Berkeley in February
Goodman, Paul
What follows are not further accounts of the Berkeley events— we are sure our readers have read enough of those—but considerations of their significance. This February DISSENT sent Paul Goodman...
...Yes," said a student, "it's the genius of administration to turn a nice guy like you into a fink...
...But the rising of students and of professors recalled to manhood occurs in the best of the middle-class itself and in the center of the economy...
...he assured the young man that he had "found students able to dissociate themselves from events last fall and simply work to future improvement...
...Come now to the University...
...So the Governor had to send his troopers and for a couple of days Clark Kerr's Multiversity ceased to exist...
...And this is not because philosophy and pleasure have seduced people from the realities of life, but because the thoughts and feelings of the young have been more relevant to the underlying realities of modern times, the drive to rationalization, the abuse of high technology, and the hardware GNP, statism and the Bomb...
...So far as the essence of a community of scholars is the personal relation of students and teachers, Berkeley has already accomplished University Reform and Jerry Byrne's inquiry need go no further.* But in fact, in freedom, there is a buzz of activity toward legislating new institutions...
...But as soon as there is an activity, the guerrillas are out in force...
...Eastern time—in various states of fever, alarm, and despair...
...And then the Faculty, as Professor Wolin has put it, "stirred to ancestral memories of the ideal of a community of scholars bound together in the spirit of friendly persuasion and pledged to truth rather than abundance...
...Of course, from the Multiversity point of view, the inflation is more than paid for by rich contracted research, no matter what, and government and foundation grants...
...cision in their favor, I heard nothing further...
...Not accidentally, the movement for the outcaste has sparked and energized this more central revolution, and we will finally come to the real issues: the revival of democracy, the human use of technology, and getting rid of war...
...There is an evident discipline to attend meetings—naturally many students lost academic credit for the fall term...
...This could be manned by students for academic credit as well as pay...
...Mi ,ht the report suggest that government of the University should be given over to the students and faculty...
...To my judgment, the students did not dig what I was saying...
...One of the leaders, Rossman, then explained to me that interest in Civil Rights was simply part of one's commitment, and it was exactly equivalent to the problem of making a classroom for real...
...but the others, who were mostly graduates and undergraduates in History, assured her that the professor was very young...
...Faculty proposals for University Reform—e.g...
...They know what freedom is—yes, they do—but they don't really know what a University is...
...When it was known I wanted to write this report, at once I received a list of key names and contacts all arranged: "he will phone you at 3:45"—one expected 15:45...
...Typical subjects, Moral Responsibility and the Sciences, Marx and Freud, History of the Oppression of Women...
...Rossman himself is a section-man in mathematics...
...There you are," said Savio, "why don't you quit...
...The Civil Rights energy, which had obviously been strong, could hardly continue animating them, since it was not essentially a campus issue at all...
...Don't you see, Jerry," I said finally, they want you to show a burning zeal to improve their school, and you're not showing it...
...Oh Bill," I cried, "why can't you say that publicly...
...he said, "they're students...
...The fact is that for a hundred years you have cut their balls off and now you say they are impatient...
...It is interesting to speculate how Senator Knowland, who owns the Oakland paper, would take this competition, while CORE, recruited from the University, pickets his door for unfair labor practices...
...the students were not making "offers" with the intention of "settling" for something different...
...Some great universities have refused such contracts...
...guardian of Lernfreiheit against administrative encroachments like grading, excessive courses, unreasonable policies of admission and transfer...
...it is our duty to let it feel the blast of University truth...
...Unfortunately, good faith and commitment are in principle not negotiable...
...But he did not seem to satisfy...
...It's as bad as dealing with Saigon...
...It's our way of living...
...A bright idea suggested itself...
...The sex and narcotics laws of the corn munity are grounded in superstitions that it is the business of the biological and social sciences publicly to expose, just as the Eastern professors exposed the hoax of the Shelter program...
...Certainly in Marxist or psychiatric terms they are less alienated than most other people...
...But as well as being a medieval fringe, the students also want "personal contact" with the dignitaries, as in a small American boardingschool...
