Reginald Zelnik, 68; Scholar Defended Free Speech

Reginald E. “Reggie” Zelnik, a UC Berkeley Russian history scholar who during the 1960s provided crucial moral support for the university’s Free Speech Movement, died Monday when a water delivery truck backed into him while he was walking across campus. He was 68.

Zelnik was headed to a farewell party for a colleague at the Faculty Center when the incident occurred. He was pronounced dead at the scene. UC Berkeley police said Wednesday that an investigation is underway into what initially was believed to be a “tragic accident.”

“This is a terrible tragedy for the campus that has left us greatly saddened,” the university’s chancellor, Robert M. Berdahl, said in a prepared statement.

Stephen B. Brier, director of the graduate center of City University of New York who was a student at UC Berkeley at the time of the Free Speech Movement, said Zelnik “was an inspiration for young students like me who were immersed in the heady politics of that time.”

“He was a calm presence and a moral force who helped support, inspire and challenge all of us,” Brier said.

Jeffrey S. Brand, a UC Berkeley history student in the 1960s who is now dean of the University of San Francisco Law School, said no other professor at Berkeley had as profound an impact inside and outside the classroom. “He inspired us as a professor, but equally important, he helped to show us the way as we fought for free speech, civil rights and an end to the war in Vietnam,” Brand said. “The Berkeley community will not be the same without him.”

Zelnik had barely joined the faculty in 1964 when the Free Speech Movement began with Mario Savio’s impassioned speech defending a former student who had been arrested for distributing leaflets on the campus, where such political activity was banned. The speech, delivered from the rooftop of a car, was heard by thousands of students and sparked the student protests of the 1960s.

Zelnik, who was then a 28-year-old untenured assistant professor, was part of the Committee of 200, a loosely formed group of faculty members who supported students and faculty in free speech rights in opposition to campus administrators, other faculty members and the UC Board of Regents.

After meeting during the Free Speech Movement, Zelnik and Savio became lifelong friends. When Savio died in 1996 at age 53, Zelnik became interested in documenting the Free Speech Movement. The result was “The Free Speech Movement: Reflections on a Campus Rebellion,” published by UC Press in 2002.

Zelnik and co-editor Robert Cohen, director of New York University’s social studies program, put together 31 essays for the book, including one that had been written by Savio and even one by Clark Kerr, the controversial president of the University of California system at the time of the protests. “Getting him to agree was something of a long shot,” Zelnik told the Contra Costa Times after the book’s publication in 2002. “We were very pleased because he had to know that he was alone among the contributors in being heavily critical of the FSM, and that other contributors would be trashing him -- some politely, some not so politely.”

Speaking of Zelnik and another young professor involved in the Free Speech Movement, Martin Roysher, an undergraduate at the time, wrote this in his essay for the Zelnik-Cohen book: “I remember the two of them sitting alone on the couch as we arrayed ourselves around the room in an inquistatorial [sic] arc that reflected our skepticism that two people hardly older than us could turn around a vaunted faculty, a thought that may have crossed their minds as well.”

Cohen told The Times on Wednesday that Zelnik approached his lengthy essay for the book not just from his memories of the time but as a historian, researching it as carefully as he did his writings on Russian history. He said Zelnik told him: “This is so easy -- everything is in English!”

“The book is pretty long ... because all these people, once they found out he was editing it, wanted to be a part of it,” Cohen said. “He was very devoted to teaching, as well as to writing. There aren’t that many people around who are like that.”

Zelnik once said of the Free Speech Movement: “It was not a revolution in the historical sense -- it did not challenge the ruling elites of the country. But within the context of the campus, everything was changed. Those who took part can feel proud of what they accomplished.”

Zelnik wrote numerous books on Russian labor history, including one about St. Petersburg factory workers in czarist Russia and another about the Kreenholm strike of 1872.

Born May 8, 1936, in New York City, Zelnik received his bachelor’s degree from Princeton and his master’s and doctoral degrees from Stanford. He served a two-year stint in the Navy. He was chairman of UC Berkeley’s history department from 1994 to 1997, and earlier headed the university’s Center for Slavic and East European Studies.

Zelnik is survived by his wife of 48 years, Elaine; a son, Michael; a daughter, Pamela; a brother, Michael; and a grandson. Services were pending.