Many of the Class of 1966 recall arriving at University High School in 1963 in a particularly somber mood. 5 At the climax of the Cuban debacle of the previous year, many of these students had been asked to wait at the end of the school day for their parents to come and pick them up. The school authorities explained that nuclear war was expected to begin before they could get home and the school system preferred that they not be incinerated in their school buses. Things did not soon improve for the children of the missile crisis. Their high school experience was not three months old when classes were interrupted by news of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. The Class of '66 was, as a group, too clearheaded to be attracted to conspiracy theories, but they were too bright not to theorize that the Cuban missile crisis and the President's death were a part of a greater social malaise that had earlier gripped Little Rock and Montgomery and was to engulf south central Los Angeles. 6

Like most children of the sixties, the students of University High were thus predisposed to see the Vietnam War as but part of a larger crisis in American civilization that had begun after the Second World War, and had played itself out before their young eyes on television in its coverage of the McCarthy-Army Hearings, the early civil rights battles and long-simmering conflict between right-and left-wing ideologies that boiled over during the 1964 Presidential campaign and the college student-driven Free Speech Movement in Berkeley, California. The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution that same year may have merely seemed to confirm that the center could not hold, and things were falling apart. It unquestionably personalized the crisis. After the passage of the Resolution, University High students began to criticize their elders for involving them in a ideologically driven conflict that was the expression of the older generations' fears, not their own, and the campus mood began to shift from acceptance of the powers that be to a hardening cynicism whose chief avenue of expression was music. Previously tame talent assemblies were electrified by student performances of "Blowin' in the Wind" and "Long Time Passing (Where Have All the Flowers Gone)." Students with no prior political interest, other than perhaps sexual politics, chanted The Who's "My Generation" with deep fervor; few would find themselves unable to relate to Jim Morrison's famed expression of his generation's growing anger at its seemly predetermined apocalyptic fate, "I don't know about you, but I intend to have my kicks before the whole fucking shithouse explodes!" 7

At University High, Morrison's rebelliousness and cynicism were expressed in the form of a growing hostility toward traditional high school activities, a sudden increase in anarchical behavior, such as the initiation of false fire alarms, 8 and the display of open contempt for administrative rules. Student interest in recreational drugs also accelerated, though few school officials at the time rightly interpreted the students' strong support for informational assemblies that focused on the nature and use of LSD. 9

The following chronology traces events of the "free speech" controversy at Berkeley from Sept. 10, 1964, through Jan. 4, 1965. Full texts of all important documents, reports, statements and resolutions are included. Where full texts were too long for inclusion, they appear in the Appendix, beginning on page 76. Also included in the Appendix are relevant portions of the State Constitution, Education Code, "University Policies Relating to Students and Student Organizations," and "The Position of the FSM on Speech and Political Activity."