...Now, for a spell, disabused of their error, they can be serene—armed...
...Administration turns them into eunuchs and then complains that they are eunuchs...
...I don't feel any burning zeal," cried Jerry, "I just want to do a good honest job, and I intend to do it...
...and not least, "to look into the nature of the University of California's financial connections, controls imposed on funds, indirect pressures on Professors...
...The election being over, Senator Knowland had subsided...
...In California specifically, it was hard not to join in the rage at HUAC...
...The other students thought that we were simply wierd...
...The Counsel fielded the questions well and generously...
...it probably won't last much longer than the Fourth of August, but let's not yet look into the future...
...a summer project to organize migrant farm labor...
...In my opinion, administrators misestimate by applying to a different, decentralized system, the costs that belong to the present over-centralized system...
...There is a limitless amount of information, polling, data-processing, and decision-making by objective computation...
...I was wrong...
...and recently 1 have come to hope that freedom and meaning will outweigh anomie...
...Don't you think it's—more lively, more interesting...
...My opinion is that when they begin to reach for positive cultural goods, rather than engaging in resistance and defense, they will have to become shaggier...
...As a University man, let me put it this way: Our society has been playing with the fire of mass higher learning...
...They could publish the interviews in progress, while they were still the students' property, so to speak...
...Schools provide the brainpower for the scientific technology...
...And in the context of a community of scholars, the technique suddenly appeared as obscene...
...Beautifully, a moral struggle has given the students a habit of good faith and commitment, and their solidarity has turned into community, like the auroral flush of a good society...
...It is suspicious of being `vocationally guided"—though unfortunately it does not yet have much sense of true Vocation...
...It is hard for people in the labor movement to understand this term as applied to students...
...The causation seems to have been classical: justified protest, risky commitment, surprising solidarity and the development of mutual trust, shaking fear met with uncalculating courage, and then the breakthrough into the joyous feeling that "we have a say in the University," "it is our home," "we are free human beings...
...there are precise political-science analyses of contending forces, legal briefs, propertyholdings of each Regent...
...But pretty soon young people were bound to gravitate, or gravitate back, to the University, as cronies of students, or as auditors, or unmatriculated students, or as diffident and choosy students...
...they could make tapes...
...Or so it seemed to them...
...The little council is called a Soviet...
...the shape of reconstruction can appear here...
...He could see no objection...
...Unfortunately, again, however, there is not yet any sense of what a real University of professionals would consist in...
...Yet there does not seem to be top-down domination...
...Oh, why didn't you just explain that to them, Jerry,—with a smile...
...but then after a single shout of "Victory...
...There is, in the count, censorship and managed news in utter contradiction to the principle of the Humanities...
...Rather, endless pages about the First and Fourteenth Amendments, gripes about the violation of due process, and proofs of the ambiguities of Clark Kerr, all relevant but not newsy...
...Michael Miller, a graduate student in English at the University of California, presents a student view...
...Then what can you suggest for us to do, what action, beginning right now, that will put pressure on the Regents and guarantee some results...
...This is the kind of nausea that recalls decent but self-centered people to their plain duty...
...Byrne is a frank and likable guy, a lawyer, and I had previous evidence that he was earnest and somewhat unorthodox...
...Inevitably, in this return to involvement, there was joining with proper politicals...
...And most important, they seemed to have no future goal to grow toward, to inspirit them...
...How can I say that in my position...
...They're hip kids...
...Yes," another student said, "Ideas don't pop out of data...
...the kids would be so proud...
...ference of the professors toward the young...
...Why," asked a young fellow, "not let a Thousand Flowers Bloom...
...I shall return to this...
...he is himself a strong and broad mind, a professor, and, I suppose, an excellent teacher...
...by Profs...
...It was an unnerving scene: the planes kept roaring over my head on their way across the Pacific to Vietnam...
...The revival of manhood can occur only if they come on again in the world as the University, as the protector of civilized standards, the professors of truth that makes a difference, and, in our country, the blasting critic of social baseness and lies...
...The discussion rose to another plane...
