The mass student protest against the defunding of public higher education on Sept. 24 was so large that activists and the press drew comparisons to the great Berkeley revolt of 1964, the Free Speech Movement and its most famous leader Mario Savio. But there is another connection between the recent protests and Savio's political legacy: passionate commitment to democratizing educational opportunity.

Before the Free Speech Movement, Savio did anti-poverty work in Mexico and helped to raise funds to build a school for the poor there. As a Bay Area civil rights worker, he served as a volunteer in a tutoring program for inner city students. And while doing dangerous voter registration work in Klan-infested Mississippi during Freedom Summer 1964, Savio taught in Freedom Schools, providing free educational opportunity to African American students whose schools were poorly funded by the state's segregationist government.

Savio's leadership in the Free Speech Movement grew out of his commitment to the freedom struggle in the South and his view that the university should be a free political space where students could be recruited to assist in the crusade to topple the Jim Crow system, with its political and educational inequities.

Savio's devotion to educational equity persisted long after his student days. As a faculty member at Sonoma State University (SSU) in the 1990s, Savio worked in numerous ways to democratize access to higher education. He taught remedial math, and founded a state-wide coalition to defend immigrant educational opportunity and diversity in the student population. This campus-based coalition sought to link the University of California's staff, faculty and students with their counterparts in the Cal state and community college systems, the idea being that only a true statewide campus coalition that broke down the elitist barriers in higher education could have enough political clout to move the Legislature away from its tendency to de-fund and devalue public education.

The final political battle of Savio's life, in 1996, is the most reminiscent of last week's protests. That battle came at a time of terrible budget cuts in public higher education. The administration at Savio's campus, SSU, wanted to offset those cuts by imposing a fee hike on its students.

Savio was the campus's most vocal facultymember in battling the fees because he thought they would gentrify the university, making it inaccessible to low-income students. Allying himself with and mentoring students protesting the fees, Savio argued that "a university education is as necessary to a decent life as a high school diploma was 75 years ago. What is necessary should be free ... Fees should be coming down, not going up."

The strain of this fee struggle was so great that it aggravated Savio's heart condition, contributing to his death from cardiac arrest in Nov. 1996. But the students with whom Savio was working in the fee battle intensified their campaign in his memory and ultimately defeated the fee hike at SSU in Nov. 1996.

Whether or not the current struggle to preserve California's low-cost public higher education succeeds this year, it is an effort that is totally consistent with Savio's democratic educational vision. In this sense, those who marched against budget cuts were keeping alive the spirit of the Free Speech Movement, whose 45th anniversary we mark this fall semester.