Rebellion at Berkeley
FEUER, LEWIS S.
The New Multiversity: Ideology and Reality Rebellion at Berkeley By Lewis S. Feuer Berkeley Throughout the world, the University of California is looked upon as the shape of...
...Why do so many persist in demanding admission to Berkeley...
...Wherever one can substitute the creative initiative of decentralized autonomous groups of scholars for the directives of a centralized master plan, one should do so...
...The less a person teaches in a university, the higher is his status...
...She explained to me that in it was an air valve of the tire from the police car, and she was presenting it to a friend as a souvenir...
...In physics, the law holds that to every action there is an equal and opposite reaction, and this is often true in social reality...
...What then is the upshot...
...Now they had their chance for a guerrilla war against the System, and they enjoyed every moment of its discomfiture...
...confused, bewildered, and with frequent casualties, they are the supernumeraries required to fill the classes of secondgrade teaching assistants...
...Weinberg is 24, a former graduate student in mathematics, and an activist in CORE...
...To the trend toward the Impersonal Managerial Multiversity, there corresponds the uprising of the alienated, seeking a sense of their personality in the impersonal setting which emasculates their idealism at manhood's beginning...
...to Kerr's mind, it must perforce succumb to the managerial and technological revolution now taking place...
...Nobody knows my name," they all say...
...The carrier wave of the student uprising is an accumulation of vague alienations—generational, political, bureaucratic...
...At any rate, many students soon perceived and defined the Multiversity as the Nulliversity (if I may invent a word...
...Eighteen thousand students and faculty in the Greek Theater heard him accept a proposal that the university press no prosecutions, and express his willingness to test some difficult issues in court, as well as guarantee not to impose any regulations which involved either prior censorship or double jeopardy...
...He is told that this is a confidential committee whose names are secret...
...It injects into the university ethos the chief note for the downgrading of teaching...
...The riot potential was extreme on Thursday and Friday...
...The professor writes to the registrar stating the facts, and asks for a change in the grade...
...The astonishing thing is that both Clark Kerr and Mario Savio agree about the nature of the modern university...
...The professor tries to find out from the registrar's secretary who the members of this Committee are...
...It turned out that the first target of the students was the administration...
...in December they carried out mass arrests which led to new demonstrations and bitterness...
...The students hear tell that their senior professors were in their youth not infrequently Marxists, Trotskyists...
...They would have gone out to meet the students, summoned the leaders at once for a personal discussion, and addressed the crowd themselves...
...The students think of themselves as a new "class," a "lumpenproletariat...
...Certainly a variety of measures and devices can be contrived to countervail Bureaucracy with Community...
...But the historical inevitability is there, overwhelming and irresistible, and the managerial dialectic breeds some cruel paradoxes...
...Today most of the new colleges are founded as a result of planning from above by an overall state authority...
...But what is knowledge...
...Now in middle age they seem to be resting on reputations gained by their advocacy of conservatism with a Marxist vocabulary, and the evils which they once fought they now lament with second-hand phrases about "tragedy...
...That is what drives the student movement on...
...The student, if he chose, would be authorized to apply that grant for the payment of tuition at any "private college" he chose...
...Several students' names were taken down by the Dean's representatives, though the tables were unmolested...
...the annihilator of students' personalities, the System, the Alienator...
...they can find no place in society where alienation doesn't exist, where they can do meaningful work...
...Undergraduate, graduate, and non-student laughter.] We want to be able to mount action on this campus...
...As she sang "We Shall Overcome," they marched in solemn procession to University Hall where the Regents were convening...
...More laughter.]" Spontaneously the natural idiom of the student political protest was that of sexual protest against the forbidding university administrator who ruled in loco parentis...
...In Marx's system, there was the increasing misery of the proletariat as the capitalist system made technological advances and moved toward a zero rate of profit...
...Who would ever expect to be confronted at the entrance into Harvard Yard with a row of eight or nine tables replete with the political literature of a variety of movements, sects, and causes...
...Actually, it is often one of its most corrupting agencies...
...What began as primarily a movement of undergraduates broadened out into a movement of graduate students as well...
...many of whom don't come from the working class...
...A Graduate Coordinating Council with several hundred research and teaching assistants arose...
...If religion was once an opiate, now the lumpen-intelligentsia has taken to opiates for its opiates...
...A new threefold class structure, moreover, characterizes the New University: on top are the researchers, at the bottom are its teachers, and in between are the hybrids...
...And what is its bearing on the ideology of the modern Multiversity...
...The campus of the University of California, it must be borne in mind, is probably the freest of any major university in the United States...
...They took the additional royalties as well as the academic credit...
...The overheated oratory vied with the sun, never ending, always strident, a ceaseless flow of "manifestese...
...the committee captains tend to be professors with little interest in their research or teaching who are making a full-time career of bureaucratizing on committees...
...Must we accept the historical inevitability of the Impersonal Institution...
...Every year sees its quota of horrible murders and rapes on the Multiversity's grounds...