...He had a thing about Abstract Values being entirely dead for his generation, though they had had meaning for "my father and grandfather...
...To have a chance to learn something was a great advance for the dissident community...
...He explained to the students his mandate and the questionnaire and interview methods that he intended to employ...
...And a related aspect is the careful sociological research—one can learn immediately that 53% of students in FSM favored sit-ins before the movement started...
...A basic trait of the young is that they don't know much, but also, beautifully, that they want to learn something and they hang around hopefully relevant teachers...
...My total impression, indeed, was that the students, including the stars of the former FSM, intended to cooperate with the Counsel in his further study...
...This ordinary freedom had to be won by risky commitment, finding solidarity, living through fear...
...somebody asked ominously...
...And it took only 250 years for the University revolt of Wydif and Hus to bring on the University-led Reformation...
...Thus they felt lied to and tricked and they got enraged...
...Meyerson reddened...
...Savio told me with scorn and amazement of a registrar who after the Event still tried to enforce a petty rule: "Don't you realize, I told her, that something happened yesterday...
...I suppose this is what these young people mean by their abuse of the word "Alienation...
...At Berkeley, there is a sprinkling of neo-Marxist lingo but it is noticeably heavy and dispiriting, except for an occasional Maoism, which is Chinese...
...Never in history, I guess, has a spontaneous uprising been so meticulously polled...
...I cut him short impatiently: "Administrators have parroted this story to me verbatim at 50 colleges across the country...
...yet when the chips are down, it turns out that nobody has expressed himself or been understood...
...Delegate power...
...To lighten the student load, I asked the new Chancellor—or Acting Chancellor, it is hard to know* *—if academic credit couldn't be given for * A former student of mine at Sarah Lawrence explained to me: "When Amy and I first came out, we didn't know anybody, so we invited our professor to tea...
...There was, but why...
...S. "Failure of Communication" I have been describing a very simple situation, a kind of Fourth of August when the French barons gave up their feudal dues...
...Is this extraordinary...
...They would follow the maxim of Gandhi: Always Cooperate...
...9. University Truth The enigma remains the Faculty...
...Let me recall a scrap of conversation with the new Chancellor...
...It is a situation where people talk to one another, mean what they say and intend to act on it, and therefore could conceivably improve their common lot...
...6. Besides the calm excitement and community, there is a third property of Berkeley in February that I, at least, found overwhelming: the fantastically expert organization of the students, as if for instant action en masse...
...Nevertheless, the shape of reconstruction cannot, in my opinion, appear among marginal groups...
...It is the lingua franca of the revolutionary campus, and is used with simplicity and conviction...
...When students and professors insisted that he, the mediator, was a party to the dispute and must confront them, Kerr's behavior was sociopathological...
...and its ferment will spread not only to other campuses but finally to other institutions of society...
...What are you driving at...
...In one corner was a reporter from the Chronicle, in another a reporter from the Examiner, and they ask me to suggest an action to coerce the Regents—" Some more action from the students of Berkeley was not, exactly, what the Regents were after...
...He is after some Ford money for a community project in Oakland...
...Byrne, we have been through an existential moment...
...But the Regents, gasped somebody else, were notorious for falsifying scholarly work, specifically a report on braceros made by the University...
...He was pointing out to me that the chief obstacle to University Reform was the teachers, inflexible, narrow, specialist, status-seeking...
...yet that response, whether as anomie or as insistence on more freedom and meaning than the system allows will be crucial...
...but the more spirited go off-campus and get lost in the fringe community...
...To be fair to Kerr, I doubt that it is possible, with honor, to avoid conflict among the forces working at the University of California: Birchite legislators, racist newspapers, Max Rafferty, the Atomic Energy Commission, Civil Rights, professors who might suddenly recall the Western tradition, students who might be naively moral...
...This process, as I have shown elsewhere, usually leads to a mark-up of 3-400% over actual educational costs...
...For instance, while I am writing this there is a to-do at Cornell about a marijuana "ring...
...Savio persisted: "How can the students cooperate with a report for the Regents, if the Board of Regents is itself a morally illegitimate body...
