The sound was familiar, but I had not heard it in many years: police helicopters, hovering overhead. When I left my office on the University of California’s Berkeley campus last week and looked up, I could see them clearly.
I last saw police helicopters flying over the Berkeley grounds when I was a graduate student here, in the 1960s. I remember fleeing the tear gas they dropped, and ducking into Wheeler Hall for cover. But on this day in 2009, some students had already occupied a floor of Wheeler, and the police had surrounded the building, using excessive force on other students to clear a path. When I got there, about 2,500 students surrounded the police and the building, just as students had done in the 1960s.
For a brief moment, I felt as if I was in a historical re-enactment. But of course, there are differences between the two sets of protests—apart from the fact that these participants didn’t hand out flowers to the police, as we did back in the day.
In the 1960s, the university’s administrators did not send frequent e-mail and text messages to update the campus community on the status of the demonstration, and to spin the meaning of the events their way. In fact, I learned of the Wheeler Hall sit-in when my computer flashed a message from Chancellor Robert J. Birgeneau, titled “Urgent"—the first of six messages he sent that day. Nor did the protesting students in the 1960s communicate through text messages and Twitter—we relied on telephones and mimeograph machines.
But then as now, the protests were about education. Often forgotten in the history of that era is the fact that the Berkeley Free Speech Movement of 1964—the Ur-protest of American students that decade—was about education. We wanted freedom of speech on campuses and in classrooms; we protested the assembly-line education we were receiving. The most famous speech by Mario Savio, the FSM’s leader, was about education. He urged students to put their bodies into the gears of the machine to disrupt it, and to fight back against the university administrators who were responding in their heavy-handed, factory-owner manner. He said nothing about peace, Vietnam, or drugs. He spoke only about education.
Similarly, the demonstrations of 2009 are about education—specifically, the eroding quality of the University of California system. Not only are the students protesting the regents’ 32-percent increase in undergraduate tuition, but they are angry about the educational implications of the move. They argue that the truly diverse student population of Berkeley will lose many African-American and Hispanic students who cannot afford the rising costs of a university education; they fear that wealthy, out-of-state, mainly white students will replace them. Indeed, the university has admitted to much of the latter strategy: It wants to attract out-of-state students who can pay the high out-of-state fees and generate much more money for the university than in-state students can.
Many current students know their Berkeley history. The main coffee shop in the center of the campus, housed in the undergraduate library, is called the Free Speech Movement Café. Its walls are covered with huge photos of FSM events; the tables have plastic tops over newspaper clippings about the protests. The university’s past provides its politically active students with a precedent—maybe even an inspiration. During many demonstrations this fall, speakers referred to “Berkeley’s glorious history of protest.” The protesters also carried some familiar signs: “Tax the Rich, Not the People,” “Chop at the Top,” “Instruction, not Construction"—familiar calls to cut the salaries of top administrators and to stop constructing new buildings and ignoring increases in class sizes.
Despite those similarities, however, these are not the 1960s. My student years at Berkeley remain vivid to me, and although I love the present similarities, I must acknowledge some of the key differences.
Then as now, the protesting students and the administration are playing to an outside audience: the residents—particularly the taxpayers—of the state and the Legislature. And both sides are using the news media to reach that audience.
Today the news media are more objective about reporting the facts of the protest events. In the 1960s, though, wealthy conservatives owned California’s newspapers and TV stations, and their media outlets did not portray the students sympathetically. Today corporations own those outlets, and campus events are reported more evenhandedly. But because there are so many media sources and so many stories on the wires each day (the majority of them trivial), the importance of the Berkeley protest story, and the protests on other University of California campuses, are often drowned out.
The political point of view of the audience has changed, too. In the 1960s, California voters believed deeply in supporting higher education. At the time, the university was essentially free to all qualified students, and because of the great and expanding prosperity in which Californians lived, they were optimistic about the future of the university, the state, and the country.
Today California is a far different place. The recession and the paralysis of the Legislature, especially in dealing with huge budget deficits, have turned the state’s taxpayers, according to most polls, into pessimistic, tight-fisted citizens—which translates into a lack of sympathy for the university and the student protesters.
My friend Paul Strohm (we originally met on the steps of Wheeler Hall during an FSM demonstration), a longtime official of the American Association of University Professors, says the current Berkeley situation “is all so poignant,” however. “In 1964, the problem was self-inflicted [by administrators’ blunders] and thus subject to correction, whereas now the question would appear to be whether California can afford expensive higher education no matter what the students or faculty do.”
Yes, that’s the question. Possibly age makes me somewhat pessimistic about the answer. I try to be objective, but it’s difficult. I’ve been back in California for over five years, and it is hard not to be appalled by the antics of the governor and the Legislature and the gridlock in Sacramento. I sympathize with the students and their vision of a better education for every qualified young person in the state, and I love their idealism. I received the following e-mail message from a student last week: “Hi everyone. If you are planning on going to the rally TODAY at NOON on Sproul Plaza, then meet at Tolman at 11:45 AM and we can walk over together as the Graduate School of Education. We have a really great banner that a lot of people worked hard to make yesterday, and it would be awesome if we had a big group of people marching together with a banner over to Sproul. Hope to see lots of students, faculty and staff there!”
On a wall of the entrance to The Chronicle’s offices, in Washington, there is a photo of the FSM protesters going through Sather Gate toward Wheeler Hall in 1964. I was in that crowd, and I was in the crowd marching through Sather Gate to Sproul Plaza last week. For me, history truly repeated itself. And I was pleased that the students of 2009, despite the pessimism of observers like me, still want to change the world, just as we did in the 60s.