...For several hours there was more singing, then anger and tears when the announcement came that the Regents would not concede the students the right to be illegal...
...A group of 15 professors argued and pleaded with the chancellor and vice-chancellor for two hours during the late afternoon of October 2; they heard rules recited and one phrase repeated, "non-negotiable...
...Anonymous functionaries become influential because the very multiplicity of committees and their changing personnel favors their strategic role...
...At 6 p.m., the time selected for police action, the police command group was notified that representatives of the university and the demonstrators were negotiating and that the operation should be delayed...
...A veteran Socialist writer repeatedly addressed the students, and published a pamphlet, "The Mind of Clark Kerr...
...We are finally faced with the "contradiction" of the Modern University...
...There are occasional rare administrators, such as Herbert Blumer, the Director of the Institute of Social Sciences, who have preserved their institutes as means for helping independent research and scholarship...
...How they listened and laughed to Savio telling that story...
...his Godkin lectures at Harvard in 1963, The Uses of the University, were its authoritative pronouncement...
...It would be cherished in later years as a sacred relic, a pathetic reminder of how this student generation looks for its Guadalcanal and Iwo Jima...
...Associated with this carrier wave are minor harmonic waves...
...Regents, legislature, students, public...
...The president was now one of the contending forces, and the determining constraints of the Impersonal Institution were challenging his own devotion to liberalism and that of his chancellor and vice-chancellors...
...This is Mario Savio telling of his search for an ideology: "As Max Eastman pointed out, a lot of Hegel got mixed in with Marx's notion of history...
...The labor movement has taken on the same impersonal quality as management...
...Another professor advises the registrar's office that his course enrollment at a certain hour will probably be close to 900, and will probably exceed that of any other course at the same hour...
...Administrators say defensively that these matters are governed by the laws of supply and demand...
...intellectual lumpen-proletarians, lumpen-beatniks, and lumpen-agitators wend their ways to the university campus to advocate a melange of narcotics, sexual perversion, collegiate Castroism, and campus Maoism...
...In the confusion, various professors came forward, most of them appalled by the irrational rigidity which had settled on the students and the administrators, others perhaps inspired by the prospect of dangling chancellorships and emoluments which they saw as the outcome of a successful debut as mediator...
...His words were rational and sincere, but the students were now in the full mood of generational uprising and Socrates himself would have gotten no hearing from them...
...The project-partitioning professor makes the pork-barrel politician and the fee-splitting physician look like petty operators, for the New Professor, akin to a Scientific Priest, receives not only the titles but the veneration of the benighted community...
...That day and the next there were feverish meetings on the campus: a huge one of several thousands, an improvised one of a thousand faculty, and in every department small ones of anxious professors and graduate assistants...
...But there was an awful flaw in Kerr's analysis...
...but its charges, coming as they did almost two months after the events, reopened cases which people had generally understood were going to be dropped...
...Knowledge and action are inseparable...
...It has been observed that several of the student leaders are the children of well-known Communist leaders, past and present...
...We are like electrons in a mass-accelerator, to be speeded up and measured...
...You must not stand by and do nothing...
...Mathematics, the haven of the long-haired among the sciences, was highly represented...
...We are confronted, he says, with inevitable changes, and the way of wisdom is to cooperate with the inevitable on the best terms we can...
...With his rich experience as a labor mediator and his Quaker philosophy, Kerr was indeed the ideal equilibrator...
...Shamefacedly she admitted that she had not even read the sign she was carrying, but she was demonstrating, protesting, rebelling...
...They will someday similarly exploit others...
...7. If the market mechanism cannot be eliminated, a system of differential tuition fees and departmental cost accounting should be established...
...At 3 a.m...
...There is an "inevitability of concentration" in research and education...
...5. It is imperative to elevate the smaller colleges and universities as intellectual centers...
...As the touch or shadow of an untouchable defiles the Brahman, so the proximity of an undergraduate menaces the managerial purity of the modern professor...
...A resolute policy could do much to restore this...
...all the activists were sons against the father...
...He had described the "incipient revolt" as one of undergraduates against the faculty...
...Nevertheless, the most important concept for understanding the student movement is Marx's notion of alienation...
...I wasn't really alive...
...Friday the students held the police car with its prisoner hostage...
...Now they have had California's October days as a near-substitute...
...some trying to read by lamplight and searchlight, others with the guitars singing ballads of themselves and creating the legend which they will embroider in later years...
...Nobody knows me after four years to write me a letter of recommendation...
...The student comes to the university in quest of a bill of particulars to justify his "alienation...
...But let it do so elsewhere, not on a university campus...
...An unruly atmosphere occasionally touches even this body, which incorporates the greatest concentration of intellectual power and genius in the sciences and scholarship the world has ever known...
...and perceives the enemies' visage in the chiefs of the Multiversity...
...The university's regulations forbade the soliciting of funds on the campus by off-campus groups, or the use of university grounds for the organization of outside political drives...
