The Student State of Mind

...There are several aspects to this admiration, and one should put them in perspective and not simply write off these students...

...And no doubt some form of pervasive alienation drove numerous students into the fray...

...They get good grades, although they often feel cynical about the system...

...The bright and serious students in this group are the ones who demand the most from the university...

...Almost instantaneously a full-scale student movement was afoot with its organizers, orators, heroes ready to commit themselves to action, even martyrs...

...A melting pot of campus intellectuals, aesthetes, and politicoes, it includes a lot of the "non-students" who have unjustly been used as a scapegoat by opponents of the FSM (most non-students involved in FSM activities are temporarily out of school, very recent graduates, university employees, or students' wives...

...Any afternoon in the week this crowd is found lounging between classes on the Terrace or in Telegraph Avenue's two coffee-houses arrayed in styles from classic beat to classic Harris tweed...

...Admittedly, its ranks contain a quota of the hipsters and revolutionary zealots concerned with little but the right names and phrases, the devotees of the latest chemical highs, the lunatic fringe of the avant-garde...

...For instance, when these students sit in for Negro rights in San Francisco or go off to register Negro voters in Mississippi, they are convinced that they are only carrying out a literal application of the democratic ideals they are supposed to memorize in the classroom...

...For this purpose, Red-baiting and beatnik-baiting are favorite devices...

...Students have had to build their own sense of community, and bonds formed in fighting for causes supply a powerful way of filling this need...

...Let us look at the Berkeley administrator's style as viewed by the students...

...The Berkeley student activist has fashioned a style of political action out of materials borrowed from the South in order to make himself a gadfly in the hide of the local liberal Establishment...

...Of course there is plenty of organizational room for left-wing ideological temperaments in YSA, YPSL, the DuBois Club, and other groups...

...Yet Berkeley is probably the only campus in the country where students could transform a general mood of restlessness and resentment into an effective political weapon against their administration...

...But the Berkeley film audience, though it digs the Bogie style, also tends to regard his films as ideological morality plays, in which Bogart, the lonewolf private eye or soldier of fortune, risks his neck for his principles and eventually wins out over the fumbling, insensitive bureaucratic cops or military officers...

...Secondly, the university is constantly buffeted by currents of animosity from the surrounding world...

...They consider liberalism far too cumbersome an instrument for altering evils like the nuclear stalemate, U.S...

...Because of its size and setup, the University of California does, after all, have some of the impersonal features of a modern metropolis...

...Similarly, 814 FSM suporters were carted off to jail before Berkeley's mostly liberal faculty came out in force to affirm the movement's goals...

...Another factor is that extolling of Castro and Mao, in the minds of a few, confers special avant-garde status that goes along with being tuned into the most far-out, especially if banned, films and the newest and most unconventional poetry...

...ites...

...For instance, Bogart's films are among the most popular attractions at movie theaters around Berkeley just as they are in Cambridge, Massachusetts...

...Furthermore, Cal is a public school in a state the government of which contains a powerful minority on the right...

...The administration threatened disciplinary action and subsequently suspended eight student leaders...

...Will this state of affairs endure...

...The students were waging war against absurdities and hypocrisies that seem endemic to modern bureaucracy...

...Some do not love Castro and Mao as much as they detest Batista and Chiang Kai-shek...

...In this manner, he recruited many of the several hundred students who appeared later at the dean's office along with the five to protest the impending suspensions...

...I have even heard of Harvard students parading through the Yard in early 1940's trench coats and snap-brim hats picked up in second-hand clothing stores...

...One can imagine the attitude of William Knowland's paper, the Oakland Tribune...

...Or are the victors only basking in the warm afterglow of revolutionary solidarity...

...Part of the local press is only too happy to abet the friction between the university and California taxpayers...

...In the first place, there is a running controversy between students, faculty, and administration about the nature of the university...

...In general, the student political framework is flexible, communal, non-ideological...

...There is, of course, a sense in which the events at Berkeley involve a battle between generations...

...Impoliteness, politicized, is civil disobedience...

...Freshmen whose minds had never been violated by a political thought, as well as hardened politicoes, became caught up in direct action in-fighting with the authorities...

...They like to see themselves as misunderstood and unable to communicate—and not only with professors...

...Behind their praise lies a critique of American society...

...V During the height of the campus struggle, some newspaper reports, national magazine articles (including the liberal press on occasion), and statements by university administrators accused the FSM of being dupes for Castroite and Maoist agitators...

...Nearly everyone who has tried to account for the recent uprising on the Berkeley campus has drawn a picture of students struggling for identity in a vast, impersonal educational and research factory run by IBM cards, remote professors subsidized by federal funds, and administrators with the temperaments of corporation executives...

...With the final group, the vast mass of sympathizers who signed petitions, swelled the ranks of sit-ins, or went on strike, alienation is not so much the issue, although many are undoubtedly uneasy about the university's size and red-tape procedures...

...Rather than feeling that school has nothing to give them, they get good educations because they have found a way of making knowledge relevant, by immersing it in the social present...

