education.”
“Baez, Savio and the other FSM speakers tapped into a powerful sense of idealism concerning freedom, democracy, and student rights,” Cohn remarks. The size of the sit-in exceeded the leadership’s expectations, with about 1000 protestors occupying four floors. Later, Mario’s cogent analyses of the functions of education were amplified throughout the Bay area by Pacifica radio and other alternative media.
Inside, sessions convened under the banner of “Free University of California” with graduate students leading sessions on sociology, math, literature, and Latin American history. A local filmmaker lectured on the cinema as art; Jack Weinberger led a session on civil disobedience, and poet Gary Snyder taught about American poetry. The committee used monitors to keep the occupation orderly and to communicate with supporters outside the building. The mood was festive. “Even the San Francisco Examiner grudgingly acknowledged this educational energy.”
It took twelve hours to evict 800 protestors who police began dragging out of Sproul Hall at 3:30 a.m. Students reported considerable roughness on their part, as did journalists. Photos appeared in newspapers from coast to coast. The New York Times stated the “sheriff’s deputies bumped the buttocks of their male prisoners as they dragged them down the stairs,” then joked about it.
This police invasion strengthened the position of the FSM by turning student opinion against the administration, ensuring a TA strike and student boycott of classes would be effective. Realizing this as he was being dragged out, Savio shouted gleefully, “This is wonderful…we’ll bring the university to our terms.”
The arrests made their most important impact on the faculty “who were outraged that the administration had failed to end the crisis and then resorted to police action because of that failure.” Before this, the faculty had been mostly inert, with only a minority, the Committee of 200, championing the FSM. Savio had often spoken bitterly about the faculty’s lack of support.
Now, some previously indifferent professors raised thousands of dollars and drove to Santa Rita to bail their students out of jail. A large meeting drew some 800 professors “probably more than had ever attended a UC faculty meeting.” Speakers used the word “inept’ repeatedly in criticizing Kerr and the Regents’ handing of the crisis. More than 300 faculty members signed a telegram to the governor condemning the arrests.
At first, Kerr took a hardline position calling the sit-in “an attempt at anarchy,” likening FSM lawlessness to the Ku Klux Klan! He planned his answer to the TA/student strike by cancelling classes and calling for a university-wide meeting at the Greek amphitheater. After Kerr’s speech, as the FSM Steering Committee had decided, Mario, one of the first media stars of the New Left, walked up to the podium, expecting the crowd to demand his right to speak. Before he could utter a word, he was jumped by two campus police officers.
The New York Times reported: “One policeman put his arms around Mr. Savio’s throat …the other grabbed him an arm lock. They forced Mr. Savio away from the microphone,” and dragged his limp body toward a dressing room on the side of the stage. All happening in plain view of the 15,000 students and faculty in the audience, many of whom booed and chanted “We want Mario.” Some FSMers were so outraged they jumped up on the stage. Police tackled them. Pandemonium ensued.
“Kerr could not act decisively or compassionately at a moment which required both,” Cohn remarks. When the police released Savio, he walked back up to the podium, urging the crowd to come to Sproul Plaza for a rally: the largest yet, drawing some l0,000.
“It seemed obvious by now,” Cohn writes, “if the crisis was to be settled, the faculty would have to assert itself. The day after…that was precisely what happened.” The Academic Senate meeting of December 8, 1964, attended by a record number of faculty, in an overwhelming 824-115 vote, endorsed the FSM’s central free speech demand “that the content of speech or advocacy should not be restricted by the University.”
As the meeting ended, and faculty walked out, crowds of students began, in Mario’s words “clapping and tears were just streaming down our faces.” Some faculty were also in tears, Cohen writes, believing this “signified new birth of freedom on campus, undoing the damage inflicted by the McCarthy era and Berkeley’s loyalty oath.” Viewing this stunning defeat as a rejection of his leadership, Kerr believed the FSM victory was engineered as much by the faculty, as by the student, rebellion.