...Now they could rely on the elemental reaction of their fellowgenerationists against the Cruel Heartless Administration which wanted to punish Mario Savio for biting a policeman's thigh...
...but Blumer belongs to a generation removed from the Middle Bureaucrats...
...He explained his position at a public meeting one evening of the Young Socialist Alliance...
...A well-known labor journalist and "inside dopester" imparted his blessing on several occasions...
...But putting aside all such probing into the unconscious sources of the generational uprising and its sometimes anti-democratic expression, it cannot be gainsaid that when the students speak of the impersonal and de-personalizing modern university they are speaking of a genuine phenomenon...
...During the last week of November, it seemed as if the university might at last know some respite from the troubles which had plagued it...
...We are breaking down barriers set up in a lot of people's personalities...
...Well and good...
...The bureaucratic channels are multiplied, the structures of committees become topheavy and their functioning inefficient...
...The students in this setting are the "untouchables" of the university system...
...The charges against Mario Savio included one for having bitten a policeman's thigh while the officer was trying to close the door of Sproul Hall...
...The meetings would obviate the reliance on selfappointed intermediaries, reduce the rumors and gossip, and clarify in interchange all the relevant considerations and difficulties...
...December 7. President Kerr addressed the students directly for the first time since the crisis began three months ago...
...One sees the alienation of the undergraduate student as the necessary social cost of an historical inevitability, and finds nothing practicable to be done about it...
...Sproul Hall was transfigured in their imagination into the Winter Palace, and the student sit-ins into the Seizure of Power...
...These second generationists have worked themselves into a sickly trenzy, declaiming in phrases utterly disproportionate to reality how they are ready to lay their lives down for the First Amendment, and they take a perverse pleasure in the easy game of heckling and defying deans...
...The official report of the Berkeley police provides further details: "On Friday, October 2, the university announced the intention to take police action and again requested mutual aid assistance...
...Suggestions have been made which deserve exploration: 1. We can ask our university presidents and chancellors to come out of their offices and confront the students directly every few weeks to answer questions and discuss their doubts...
...It stands for the university of the 21st century...
...Its basic meaning is that the worker is alienated from his product, but the concept is applicable to students too...
...The students feel themselves propelled about by IBM machines from one big line to another...
...to their eyes a new academic generation is replacing them which has not known Joseph (as the Bible says), which has been moved not by a vocation of teaching and scholarship but by status, secretaries, kudos, foundation finance...
...This functionary decides to refer the problem to a Committee on Changes in Student Grades...
...First and foremost, the great presidents were teachers, and their conception of their office was shaped by their conception of themselves as teachers...
...The Committee acknowledges the professor is conscientious, regrets that he finds it obstructive, but refuses to budge from its refusal to correct the injustice to the student...
...With a huge conglomeration of students, the ties of informal association and community linkage become weaker...
...The Bible says what knowledge is when it writes that a man knows a woman...
...From noon Thursday till 7:30 p.m...
...Then on Tuesday, September 29, four student organizations undertook the direct action of setting up their tables in front of Sather Gate in contravention of the rules...
...The so-called students' movement now wished the university to promulgate their right to engage in illegal action...
...What do a college and graduate school in the arts and sciences, a school of business and a law school gain by being built into common blocks of buildings...
...Similarly, the "someone" who placed himself obstructively in front of the police car was another non-student—chiefly famed for his tireless advocacy of the use of drugs, and at the time of these occurrences, on parole from a jail sentence...
...The institutes have tended to become foreign bodies in the university's organism which are inimical to its healthy functioning as a community of scholars...
...A new set of class struggles appear—"an incipient revolt of undergraduate students against the faculty...
...The non-violent civil rights movement had come a long way since three years ago—when they used to plead guilty proudly and unashamedly to their acts, and place their trust in the moral case...
...How much thought has the immense sociological intelligence concentrated in Berkeley given to the problem of reducing bureaucracy rather than justifying its ways...
...Despair sets in, a volatile political agent...
...Many who were arrested have acknowledged that the inevitable cry of "police brutality" was an exaggeration...
...Speakers addressed the crowds from the top of the car, and so the vehicle, now Jack Weinberg's cell, became the focal point of the rapidly accelerating movement...
...Yet all were undeniably innovators from above...
...A week later the administration, in an ill-advised move, notified four of the student leaders that they would have to face charges for alleged violence against the campus police...
...The New Multiversity: Ideology and Reality Rebellion at Berkeley By Lewis S. Feuer Berkeley Throughout the world, the University of California is looked upon as the shape of educational things to come...
...Long lines in the library to get a book, long lines outside a professor's study...
...Extremes do meet...
...their mechanical functioning makes for splits in people's personalities...
...he balances the contending forces...
...There were no stepsons...
...What is more, despite all the talk about "the end of ideology," it is well to speak of the ideology rather than the idea of the modern university...
...German ministers of education, the Soviet Communist party, the Emperor of Japan, and now, the American foundations...