...an intuition that perhaps America has played an underhanded game in its treatment of the Cuban and Chinese Revolutions...

...Last spring a huge number of Berkeley and other northern California college students helped stage sit-ins in a fight for equal employment opportunities for Negroes at a major hotel and several automobile dealers in San Francisco...

...By and large, these seem to me among the least alienated students on campus, at least from themselves...

...Their politics border on melodrama...

...It is far more important to realize that the revolt was the latest and most explicit confrontation at Berkeley between two antagonistic political styles...

...or of Major Major Major, the squadron commander in Catch-22, who signs his daily allotment of papers but leaps out his office window whenever anyone shows up with a problem...

...And they feared that apparently arbitrary restriction on freedom in one area might quickly lead to similar infringements in others...

...Finally, nearly all radicals are fascinated to some degree with two men who—whether for better or worse—have so completely transformed their societies...

...The campus atmosphere is modern and cosmopolitan...

...He reminds them too closely of Peter Sellers playing the U.S...

...of traditional divisions between campus cliques—bohemians, "dormies," even fraternity and sorority types—having been bridged...

...Students interested in tactics and ideology hang out on the Terrace, an elevated outdoor cafeteria in the student union complex with a touch of Left Bank atmosphere...

...Perhaps student supporters of the revolt could be lumped under three rough categories: Some students derive gratification and a sense of meaning from their involvement in politics...

...Of course this is so much garbage...

...III The overall cast of Berkeley campus politics is distinctly to the left of center, despite a sprinkling of moderate Republicans and Goldwater...

...Like the state itself, the University of California still feels new, a little rootless, unsure of the boundaries between itself and outside social forces...

...of professors and students greeting each other by first names...

...Every now and then, the Berkeley Gazette prints a column of "campus news" written by ladies with three names who express profound shock over rumours of female students walking around campus in their bare feet...

...But here also are a surprisingly large proportion of the most intellectually serious and morally alert students on campus, fellowship holders as well as veterans of the Mississippi wars...

...This puts students on the defensive and the administration under pressure...

...for several years now Berkeley has attracted urban youngsters who in previous times might have gone to the University of Chicago or C.C.N.Y...

...A couple of hours before this eventful appointment, a leading opponent of the ban stood near the Sather Gate entrance to campus and shouted at students coming off the Terrace, "All right, all you Terrace intellectuals, here's your chance finally to do something...

...But however plausible it may be, the multiversity analysis portrays the landscape of the Berkeley rebellion without sufficient color or contour...

...A number of conservative state legislators make a habit of tossing bills in the hopper that promise to chop off large amounts of university budget unless the administration undertake purges of controversial students and faculty members...

...Political enthusiasm with an emphasis on action pervades the cultural habits of Berkeley student intellectuals to an extraordinary degree...

...Kerr's description of the bureaucratized "multiversity," set forth in his Godkin lectures at Harvard in 1963, has even been converted into an ideology of justification for the revolt by its leadership...

...But Slate, the unaffiliated Berkeley political organization, has always been an issue-oriented and action-oriented group, a collectivity of political independents and various shades of socialists who came together to work on specific issues...

...they have bittersweet histories of brief and tragic love affairs to relate...

...Clearly a movement of such magnitude and sophistication could not have been born overnight—as the Free Speech Movement virtually was—without experienced tacticians to create it, in addition to wide spread unrest to nourish it...

...This shows up even in their choice of entertainment...

...Everyone speaks of an authentic, campus-wide feeling of community in the air...

...My impression is that the revolt drew its leaders and its most vocal and committed supporters mainly from these two groups...

...Meanwhile, several hundred students had been arrested...

...They feel it is somehow implicated, if only by default, in the heritage of nightmares that compose recent history: Auschwitz, Hiroshima, the Cold War, McCarthy...

...Furthermore, the more militant students regard modern liberalism as a whole with something less than pleasure...

...that democratic ideals too often do not seem to extend beyond the borders of the U.S...

...support for tyrannical rule in foreign lands, the exclusion of the Negro from his fair share of society's rewards...

...Elderly Berkeley landladies often seem to loathe and fear the emancipated habits of students from whom they earn their bread and butter...

...When negotiations between students and deans over the original administration ban on political activity broke down, a few student organizations set up booths in protest...

...Many of them are genuinely more concerned with putting knowledge of the past to work in the present than regurgitating it on a final...

...But the campus is enclosed by a typical conservative California town—and the two tend to grate on each other...

...It is made up mostly of older undergrads and a few beginning graduate students who have sulked through their years at Berkeley in a pose of militant sensitivity...

...From the time they began trying to negotiate the administra tion ban on politics, students came up against constant buck-passing of responsibility for decisions...

...Strangelove, who tries unsuccessfully to juggle forces in a society gone mad...

...many ended up paying fines and being put on probation...

...Perhaps such students are a little too quick to blame their stifled creativity on the system, or their inability to find love on the structure of modern society...