...2. Calm Excitement During their troubles last winter, Berkeley students kept phoning me—at 3 a.m...
...and it correctly interprets the so-called "orientation to the discipline rather than to teaching" as nothing but careerism...
...It was part of the immediate bone of contention, the banning of recruiting...
...Establishment forecasts of the future almost never mention the response of the young as a factor...
...These abuses occur in every modern country and ideology, whether U.S.A., U.S.S.R., China, or even the emergent African states...
...But if they do, I think that the students of Berkeley will be proud of them, and I think the students will begin to understand what it is to have not only a free university but a University altogether...
...And it is different, in both genesis and meaning, from the Solidarity engendered by fighting for political Causes...
...Clinging to a petty ruling, he kept Regents and professors in separate rooms at the airport...
...Don't get me wrong," he said, "I picket seriously...
...An unknown professor came up to me and said, "Since those kids acted up, I feel twenty years younger...
...they do not have much memory of the tradition of the West...
...The new Chancellor didn't seem to relish them either— maybe I am wrong...
...In turn I proposed to him the following: Instead of discontinuing the department of Journalism, as seems to be in the offing, rather make it for real by putting out a good daily newspaper which the Bay Area sorely needs...
...I don't think that the students can much help their professors to remember these ancient duties...
...The extremists moved into it...
...and the young Hippies boringly went in for tip-top expertise —they knew all about Black Boxes and Motivational Research—without knowing anything...
...Byrne did not seem to grasp this epistemological subtlety...
...and he was visibly impressed by the idea that a 3-yearold divides the candy-bar with another child for symmetry...
...In one model, 150 students and 10 professors will agree to study some Area or Issue that transcends departmental lines (as a gimmick to get around the entrenched Chairmen...
...Alas...
...A Cuban student, not a Castroite, said to me, "Kerr made the same mistake as the U.S.A...
...just the same, it's a place to see the girls and sometimes we have a great time...
...The new community, returning to the University and magnetizing the collegians, is by its genesis and nature not simply economically exploitable, unlike the ordinary college community which is at the top of the 16- to 20-year ladder of school-processing...
...Some of the young are then penned up in rule-ridden dormitories (built with Federal funds but rented at high rates...
...He intended, he said, to be objective...
...Testing, I raised the issue provocatively and was routinely put right and turned off...
...This comes under the rubric of paternal concern, yet girls are dragged out of classes and dormitories to be grilled by FBI-men without counsel, cases when he would not speak directly to professors by phone but insisted on an intermediary...
...And since the students asked me to address them, I talked about them at a mass meeting on the campus...
...Yet what they ultimately wanted was just to be told the truth: E.g., if the tables were banned because of traffic congestion, why, when the aisles were kept clear, were the tables still banned...
...with regard to Cuba...
...We would do well to recall Marx's description of the 9-year-olds picking straw, not because this was economically valuable but as training in work-habits...
...But the event has been not that the young exiles have been politicalized but that politics have been "existentialized" and brought into the community, even containing the dreadful sex and hasheesh...
...threatening Machine literally destroying human life, just as Camus had said...
...previously most of them would have been in the factories, etc., for 4 or 5 years by that age...
...FU plans also "to launch projects for the general welfare of the larger community," e.g...
...This February DISSENT sent Paul Goodman to Berkeley in order to survey the repercussions of the student uprising...
...More seriously, there is evidence that men whom he involved as his intermediaries became utterly demoralized...
...Were there any questions...
...During the troubles, the Associated Students were rather unfriendly to the FSM, but part of the "calm excitement" is a spreading among the students of the insistence on freedom and meaning...
...The professors will have to come to their own resolve...
...A Regent, however, thought that the reactionaries in the Legislature might balk at some of the titles...
...My error was that I did not realize that every step of the students' fight was desperately immediate, unchartered, and uncharted...
...When the students were occupying Sproul Hall, he stayed at home and would not speak to them...
...The young Beats, of course, made a thing of voluntary ignorance like voluntary poverty...
...In principle, it has dropped out and returned...
...As I have put it elsewhere, it is the first time in history that a dominant class has imposed on its free children the discipline of slaves...