...As for the chancellor, Edward W. Strong, he is a man of saintly character and an eminent scholar, who defended the academic freedom of Communist professors in an era when it required moral courage to do so...
...Imagine a student demonstration confronting a Charles W. Eliot, or a James Burrill Angeli, or a Woodrow Wilson...
...In the social sciences, the departments generally allowed or advised the assistants not to meet their classes temporarily...
...Tables were set up in opposition to the ban...
...insofar as there would be any mediators, they would be faculty men...
...As the university gets better and better, the teaching gets worse and worse...
...Do not attend classes today...
...they were SNCC, Slate (a student political party of all Leftist shades, embracing varieties of Stalinism, Maoism, beatnikism...
...For as an ideology, it provides a rationale for the contribution of the university to the managerial revolution...
...it had proved itself in the most testing circumstances...
...Join them in a massive university-wide strike...
...He went limp and was carried into a police car...
...In several cases, the students' tactic of going limp resulted in some forcing and pushing...
...Well, that's the language he understands, so we are here as numbers—hundreds and thousands . . ." The numbers fluctuated from several hundred to close to 6,000 Friday evening...
...There were signs and slogans, a medley of the heroic and scurrilous...
...His prediction is confirmed, but nonetheless he is assigned a room for 550...
...its citing of Plato for a new concept of "organic democracy," sometimes remind one unpleasantly of young German students talking in a similar vein in the early '30s...
...One student declaimed: "Clark Kerr has written that the university is a factory...
...The dialectic was a way in which Marx made the course of world history coincide with his unconscious desires...
...She was carrying a beautifully wrapped gift box...
...And because administrators themselves felt sympathetic toward the civil rights movement, a certain laxity in the university's enforcement of its own rules developed...
...The other voices the alienation, and casts the university's president in the role of an evil ogre who battens on the separations of men...
...There are naturally psychoanalytical overtones to the student uprising...
...Now there is nothing wrong with the government conducting, say, its own Research Institute for Political Intelligence and Administrative Affairs...
...And it is a choice which an emerging student movement may have to make...
...The state might offer to every student eligible to enter a state university or college the alternative of a grant equal to the average cost of educating a student at such an institution...
...they find employment as research assistants...
...The administration, on its side, explained that it aimed to punish violence, not nonviolence...
...For one, says Kerr, there is the "cruel paradox" that a superior faculty means inferior teaching...
...How then to restore a more autonomous, decentralized creative response by scholars and students themselves...
...The police action took 12 hours, and was generally without violence...
...Thus began the students' revolt against the Multiversity...
...At the gates, strike leaflets were issued: "Our fellow students are being dragged off to jail...
...The student activists, veterans of civil disobedience actions from San Francisco to Mississippi, resolved precipitously to use their well-practiced tactic on the university itself...
...It corrupts both professors and students in the way that the Soviet institutes do...
...The bitterness of the activist students at this time extended to those senior professors who urged them to disassemble...
...It displeased the Trotskyist group because its terms were so personalistic and devoid of a class analysis of American society...
...Their gestures are curiously the same as those of their fathers in the '30s—the same mixture of arrogance and dictatorial attitudes alternating with humility and self-sacrificial masochism...
...Chancellor Strong pleaded with the students unavailingly to leave...
...Yipsels, Left-wingers...
...The next part of the story is best told by the Newsletter of the Free Speech Movement, which shortly came into existence as a Soviet-style coalition of 14 student groups ranging from Khrushchevites to Goldwaterites: "Then came the unpredictable...
...The ethical standards of the professors decline as they seek through devious means to pyramid their incomes...
...It is true, he notes, that many faculty members will feel themselves lonely persons in an impersonal institution, but after all no faculty has ever made any innovations in education: The major changes in education have always come from above...
...with their tradition of voluntary poverty, they represented a kind of enclave of higher ideals...
...is present long before a causa belli has been defined...
...Who would expect to hear in the center of the Columbia campus, or from the steps of its buildings, sundry addresses calling on the students to take drugs, to join a group going to Cuba, to demand the sale of contraceptives by the University Bookstore and their free distribution to freshmen and girl students, or to launch a frontal attack on the university's bureaucracy by occupying its buildings...
...When daylight came, it brought a mercilessly hot sun...
...There was an accumulated bitterness stemming from a variety of "alienations," real and imaginary, which converged into an assault against the System...
...3. What economy or educational purpose is served by gathering together on one campus 27,000 students and 1.700 professors...
...But it applies equally to our bureaucratic society where there are several centers of impersonal power...
...Marx's concept of alienation was worked out for a two-class society...
...The acrid smell of the crowded sweating unbathed students sharply reminded me of smells I had long since forgotten among soldiers in the Pacific more than 20 years ago...
...When Professor Harold Urey visited the Soviet Union, he was shocked by the way distinguished Soviet scientists would publish under their own name the inferior work of their research assistants...