...The student assault upon the attempt of Berkeley deans to control their tiny strip of land at Bancroft and Telegraph Avenues marshalled support from students and faculty on a scale unprecedented at American universities...

...of innumerable plans cropping up to give students more control over course content and professors over student discipline...

...IV Two features peculiar to the Berkeley campus have played an essen tial part in determining the recent drift of student politics...

...Eventually agreements were hammered out between the Hotel Owners' Association, the auto dealers, a commission appointed by San Francisco's liberal Mayor John Shelley, and NAACP and CORE...

...And sometimes the lines are extremely difficult to draw...

...To many students, there is something ineffectual and a little slippery about the new liberal-bureaucrat with his tools of mediation and compromise...

...Now and then, they may leave school for New York or Europe on the hunt for significance, but they usually wend their way back to Berkeley...

...San Francisco Chronicle columnist Lucius Beebe, a self-styled connoisseur of expensive restaurants and rugged individualism, frequently launches attacks in atrocious polysyllabic rhetoric on the unwashed hordes of "Red Square in Berkeley" or "Kremlin West," as he alternately terms the school...

...Everything is forever being revised, from methods of registration and length of terms (about to be changed from semesters to quarters) to styles of architecture and, of course, rules governing student political behavior...

...He refuses to go through proper channels when they lead nowhere and turns his back on the decorum of committees when all the real issues have already been quietly tabled...

...VII Students at Berkeley say that incredible changes have occurred on campus as a result of the struggle, which the FSM for the moment appears to have won...

...Students against administrators obviously means youth against its elders...

...What enraged them was the realization that the administration was being overbearing and unfair by suddenly trying to chop the guts out of student politics, which are as much a part of Berkeley as its tradition of Nobel prize winners in science...

...These students tend to be bright and talented, yet feel themselves edging ever closer to a failure of self-realization...

...When the administration suddenly barred all meaningful political activity from campus—recruiting members, soliciting funds, advocating action—it created a situation that threatened partially to rupture these bonds...

...What the students found behind all this were not corrupt villains who wished them ill, but rather nervous modern liberals dressed out as bureaucrats...

...One of the most striking characteristics of the revolt was its interplay of spontaneity and efficient organization...

...The experience of these students is that it takes radical action on their part to get the liberals in motion...

...But they considered the outcome their victory...

...There is more than a grain of truth in this account...

...Another segment of the student body constitutes, more or less, a community of self-pity...

...11 Many features of the impersonal machine exist at other large universities like Harvard, Columbia, or U.C.L.A., which is itself part of the west coast multiversity...

...Certain city councilmen cry out about once a week for investigations into student activities, both moral and political...

...The Terrace was already humming with discussion of the recent ban on politics last September 30, when five students who had manned political tables in defiance of the administration ruling were summoned to appear at a dean's office that afternoon...

...Though most student offspring of thirties' radicals are wary of Communism, a few gravitate toward a doctrinaire left position, and for them Mao and Castro are the ideological replacements for Lenin and Stalin...

...Such behavior unnerves the administration, which has to soothe the ruffled feelings of taxpayers and their representatives who grow anxious about the threats their sons and daughters are posing to the Established order...

...To understand the explosive nature of the administration's restriction on campus politics, one must bear in mind that political activities have become in the last few years a primary means of personal expression and social contact for numerous students...

...In a sense they are always putting administrators on the spot, because they believe that the educational process should provide a continuum between ideas and social and political action...

...When all else fails, he resorts to impoliteness...

...Castro's bearded revolutionary swagger with its touch of the bandito, Mao's militant anti-bourgeois posture and championing of underdog countries make these figures into culture heroes that conjure up a sense of the forbidden, the experimental, the provocative...

...if that far...

...Those students who paused on their way to class from the Terrace are part of an important—by now even traditional—subculture of the Berkeley student body...

...At Harvard, the Bogart rage is mainly a cult of style...

...Generational conflict, however, is so ancient and archetypal a social mechanism—certainly it functions in almost every revolution, political or artistic—that it affords little insight into the campus turmoil...

...But all shades of motivation were functioning here, and alienation is only part of the story...

...However, a few student activists do like to praise the revolutionary deeds of Castro and Mao Tse-tung...

...neither Peking- nor Havana-brand Communism had anything to do with FSM methods or goals...

...President in Dr...

...But they did feel that alienation threatened when they saw the administration attempt to sever the connection between school and society...

...This analysis has the curious effect of making University of California President Clark Kerr the prophet of the student revolution against his administration...

...They were shuttled back and forth between a battery of deans and obscure committees...

...VI Nothing is gained from regarding the Berkeley uprising as a Freudian clash of sons against the fathers, as some commentators (fathers) have suggested...

...It is not surprising that Cal students feel they should have a say in shaping the university's image, their own role, even the society around them...

...They are the specialists in alienation...

...They are the ones who have fought in the student movement on several fronts—against HUAC and capital punishment, for peace and civil rights...