...to my ear this question was entirely innocent, without desire to shock...
...My expectation, on visiting in February, was that there would be deep depression...
...The quantity of printed material is simply appalling...
...on the other, they want the professors to become part of the fringe community, to give it intellectual structure and selfassurance...
...It meant, quit them and join us, and put your talents to an authentic use...
...collective bargaining agent on food, housing, tuition and other finances...
...The movement of the Negroes and their wise white friends, mainly youth, has been encouraging toward change...
...In a letter to the new Chancellor, Martin Meyerson, John Seeley of Brandeis speaks of the students' action as "the Boston Tea Party...
...There were • Something like calling a Negro "boy...
...The organization of all this, however, is calculated by the powersthatbe amazingly without regard to the thoughts or feelings of those who are to be "educated...
...On the one hand they distrust everybody over 30...
...and probably our society cannot incorporate its outcastes without revolutionary changes in structure...
...he had chosen assistants from outside of Berkeley...
...a student asked this very earnestly...
...Yet, genetically and persistently, this fringe University community—with its own readings and music, political actions, free sexuality and hasheesh—is not identical with the in loco parentis and late-adolescent American college community...
...he had no ax to grind...
...In many a Town-Gown fracas, the analogy of student and Negro is pretty obvious...
...I have tried to point out that the Regents and the new Chancellor could easily accept a more flexible, decentralized, and human "free university...
...Harry Bridges, e.g., seems to feel that the Berkeley students were pampered brats...
...Each section elects two delegates who sit with him and the teaching-assistants at fortnightly meetings that criticize the course and chart its further progress...
...The paranoia of the students toward the grown-ups is probably stronger than the indif...
...But indeed he acted impeccably as a professional mediator...
...personal relations" between the students and the professors...
...The Berkeley students didn't much relish the thought of Hus at the stake, but they were crazy for the Wydifites at Oxford standing on the ramparts and fighting off the King with bows and arrows...
...Simply, it is not moral enough to grow up into...
...Then, "when the teaching-assistants went out," said a professor, "it was all over, for we can't run the school without them, and if we fired them, we'd never get another good graduate in California...
...I take it that this meant that so-called objective methods would get him nowhere...
...Consider the history of Beat youth as a type...
...The proper function of such a disciplined student body, I think, is not to be the Free University, which must consist in piecemeal voluntary associations between teachers and students, but to be the Student Government, responsible for social and political rules...
...But historically, it is better to consider these university-centered politically active communities in terms of a "withdrawal" from the absurd System and its problems, and a return on more authentic premises...
...Later, however, the Counsel said to me privately, "When that boy looked up at me, his eyes pierced to the bottom of my soul—there was no use in trying to lie to them...
...A slim dark-eyed youth spoke up: "Mr...
...Professor Leggett, the sociologist, has already instituted (I think) an ingenious form of democracy for a lecture course...
...Given its exploiting motives, it is impossible for American education to take the young seriously, except as objects to manipulate.** It seemed odd that Clark Kerr, who had made a reputation as a mediator in labor disputes, should have failed so badly precisely in communications...
...I tried to show him that, for some of us, Social Justice with capital letters was not abstract but a concrete property of a tolerable environment, just like unpolluted rivers...
...it took less than 400 years...
...One would have expected, in the era of the Organization Man, that precisely the bright graduate-students, the junior-executives, would be the most conformist, to protect their status and advancement...
...To speak proleptically, he was not like—Clark Kerr...
...How was I supposed to answer that...
...At present the Multiversity operates by tightly holding together essentially disparate parts...
...after the Faculty Senate de * I am using the word "exploitation" strictly...
...It was not that they questioned his integrity, a student assured him kindly...
...A couple of days later he said to the counsel of the Regents, "Goodman is right...
...they never had it so good...
...Jerry firmly and believably declared that this would not happen...
...In my opinion, the situation at Berkeley is historical and will not be local...
...Correspondingly, Professor Wolin speaks of the "Faculty's finest hour," as if the Faculty had been revived and "justified" by the students) "There occurred on this campus the first human Event in 40,000 years," Michael Rossman assured me— I did not press him for the predecessor...