...Once more Joan Baez sang the Lord's Prayer and "We Shall Overcome," and about 1,000 students marched in holy procession to occupy the administration fortress...
...Thereupon the police began to arrest and remove 814 sit-down occupants, 590 of whom were students...
...Then...
...a CORE officer bore aloft a quotation from a book signed by "Clark Cur...
...On Thursday, December 3, picket lines paraded in front of the classroom buildings...
...For years graduate students have advised each other as to how to "beat the System...
...the research assistants mock at the System and their directors but are content to be bought off with good salaries and jobs...
...Many of them were arrested and convicted in court for their actions in the Sheraton-Palace Hotel and Automobile Row...
...A more equitable accounting would raise the salaries of the humanists, who would get the benefit of the low-cost operation and larger classes...
...The evolution from idea to ideology has taken us from the vocation of the autonomous thinker to the bureaucratism of the managerial ideologist, whose "technological materialism" converges strikingly with dialectical materialism...
...the individual, independent scholar finds himself faced with the alternative of being denied funds or being compelled to "join the project...
...The Committee propounds a decision saying the professor cannot change this grade unless he is sure that no other similar inequity has occurred among his other 800 students...
...like so many student movements, has within it an anti-democratic potential, with a conception of "free speech" compatible with taking over other peopled meetings and dictating the terms...
...suddenly they sounded more like children asking for permission to be bad than the stern revolutionists they proclaimed themselves to be...
...In Kerr's system, there is the increasing misery of the students as the university system moves on toward intellectual advance with a zero rate of teaching...
...Nevertheless, the "alienation" of many students often seems little more than the use of a fashionable sloganword...
...The combined membership of these organizations was no more than 170 persons out of a total student population of more than 27,000...
...Of all university presidents, moreover, his devotion to academic freedom was unquestionable...
...But another remark of his has become well-known because it reveals the generational animus which underlies the student uprising: "We have a saying in the movement that you can't trust anybody over 30...
...Consequently, in September after the vacation the university undertook to enforce the regulations...
...On December 1, the activists submitted an ultimatum saying that unless the charges were dropped within 24 hours, the students would resort to massive tactics...
...All this is inevitable, says Kerr, the necessary consequence of the huge flow of Federal funds for research to the universities after World War II...
...Weinberg, the police car limpnik, is a characteristic member of the student movement, that is, he is a non-student...
...the Soviet Communist party, which established unparalleled control over the teaching of every subject, and directed the curricula at various times against genetics, mathematical logic, the theory of relativity, quantum theory, psychoanalysis, formalist literary criticism, objective history, and Western linguistics...
...There are other campuses and colleges with fine faculties in smaller, warmer, more personal settings that are not more costly...
...There is no reason why a university institute should be used to serve this function...
...A sit-in then began which lasted into the early morning of October 1. On that day eight students were suspended from the university...
...English Laborite publications have hailed the University of California as a model of socialism in action...
...it manned illegal tables, and in one department began to collect money for a strike fund...
...But until the October uprising all the administrators reacted like billiard balls to the impersonal forces of the Multiversity...
...since the doors were closed, food was hoisted through the windows...
...Forgotten too is the wisdom which William James taught us: "The bigger the unit you deal with, the hollower, the more brutal, the more mendacious is the life displayed...
...Make their teaching schedules uniformly lighter so that they can overcome the difficulties of doing research in a more isolated center...
...The universities used to be socialistic enclaves, communities of scholars, in the midst of a competitive world...
...the highest status comes with zero teaching...
...They are not impressed by their radical pasts...
...They were seen as the Faculty Front for the bureaucracy...
...A vacuum of communication with the students was created...
...I thought about it and my own involvement when I went to Mississippi where I could be killed...
...Thus, Kerr observes, industry and university have coalesced...
...Generational solidarity carried the day as undergraduate Goldwaterites and graduate Maoists somehow defined a common enemy in Paternalism (a word endlessly repeated) and the System...
...They ask chairmen of departments and directors of institutes, supervisors of courses, and ordinary professors alike whether they have practiced their principles as administrators and teachers...
...The majority of the students now wanted to return to their studies...
...At that time, and again this month, there was the appalling spectacle of hundreds of police, drawn up in formations, helmeted astride their motorcycles...
...The professor replies, asking what the Committee would advise him to do along these lines more than he has customarily done...
...The daily demonstrations and noon orations were dwindling in numbers to some 200 or so of the faithful...
...Throughout this time, President Kerr steadfastly refused to consider punishing students for their actions in the community at large...
...Probably half the classes in the university did not meet those days...
...What are the basic causes and origin of this student uprising...
...The students' first moment of victory was when Clark Kerr met them and called them "Mister...
...The policemen behaved good-naturedly and worked out arrangements to provide for the physical needs of their prisoner...
...In October they stood awaiting an order to invade a massed dense crowd of 6.000 students, while a heavy sullenness and expectancy hung in the air...
...Meanwhile, a never-ending demonstration continued before the Administration Building...