Of course, a major backlash occurred, not only in the deep divisions which remained within the faculty, but by the public scapegoating of Mario Savio. A San Francisco Chronicle columnist referred to him as “the movement’s Patrick Henry or Fidel Castro,” inaccurately associating Savio with Communism and dictatorship, “both antithetical to his hyperdemocratic politics.” (Angry letters to the editor demanded, among other things, the FBI investigate Savio’s links to Lee Harvey Oswald!)
Cold war imagery was almost universal among FSM detractors. The press and much of the public focused on the worst student behavior, not the issues. As did Governor Brown, whose statement defending the Sproul Hall arrests ignored the free speech issue, addressing instead, the disruptiveness of student rebels posing “an actual threat of anarchy.” Despite Brown’s rhetoric and his use of police, “California voters did not deem him tough enough on campus unrest…The electorate’s anger at the lawlessness helped to fuel Ronald Reagan’s bid for the governorship in 1955,” Cohn assesses. Reagan promised to “clear up the mess in Berkeley.”
This author, Robert Cohn, a Berkeley graduate and historian at NYU, goes into meticulous detail about the ongoing negotiations. The book would be invaluable to anyone interested in the Free Speech Movement’s organizing tactics and decision-making processes.
Students within the movement elected a Steering Committee, with Mario as its spokesperson: the themes his speeches highlighted were determined collectively by the Committee. Very much opposed to the Old Left’s “vanguard party” methodology which included stacking meetings with members of various sectarian groups, for the Steering Committee coming to consensus was obligatory--leading to insanely long meetings.
The internecine battles within the Committee also are explicated in some detail. Of course, some “Old Left” students were prominent, but none dominated: one Trotskyist, two Socialists, and Bettina Aptheker, a “red diaper” baby born into CP family: her mother a union activist, her father, Herbert, a major historian of the slavery era who helped redefine ways slaves endured and resisted bondage.
Mario “respected Marxists and praised them for offering a coherent analysis of imperialism but he could never embrace their fixed view of the world,” as an ex-Catholic having freed himself from one doctrinaire faith. He disdained their overly dogmatic and theoretical perspectives and absolutely concurred with the idea that no one should be excluded from the movement.
Of particular interest to me were the very positive relations between Aptheker and Savio. She’d been president of the W.E.B. Dubois Club, a communist front organization, and a close friend and vocal supporter of Angela Davis. (Later, Bettina received a Ph.D. in UC Santa Cruz’ “history of consciousness” program, and like Davis, taught there.) Ironically, Bettina tempered some of Mario’s tough, often unyielding negotiating positions which felt compelling to him for both tactical and moral reasons.
Coming from a Communist background, Aptheker “knew something about political discipline,” as one of her teachers stated. Looking beyond Berkeley, her perspective was of community building: trying to strengthen ties between campus radicals and the larger community. Bettina noted she and Mario “did balance…each other because I probably went too far accommodating. I needed someone like Mario who wouldn’t compromise and he needed someone who would.”
Two other significant aspects of Cohn’s study stand out: he comments and quotes others extensively on many of Savio’s speeches, clarifying why he was such a brilliant orator. The last section of this volume is a nearly l00 page selection of those speeches and writings. Additionally, Cohn’s precise, detailed biographical view of Mario’s life and development conveys a vivid portrait of the man.
About Savio’s rhetorical appeal to fellow students: first was honesty and transparency. “He made use of extensive narrative storytelling to communicate his lack of interest in obtaining personal power and his refusal to defer to those who held power.” Straight talking and directness were much preferred to self-aggrandizing rhetoric.
After meeting with university officials, Savio kept nothing secret or confidential, often stating, “I was told the following by…” then offering verbatim accounts of the conversation. Cohn argues this mode was “emulating what he admired about the SNCC organizers in Mississippi.” Not pretending to have all the answers, another hallmark of Mario’s speeches was displaying his uncertainty, in what Reginald Zelnik (a history professor calling Mario “the most original public speaker I would ever hear”) termed a “dialogical style of oratory.”
Zelnik said: “He could give a strong speech with a beginning, middle, and an end, and keep everybody mesmerized and fascinated. But all the doubts he had or questions or qualifications of the position he was trying to argue got incorporated into the speech and it gave students and listeners in general the sense that they were part of a dialogue.”