...A composite picture of 'public' student opinion will not reveal our meaning...
...But maybe I am prejudiced against social sciences—a writer—from the Twenties...
...The Chancellor's best idea for University Reform, however, is a kind of tacit understanding between him and the students—at least so I have been told—that certain idiotic rules, which ought not to exist, need not necessarily be enforced in every jot and tittle...
...inevitably a tremendous amount of money is spent on administrative cement...
...They even speak of a founding Event, presumably the Faculty Senate vote that "justified" the students...
...But I don't think that University truth is acceptable in our society, any more than the democratic action of the Free Speech Movement is finally acceptable...
...He would present his recommendations to the Regents in three months...
...They are wistfully expected, beginning with age 3, to bring everybody into the mainstream of economic usefulness...
...Jerry complained to me later...
...Why," asked a young lady, "is Unrest something that must be `remedied...
...And finally, we round out this section with a sensational report from the University of Kiev.— EDITOxs The dominant system of society is critically dependent on the schools, especially the universities...
...It was evident in the fall that the movement for the Negroes was a major background cause for the Free Speech Movement...
...But now it wouldn't be unusual...
...8. The New University Constitution In the circumstances, there is an uncanny re-emergence of the primitive medieval University, with its fat-cat professors lecturing in the central halls, a ragged student community living in its own neighborhood, and, astoundingly, a new student leadership by the graduates and teaching-assistants, the very Masters of Arts who used to cause all the trouble in 1200...
...Instead of depression, I found what I have called "calm excitement"—the phrase belongs to a youth in the establishmentoriented student Government...
...At a session I attended (Anarchism), a young lady complained rather tearfully that if they invited a professor to the next meeting just because he knew a lot about the subject, it would be just like the ordinary University...
...The existential language that I am beginning to slip into is entirely the students' own...
...I discussed these Faculty proposals with a Regent, who declared that they would cost too much...
...but even more important was the horror at the Chessman execution: here was the • None of this was news to me...
...and Great Society, Neo-Marxism, and even moral Pacifism do not fundamentally address them...
...Instead they were told another lie...
...There was little ideology—which was good—but there was also almost no economics, history, or philosophy...
...The question is: if such a Free University exists in the offing, to whom, to what government, will the Federal government, the founda tions, and the corporations channel all that money that is the fuel of modern education...
...This illustrates, by the way, that student-faculty estrangement is a two-way street...
...At present in the town of Berkeley itself, there is an urban Renewal plan to clean up a street which, to me, seems very pleasant and lively, but it is occupied by students and their beatnik cronies...
...Professor Wolin says, the Faculty was "shocked out of its shameful neglect of teaching, its acquiescence in the bureaucratization of the University," and it recovered its "collective conscience...
...Dealing with probably benevolent professors, they had to bring lawyers and speak through them, and they became acute experts in their rights under various Amendments to the Constitution of the United States...
...Jerry vetoed this with alarm...
...Perhaps it is a way of creating a Free University in the conditions of high technology...
...Maybe this was "intuitive" mathematics...
...and more realistically, they process the professional personnel to control the increasing scores of millions useless to the economy, the out-caste poor, displaced farmers, people over 65, unemployable adolescents who must be regimented...
...Unluckily, none of the students knew enough psychosomatic medicine to point this out to him, and I kept my mouth shut...
...In my opinion, the matrix of a community in which political action is a custom, is essential for the American future...
...Another student (Mario Savio) asked a down-to-earth question: Was there any guarantee that the Regents would release the Byrne recommendations...
...The question now was whether they ought morally to be talking to Byrne at all, since his mandate was inauthentic...
...The education has become mere exploitation—the abuse of the abilities and time of life of school youth for others' purposes...
...Correspondingly, it is resentful of the jet-set faculty busy with contracted research...
...Tussman and Trow—tend to small voluntary colleges within the University...
...For instance, the University of California has "classified research," but this is entirely incompatible with the tradition of Western science and its theory as consensus...