...With some sorrow, one reads the roll call of President Kerr's pioneers in innovation—Napoleon, who abolished the teaching of social science in the French universities...
...Every bureaucrat will have his corresponding beatnik, every IBM machine will have its corresponding neo-Luddite rebel, organization will have its counterpart in alienation, the Multiversity will evolve into a Nulliversity...
...the student uprising has been an occasion for the return of those best called Octobristes manques, those whose life's tragedy is that they have never enjoyed an October Revolution...
...This is the motive power of the student movement...
...Curiously, the doctoral requirements in the humanities are far more rigorous than they are in such fields as political science and sociology, where a strategic use of a small body of readings can get one by on the qualifying examinations...
...Is their "socialism" or "liberalism" a ritual of words or a guiding philosophy fulfilled in everyday relations...
...The students revolt against the apparatus of the university...
...The Free Speech Movement...
...On Wednesday, 400 students signed petitions to the Dean that they too were guilty of having manned the political tables in conscious violation of the university's edicts...
...This in effect would be a civilian version of the old GI Bill of Rights...
...We have so many bureaucracies...
...Such departments as history and the humanities operate with low-cost budgets, whereas the physical sciences have exceedingly high costs...
...Suddenly the president was called upon not to mediate but to lead...
...Among this, campus police arrested Jack Weinberg, who was manning a table for CORE...
...The students regard many of their senior professors as having sold out to what might best be called the ideology of "smuggism...
...The student activists no longer were compelled to invent scholastic arguments for an alleged right to organize illegal actions on the campus...
...Shall we allow these "contradictions" to deepen until they breed a directionless generational uprising, or shall we intervene against the so-called inevitabilities and do what we can to revive the idea of universities as centers of human wisdom...
...I needed some way to pinch myself, to assure myself that I was alive...
...All this would be a necessary evil, if it were necessary...
...After the October days there were weeks of negotiation, followed by the university's proposal of broad provisions for freedom of speech, organization, solicitation of funds and members, and actions in the community—everything short of explicit permission to use the university's facilities to organize illegal actions in the community at large...
...Finally on Monday...
...Why should the behavior of such professors differ from that of any corresponding convention of manaaerialists...
...The only "dispersion" of Big Research and Education envisaged is that which is advisable to alleviate the military vulnerability of an area where a huge concentration of equipment and intelligence exists...
...the managerial professor receives grants, overt and covert, for needless travel, books, magazines, research assistants who write his books, flunkeys who unpack his trunks and flatter his ego...
...How sound was his indictment of the New University...
...Clearly, however, Savio had captured the mood of the embryonic student movement...
...Thus Mario Savio—a 21-year-old philosophy student whose education began in a Catholic parochial school on New York's East Side, and whose family moved to middle class status in Southern California...
...All their accumulated unwisdom did not add up to a fraction of the influence extended by the grace and voice of Joan Baez...
...At once all the ties of generational solidarity came into play...
...But when it came to concrete cases, the administrators were loathe to order the removal of tables set up at the university gate by such groups as SNCC and CORE to solicit funds and volunteers...
...The ablest graduate students do not teach...
...As the meeting was being adjourned by the chairman, Professor Robert Scalapino, student leader Mario Savio stalked across the platform and tried to seize the microphone to "take over" the meeting...
...Police have to rush into the library stacks to guard women students against mentally sick men...
...It was stupid and ridiculous, wonderful and romantic...
...Its spokesman is the ablest university president in the United States, Clark Kerr...
...In witness thereof, Kerr cites the innovative role of Napoleon...
...At 7:10 p.m...
...Whither the Multiversity-Nulliversity...
...There is a simple financial way to do so: Subsidize higher salaries for professors who will choose to accept appointment at the smaller colleges rather than the larger ones...
...The halls were like an indoor bivouac of boys and girls enjoying a rare all-night party...
...The dialectic however has a malicious streak...
...the smallest groups came from the physical and natural sciences...
...At noon the following day a rally was held to protest the suspensions and the freedom limitations...
...Several "non-students," members of the so-called "hidden community" in Berkeley which is available for full-time activity in any action against the Establishment or System, exhorted the first group of students as they invaded the Administration Building for their first sit-in...
...My reasons were selfish...
...Left administrationists...
...but we all know as well that often saying something is inevitable tends to make it so...
...The Graduate Co-ordinating Committee, the "Soviet" of delegates from the graduate students of the various departments, authorized its Strike Committee to call a general strike of teaching assistants if necessary...
...It was not really a matter of fighting for constitutional rights...
...As the university becomes greater, Kerr goes on, its faculty becomes more corrupt...
...2. In the 19th century, new colleges and universities were founded in response to new intellectual movements as well as regional needs...
...At its faculty meetings, the Multiversity struggles pathetically to overcome its atmosphere of anonymity...
...A self-styled Soviet expert sought to exert influence at meetings of the student leaders...
