Berkeley: The New Student Revolt
by Hal Draper
Introduction by Mario Savio
There are many things that happened at Berkeley
which will not be of interest to people elsewhere, and need not be; it is to be hoped that
others will have their own problems to contend with, and will have interesting things of
their own to do. Others should not have to get their experience second hand. But there are
certain things that happened at Berkeley which it would be useful for people in other
places to know about, as an aid in understanding themselves, as help to them in preparing
revolts of their own.
There were some things which made the Berkeley
revolt peculiarly Berkeley's, but other things made it a revolt among white middle-class
youth that could happen at any state university. And it is the second set of factors which
will probably be of most importance to people outside Berkeley.
Why did it happen in Berkeley? The important
question to ask, rather, is: why did it happen in Berkeley first? -- because
there are several universities in the East and Midwest where, since last semester, little
home-grown revolts have flared up.
Asking why it happened in Berkeley first is like
asking why Negroes, and not Americans generally, are involved in securing access for all,
to the good which America could provide for her people. This may seem strange to those who
imagine America to be a virtual paradise except for certain groups, notably Negroes, who
have been excluded. But this is a distortion. What oppresses the American Negro community
is merely an exaggerated, grotesque version of what oppresses the rest of the country --
and this is eminently true of the middle class, despite its affluence. In important ways
the situation of students at Berkeley is an exaggerated representation of what is wrong
with American higher education.
The forces influencing students at Berkeley --
not merely those resulting from participation in the university itself, but also those
deriving from student involvement in politics -- these forces are likewise exaggerations
of the forces to which society subjects other university students in other parts of the
country. So probably the reason it could happen here first is this: while the same
influences are present elsewhere, there is no university (none that I know of, at all
events) where these influences are present in as extreme a form as here in Berkeley.
The influences upon students are of three main
kinds: those deriving from personal history; "internal" problems resulting
directly from being a student; and "external" problems deriving from after-class
political activities. The external influences on students result primarily from
involvement in the civil-rights movement, both in the Bay Area and in the South. The
internal derive primarily from the style of the factory-like mass miseducation of which
Clark Kerr is the leading ideologist. There are many impersonal Universities in America;
there is probably none more impersonal in its treatment of students than the University of
California There are students at many Northern universities deeply involved in the civil-
rights movement; but there probably is no university outside the South where the effect of
such involvement has been as great as it has been at Berkeley.
One factor which helps explain the importance of
civil rights here is the political character of the Bay Area. This is one of the few
places left in the United States where a personal history of involvement in radical
politics is not a form of social leprosy. And, of course, there are geographical
considerations. The Berkeley campus is very close to the urban problems of Oakland and San
Francisco, but not right in either city. On campus it is virtually impossible for the
thoughtful to banish social problems from active consideration. Many students here find it
impossible not to be in some sense engage. The shame of urban America (just south
of campus or across the bay) forces itself upon the conscience of the community. At the
same time it is possible to think about political questions by retreating from their
immediate, physical, constant presence. Thus, at Columbia or CCNY it is difficult to tell
where the city ends and the university begins, whereas at Berkeley there is a clearly
demarcated university community, with places where students and faculty members can enjoy
a certain sense of retreat and apartness. At Berkeley we are both close enough to gross
injustice not to forget; but far enough away, and set well enough apart, so as neither to
despair nor simply to merge into the common blight Furthermore, ours is not a commuter
school; the students live here at least part of the year. This makes possible a continuing
community such as would be impossible at UCLA for example. This community, with a great
deal of internal communication, has been essential to the development of political
consciousness. And there is a good deal for the students to communicate to one another.
Over ten per cent of the student body has taken part directly in civil-rights
activity, in the South or in the Bay Area. These three thousand, all of whom have at least
walked picket lines, are a leaven for the campus. And many more can be said to have
participated vicariously: there is great and widespread interest in what those who
"go South" have done and experienced. Of course, there is a natural receptivity
for politics at Berkeley simply because this is a state-supported university: a good
percentage of the student body comes from lower-middle-class or working-class homes; many
who can afford to pay more for an education go, for example, to Stanford.
Now for those problems which have their origin
within the university: the tale which follows is strictly true only for undergraduates in
their first two years; there are some improvements during the second two years; but only
graduate students can expect to be treated tolerably well.
It is surprising at first, after taking a
semester of undergraduate courses here -- except in the natural sciences or mathematics --
to realize how little you have learned. It is alarming at the same time to recognize how
much busy work you have done: so many papers hastily thrown together, superficially read
by some graduate-student teaching assistant. Even if you want to work carefully, it is
difficult to do so in each of five courses, which often have unrealistically long reading
lists -- courses with little or no logical relationship to one another. Perhaps in the
same semester, the student will "take" a superficial survey of all the major
(and many minor) principles of biology, and a language course, a good part of
which is spent in a language "laboratory" very poorly integrated into the
grammar and reading part of the course, a laboratory which requires its full hour of
outside preparation but which benefits the student very little in terms of speaking
ability in the foreign language. Perhaps, ironically, the semester's fare will include a
sociology course in which you are sure to learn, in inscrutably "scientific"
language, just what is so good and only marginally improvable in today's pluralistic,
democratic America.
