Illustration by Tom Bachtell

Ronald Reagan, fifty-five and as spruce as a groom, ran for governor of California in 1966. On the stump, he complained about undergraduate “malcontents,” and, as Election Day neared, he made a point of denouncing invitations issued by students at the University of California, Berkeley, to two speakers: Robert F. Kennedy, who was slated to talk about civil rights, and Stokely Carmichael, who had been asked by the Students for a Democratic Society to deliver the keynote address at a conference on Black Power. “We cannot have the university campus used as a base from which to foment riots,” Reagan warned. He urged Carmichael, at that time the chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, to decline the invitation—a clever way to guarantee that Carmichael would accept.

“This is a student conference, as it should be, held on a campus,” Carmichael, twenty-five, lean and grave in a suit and tie, told a crowd of ten thousand on October 29th. Regulation of speech, he added, amounted to a struggle over “whether or not black people will have the right to use the words they want to use without white people giving their sanction.” Days later, Reagan won the election, and the conservative movement claimed its first major victory, fuelled by inciting opposition to the Free Speech Movement.

This September, a planned Free Speech Week at Berkeley flopped. Sponsored by a conservative student group, the event was the brainchild of Milo Yiannopoulos, who may have expected that the university would call it off. In February, the university cancelled a talk by him after protesters rioted and more than a hundred members of the faculty signed a letter, stating, “We support robust debate, but we cannot abide by harassment, slander, defamation, and hate speech.” In response, Donald Trump tweeted, “If U.C. Berkeley does not allow free speech and practices violence on innocent people with a different point of view—NO FEDERAL FUNDS?”

In the half century between the elections of Governor Reagan and President Trump, the left and the right would appear to have switched sides, the left fighting against free speech and the right fighting for it. This formulation isn’t entirely wrong. An unwillingness to engage with conservative thought, an aversion to debate, and a weakened commitment to free speech are among the failures of the left. Campus protesters have tried to silence not only alt-right gadflies but also serious if controversial scholars and policymakers. Last month, James B. Comey, the former F.B.I. director, was shouted down by students at Howard University. When he spoke about the importance of conversation, one protester called out, “White supremacy is not a debate!” Still, the idea that the left and the right have switched sides isn’t entirely correct, either. Comey was heckled, but, when he finished, the crowd gave him a standing ovation. The same day, Trump called for the firing of N.F.L. players who protest racial injustice by kneeling during the national anthem. And Yiannopoulos’s guide in matters of freedom of expression isn’t the First Amendment; it’s the hunger of the troll, eager to feast on the remains of liberalism.

The Free Speech Movement is the taproot of a tree with many branches. In 1964, Mario Savio, a twenty-one-year-old Berkeley philosophy major, spent the summer registering black voters in Mississippi. When he got back to Berkeley that fall, he led a fight against a policy that prohibited political speech on campus, arguing that a public university should be as open for political debate and assembly as a public square. The same right was at stake in both Mississippi and Berkeley, Savio said: “the right to participate as citizens in a democratic society.” After the police arrested nearly eight hundred protesters at a sit-in, the university acceded to the students’ demands. The principle of allowing political speech was afterward extended to private universities. Without it, students wouldn’t have been able to rally on campus for civil rights or against the war in Vietnam, or for or against anything else then or since.

Stokely Carmichael graduated from Howard University in 1964, with a degree in philosophy. He’d been a Freedom Rider; he’d registered voters; he’d been arrested half a dozen times. He also pioneered tactics and language later adopted by the Black Lives Matter movement. The month before he spoke at Berkeley, he was charged with inciting a riot for organizing a protest against police brutality after a white police officer in Atlanta shot a black man. Reagan, meanwhile, promised to crack down on Berkeley’s “noisy, dissident minority.” He talked about the issue constantly, much to the dismay of his campaign manager, who told him that it hadn’t left a trace in the polls. “It’s going to,” Reagan promised. Even after he won the governorship, he didn’t let up. “Free speech does not require furnishing a podium for the speaker,” he said. “I don’t think you should lend these people the prestige of our university campuses for the presentation of their views.”

The N.F.L. protest has its origins in the dispute that followed. In September, 1967, black students at San Jose State College, led by a dashiki-wearing sociology professor and former San Jose discus thrower named Harry Edwards, filed a protest against racism on campus and threatened a mass sit-in on the gridiron during the home football opener. Fearing a riot, administrators called off the game—“the first time a football contest in America had been cancelled because of racial unrest,” the Times reported. Reagan said that the cancellation was an “appeasement of lawbreakers” and that Edwards was “unfit to teach.” Edwards, who declared Reagan “unfit to govern,” began organizing a campaign for black athletes to protest at the 1968 Summer Olympics, in Mexico City. The two medal winners who raised clenched fists on the podium were from San Jose State’s track-and-field team. Colin Kaepernick’s bended-knee protest against police brutality and racial injustice draws inspiration from their gesture, but their protest came out of the Free Speech Movement.

What happened next is a tragedy of betrayals. During the seventies, the left’s commitment to free speech began to unravel. The “no-platform movement”—the turn where the left started sounding like the right—was founded in 1974, by a British student group that banned any speaker “holding racist or fascist views.” One influence was Herbert Marcuse, who argued that liberals’ commitment to open debate was absurd, because free speech had become a form of oppression. Another influence, beginning in the eighties, was the field of trauma studies, which understood words as harm. By the nineties, more than three hundred and fifty American colleges and universities had adopted hate-speech codes, which were often used against the very people they were designed to protect. In less than two years under the University of Michigan’s speech code, more than twenty white students accused black students of racist speech. Had such codes been in place in 1966, Carmichael’s Berkeley speech would have violated them.

Restricting speech is like trying to waltz with a wolf. Every hate-speech code that has been challenged in court has been found unconstitutional. Some have been lifted, others disavowed. Nevertheless, a generation has come of age knowing nothing but the wolf. A new Brookings Institution study found that one out of two students believes that colleges should prohibit “certain speech or expression of viewpoints that are offensive or biased against certain groups of people.”

N.F.L. players insist that a stadium is a public square in which they have a right to exercise free speech. Their fight will rage on. But this fight began on college campuses, and it needs to be won there. All speech is not equal. Some things are true; some things are not. Figuring out how to tell the difference is the work of the university, which rests on a commitment to freedom of inquiry, an unflinching search for truth, and the fearless unmasking of error. But the university has obligations, too, to freedom of speech, whose premise, however idealized, is that, in a battle between truth and error, truth, in an open field, will always win. If the commitment to these difficult freedoms has sometimes flagged—and it has—it has just as often been renewed. Free speech is not a week or a place. It is a long and strenuous argument, as maddening as the past and as painful as the truth. ♦