The Free Speech Movement started as a dispute over 26 feet of sidewalk and escalated into a pitched battle for control of the University of California at Berkeley. In the process, an entire school, students and faculty alike, was polarized into two camps fundamentally at odds with each other, both ideologically and in terms of rhetoric. The Free Speech Movement represented the adoption of civil rights protest techniques—pickets, sit-ins, and other non-violent methods—in a hitherto untested arena, the university. As it turned out, it was the opening salvo in a long, drawn-out battle, a tumult that would ultimately affect one out of every ten college and university campuses nationwide (a conservative figure), rending the country in two along ideological and generational lines.

Over the summer of 1964, the administration of the UC Berkeley changed its rules on political activism on campus, eliminating a narrow...