Free Speech: Then and Now

This is a note about your Reporter's Notebook column, October 22, 1993, "Shouting Down the Masses."

25 years ago in April 1968, it was Columbia University President Grayson Kirk's banning of indoor demonstrations that began a series of confrontations that shook Columbia for two years.

Specifically Mark Rudd and his SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) supporters had used a bull horn in Columbia's administration building. President Kirk then banned indoor demonstrations.

Undergraduates ended up smoking Kirk's cigars in his office when they liberated the building, shutting down the University for several weeks in the spring of 1968.

It was only four years after the Free Speech Movement at Berkley then, and there was much more support for free speech in the sixties than there is in the nineties. Roy Bercaw