At Berkeley in the '60s

In At Berkeley in the '60s, Jo Freeman argues that the stage for campus radicalism of the sixties was set by the repressive climate of McCarthyism that permeated American society in the 1950s. Skillfully laying the historical foundation, she argues that Berkeley in the sixties began in the 1930s when rules were laid down prohibiting political activity in order to protect the university against charges of Communist influence. These rules were later used to justify the suppression of all political activity and advocacy inside the campus boundaries. She concludes that what happened at Berkeley in the early 1960s was not so much a "battle in the Civil Rights Movement [as] a skirmish in the Cold War."