Michael Rossman, now a science teacher, still goes barefoot

by Tony Hicks.

COPYRIGHT 2000 Knight-Ridder/Tribune News Service

BERKELEY, Calif. Michael Rossman still sounds as if he doesn't trust anyone over 30.

He's twice that age.

"This business of who (had oral sex with) President Clinton _ give me a break. Half of Africa is starving _ how degrading," says Rossman, rocking back and forth as he gets revved up over America's misplaced priorities.

Rossman's voice, familiar around town since helping build the University of California Berkeley's Free Speech Movement in 1964, picks up steam as he dives deeper. "How degrading it is to tell my children that 'This is the world I brought you into.'"

Now he's really rolling.

"Have a DVD player, have an iMac while people are dying over there. Impeach Clinton? When we were talking about impeaching that sucker (Richard Nixon), it was over suborning an entire political process."

Rossman, now an elementary school science teacher, doesn't come out and say he still lives by the call of fellow Free Speech Movement member Jack Weinberg not to trust those older than 30. After all, Rossman has a son about that age.

But he's not joining anyone's establishment anytime soon.

"America stopped caring for its children in the late '60s because they got weird," Rossman says as he sits barefoot on a banister in front of his house, frequently reaching over his right shoulder to pull on his long white ponytail. "Children go to bed hungry every night, but it's not in your neighborhood. If you have to worry about Africa, how can you keep your toenails clean?"

Rossman hasn't been arrested at a protest since the 1980s and doesn't get out to demonstrations much anymore. He lives with his partner of 35 years, with whom he has two children _ the second of whom just left home for college.

He's still in Berkeley, he says, because it's where he fits.

Rossman was a physics major when he came to UC Berkeley from Illinois in 1958. He was working on a graduate math degree when campus administrators cracked down on campus political activity.

The Free Speech Movement came to a head on Oct. 1, 1964, when campus police arrested Weinberg for distributing political literature. Students surrounded the UC police car with Weinberg in the back seat and didn't move for 32 hours.

"It started about civil rights, but immediately we focused on the quality of education," Rossman says. "There was a tremendous head of steam from the civil rights movement. When the campus said we couldn't (distribute political material), we went nuts."

Rossman kept struggling for change after the movement fizzled. He teaches full-time and has frequently written freelance articles about social injustice. He has also run Camp Chrysalis, a summer camp for science students, since the 1980s.

And he's the editor of the Free Speech Movement Web site, www.fsm-a.org, compiling historical material. The movement wasn't about one issue, he says, but rather a convergence of ideas concerning change. And he credited it with jump-starting the push for education reform.

"We said, 'You're not teaching us the right things. Why are there no classes on racism? Why are there no classes on the real power of politics?'

"I've always thought the FSM was so weird _ there was a heart of a mystery to the whole thing as a historical phenomenon."

From 1966 to 1972, Rossman traveled the country, speaking to students about the American educational system and how to organize reform movements. That helps explain his interest in new movements tackling old subjects, from working conditions of the poor to children going hungry.

"They're more sophisticated now _ the Seattle thing (last year's World Trade Organization protests) signaled the growth of global consciousness," he said.

The difference between him and the younger rabble-rousers fighting the current corporate world is maturity, he says.

"I can walk around town barefoot, I say, 'I'm 60, I'm entitled,'" he says. "Sometimes I teach barefoot. I tell the children, 'There's no law saying you can't be barefoot.'"

If there were, Rossman would probably have something to say about it.

"Just go up and look at the colors of the kids on campus," he says. "The reason it's got all that color now is because people tugged on the doors for them. It took a lot of work to get color on that campus.

"A kettle of issues were opened up, and they're still here now."

Michael Rossman is one of the founding members of the University of California-Berkeley's 1964 Free Speech Movement. He still lives in Berkeley and teaches science at an elementary school.