S. I. Hayakawa Unplugs Protest Microphone During Student Strike, San Francisco State College, December 2, 1968

This photograph captures a pivotal moment during the 1968–69 San Francisco State College student strike, led by the Black Student Union and the Third World Liberation Front. The sound truck served as a platform for student speakers outside the Ecumenical House. Hayakawa’s action—cutting the microphone mid-speech—became one of the most widely recognized images of the strike and symbolized the administration’s response to escalating protests.

The strike, the longest collegiate strike in U.S. history, resulted in the establishment of the nation’s first College of Ethnic Studies. Hayakawa, a noted semanticist who joined the faculty in 1955, had been appointed Acting President in December 1968 and was later named president in 1969. The incident was widely covered in the press and remains a defining visual record of student activism and institutional conflict in higher education.

Credits: S. I. Hayakawa's bio was provided by Meredith Eliassen and some descriptions were developed with the assistance of ChatGPT, an AI language model by OpenAI.