In other words, this isn’t just a story about a perhaps-unwell professor and her victim. It’s a story about campus activism and, depending on your point of view, its promises or pathologies. Del Valle was much beloved by her undergraduate and graduate students. She seems to have been a wonderful teacher. It’s unsurprising that her students would have trouble processing the painful facts the university’s investigations revealed about her. Attempts to protect her from adverse employment consequences might seem noble, or at least understandable. Less understandable is the insistence, in the face of all evidence, that del Valle is the real victim here, sacrificed to a system of racialized injustice thought to infect every aspect of university operations. An open letter from supporters put it this way: Berkeley “needs to start treating our Latinx professors with respect.” Del Valle herself has encouraged that interpretation: “I don’t want UC Berkeley to think that they can do this to a minority woman in order to protect a white, senior professor. It’s not acceptable.”
Students’ immediate recourse to militant protest tactics such as the hunger strike over what is an unpleasant but essentially nonpolitical HR matter reflects, perhaps, a newly dominant culture of activism, one which has achieved a degree of unprecedented autonomy. Radical action has become the default manner of responding to anything students feel unhappy about — or at least, it has come to feel like a highly available option. Or, put differently: Militancy attracts in its own right, and students are on the lookout for occasions to practice it.
Of course, skeptical observers of campus protest have long perceived something like this autonomization of activism as an activity for its own sake. In an essay about the campus revolts of the 1960s, the University of Chicago sociologist Edward Shils refers to the “innovation in student radicalism that has occurred in Northwestern Europe and the United States” as a “moral mood,” a certain set toward the world. Some stimuli toward radicalism, Shils acknowledges, are legitimate — he names especially “the war in Vietnam with all its cruelty and its unending ineffectiveness and the menace of conscription into the most individuality-constricting of environments.” But for Shils, Vietnam is the exception that proves the rule: “There are scarcely any other issues … that do not seem contrived by those who are bent on confrontation.”
It would be uncharitable to accuse del Valle’s student supporters of being merely “bent on confrontation.” Their affection for their teacher is valid, and their commitment to her is moving. Still, very few people outside of the hothouse habitat of student activism will feel that a hunger strike is a proportionate response to del Valle’s situation. The intrinsic attractions of militancy in an environment that valorizes activism for its own sake help explain the students’ readiness to go to the wall. In Shils’s acerbic formulation, “It is authority that the radical students wish to confront and affront — and almost any stick will do for the camel.”