By no means an ideologue, Mario’s speeches were free of dogma, fresh and original. He reasoned things out for himself, drawing on his wide-ranging knowledge of academic fields, the political world, his experiences in the civil rights movement. He might tell stories from or about Thoreau, Thucydides, Melville, Herodotus, or First Amendment scholarship. John Searle, Mario’s influential philosophy professor, referred to him as “An intellectual who mastered ideas from diverse disciplines and brought his learning to bear on Berkeley’s political crisis.”
Others commented on Savio’s lyrical qualities. The literary critic, Wendy Lesser, termed him, “the only political figure from my era for whom language truly mattered…He was the only person I have ever seen or met who gave political speech the weight and subtlety of literature…When he spoke, he seemed inspired—literally so, as if he were breathing thought through language.”
Resigning from the FSM, Mario believed the group’s existence was no longer necessary. In a very bitter final speech, he denounced the prolonged inactivity of the faculty, and law enforcement agencies, especially the FBI, for not intervening in Southern incidents of racism. Meanwhile, “unbeknownst to him,” the FBI was compiling a massive file on Mario.
Remaining politically active for a short period, his successful campus speaking tour shared the inside story of how student protestors won their fight. Mario was at the second march in Selma. Vietnam was emerging as the dominant issue, and Savio signed a pledge against military service. Much of his time was taken up with court battles. Free speech issues were taken off the table, and protestors were charged with trespassing—also for Mario and other FSM leaders, resisting arrest. He was sentenced to 4 months in prison.
His final speech in 1965 was at a massive anti-Vietnam War rally, but he was uncomfortable with the “abstract quality” and increasing ideological terminology of New Left rhetoric. Cohn describes Mario’s activism as hyperdemocratic, experimental, empirical, grounded in an ethos of fairness and compassion. At Berkeley, he could talk about his personal experiences in the South or his with the Dean. “See, I had no language in which to talk about Vietnam,” Mario wrote.
Savio’s bid for readmission to the university was denied, effectively ending his academic career until he returned to school in the late 1970s. Graduating summa cum laude from San Francisco State in physics, he got a Master’s there a few years later. Before that, in the fall of 1965, Mario and his wife Suzanne Goldberg, a FSM veteran, left for England. He was to study physics at Oxford but was unable to focus on the work.
According to Goldberg, Mario fell into a kind of “compulsive thinking,” spending so much time analyzing problems unrelated to school, or to only one small part of a problem. She believed this was an aftermath of his “earlier childhood experiences, which were deeply disturbing and unresolved.” Mario and Suzanne had a second son but divorced shortly afterward.
Participating in the launching of the Peace and Freedom Party in California, whose main focus was ending the war in Vietnam, Mario ran for state senate in 1968 on its ticket. He briefly came back to UC in ’69 to support People’s Park. “The deepest result of the 1960s,”he believed, came with the women’s liberation movement and related struggles for gay and lesbian rights.
By the early ‘70s, the leftist movement Savio found “most impressive…and inspiring” was Salvador Allende’s Popular Unity government in Chile because it came to power democratically, implementing socialist reforms while respecting civil liberties.
For Savio, the late ‘60s and early ‘70s were years of personal crises. He began to experience panic attacks, especially in work settings, where he felt unable to function well even within part-time jobs, including clerking at Cody’s books near the campus, bartending, and doing warehouse and factory work. Added to this was the stress of financial and marital problems, and dealing with his “severely handicapped son,” as he wrote in his unpublished memoir which also discussed becoming “severely depressed” and spending a long time in a psychiatric hospital.
He taught mathematics and English in the inpatient school for children and adolescents there. In the middle of the decade, Mario continued teaching, first in a private school for learning-disabled students, and later in a Venice, California alternative private school. He took a college course in literature which spurred his interest in writing poetry.
