Murray Sperber: The Berkeley Protest: Fresh Anger in the Footsteps
[Murray Sperber is a visiting professor in the Graduate School of Education at the University of California at Berkeley and an emeritus professor of English and American studies at Indiana University at Bloomington.]
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...
... 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...
Read entire article at The Chronicle of Higher Education
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...
... 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...