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full version with Neal Blumenfeld's Human Dignity and the Multiversity
WE WANT A UNIVERSITY
(DEDICATED TO THE 800)
BY THE FREE SPEECH MOVEMENT
At present in the
United States, students -- middle class youth -- are the major exploited class. The labor
of intelligent youth is needed, and they are accordingly subjected to tight scheduling,
speedup, and other factory exploitative methods. Then it is not surprising if they
organize their CIO. It is frivolous to tell them to go elsewhere if they don't like the
rules, for they have no choice but to go to college, and one factory is like another.
Paul
Goodman
.. we get a four year
long series of sharp staccatos: eight semesters, forty courses, one hundred twenty or more
"units," ten to fifteen impersonal lectures per week, one to three
oversized discussion meetings per week led by poorly paid graduate student
"teachers." Over a period of four years the student-cog receives close to forty
bibliographies; evaluation amounts to little more than pushing the exam button, which
results in over one hundred regurgitations in four years and the writing of twenty to
thirty-five papers in four years in this context means that they are of necessity
technically and substantially poor due to lack of time for thought.
Brad
Cleaveland
Throughout the
semester, the FSM has been producing leaflets and pamphlets at a furious pace. We have
been patient, repetitious, sometimes boring, we have tried to explain what we're doing and
who we are. As we look back at our written communications of the semester, we discover
that to some extent we have failed. Each day was an emergency, a crisis, so that although
we said important things, issues arose which were not of the moment -- important issues
which we have not adequately discussed. We take this opportunity to more fully discuss our
movement, the university, and our education.
The
Free Speech Movement
FSM: MORAL IMPETUS, THE FACTORY,
AND THE SOCIETY
1. The Moral Impetus
Our stand has
been moral. We feel, that to a great extent, our movement has accomplished something which
so many of the movements of the past few generations have failed to accomplish. We have
tried, in the context of a mass movement, to act politically with moral just)fication. We
have tried to be sensitive to each of our supporters and the individual morality he has
brought to the movement. This is what has been unique about our movement.
Although our issue
has been free speech, our theme has been solidarity. When individual members of our
community have acted, we joined together as a community to jointly bear the responsibility
for their actions. We have been able to revitalize one of the most distorted, misused, and
important words of our century: comrade. The concept of living cannot be separated from
the concept of other people. In our practical, fragmented society, too many of us have
been alone. By being willing to stand up for others, and by knowing that others are
willing to stand up for us, we have gained more than political power, we have gained
personal strength. Each of us who has acted, now knows that he is a being willing to act.
No one can presume
to explain why so many thousands have become part of the Free Speech Movement. All we can
say is what each of us felt: something was wrong; something had to be done. It wasn't just
that student political rights had been abridged; much more was wrong. Something had to be
done about political rights, and in actively trying to cope with political rights we found
ourselves confronting the entire Berkeley experience. The Berkeley campus has become a new
place since the beginning of the semester. Many are trying to tell us that what we are
trying to do may destroy the university. We are fully aware that we are doing something
which has implicit proportions so immense as to be frightening. We are frightened of our
power as a movement; but it is a healthy fear. We must not allow our fear to lead us into
believing that we are being destructive. We are beginning to build a great
university. So long as the students stand united in firmness and dignity, and the faculty
stands behind us, the university cannot be destroyed. As students, we have already
demonstrafed our strength and dedication; the faculty has yet to show it can do its share.
Some faculty members have stated that if what they call "anarchy" continues,
then they will leave the university to seek employment elsewhere. Such faculty
members who would leave at this point would compromise themselves by an antiseptic
solution to a problem of personal anguish, rather than stay and fight for a great
university. There is reason to fear these professors, for they can destroy the
university by deserting it.