The low point of Savio’s psychological crisis in the 1970s came with his mother succumbing to cancer, triggering his one attempt at suicide. He’d spent a great deal of time helping to care for her during her illness. Cohn remarks: “For the rest of his life, he battled with symptoms of depression, high anxiety, panic attacks, obsessive thinking and compulsive behavior, while always seeking to understand and resolve the conflicts he believed responsible for them.”
In another draft of the memoir, Savio discussed his personal crises in relation to his past. Only after the decline of the mass insurgency of the ‘60s did he “realize how unstable and inadequate” his own “formation of character had been. The deep division within my family …combined with a sharp severance from the church left me in real need for alternative structure.”
Mario was born in Manhattan, into a deeply religious Italian-American family. (Two of his mother’s sisters were nuns.) His father was a skilled mechanic but frustrated because he’d wanted to become a chemist. Further, the household was dominated by Mario’s maternal grandfather who was a Fascist, and with whom Mario’s father was in bitter competition (as a result, he needed to win every game he played his son). Molested by a teenage uncle, Mario was prone to severe depressions growing up.
When the family moved from Manhattan to Queens, Mario became an altar boy and seriously considered entering the priesthood. His parents couldn’t afford college and had professional aspirations for their eldest son who focused his energies on obtaining the highest grades in school. Mario stammered badly and had to be pressured to enter the prestigious Westinghouse Science Talent search, in which he was one of 40 national finalists. The principal told Mario’s mother if he didn’t enter the competition, he “might not be able to send entirely favorable college recommendations.”
The threat was superfluous, because Mario graduated as valedictorian of a class of 1200 with the strongest academic record in the history of Martin van Buren High. His stammer had begun to subside in high school, and he considered his valedictory speech “a miracle”—only stammering on the very first word, not all after that. He received a full scholarship to Manhattan College, a small Catholic school in the Bronx—on his father’s insistence.
As a high school junior, Mario’s ambivalence about religion—increasingly sophisticated questioning of Catholicism while retaining his emotional ties to the Church-- was already leading him to use his scientific education to test the validity of Catholic conceptions of the world. “Mario’s interest in science, then,” Cohn writes, “was philosophical, an approach to understanding grand questions about the world, rather than merely technical.”
He began studying writers and activists from “certain [reform-minded] parts of the Church,” like Jacques Maritain and leading contributors to Dorothy Day’s Catholic Worker. Emphasizing social justice, instead of demonizing the left, they credited Marxists for their concern about economic inequality. Identifying with religious writers critical of materialism, Mario began to accept socialist ideals.
Throughout high school, almost all his friends were secular Jews. Theirs seemed to be “a freer culture…in which there was much more respect for critical thinking than the Catholic Church that I was born into.” His mentors at school were intellectually intense Jewish teachers who shared his reverence for the life of the mind.
Transferring to Queens College, a tuition-free public institution, part of the CUNY system, with its predominantly Jewish student body and secular character, Mario felt involved in a much more stimulating environment, similar to his high school experience. His first step toward student activism was going to Albany along with other Queens students to protest an attempt to raise fees. He witnessed his first civil rights demonstration at the Woolworth’s store close to his house.
As part of the Queens College Mexican Volunteers, which he later likened to a private Peace Corps effort, he spent a memorable summer in Taxco, a town in central Mexico, working to construct a laundry facility for that town’s poor. The delegation member with the strongest Spanish (which he’d mastered in high school), Mario naturally fell into the role of translator for the group. Here, he got his first exposure to deep Third World resentment of U.S. expansionism.
Although Taxco was a center of tourism, he observed desperate poverty unlike any he had ever experienced: “whole families (one with seven children) sleeping in one filthy bed…starved children, widespread dysentery.” He was appalled by the refusal of the local Mexican elite, though Catholic, to cooperate with the Queens College volunteers. After the summer, he worked with a small group of students to raise funds to build a school there which they did the following summer, though Mario was unable to go back.
At first, he had a hard time adjusting to Berkeley, especially to the rowdy partying going on every night. About halfway through his first semester, though, Savio started attending meetings of University Friends of SNCC. He viewed SNCC as “whatever is most meaningful in American student life…”: waging the most admirable struggle for social justice in America, unsullied by self-interest. He began recruiting others into the organization “The thing about the SNCC workers—and that’s really what got to me, I think—it was radicalism without ideology.”
