Press Conference Announcing University Library Gift
Moffitt Library, UC Berkeley
April 29, 1998
Acknowledging the Impact and the Values of the FSM
By Robert M. Berdahl
Chancellor,
University of California, Berkeley
Thirty-three years ago on this campus a student named Mario Savio removed his shoes and mounted the top of a police car to defend the right of free speech, and life has never been the same ever since on the Berkeley campus or any other major university in the United States.
What that moment did for Berkeley will draw different responses depending on who you talk to, but as a historian I can tell you that its impact was unequivocal.
No one would disagree that the Free Speech Movement had a significant role in placing the American university center stage in the free flow of political ideas, no matter how controversial.
History affords us few crystalline moments, and what the campus experienced in the fall of 1964 was one of those moments.
As a result of those events, universities everywhere have been more open to student political activism and engagement with the issues facing society. The result is a student body that today is more committed to public service than its peers anywhere in the country. Students at Berkeley, for instance, lead the nation in volunteering for the Peace Corps. And the excellence of Berkeley today is reflected in the profuse ways that our campus community is engaged with the world-both inside and outside the classroom.
Today I would like to announce a gift from an alumnus and former University employee, Stephen Silberstein. This gift will help us accomplish what I laid out last week in my inaugural address. It allows us to address the health of the University Library, which is of utmost concern to our students and faculty and was the subject of a recently concluded Blue Ribbon Task Force. It fills the gap that will bring our collections budget to parity with Berkeley's peers.
It is altogether fitting that this gift for the Library is in honor of the Free Speech Movement and the late Mario Savio, who valued knowledge and learning as a vital precursor to action and as the foundation of wisdom. Here with us today are various members of the Savio family and alumni of the Free Speech Movement, including the son of Mario Savio, Nadav Savio, and a key player in the movement, Jack Weinberg.
Along with supplementing our humanities collections budget, this gift will do two important things. It will fund the construction of a Free Speech Movement Cafe in this building, which will acknowledge the impact and the values of the movement and its participants. And it will allow us to preserve the historic Free Speech Movement archives at the Bancroft Library and make them accessible to a worldwide audience via the Internet.
It is a great pleasure to accept this gift today on behalf of the University of California at Berkeley. In doing so, we reconcile ourselves with history, we celebrate the contributions of those who made history, and we accept the lessons of civic involvement for the benefit of future generations.
Thank you, Stephen Silberstein. Your generosity will make it possible for the University Library to light the minds of students and faculty into the 21st century. It is an example of the fundamental ecology of a just society-to give back as much as you take from it.