ABSTRACT
The 1960s stand as the last decade when big questions were raised about the modern university. Students who were starting to congeal into the New Left protested the university’s collusion with government and defense corporations as the Vietnam War raged on. Intellectuals like Paul Goodman defended the free-speech movement (FSM) at the University of CaliforniaBerkeley, arguing for a renewal of the medieval conception of the university as a “community of scholars” capable of governing itself and resisting outside forces. As a key leader of and spokesperson for the FSM, Mario Savio famously strode onto the top of a policeman’s car to give a ringing protest speech against the “multiversity.” As Savio saw it, the vision of the university most fervently advocated by Clark Kerr, the president of California’s entire university system, represented “the greatest problem of our nationdepersonalized, unresponsive bureaucracy.” Its enormous size, its conformity, its tendency to churn out students like products on a factory line-all these features of the modern university symbolized how America was “becoming ever more the utopia of sterilized, automated contentment.”1