Finding the Berkeley political milieu “amazing,” he was involved in a tutoring project in West Berkeley, organized by this group and the Campus CORE chapter, teaching black high school and elementary students. Mario was “becoming part of a subculture in the University community which in part…attracted him to Berkeley in the first place.”
After leaving Berkeley, it wasn’t until the late 1970s that Mario made enough progress psychologically to return to full-time studies in academia. Deepening his relationship with Lynn Hollander, a clinical psychologist, who’d befriended him in the FSM and was also involved with him in the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, they married in 1978 and had a son two years later.
One of Mario’s physics professors at SF State said about this undergraduate: “He was gifted in a way that was almost unfathomable …His powers of concentration and perception and insight that allowed him…to do physics on an exquisite level…allowed him to see the political realities of the world…so clearly…to see all the layers.” After getting his Master’s there, his teachers believed he’d go on to the Ph.D. and take his place among eminent scientists of the day. Yet because of the pressure this would place on him, Mario decided not to pursue a doctorate.
Well before graduating from SF State, he took on an activist role again: Cohn claimed Mario’s “conscience could not permit him to remain silent.” Serving on the steering committee of the Citizens’ Party, a new leftist-liberal third party led by the environmentalist Barry Commoner, Mario tried to push the platform toward socialism, such as proposing public ownership of the oil industry. But He retreated, discovering the national office was “hopelessly disorganized and incompetent,” with the leadership pushing through a sort of “weirdly left wing rendition of Tammany Hall.”
At the 20th anniversary of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement, Mario didn’t say a word about FSM, but talked about American imperialism, and peace and social justice in Central America. The huge FSM-20 commemoration inspired new waves of student activism which had been in a lull during the early Reagan years. The following semester saw large student and antiapartheid demonstrations in D.C., spreading from Columbia to Berkeley: demanding universities end their divestments with companies doing business with apartheid regimes.
Mario visited Nicaragua and El Salvador, along with other antiwar activists, coming away “very impressed with Nicaragua’s” efforts to fight poverty. He admired the Italian Marxist Antonin Gramsci, and on a trip to Italy, as guest of the Italian Communist Party, Savio joined in a parade of the Italian antifascist resistance, gave speeches to radical audiences, and began to reclaim a pride in his heritage. Much as he’d loved his grandfather, his fascist loyalties had embarrassed the young Mario who was also ashamed of Italy’s role in WW11.
After SF State, he briefly worked as an instructor at a community college, then was hired as a lecturer at Sonoma State University where he initially taught remedial math in the Intensive Learning Experience (ILE) division, helping underprepared students (mostly of color) to attain college-level academic skills. His finances and intellectual interests led him to obtain additional work in the school’s liberal arts program: including logic courses in the philosophy department, and interdisciplinary courses of his own design, “Discovery of Time,” and “Science and Poetry.”
When Sonoma State’s new President put the ILE program on the chopping black, “during one of our never-ending budget crises,” ILE director Elaine Sundberg recalled, “Mario spoke up against its elimination at a large forum attended by the president…and ILE was saved.” However, Mario was “distressed and vocal about changes in our Educational Opportunity and Summer Bridge Programs in which he taught for two summers,” and disheartened when they were “drastically changed, and weakened.”
He helped organize statewide lobbying of the board of trustees to oppose plans to eliminate remedial education. Emerging as the kind of politically engaged faculty member he’d been asking UC faculty to become in 1964. California’s “lurch to the right” under San Diego’s own horrible, Governor Pete Wilson, saw Republicans pouring money into a statewide ballot, Proposition 187, designed to deny educational and health benefits to undocumented immigrants.
During the FSM’s 30-anniversary commemoration, Mario mostly discussed the threat from the right, the upsurge of nativism, and especially the evils of Prop 187, denouncing it as “a fascist solution: find a scapegoat…the poor, the Mexicans,” so as to distract Californians from their economic malaise. (The electorate did eventually pass this proposition, but the U.S. District Court struck it down.)
