Before the Storm (87 page)

And then, that same week, came Berkeley.

An unheard-of 42 percent of high school graduates sought higher education in 1964, as if reserving a spot in the knowledge-driven Great Society to come. In California 68 percent of high school graduates went to college, most of them taking advantage of the state's glittering free university system—the best of them to her crown jewel, the Berkeley campus. The system's leader, Clark Kerr, was managerial liberalism's uncrowned king. His book
The Uses of the University
was its bible.

In it he wrote that the modern “multiversity”—he also dubbed it the “knowledge factory”—was both catalyst and mirror for a society in which the objectives of myriad plural interests could be harmonized with the help of neutral, efficient, nonideological administration, delivering ever more peace and well-being to all. He also described the disasters that would befall such a system if people became too interested in their interests. To the best of his ability, the individual should seek “to lend his energies to many organizations and give himself completely to none.” The only alternative was the conviction that some interests were irreconcilable, some principles beyond compromise. If too many people were to hold such beliefs, the outcome, in a complex, integrated social system, would be “all-out war.”

Thus Clark Kerr's perennial challenge. Universities were made up of young people, and young people tended to unruly passions. Such passions led to irreconcilable interests, and they had to be reined in. Berkeley students did not always fancy these theories—a campus radical named David Horowitz had answered them in 1962 in a book called
Student
by writing “A man is not a product, nor is he an IBM record card”—and these days, the students seemed to fancy the theories less than ever. The traditional off-campus center for student politicking, a little bricked-over esplanade at the corner of Bancroft Way and Telegraph Avenue called the Bancroft Strip, had been characterized by a
cacophony since July—when the Republican Convention, Mississippi Freedom Summer, Prop 14 (in the wake of Berkeley's own open-housing law campaign the year before), Johnson vs. Goldwater for President and Pierre Salinger vs. George Murphy for Senate all converged. Every side in these contests was represented in the burbling confluence of irreconcilables at Bancroft and Telegraph—sometimes two, even three factions jostling on each: lefties, liberal to Trotskyite to Maoist to Castroist; righties from Republican to anarchist. The myriad conservative groups—YAF, Young Republicans, Conservatives at Large (CAL), Cal Students for Goldwater, and the University Society of Individualists—were well stocked with hellions: a University Society of Individualists member sporting an “I AM A RIGHT-WING EXTREMIST” pin became the Rosa Parks of the San Francisco streetcars when she flamboyantly defied the unwritten rule against women standing on the running boards and caused such a disturbance that she ended up getting arrested. Berkeley political scientist Seymour Martin Lipset thought he understood what made youngsters so prone to an inappropriate overabundance of political commitment: a “relative lack of experience with the conflicting pressures derivative from varying value obligations or role demand.” They would grow out of it.

But Clark Kerr didn't have time to wait. A vital construction-bond issue would be on state ballots in November. Bad publicity could kill it. Berkeley had already attracted a powerful foe who was editorializing against the “Little Red Schoolhouse” ever more frequently: William Knowland of the
Oakland Tribune,
enraged when Scrantonites used Berkeley as an organizing base, even madder now that Berkeley CORE was picketing his paper (where only 17 of 1,500 employees were black) every week. Berkeley was developing a reputation. Evans and Novak wrote after a reporting trip to San Francisco in March, “Here as elsewhere, the Negro is in danger of losing control over the civil rights movement to thugs and Communists.” The thugs and Communists they referred to were Kerr's own students.

As the 1964-65 school year approached, an especially prickly administrator, suffering from the bongo drumming that drifted up from Bancroft and Telegraph to his second-floor office, began taking steps to pacify the Strip. Meanwhile one of Knowland's lackeys discovered at the county assessor's office that the Bancroft Strip was actually
inside
campus property—meaning that the presence of demonstrators was in violation of the university's mandate to keep partisan politics off campus. Subtle threats were issued through channels.

