Edward W. Strong Dies; Resigned as UC Berkeley Chancellor Amid Unrest

Edward W. Strong, the UC Berkeley chancellor who took a firm stand against students after the Free Speech Movement sit-ins on campus in 1964 and later stepped down as the student demonstrations reached a peak, has died.

Strong, who suspended eight students after the initial protest and then attacked UC system Chancellor Clark Kerr for “capitulating” after Kerr reversed that decision, was 88. He died of cancer Jan. 13 at his home in Berkeley.

In January, 1965, Strong had publicly pleaded illness and asked Kerr to relieve him. In March of that year, he wrote to seven of the university’s 24 regents, attacking Kerr for much of the trouble that followed the first rash of sit-ins.

In what proved a prophetic statement, he said in his letter that “if the tide of revolt . . . is not turned back in the University of California, the portent is truly frightening.”

The often-violent revolts of the late 1960s and early ‘70s over university policies toward students’ right of free speech and the nation’s involvement in Vietnam eventually came to involve most of the UC campuses around the state.

Kerr eventually granted amnesty to hundreds of students arrested at the then 22,000-student campus after the large-scale Sproul Hall sit-ins of December, 1964.

Strong became Berkeley’s third chancellor in 1961, succeeding Glenn T. Seaborg when Seaborg became chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission. Strong was a professor of philosophy and vice chancellor of the Academic Senate and had been at Berkeley since 1932.

After taking a leave of absence as chancellor, Strong returned to the campus as a philosophy professor (he was the widely honored Mills professor of philosophy there) but continued to speak out publicly against the student and faculty protests.

He retired in 1967 but remained active as a member of the editorial board of the Journal of the History of Philosophy.