Although many metaphors were developed throughout the Free Speech Movement at the Berkeley campus of the University of California, the central metaphor of the movement was the university as a factory. The analogy was used to argue that trends in higher education were moving toward the dehumanization of students and was related to the national concern over lack of freedom by many to exercise their constitutionally mandated civil rights. Students argued that university involvement with industry was mercenary and that students were used, like raw materials, to be molded into prefabricated cogs to fit easily into the machinery of government and industry. The movement, by its use of the structural analogy--university as factory--chose an extremely powerful argumentative tool and a useful image that lent itself to quick and wide dissemination among members of the movement. The continued development of metaphors allowed the leadership to control the analogy to a fairly high degree. However, when compared to the standards of ethics proposed by Richard Weaver, the Free Speech Movement--because of certain unwarranted uses of words as "free speech", its desire to eradicate hierarchical distinctions at the university, and its failure to recognize the constraints placed upon the university--must be judged as ethically suspect with regard to rhetoric. (HOD)