...The expenditure on police protection in the Multiversity to be adequate would have to increase geometrically...
...Should they not give the managerial innovator of the Multiversity more cause for concern as to the direction in which he would take us...
...The several hundred sitting demonstrators dispersed when Mario Savio, the chief student leader, told them from the police car of the agreement with the Administration...
...The university Plaza became the last best hope and sanctuary of every forlorn crackpot and rejected revolutionist in town...
...At the great November 20 rally graced by the presence of Joan Baez, young Mario assailed the epistemology of Clark Kerr: "The president says this is a knowledge-factory...
...New colleges, with a literary, humanistic, even existentialist emphasis would be much likelier to come into existence, and a creative flexibility in the founding of new institutions would be encouraged...
...But is it necessary...
...Yet during October this university came nearer to having its October Revolution than has any other American institution...
...But that evening hysterical and emotionally wrought students were still standing on the abandoned battlefield which groundsmen were trying to clean...
...The students are frustrated...
...The so-called Institute is regarded by Clark Kerr as the great innovation of the Multiversity...
...They put a premium on the so-called "collective research" dominated by the ideology and aims of a director...
...he is the equilibrator between the faculty...
...It does not matter whether you support a particular tactic...
...No president, vice-president, chancellor, or vice-chancellor went out to face the students...
...The presence of undergraduate students is a necessary though regrettable concession to the taxpaying citizenry of California...
...On November 20, they again gathered by the thousands on the Plaza to hear Joan Baez sing of freedom...
...Strike...
...Every faculty member, moreover, has stories to tell of life in the New University of the Nuclear Age...
...There is the phenomenon, for instance, of what we may call "the return of the second generation...
...As Clark Kerr and Mario Savio say, it turns students into numbers, and corrupts the vocation of a university teacher...
...The biggest contingents came from the most "alienated" departments —history, English, political science...
...Here are two less horrendous sample incidents of professorial experience under Bureaucratic Education: A professor in charge of a course with more than 800 students finds that a student's complaint of an unfair grade by a teaching assistant is well-founded...
...4. In line with this notion, one might very well consider the complete divorce or partial separation of research institutes from the universities...
...Always there was the oratory, the invective against the bureaucrats, the demand for freedom...
...An administrative official visits him and tells him that the rival course at that hour is an offering of a very powerful department, with much money and many non-teachers...
...Outside, the detachments of police were mobilizing for what might have been the first major battle and violence between police and students on an ideological question in the history of the United States...
...A thousand professors crowd into a large hall...
...The dean's office, therefore, cannot undertake to override the registrar's office...
...Now we will have to break down the fiction of the separation of student and citizen...
...It accepts as historically inevitable the surrender of the scholar's autonomy, and sees his intellectual and moral idealism as cultural survivals...
...What is the ideology of the modern university...
...Its orations about "alienation," its diatribes against pluralistic democracy...
...The will to revolt, the "alienation...
...The matter is that the police are on our campus sending students to prison farms in an attempt to crush the free speech movement . . . There are only two sides—you must choose yours . . . Defend your fellow students...
...Fortunately, the professor in the rival course does not subscribe to the bureaucratic standpoint, and volunteers the change himself...
...English Conservatives and Socialists, for example, both agree on this...
...6. The new class structure in colleges and universities should be counteracted by a more uniform structure of salaries and teaching duties—whether in the natural, physical, or social sciences, or the humanities...
...Somehow people are being separated off from something...
...The Research Institutes in the universities, he writes, are its creative centers...
...It took little capital for a group of professors and students to secede from one institution to found another...
...radicalism), the YSA (Trotskyist Young Socialist Alliance), and CORE...
...His followers were at first shocked by what he had done, yet by the afternoon were busy inventing rationalizations for the tactics of the coup...
...the German ministers, who safeguarded the universities from liberals and socialists and abetted the Nazi trend...
...The conglomeration acts as a magnet for the morally corrupt...
...During the past spring, several hundred students were actively involved in civil rights "sit-ins" in San Francisco...
...Every classical student movement, beginning with the Russian movement in the 19th century, has attracted non-students who find their life's calling in a prolonged adolescence and repetitive re-enactment from year to year of a rebellion against their father...
...The next day at noon a crowd of several thousand listened again to Mario Savio attacking Clark Kerr as a manager, responsible to a board of directors, who treats the students as "raw material": "It becomes odious so we must put our bodies against the gears, against the wheels and machines, and make the machine stop until we're free...
...In October, the ideology of the Multiversity collided with the student uprising which Clark Kerr had foreseen...
...Kerr is a technomanagerial realist, indeed almost a "neo-Marxist" in his conception of the modern university's development...
...all of them tired, weary, fighting vaguely for a cause they could hardly explain, but moved to this declaration of generational independence...
...He deals with us as numbers...
...As Marx indicated, it is always standing men and institutions on their head, and this physical assault can take on the added overtones of generational uprising...
