ABSTRACT
The Free Speech Movement at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1964, was set off in part by many students' frustration over the feeling that college education had become a process just to turn them into cogs in the machinery of business, professions, or government. In California, the privileged minority manipulates the University bureaucracy to suppress the students' political expression. The university is the place where people begin seriously to question the conditions of their existence and raise the issue of whether they can be committed to the society they have been born into. After a long period of apathy during the fifties, students have begun not only to question, but, having arrived at answers, to act on those answers. Some students and teachers will react against this orientation by complaining that it is too "negative," with all the emphasis on detecting and defending against deceptive, fallacious arguments.
