On Tuesday, protesters wheeled blackboards and pianos onto Sproul Plaza at the University of California, Berkeley. Thousands gathered near the famous steps for a day of teach-ins, music and speeches — one of the largest protests on the campus since the 1960s.

The university embraces activism as part of its official history. But as the Occupy movement spreads to Berkeley, some students and faculty members said they feared that administrators were turning back the clock, using harsh tactics to suppress political advocacy protected by university policy that grew out of the Free Speech Movement.

As night fell on Tuesday, protesters voted overwhelmingly to put up tents in defiance of Robert J. Birgeneau, Berkeley’s chancellor, who has prohibited encampments synonymous with the Occupy demonstrations. More than a week ago, the police dragged protesters by the hair and struck them with batons as they tried to protect a similar encampment.

By Thursday, the new tent city was gone. University police in riot gear descended on Sproul Plaza at 3:30 a.m. and dismantled about 20 tents. Most protesters left peacefully, the police said, but two were charged with illegal lodging and failure to disperse, both misdemeanors.

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University officials said they intended to allow protests, but would continue to prohibit the encampments.

“This is not a city; it is a college campus,” said Dan Mogulof, a Cal spokesman. “We have a dual responsibility for free speech and to protect the interests of thousands of students who elect not to participate in these encampments.”

But protesters and critics of the university administration said the tents were a form of political expression. They compared them to the acts of 1960s protesters like Mario Savio, who helped start the Free Speech Movement by climbing on top of a police car to address demonstrators who had staged a spontaneous sit-in.

Savio, who died in 1996, would be “disappointed that the administration violated the free speech principles” championed by the movement, said Robert Cohen, a social studies and history professor at New York University, who wrote “Freedom’s Orator: Mario Savio and the Radical Legacy of the 1960s.”

“Tents in this sense are protected speech,” Cohen said, “and he’d have argued that U.C. trampled free speech by banning them.”

Alex Barnard, a spokesman for Occupy Cal, said protesters planned to put the tents back up.

“Tents are the means by which we have chosen to express our First Amendment rights,” said Barnard, who is working on a Ph.D. in sociology. “We are not going away.”

A half-century ago, Berkeley’s protest movement revolved around racial equality, free speech and, later, opposition to the Vietnam War. Robert Cole, an emeritus professor of law who joined the Berkeley faculty in 1961 and provided legal assistance to the movement, said the tumultuous period primed students to fight the university’s restrictions on political advocacy.

“At first,” Cole said, “the university couldn’t really understand why students were asserting themselves in this way. But these issues were so blatantly American issues, so they appealed to a very large cross section of students and faculty.”

In 1964, the Berkeley division of the Academic Senate voted to bar the university from restricting political advocacy on campus

as long at it did not interfere with classes or disrupt the university’s operations. Several universities followed suit. The landmark legislation followed a sit-in at Sproul Hall that led to the arrests of about 800 protesters.

The recent demonstrations here have fused the Occupy Wall Street movement’s anger over corporate excesses with growing student outrage over budget cuts and higher tuition. On Tuesday, protesters carried signs reading “Refund education, make banks pay!”