And sadly there is
reason to believe that even after all of the suffering which has occurred in our
community, the overwhelming majority of faculty members have not been permanently changed,
have not joined our community, have not really listened to our voices -- at this
late date. For a moment on December 8th, eight hundred and twenty-four professors gave us
all a glimpse -- a brief, glorious vision -- of the university as a loving community. If
only the Free Speech Movement could have ended that day! But already the professors have
compromised away much for which they stood on that day. They have shamed themselves in
view of the students and their colleagues all over the country. The ramparts of
rationalization which our society's conditioning had erected about our professors' souls
were breached by the relentless hammer-blows of conscience springing from thousands of
students united in something called "FSM." But the searing light of their
momentary courage became nakedness to them -- too painful to endure. After December 8th
most faculty members moved quickly to rebuild their justfications for years of barren
compromise.
We challenge the
faculty to be courageous. A university is a community of students and scholars: be equal
to the position of dignity you should hold!! How long will you submit to the doorkeepers
who have usurped your power? Is a university no more than a physical plant and an
administration? The university cannot be destroyed unless its core is destroyed, and our
movement is not weakening that core but strengthening it. Each time the FSM planned to
act, it was warned that to act was to destroy. Each time, however, the campus community
responded with new vigor. Too many people underestimate the resilience of a community
fighting for a principle. Internally, the health of the university is improving.
Communication, spirit, moral and intellectual curiosity, all have increased. The faculty
has been forced to take the student body more seriously; it has begun to respect students.
Furthermore, it has gained the opportunity to achieve a profound respect from the
students. Those professors at Cal and other universities who love to teach, should be
looking to Berkeley as the nation's greatest reservoir of students who embody the vital
balance of moral integrity and high intellectual calibre. If the university community can
maintain its courage, stand firmly together in the face of attacks from without, it will
survive. Those who fearfully warn that we are destroying the university, are unwittingly
weakening the FSM and the university. In the final analysis, only fear destroys!
ll. Free Speech and the
Factory
In our fight for
free speech we said the "machine" must stop. We said that we must put our bodies
on the line, on the machinery, in the wheels and gears, and that the "knowledge
factory" must be brought to a halt. Now we must begin to clarify, for ourselves, what
we mean by "factory."
We need to clarify
this because the issues of free speech and the factory, of politics and education on the
campus, are in danger of becoming separated. For example, the press has had the tendency
to assert this separation when they insist that we return to our studies; that we are not
in a center for political activity, but a center for education. Likewise, the faculty
betrays the same tendency in its desire to settle the free speech issue as quickly and
quietly as possible in order that we may return to the "normal conduct" of our
"great university."
In contrast to
this tendency to separate the issues, many thousands of us, the Free Speech Movement, have
asserted that politics and education are inseparable, that the political issue of
the First and Fourteenth Amendments and the educational issue cannot be
separated. In place of "great university," we have said "impersonal
bureaucracy," "machine," or "knowledge factory." If we emerge as
victors from our long and still hard-to-be-won battle for free speech, will we then be
returning to less than a factory? Is this a great university? If we are to take ourselves
seriously we must define precisely what we meant when we said "knowledge
factory."
The best way to
identify the parts of our multiversity machinery is simply observe it "stripped
down" to the bare essentials. In the context of a dazzling circus of
"bait," which obscures our vision of the machinery, we get a four- year-long
series of sharp staccatos: eight semesters, forty courses, one hundred twenty or more
"units," ten to fifteen impersonal lectures per week, one to three oversized
discussion meetings per week led by poorly paid graduate student "teachers."
Over a period of four years the student-cog receives close to forty bibliographies;
evaluation amounts to little more than pushing the test button, which results in over one
hundred regurgitations in four years, and the writing of twenty to thirty-five
"papers" in four years, in this context means that they are of necessity
technically and substantially poor due to a lack of time for thought. The
course-grade-unit system structure, resting on the foundation of departmentalization,
produces knowledge for the student-cog which has been exploded into thousands of bits and
is force-fed, by the coercion of grades. We all know what happens when we really get
"turned on" by a great idea, a great man, or a great book: we pursue that
interest at the risk of flunking out. The pursuit of thought, a painful but highly
exhilarating process, requires, above all, the element of time.
Human nerves and
flesh are transmuted under the pressure and stress of the university routine. It is as
though we have become raw material in the strictly inorganic sense. But the Free Speech
Movement has given us an extraordinary taste of what it means to be part of something
organic. Jumping off the conveyors, we have become a community of furiously talking,
feeling, and thinking human beings. If we take seriously our common agreement that we
stopped a "machine" how can we be accused of conspiring to destroy a "great
university"? Where?
