BERKELEY — At the Free Speech Movement Cafe on a recent afternoon here, students silently sipped lattes and smoothies, oblivious to enlarged photographs on the walls of historic campus demonstrations.
A documentary film on the radical era, "Berkeley in the '60s," flickered unwatched in one corner of the terraced cafe, where an intense new generation of scholars hunched mutely over wireless laptops.
The cafe decor, which features a picture of an impassioned student leader addressing a crowd from the roof of a police car, is a reminder that 40 years ago today, modern campus political activism began here at UC Berkeley.
The studious atmosphere inside the cafe, endowed by a wealthy admirer of the movement and dedicated in 1998 as part of the Moffitt Undergraduate Library, symbolizes how much California's flagship public university has changed in four decades.
On Oct. 1, 1964, students protesting the noontime arrest of a civil rights activist surrounded a university police car and staged a 32-hour sit-in, an event that not only ignited the Free Speech Movement here but also inspired countless other movements under different names and forms on campuses around the world for years to come.
"In the fall of 1964," states a panel at the entrance of the cafe that reads like a message from a time capsule, "a student protest movement galvanized this campus and shocked the nation. It soon resonated on campuses around the United States."
But except for a few graduate students quietly discussing the works of Virgil, there was virtually no speech at all on the recent afternoon at the Free Speech Cafe. The only other audible voice was that of a cashier barking out food orders in Spanish.
The university still boasts hundreds of student organizations. But their causes, reports historian Lisa Rubens, 58, a Berkeley graduate and veteran of the Free Speech Movement, tend to be more personalized, centered on issues of gender, ethnicity and narrower political and environmental concerns.
"You don't see the constant mass public demonstrations that tended to characterize the late '60s," Rubens said. "Today's concerns are much more sophisticated and targeted, reflecting the era of identity politics."
'Nothing but a Cafe?'
Faculty and students say that increasingly selective admissions standards, higher costs, onerous academic workloads and a largely apolitical Asian student population are some of the reasons behind the change in campus politics.