These factors converged when the university administration announced that as of the first day of school, September 21, the Bancroft Strip would be off-limits to politics “because of interference with the flow of traffic.” To Clark
Kerr's shock, students, deploying organizing skills acquired in those long months of agitating for civil rights and for Barry Goldwater, struck back—forming a United Front of nineteen political organizations, from right to left, to demand negotiations with the administration. The administration, as was its wont, compromised: students could continue to distribute informational leaflets, as long as they did not encourage “action”—the university, as a state institution, was duty bound, after all, to discourage “advocacy of action without thought.”

But students had thought, and deeply—and, in rounds of negotiations, they cut their masters to ribbons. Didn't the administration, by changing its story from “clogged traffic” to “advocacy of action without thought,” demonstrate bad faith—or capitulation to outside influence, in the form of no less a partisan than William Knowland? If a campus was contaminated by the introduction of outside politics, wherefore Nelson Rockefeller's invitation to speak on campus back in March? Why had Kerr put his own administration to work politicking among voting-age students to vote for the bond-issue proposition? Why wasn't the $12 million the university received from the Atomic Energy Commission each year political? Its contributions to the American presence in Vietnam? Could it be that deciding what was neutral and what was political was itself political—that enforcing “neutrality” was just another way for the administration to wield its power?

So they acted. On the twenty-first, students kept an all-night vigil on the steps of the administration building, Sproul Hall. A week later, pickets flooded the school's ceremonial convocation. Tables were carted 100 yards inside campus borders, a leader announcing, “We won't stop now until we've made the entire campus a bastion of free speech.” Administrators warned the eight students manning the tables that they were about to be expelled. The eight were summoned to the dean's office on September 30 for expulsion—and brought hundreds of their closest friends along with them to stage a sit-down demonstration in Sproul Hall to demand negotiations. And suddenly the administration building was playing host to a
festival
of free speech—one student following the other, Socratic-style, reasoning over the true meaning of the university, of free speech, of freedom itself.

It was near midnight when the intense, wild-maned Italian kid from New York, back from registering voters in McComb, Mississippi, stood up to speak. Mario Savio had a bad stutter that faded only when he was stirred. He wasn't stuttering now. “President Kerr has referred to the University as a factory,” he said. “And just like any factory, in any industry—again, his words—you have a certain product.... They go in one side, as kind of rough-cut adolescents,
and they come out the other side pretty smooth.... And never, at any point, is provision made for their taking their places as free men!” The sentiment was something with which the department store owner from Phoenix could agree (his enemy, he wrote in one of his first columns, was “a stereotyped, carbon copy society”), or William F. Buckley (“Middle-of-the-Road,
qua
Middle-of-the-Road, is politically, intellectually, and morally repugnant,” the prospectus of his magazine announced in 1954). Commitments—not “interests”—were the building blocks, not the stumbling blocks, of politics. Some commitments were sacred, could not be bargained away. Sometimes the proper arena for politics was a boxing ring.

The next morning, a CORE member named Jack Weinberg set up a table (a propped-up old door, actually) at the foot of the Sproul Hall steps. Police arrested him for criminal trespass. Or at least they tried to. Weinberg went limp, civil disobedience-style (while finishing a stirring peroration about how thought, talk, and discussion were vacuous “unless we then act on the principle that we think, talk and discuss about”). Rather than break their backs carrying him to headquarters, the Berkeley campus cops rolled in a squad car and dumped him into the back—then found their way blocked by a hundred students who had gathered for a planned noon rally. The engine revved; the students raised a chorus of “We Shall Not Be Moved.”

It was then that Mario Savio removed his shoes. Boston Harbor, Harpers Ferry, Omaha Beach: this time the stand for freedom would be made atop a dented squad car roof. “Be careful of the antenna! Be careful of the antenna!” the cops pleaded. Savio promised he would.

The chancellor “must agree to meet with the political organizations,” Savio began. “And there must be no disciplinary action against anyone before the meeting! And, I'm publicly serving notice that we're going to continue direct action until they accede.”

No one could have guessed what would happen next. Others wished to speak, so a sign-up sheet went around. One after the other, students took to the roof; more and more students straggled into the plaza—thousands, once word got around campus that something extraordinary was taking place. The speaking continued, interrupted only by singing, for another day and a half.