...His claims to "expertise" were unfortunately marred by the fact that as late as 1952 he testified before a Congressional committee that Stalin had never killed his political opponents and that there were no slave-labor camps in the Soviet Union...
...I decided I'd rather work for civil rights than study math," he says...
...This ideology of smuggism seems to the activist student the ideology of the alienators—those who in their existence and consciousness have identified themselves with the Bureaucratic System, and extol its ways to man, if not to God...
...another sit-in November 23 came to an end after three hours when the graduate students withdrew their support...
...Men of the past recall the dignity of ancient professorial proceedings...
...But the student activists were unyielding...
...For if the bigness and impersonality of the modern university alienates them, then one naturally asks why they have chosen to come to Berkeley, the archagent of estrangement...
...The vigil around the car was maintained through the night by students on blankets...
...The president of the Multiversity, according to Clark Kerr, is essentially a mediator...
...Socialism, one recalls, had something to do with human values and the reduction of class barriers...
...the dispute was compromised and the police force dismissed...
...If this should become the shape of an American student movement, it would be no safeguard for democracy...
...Evidently, therefore, many students come to Berkeley, to the Impersonal Knowledge Factory, precisely because they want to have the experience of generational revolt...
...They say to each other, if you consult on my project for a fee, then I shall consult on yours likewise...
...Meanwhile, the government funnels in its funds for sundry projects...
...Provide them with special allowances for the purchase of books and journals and attendance at academic meetings...
...the departments arc vaults of tradition...
...Mario Savio, like a typical philosophy undergraduate, announced sententiously that he refused to grant the presumption that Kerr had a mind...
...The like of it is unimaginable in Harvard Yard, or the campuses of Columbia University or the City College of New York...
...Universities and colleges once embodied a kind of classlessness in their faculties...
...The ideology of the modern university almost foundered on these days, and many will forever after doubt its claims...
...Such is the ethic of the New University...
...In Sproul Hall they quickly set up a Free University of California, and announced a course on music by Joan Baez as well as courses on the Nature of God and the Logarithmic Spiral, Wild Spanish, and Arts and Crafts, with a special section for making strike signs...
...I met the editor of the Newsletter...
...643 officers from the Berkeley and Oakland Police Departments, the Alameda County Sheriff's Office and the California Highway Patrol were assembled on the campus, briefed and prepared for action within a period of three hours...
...In the physical sciences and engineering, the strike was unsuccessful...
...He asks, in view of the fire hazard, for a change to a larger hall...
...We are breaking down the fiction of roles...
...They had intended their move to provoke the calling of the police, counting on generational solidarity to succeed where their argument had failed...
...Has the chairman or director shown himself first and foremost interested in concentrating authoritarian power and prerogatives into his person...
...The Multiversity has superseded the university as modernity superseded medievalism...
...They could not leave the scene where they had embattled the Administration...
...the battered police car was the enemy's pillbox they had taken...
...It comes as a surprise indeed to find distinguished social scientists speaking of the Multiversity as the pre-eminent embodiment of socialism in America...
...Probably it is time for educators to enact their own anti-trust law to break up tendencies to educational concentration unless they can be shown to be necessary from the standpoint of better education...
...The old liberal arts college with its humanistic philosophy is technologically obsolescent...
...As things stand now, the professor of literature has to work much harder with more students and more classes than his colleagues in the natural and social sciences...
...The staid London Times proposed a year ago that British universities be reconstituted on the Californian model, and that they emulate the university which has "carried out the largest quantity of original and successful scientific research of any institution in the world...
...The several thousand spectators, sympathizers, and opponents of all degrees quit the Plaza...
...Such encounters could be restricted to students, to exclude the throng of non-students who lead their parasitic, vicarious lives among the students...
...Since they are mostly strangers to each other, each speaker has to identify himself by name and department...
...Angry, sleepless voices charged that their leaders had sold them out...
...A Trotskyist vice-presidential candidate harangued the students...
...But the philosophy of the new university, says Kerr, is a "technological materialism...
...But these phenomena were marginal to the central fact of student alienation and resentment in the Multiversity on which the movement fed...
...When the police tried to drive the car off campus, someone sat down in front of it and a moment later the car was completely surrounded...
...During the summer, however, conservative elements of the community evidently complained that the university's regulations for political neutrality were not being enforced...
...Differential tuition fees should be introduced for the students, since the young physicist can expect a far higher salary than the young humanist...
...Each kept a vigil in his office, ensconced by a protective moat of secretaries and aides...
...But exaggeration or not, the spectacle of 635 police on the campus acting against students had the effect hoped for by the student leaders...
...six universities have been receiving more than half the funds...
...My life, my middleclass life, had no place in society, nor it in me...
...The police removed him, but he was later allowed to go back to announce his own daily meeting...
...When asked why, the students explain that it is so much more exciting here, so many groups, and so much activity and movement in the air...
...That there are some inevitabilities in human history we may all grant...
...Something similar happens in our university institutes...
Vol. 47 • December 1964 • No. 26