If you are an undergraduate still taking
non-major courses, at least one of your subjects will lecture in which, with field glasses
and some good luck, you should be able, a few times a week, to glimpse that famous profile
giving those four- or five-year-old lectures, which have been very conveniently written up
for sale by the Fybate Company anyway. The lectures in the flesh will not contain much
more than is already in the Fybate notes, and generally no more than will be necessary to
do well on the examinations. Naturally, it will be these examinations which determine
whether or not you pass the course. Such an education is conceived as something readily
quantifiable: 120 units constitute a bachelor's degree. It is rather like the outside
world -- the "real" world -- where values are quantified in terms of the dollar:
at the university we use play money, course units. The teacher whom you will have to
strain to see while he lectures will be very seldom available for discussion with his
students; there is usually an hour set aside, in the course of each week, during which all
of the students who want to speak with him will have to arrange to do so. In the face of
physical impossibility, there are generally few such brave souls. If more came, it would
make little difference; this system is rarely responsive to individual needs. There are
too few teachers, and too little time. Indeed, if the professor is one of those really
famous scholars of whom the university is understandably proud, then the primary reason
there is not enough time for the problems of individual undergraduates is that the bulk of
the professor's time (other than the six or eight hours spent in the classroom each week)
is devoted to "research" or spent with graduate students. The moral of the piece
is: if you want to get an education, you will have to get it yourself. This is true in any
case, but it is not usually intended to be true in the sense that getting it yourself
means in spite of the work at school. There are just too many nonsense hours spent by
American students, hours to "do" much as one "does" time in prison.
In the course of one semester, doubtless, there
will be several opportunities for each unlucky student to come into contact with the
administration of the university. This may be to request an exception from some university
requirement. However formal the requirement may be, invariably at least once a semester,
the student finds he cannot be excepted, not because the requirement is important but
simply because it happens to be a requirement. Well, that is a problem common to
bureaucracies of various kinds, but one wonders if this is the sort of thing that should
be regularly encountered at a university. Yet this ordeal is what a large part of American
college-age youth have to endure. We should ask not whether such intellectual cacophony
and bureaucratic harassment are appropriate at universities -- for certainly they are not
-- but rather, whether these local "plants" in what Clark Kerr calls the
"knowledge industry" deserve the name university at all. This is a somewhat
overdrawn picture of life at Berkeley. The students are aware of meaningful activity going
on outside the university. For there is some meaningful activity going on in America today
-- in the civil-rights movement, certainly. At the same time, but much more dimly, each
student is aware of how barren of essential meaning and direction is the activity in which
he is primarily involved, as a card-carrying student. I write "each student is
aware" but I realize that this is to express more hope than fact. In less than a
tenth of the students is this "awareness" a "consciousness." This
consciousness of the poverty of one's immediate environment is a difficult thing to come
by. In most it must remain a dim awareness. It is far easier to become aware of (and angry
at) the victimization of others than to perceive one's own victimization. It is far easier
to become angry when others are hurt. This is so for a number of reasons. Fighting for
others' rights cannot engender nearly so great a guilt as striking rebelliously at one's
own immediate environment. Also, it is simply easier to see the injustice done others --
it's "out there." Many of us came to college with what we later acknowledge were
rather romantic expectations, perhaps mostly unexpressed at first, about what a delight
and adventure learning would be. We really did have unanswered questions searching for
words, though to say so sounds almost corny. But once at college we quickly lose much of
the romantic vision; although, fortunately, some never give in to the disappointment.
Discovering that college is really high school grown up and not significantly more
challenging, many console themselves with the realization that it is not much more either.
The revolt began in the fall semester of 1964 as
an extension of either vicarious or actual involvement in the struggle for civil rights.
It was easy to draw upon this reservoir of outrage at the wrongs done to other people; but
such action usually masks the venting, by a more acceptable channel, of outrage at the
wrongs done to oneself. I am far from propounding a psychoanalytic theory of politics, yet
most people whom I have met who are committed to radical political innovation are people
who have experienced a good deal of personal pain, who have felt strong frustration in
their own lives. This mechanism made possible the beginning of one pint-sized
revolution on the Berkeley campus. The university set about denying students access to
those facilities and rights on campus which had made possible student involvement in the
civil-rights movement in the previous few years. Yet very rapidly the concern of the
movement shifted from Mississippi to much closer to home; we soon began doing an awful lot
of talking and thinking about the limitations of the university, the
"Multiversity," the "knowledge industry" -- these metaphors became
ever more a part of the rhetoric of the movement. Civil rights was central in our fight
because of business-community pressure on the university to crack down on campus-launched
campaigns into the surrounding community -- which had proven all too effective. University
spokesmen have acknowledged that the need to respond to such pressures was the only
"justification" for the ban on political activity. Nevertheless, the focus of
our attention shifted from our deep concern with the victimization of others to outrage at
the injustices done to ourselves. These injustices we came to perceive more and more
clearly with each new attack upon us by the university bureaucracy as we sought to secure
our own rights to political advocacy. The political consciousness of the Berkeley
community has been quickened by this fight. The Berkeley students now demand what
hopefully the rest of an oppressed white middle class will some day demand: freedom for
all Americans, not just for Negroes!
A word about the author of this book:
"Don't trust anyone over thirty"
became a motto of the Free Speech Movement when Jack Weinberg was quoted to that effect.
Hal Draper is one of the few "over thirty" who were familiar with the events of
the struggle from the very beginning, and who understood well enough to take the students
seriously. He has always been ready with encouragement, but has consistently refrained
from giving inappropriate and unsolicited "vintage 1930" advice. This is far
from common with our "fathers." A pamphlet Hal wrote, The Mind of Clark Kerr,
contributed mightily to the movement's understanding of the extent and depth of the
injustice by which the "multiversity" runs.
He has been a friend.
Berkeley, California