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A Generation of Distrust | The New Yorker

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The student-protest encampment at the University of California, Berkeley, sits on the steps of Sproul Hall. Sixty years ago on the same site, Mario Savio, a leader of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement, gave a famous address in which he told his fellow-students that sometimes “the operation of the machine becomes so odious” that “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.” At the time, students were forbidden from on-campus demonstrations about noncampus matters—the “machine” was the state-university system, which eventually gave into the Free Speech Movement’s demands. But Savio’s words have since assumed a broader resonance for dissent and civil disobedience of any stripe. Like many other élite institutions of higher learning in America, Berkeley presents itself as a place where historic change took place thanks to the bravery of its former students; in 1997, the university installed a smal

Save this story Save this story The student-protest encampment at the University of California, Berkeley, sits on the steps of Sproul Hall. Sixty years ago on the same site, Mario Savio, a leader of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement, gave a famous address in which he told his fellow-students that sometimes “the operation of the machine becomes so odious” that “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.” At the time, students were forbidden from on-campus demonstrations about noncampus matters—the “m

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