57.Mario Savio - Sproul Hall Address
You know, I just wanna say one brief thing about something the previous speaker said.
I didn"t wanna spend too much time on that "cause I don"t think it"s important
enough. But one
thing is worth
considering.
He"s the He"s
the nominal head of an organization supposedly representative of the
undergraduates. Whereas in fact under the current director it derives its
authority is
delegated power from the Administration. It"s totally unrepresentative of the graduate
students and TAs.1
But
he made
the following statement (I quote): "I would ask all
those who are not definitely
committed to
the FSM2 cause to
stay away from demonstration."
Alright, now
listen
to this:
"For all upper division
students who are interested in alleviating the TA
shortage problem, I
would encourage you to offer your services to
Department Chairmen and Advisors."
That
has
two things: A strike breaker and a fink.
I"d like to
say like
to say one other thing about a union problem. Upstairs you
may have
noticed they"re ready on the 2nd floor of Sproul
Hall, Locals 40 and 127 of the Painters Union
are painting the inside of the 2nd floor of Sproul Hall. Now, apparently that action
had been
planned some time in the past. I"ve tried to contact
those unions. Unfortunately and
[it]
tears my heart out they"re
as bureaucratized
as the Administration. It"s difficult to
get
through to anyone in authority there. Very sad.
We"re still
We"re
still making an attempt.
Those people up there have no desire to interfere with what we"re doing. I would ask that
they be considered and that
they not be heckled in any way.
And I
think that you
know while
there"s unfortunately no sense of no
sense of
solidarity at
this point
between unions and students, there at
least
need be no
you
know excessively
hard
feelings between
the two groups.
Now, there are at
least
two ways in which sitins
and civil disobedience and whatever least
two major ways in which it can occur. One, when a law exists, is promulgated, which is totally
unacceptable to people and they violate it again
and again and again
till it"s rescinded,
appealed.
Alright, but
there"s another way. There"s another way. Sometimes, the form of the
law is such as to render impossible its effective
violation as
a method to
have it repealed.
Sometimes, the grievances of people are more extend
more to
more than just the law,
extend to a whole mode of arbitrary power, a whole mode of arbitrary exercise of arbitrary
power.
And that"s what we have here. We have an autocracy which which
runs this university. It"s
managed. We were told the following: If President Kerr actually tried to get something more
liberal out of the Regents in his telephone conversation, why didn"t he make some public
statement to that effect? And the answer we received from
a wellmeaning
liberal was
the following: He said, "Would you ever imagine the manager of a firm making a statement
publicly in opposition
to
his Board of Directors?" That"s the answer.
Well
I ask you
to consider if
this is a firm, and if the Board of Regents are the Board of
Directors, and if President
Kerr in fact is the manager, then I
tell you something the
faculty
are a bunch of employees and we"re the raw
material!
But we"re a bunch of raw materials that
don"t mean to be have
any process upon
us. Don"t mean to be made into any product!
Don"t mean Don"t
mean to
end up being bought by some clients of the University, be they
the government, be they industry, be they organized labor, be they anyone!
We"re human
beings!
And that that
brings me to
the second mode of civil disobedience. There"s a time when
the
operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you
so sick at
heart
that you
can"t
take
part! You can"t even passively take part!
And you"ve got
to put
your bodies upon
the gears
and upon
the wheels, upon the levers, upon all
the apparatus and
you"ve got to
make it
stop! And you"ve got
to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it that
unless you"re free the machine will be prevented from working at all!!
That doesn"t mean I
know
it will be interpreted to
mean, unfortunately, by the bigots who
run
The Examiner, for example That
doesn"t mean that you have to break anything. One
thousand people sitting down
some place, not letting anybody by, not [letting] anything
happen, can stop any machine,
including this machine!
And it will
stop!!
We"re gonna do
the following and
the greater the number of people, the safer they"ll be and
the more effective it will be. We"re going, once again, to
march
up to the 2nd floor of Sproul
Hall. And we"re gonna conduct our lives for awhile in the 2nd floor of Sproul
Hall. We"ll show
movies, for example.
We tried to get
and
[they] shut
them off.
Unfortunately, that"s tied up in the court because of a lot of squeamish
moral mothers for a
moral
America and other people on the outside.
The same people who
get all
their ideas out of
the San Francisco
Examiner. Sad, sad. But, Mr. Landau Mr.
Landau has gotten
us some
other films.
Likewise, we"ll do something we"ll
do something which
hasn"t occurred at this University in a
good long time!
We"re going to
have real
classes up there! They"re gonna be freedom schools
conducted up there! We"re going to
have classes on [the] 1st and 14th amendments!!
We"re
gonna spend our time learning about the things this University is afraid that we know!
We"re
going to
learn about
freedom up there, and we"re going to learn
by doing!!
Now, we"ve had
some good, long rallies. [Organizers inform Mario
that Joan
Baez has
arrived.] Just
one moment. We"ve had some good, long rallies. And I
think I"m sicker of rallies
than anyone else here. She"s not going to be long. I"d like to introduce one last
person one
last person before we enter Sproul
Hall. Yeah. And the person
is Joan Baez.
1Graduate
Student
Teaching Assistants
2Free Speech Movement