...Let me give a few examples...
...contrariwise, the champions of the students then prove that the outsiders are mostly alumni, wives, temporary dropouts...
...his report follows...
...the para-courses, if they met certain standards...
...But they would be exquisitely simple in what they are doing and therefore far brighter than Jerry Byrne...
...But they were really dealing with a juggling robot...
...These explanations must be substantially accurate for they lead to the evident February situation of friendly contact with the students and cooperation in "University Reform" toward Lernfreiheit, student democracy, Faculty resumption of counselling, and so forth...
...Chancellor Meyerson told me a good idea...
...Inevitably, the militant students were caught in the toils and became administrative...
...They imagined that a mediator, one who avoids conflicts and negotiates, is a human being like you or me and makes propositions that are true or false...
...By refusing to talk, he left a vacuum...
...4. Community It is vividly clear on the Berkeley campus that there has been a breakthrough into communication, community...
...About this time, the Counsel's unfailing friendly smile began to tighten, so that it became increasingly impossible for him to get into contact with them, unless he wiped off the smile, which he couldn't do...
...mutual aid and self-protection against the local police...
...The existential theory seems to be that by acting in freedom they made history, and conversely, the historical event made them free...
...but perhaps it would be better now...
...His name is William Coblentz...
...Those hostile to FSM have emphasized the number of off-campus participants, who are then called outside agitators, Maoists, Castroites, etc...
...I was crossing the campus with a Regent and he suddenly asked me, "Do you notice much change since you were here a couple of years ago...
...And finally, as American citizens, they want self-rule, not only of their own social life like the medieval student-government, but also to have a say in the administrative and curricular doings: that is, the distant Regents are regarded as illegitimate...
...7. Let us turn to a broader question: what is the relation of a liberated University to social change in the general communty...
...No, said Jerry, they were the Regents' property...
...This can be so hypocritical as to be nauseating...
...Every division and department is falling short...
...How far will the inquiry probe...
...Yet almost from the beginning there were social needs that were taken for real, especially banning the Bomb, thwarting the Fuzz, and supporting Negroes and Spanish because they were friends and equally out-caste...
...Yet in February I did not hear a single spontaneous mention of this struggle...
...Needless to say, I am in love with that, and with Berkeley in February...
...The "Free University" is a para-university of voluntary study-groups off-campus, in which the collaboration of a teaching-assistant or assistantprofessor is invited...
...This novel amalgam, then, of a fringe community of the young and masters of arts...
...And the exploita tion itself is of a peculiarly difficult and deadly kind, for it involves not merely forced time and labor, but active intellectual participation by the exploited, in learning and even in being original and creative under duress.* This is not viable...
...The organized guerrillas sat in...
...The "leading figures" are rather easy-going, there is no jockeying for position, there is no party-line, and it looks as if new faces easily come to the fore...
...And if we take it into account, we see that the dominant system is probably enviable...
...yet we see at Berkeley that the teaching-assistants provided leaders and almost unanimously went on strike...
...But they were making a naive metaphysical error...
...I mentioned these things to a couple of liberal Regents and they turned pale...
...The overwhelming Faculty vote for the students seems to have been a reaction of nausea at the Administration's lies, its subservience to outside pressures, its pathological avoidance of contact, and finally the presence of the cops...
...Indeed, reading the FSM's voluminous broadsides and pamphlets, I was appalled at the low level of analysis by such bright people...
...Kind of to encourage them, I told them of two ancient examples, where revolt in the University led to great social revolutions...
...How do we know that the student opinion we give you won't be subpoenaed for the trial...
...When, on another campus like Ann Arbor, I listen to even a fine group like the Students for a Democratic Society, their talk of "strategy" etc...
...Nevertheless, although this breakthrough is splendid for the teachers as human beings—if professors don't like to associate with young people, why in the devil do they hang around schools?—in my opinion it does nothing for them as men...
...3. Good Faith and Commitment On February 10 occurred a curious dialogue between Jerry Byrne, the special counsel of a committee of the Regents of the University of California to investigate "the causes of student unrest," and a group of students from the government, newspapers, religious organizations, and leaders of the former FSM (now FU, movement for a Free University...