The history of
rather volcanic emotions which led up to the eruption of the Free Speech Movement did not
result from thin air. It came from within us. On November 29 a letter appeared in the New
York Times Magazine. It is a beautiful and sad letter from a young girl, and
describes well the "volcanic activity" in all of us.
To the Editor:
"I'm a student in the oldest girls' school
in the country. I love my school, but your recent article on homework really hit home
(Hard Day's Night of Today's Students by Eda J. LeShan). I came to this school not
thinking I could even keep up with the work. I was wrong. I can keep up. I can even come
out on top. My daily schedule's rough: I get up at 6:30 and have classes from 8:15 to 3:00
and stay in study hall or engage in activities until 5:30. I have majors, plus religion,
speech, music, and art once or twice a week. I have gym four times a week. All this I can
take. The homework I can't. I work from 3:00 until 5:00 in school.
After dinner I work until midnight or 12:30. In
the beginning, the first two weeks or so, I'm fine. Then I begin to wonder just what this
is all about: Am I educating myself? I have that one all answered in my mind. I'm
educating myself the way THEY want. So I convince myself the real reason I'm doing all
this is to prepare myself for what I really want. Only one problem. After four years of
this comes four years of college and two of graduate school for me. I know just where I'm
going and just what I want, but I'm impatient.
Okay, I can wait. But meanwhile I'm wasting
those years of preparation. I'm not learning what I want to learn. I don't care any more
whether 2 + 2 = 4 anymore. I don't care about the feudal system. I want to know about
life. I want to think and read. When? Over weekends when there are projects and lectures
and compositions, plus catching up on sleep.
My life is a whirlpool. I'm caught up in it but
I'm not conscious of it. I'm what YOU call living, but somehow I can't find life. Days go
by in an instant. I feel nothing accomplished in that instant. So maybe I got an A on that
composition I worked on for three hours, but when I get it back I find that A means
nothing. It's a letter YOU use to keep me going.
Every day I come in well prepared. Yet I dread
every class; my stomach tightens and I sit tense. I drink coffee morning, noon, and night.
At night, after my homework I lie in bed and wonder if I've really done it all. Is there
something I've forgotten?
At the beginning of the year I'm fine. My
friends know me by my smile. Going to start out bright this year. Not going to get bogged
down this year. Weeks later I become introspective and moody again. I wonder what I'm
doing here. I feel phony, I don't belong. All I want is time; time to sit down and read
what I want to read, and think what I want to think.
You wonder about juvenile delinquents. If I ever
become one, I'll tell you why it will be so. I feel cramped. I feel like I'm in a coffin
and can't move or breathe. There's no air or light. All I can see is blackness and I've
got to burst. Sometimes I feel maybe something will come along. Something has to or I'm
not worth anything. My life is worth nothing. It's enclosed in a few buildings on one
campus; it goes no further. I've got to bust."
NAME
WITHHELD
P.S. I wrote this last night at 12:15 and in the
light of day I realize this will never reach you.
This letter is
probably one of the most profoundly shared expressions of anguish in American life today.
It is shared by millions of us.
III. The Factory and the Society
The emotions
expressed in that letter reflect the problems of the society as expressed in the
multiversity as well as in a small prep school for girls in the East. The university has
become grotesquely distorted into a "multiversity"; a public utility serving the
purely technical needs of a society. In Clark Kerr's words, it is a factory for the
production of knowledge and technicians to service society's many bureaucracies.
Current federal
and private support programs for the university have been compared to classic examples of
imperialism and neocolonialism. The government has invested in underdeveloped,
capital-starved institutions, and imposed a pattern of growth and development upon them,
which if disrupted, would lead to economic breakdown and political chaos.
Research and
training replace scholarship and learning. In this system even during the first two years,
the student is pressured to specialize or endure huge, impersonal lecture courses. He
loses contact with his professors as they turn more to research and publishing, and away
from teaching. His professors lose contact with one another as they serve a discipline and
turn away from dialogue. Forms and structures stifle humane learning.