Despite repeated bouts of endocarditis, Mario spearheaded the 1995 organization of activists from across California community college districts, California State University (CSU) schools and the University of California on behalf of an ambitious agenda to stop Prop 187. Creating such a coalition from diverse higher education institutions was a radical idea. No one had managed to organize students, staff, and faculty from the three largest public higher educational systems in the state.
The first political battle of Mario’s life at Sonoma State erupted over a proposed $300 fee hike he believed regressive: sneaking in tuition under another name, to make the university too expensive for low-income students. Mario became heavily involved in this issue, out of disgust with the administration who, according to one union leader “leaned on the deans to lean on the faculty to lean on the students to vote” for the fee hike.
They set up a “phony organization which prepared a biased pamphlet mailed to every student. Most of the pamphlet’s 15 pages featured fee endorsements from the Academic Senate, senior faculty, department chairs, the student government, the alumni association, a leading fraternity, and a campus employee group. Buried in the last page and a half of the pamphlet were the only negative opinions about the hike.
Mario seemed to be everywhere, writing opinion pieces for the student newspaper, speaking to the off-campus press, appealing to the faculty union for support, mentoring the student opponents to the fee hike, consulting with a lawyer about a test case, addressing campus forums. But, “Savio took little joy in this conflict, which grew so unpleasant he considered leaving SSU.”
Partly, this activism, which approached the intensity of the FSM fights, evoked strong resentment because it was such an unusual role for a faculty member. All the more so because he pushed them to put their money where their mouths were and donate 1% of their salaries to ameliorating the budget crisis.
Probably, Cohn assesses, “the only personal gain he took from the battle was the pleasure” of seeing the students he was working with develop as political organizers. One of them stated: “Mario always made you feel significant and included. He showed the same respect for us that we had for him and that reflection was invaluable and altered many lives.”
The contentious fee fight wore on. Establishing an anti-fee table on campus, one student reported, “We had faculty members that came up…and screamed at us.” Cohn remarks, “Both sides in this debate proved uncompromising since each saw itself championing important educational principles.”
Physically and psychologically exhausting himself, Mario worked feverishly to get a packet of documents on the fee battle to his lawyer and move with his family into their new house. Finishing the packet, he drove furiously to the Fed Ex office in Santa Rosa because he thought the lawyer needed them by Monday. He got lost and frantic but made it in time. Then he came home, went to an art exhibit, and drove his son Daniel to a party.
That’s where he collapsed, carrying a small amplifier out to the car. He went into sudden cardiac arrest, fell into a coma, and was rushed to the hospital. Mario died there four days later, on December 6, 1996, at age 53.
Carrying on the fee fight, the students ultimately prevailed. Those who were close to Mario took his death as “a personal loss,” and were very firm about going ahead with the lawsuit. A superior court judge ruled the administration could not implement the fee without coming back to court to hear student complaints. Further legal action proved unnecessary, when SSU’s student body, in a record turnout, rejected the hike by 58 percent.
Cohn ends his book with a kind of eulogy. Mario’s “continuing activism and educational work, and that of other sixties veterans, helped to maintain the university as an outpost of liberal and radical dissent even as the political system drifted rightward. The academic Left of the 1990’s was too weak to win national elections or build mass movements, but it was rigorous enough to win battles locally, as Savio had at SSU, and to keep the torch of sixties idealism from being extinguished in America’s new Gilded Age.”
“For Savio and so many others of his generation the 1960s was not a decade that ended but a seedbed for a lifelong commitment to a more democratic and egalitarian social vision and nonviolent America.”
Needed now, more than ever, friends…
Mel Freilicher retired from some four decades of teaching in UCSD's Lit. Dept./ writing program. He was publisher and co-editor of Crawl Out Your Window magazine (1974-89), a journal of the experimental literature and visual arts of the San Diego/Tijuana region. He's been writing for quite some time. He is the author of The Unmaking of Americans: 7 Lives, Encyclopedia of Rebels, American Cream, and most recently, Privilege and Power: The Novel, all on San Diego City Works Press.