...they do not have enough culture, science, and technique to work a good modern society, though plenty of spirit and justice...
...Myself, I find it oppressive...
...Since I wrote this, Kerr and Meyerson "resigned" and were retained apparently as a bid for a vote of confidence against the reactionary wing of the Regents...
...Hopefully, if they continue a path of commitment, they will discover they are "alienated" in Luther's meaning...
...is grating by comparison...
...And administrators, incidentally, have heightened the tension by dissolving the fraternity system...
...Just as part of the Gross National Product, I have heard the estimate that more than 40% of the cash is in the Knowledge business...
...Don't call them kids...
...he meant business...
...The only honorable alternatives are to quit, as Buell Gallagher did, or sometimes to take a stand and fight...
...But therefore the fruit of it was character-change, the first opening of new possibilities...
...50% of the total population is under 25...
...New York City Feb...
...I think he is wrong...
...They have put out phonograph records: Joan Baez songs, FSM's Sounds and Songs of the Demonstration, and a remarkable long-player of the Sproul Hall sit-in and the meeting of the Faculty Senate...
...On the campus, this ramshackle constitution proved to have political power...
...Professor Searle tells me that he had already tried such voluntary seminars last year, but the students didn't come— they needed the support of Credits and the Official Syllabus...
...It is said that there was a "breakdown of communication" in Berkeley...
...Would the range of questions include whether UCAL should accept war contracts...
...1965...
...and it was certainly a vast advantage for the University to be infiltrated by a new breed of students who demanded authenticity and practical application...
...Except for a New Year's Eve visit from Steve Weissman, one of the most thoughtful leaders of the Free Speech Movement, who was now interested in "University Reform...
...and in the long run he would learn more from them than he, with his auspices, would be able to do for them...
...And it resists in the University the identical Organized System that it resists outside...
...But to my ear, this was said without hostility, even affectionately...
...Through the extremists, the mass discovered it had a community...
...if so—I am speaking seriously—it is a major social invention...
...They had won their demand to advocate political action, like any other citizen...
...he kept the parties apart in order to negotiate their demands...
...he teaches "intuitive" mathematics—I did not have the chance to pursue whether this meant school of Brouwer or something else...
...The students might object to the factory-University, but they have certainly mastered its arts and sciences...
...First, the Averroists, the new science, the rediscovered Aristotle: this was squelched and "harmonized" after a fierce struggle at Paris, yet it persisted and brought on, at Padua, the heroic age of modern science...
...and the education department does not speak as a Faculty about the compulsory mis-education, or at least Max Rafferty...
...The bother was that the Regents consisted almost entirely of multimillionaires in aircraft, oil, banks, shipping, etc., with Max Rafferty representing Education...
...how can it be the judge...
...Several years ago I noted that students of Fair Play for Cuba had no "political" interest in Castro, but were enchanted by a young leader who spoke to everybody on the street and wrangled on national TV with conspirators against his life...
...said the Regent...
...and more important, leaders who had taken their risks in Mississippi were not afraid to sit in against Clark Kerr...
...I don't mean that they will, for the Bourbons never learn and never forget...
...There must be both breakdown and revolutionary break-through...
...The engineers and architects do not speak as Faculties about the community-destroying Urban Renewal...
...I asked...
...The Free University sponsored a speech of mine and 3500 students attended...
...It is a remarkable phenomenon, a kind of hyper-organized anarchy...
...Besides, we must notice that nearly 50°%o of the young are now kept in schools till 21 and 22 years of age...
...and student membership on the Board of Regents—this amalgam is the Free University...
...The withdrawal into voluntary poverty, the community of the Illuminati, kicks On the Road, and finger-painting, did not provide much world...
...The failure of communication is not an isolated cause but is endemic in the structure of American society and in the Multiversity as part of it...
...The calm excitement and matter-of-fact democracy and human contact now prevalent on the Berkeley campus are in revolutionary contrast to our usual demented, inauthentic, overadministered American society...
Vol. 12 • April 1965 • No. 2