The student is
powerless even to affect those aspects of the university supposedly closest to him. His
student "government" by political castrates is a fraud permitted to operate only
within limits imposed autocratically by the administration. Thus it is constitutionally
mandated to serve the status quo. Likewise, the student has no power over the social
regulations which affect his privacy, and little influence in shaping the character of the
dormitories in which he lives. The university assumes the role of the parent.
As a human being
seeking to enrich himself, the student has no place in the multiversity. Instead he
becomes a mercenary, paid off in grades, status, and degrees, all of which can eventually
be cashed in for hard currency on the job market. His education is not valued for its
enlightenment and the freedom it should enable him to enjoy, but for the amount of money
it will enable him to make. Credits for courses are subtly transformed into credit cards
as the multiversity inculcates the values of the acquisitive society.
It has been
written that "The main concern of the university should not be with the publishing of
books, getting money from legislators, lobbying for federal aid, wooing the rich,
producing bombs and deadly bacteria." Nor should it be with passing along the
morality of the middle class, nor the morality of the white man, nor even the morality of
the potpourri we call "western society." Nor should it be with acting as a
second household or church for the young man away from home, nor as a playground for
twisters, neophyte drinkers, and pledge classes. Already the parallels between the
university and the habits of the society are many; the parallels between our academic and
financial systems of credit, between competition for grades and for chamber of commerce
awards, between cheating and price rigging, and between statements of "Attendance is
a privilege, not a right," and "We reserve the right to refuse service to
anyone."
In an article in
the current New York Review of Books, Paul Goodman poignantly comments upon the
plight of the modern student: "At present in the United States, students -- middle
class youth -- are the major exploited class, (Negroes, small farmers, the aged are rather
outcast groups; their labor is not needed and they are not wanted). The labor of
intelligent youth is needed and they are accordingly subjected to tight scheduling,
speedups and other factory exploitative methods. Then it is not surprising if they
organize their CIO. It is frivolous to tell them to go elsewhere if they don't like the
rules; for they have no choice but to go to college, and one factory is like
another."
In saying these
things it is important to avoid a certain misunderstanding. By identifying the parts of
the machinery in our factory, the way in which we have described them, and their blending
into our society of institutionalized greed, might lead people to assume that we have a
fundamental bias against institutions as such; that we wish to destroy the structure
altogether, to establish politics on the campus, and lash out against the power structure
for the purposes of expressing a kind of collective orgasm of seething resentment against
the "power structure." When we assert that free speech and the factory, or
politics and education, are bound up together, we are again pointing to the obvious. In a
twentieth-century industrial state, ignorance will be the definition of slavery. If
centers of education fail, they will be the producers of the twentieth-century slave. To
put it in more traditionally American terms, popular government cannot survive without
education for the people. The people are more and more in the schools. But the pressure of
the logistics of mass popular education combined with excessive greed has resulted in the
machinery of the educational process having displaced the freedom to learn. We must now
begin the demand of the right to know; to know the realities of the present world-in-
revolution, and to have an opportunity to learn how to think clearly in an extended manner
about that world. It is ours to demand meaning; we must insist upon meaning!
The Free University of
California
The question of
how to break down the machinery and build "intellectual communities worthy of the
hopes and responsibilities of our people," is one of the minds of many participants
in the Free Speech Movement. No one supposes he has the answers, but they can come from
the Berkeley community. Our task is to generate these answers and to discover how they can
be implemented. The Free Speech Movement proposes that the Free University of California
be formed. We are inviting prominent intellectual and political figures to address the
university community. We would like to see seminars on the educational revolution and many
other topics which are not considered in the university. In the near future we hope that
discussions with students, faculty, and members of the community, will take place
independent of the university community. Such discussions would deal with any topic in
which a aufficient number of people are interested. We would like to establish the
availability of a revolutionary experience in education. If we succeed, we will accomplish
a feat more radical and sign)ficant than anything the Free Speech Movement has attempted.
We will succeed in beginning to bring humanity back to campus.
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