Jackie Goldberg, the students' lead negotiator (because she was a well-dressed sorority girl), wondered how the university could believe that the student's United Front threatened the institution's neutrality when its different groups were “at the same time supporting Goldwater and trying to defeat him.” The crowd rollicked with laughter. Weinberg received the reluctant dispensation of the police to get out of, then onto, the car, where he explained that if
they hung together they could never hang separately (“Fill the jails,” as the SNCC motto went). A Young Republican took the floor, or roof, and joked wanly, “I am up here as an example of tokenism” (there was no question by now that events were dominated by the left wing of the United Front; conservatives drifted away as soon as laws began to be broken), and proclaimed the conservatives' solidarity “so you know that this is not protest by the same people who were washed down the steps at San Francisco.” A woman, a freshman, with a squeaky voice and a nervous manner, popped onto the car; she spoke, and she seemed less a freshman and less squeaky by the minute.

By 2:30 in the afternoon hundreds of the hardest core forced their way into Sproul Hall for another sit-in. By dusk a combined 500-man police force from the cities of Oakland and Berkeley, Alameda County, and the California Highway Patrol (spluttering in on motorcycles) began mustering. Students who had worked in the South instructed those who hadn't about the Gandhian method of submitting to arrest.

There were, it turned out, no arrests—just more talk. History majors cited Founding Fathers, folkies led sing-alongs, aspiring comedians ridiculed administrative doublespeak. The occasional administrator dared take a turn. Professor Lipset lectured the crowd on how their mob tactics violated procedural democracy, rendering them cousins to the Ku Klux Klan.

It was one “second-and-a-half-year graduate dropout” who named the stakes. It was interesting, he said, that all the speakers were gravitating toward the issue of the relationship of democracy and free speech. “They're almost so much the same thing,” he piped up, “that there ain't no relationship! Aristotle said if you are not a citizen you are either a beast or a god.

“Now I ask you a simple question—” (peals of laughter; his timing was impeccable).

He continued: “Johnson and Goldwater get up in front of the American people and say, ‘Let's keep Vietnam out of politics,' ‘Let's keep civil rights out of politics,' and ‘Let's keep universal military training out of politics.' ” He proclaimed, in disgust: “These are three of the most intimately political issues you can think of!”

Darkness fell. An administrator—the one who felt imperiled by the bongo drums—summoned a cordon of fraternity men to preserve the principle of institutional civility; they did so by pelting activists with lit cigarettes and rotten vegetables. (Savio implored them to get up on the car and present their complaints civilly, to no avail.)

Around 2:30 a.m. a near-riot was quelled by the car-top intervention of a respected campus minister. Truce negotiations stepped up inside Sproul, to the
accompaniment, through the night, of speaking, chanting, and dueling renditions of “We Shall Overcome” and (from the frat boys) the Mickey Mouse Club theme, through the next morning, the next afternoon, and the dinner hour—when the members of the United Front finally declared that their terms had been met. The prisoner was released, the crowd of 7,000 broke up, the battered car rolled forth. And observers wasted no time identifying the conspiracies behind the event.

“It is regrettable that a relatively small number of students, together with certain off-campus agitators, should have precipitated so unfortunate an incident,” the chair of the Regents droned. The
San Francisco Examiner
headlined its report “REDS ON CAMPUS.” A columnist in the (liberal)
San Francisco Chronicle
grumbled that the instigators should be hung, then shot with arrows. A crowd photograph in Knowland's
Oakland Tribune
was artfully doctored with another picture to illustrate the caption “A textbook on Marxism was among the crowd.” The article charged that the ones who started the trouble were “Cuba-trained” instigators. Clark Kerr, for his part, disagreed. He claimed that “the university was contending with a hard core of Castro-Mao Tse-tung-line Communists.” The theorist of pluralism could not confront the fact that he was dealing with an ideological plurality. Or that the leaders of the United Front were just as startled as everyone else by the Squad Car Revolution.