And the students are revolting, too

Berkeley: The Student Revolt by Hal Draper (Author), Mario Savio (Introduction)

ISBN 978-1-64259-125-5. Haymarket Books, Chicago, IL, USA, 298 pp., 2020.

Reviewed by Neil Mudford

Introduction

This is a book written 55 years ago and yet the lessons it can teach us are just as relevant and the stories it tells are just as riveting as when the type bar last hit the ribbon for the original manuscript. So many things have changed since then but the need to campaign and protest to retain, establish or recover political and other human rights never ends. Primary author Hal Draper, contributor and foremost student leader Mario Savio and others provide us here with eye-witness accounts and incisive analyses of the Free Speech Movement (FSM) struggle by university students at the University of California Berkeley to assert their right to engage in political action. They fought an intelligent, noble and, on their side at least, non-violent fight for the right of students to organise, campaign, work and collect donations on campus for causes such as the Civil Rights movement that was in full swing back then. Well, almost non-violent; Draper notes that ‘Savio was charged with biting a policeman in the leg during the October 1 [1964] scuffle around the Sproul [Hall] doors – an act which he admitted to be ‘excessive’ and informally explained as due to momentary irritation at having his head trampled by policemen’s heels.’ (p. 109).

The huge and dramatic actions profoundly affected the nature of student protest in the USA and around the world and have been said to have largely defined student protest in the 1960s. Besides the huge scale of the actions, the mass student involvement, the arrests and trials and the associated police violence, much of their actions’ significance consists in the students’ use of the non-violent protest techniques learned during participation by some of their number in the Civil Rights Movement itself.

It is timely that this work is being republished, especially with the advent of the Black Lives Matter movement the rise of which emphasises the fact that African-Americans are still denied the rights and social standing of Euro-Americans even where such rights are theirs on paper. On top of that, there seems to me to be a surge in public protest action over other issues such as climate change and refugees. Extinction Rebellion (XR), for example, is an active and determined group whose techniques bear more than a passing resemblance to those used at Berkeley.

The techniques and strategies of the Berkeley struggles are still powerful tools for change and this book is a rather rare chance for us to learn about them and be inspired by them.

The book has several sections. The first is written by Mario Savio. It is referred to as an Introduction but it is, above and beyond that, a thoughtful and broad-ranging summary of the importance for all social groups of the struggle for free speech and civil rights and the place of the Berkeley events in this struggle. Savio provides us with a sweeping perspective of the state of social oppression and discontent of his time that, unfortunately, seems to quite accurately describe current troubles and dilemmas as well.

Hal Draper authors the book’s 188 page main section in which he recounts, in marvellous detail and style, the chronology of the dispute from its origins in the Berkeley administration’s repression of undergraduate political activity through to the huge student sit-in at Sproul Hall, the violent pre-dawn mass arrests by 600 police and the student strike that finally won the day for the students.

Throughout, Draper acknowledges the vital aid provided by Pacifica Radio, station KPFA which broadcast live from the scenes of protest, extensively interviewed the participants and clearly amassed a significant collection of oral history recordings on the spot. Draper was able to draw on these recordings as a rich and vibrant source of information for the book.

The last third of the book consists of a section entitled ‘Voices of Berkeley’ in which are presented key contemporary documents, pamphlets and reflective analyses concerning the actions. Like Savio’s Introduction, these short works reveal a great depth of understanding of the events’ political dynamics and the broader context of the uprising. It is clear that those participating in the actions thought deeply about them and developed an impressive understanding of what they were doing, as you would hope to see from the denizens of an institution of higher learning.

The origins of the revolt

Over the years leading up to the revolt, the University of California (UC) administration had imposed severe restrictions on political activities by student clubs. For example, the student ‘government’, the Associated Students of the University of California (ASUC), was forbidden to take stands on ‘off-campus’ issues, ‘except as permitted by the administration’ (p. 20). Clubs with an interest in social issues were labelled ‘off-campus clubs’ and were prevented from holding organisational meetings, collecting funds or recruiting on campus.

Only a few years before these events, Berkeley staff had been subjected to McCarthyist demands that they sign loyalty oaths. Some refused and lost their jobs. Draper comments that the university lost many good staff because of this. In spite of this, practically no-one believed the FSM, formed as part of the actions here, was communist dominated or led.

This state of affairs was at odds with Berkeley’s reputation, in the world beyond the campus gates, as a ‘liberal’ campus; that is, ‘small-l liberal’ in Australian parlance. Similarly, the UC’s Chancellor, Edward Strong, and President, Clark Kerr, were considered ‘liberal’ administrators. As central players in the administration’s role in the dispute, however, they behaved as anything but liberals.

Draper explores in detail Kerr’s character and belief system, in relation to universities, in his extensive pamphlet The Mind of Clark Kerr – His View of the University Factory and the ‘New Slavery’, written in the thick of the dispute and reproduced in the final section of this book. In his Introduction, Mario Savio acknowledges this pamphlet as ‘contributing mightily to the movement’s understanding of the extent and depth of the injustice by which the “multiversity” runs’. (p. 7).

Draper acknowledges that Kerr had a liberal side to him, more so in his younger days, and still in his rhetoric and public pronouncements but now largely absent in his actions of relevance here. Draper encapsulates the contradiction nicely when he says, ‘...Kerr is sensitive to the real relations between Ideals and Power in our society. Ideals are what you are for, inside your skull, while your knees are bowing to Power.’ (p. 26).

Draper’s analysis focusses in part on Kerr’s published theories on the contemporary and future role of the modern university as expounded in The Uses of the University (Kerr, 1963) of which he is chief author. This work seems to have had a profound influence on the development of universities over the intervening decades and ran to its 5th edition before Kerr’s death in 2003.

According to Draper, Kerr’s view was that the modern university is destined to serve society and industry as a producer of tertiary educated workers. In many ways, this has now become the standard model for a university. As part of this model, the corporate world outside the university would naturally become the arbiter of what students should be learning at university and aiming to become on graduation. It is then a short step for a compliant university to yield to pressure from that sector to curb students’ political activities lest these interfere with the production of desirable graduates or the sector’s more immediate business interests. Certainly, the UC administration’s clear preference was to repress the students rather than rebuff the urgings of these external interests.

Draper points out that other facets of Kerr’s view of the modern university are that it should primarily exist as a business and that administrator quality is a critical factor in ensuring its business success. Sounds familiar now but it seems to have been a new idea in 1963.

Reactions to The Uses of the University are many and varied. This may well be because, irrespective of the desirability of the model, Kerr’s description of what universities were becoming was quite perceptive and therefore illuminating. Draper and the FSM considered the vision abhorrent and de-humanising.

The campaign by the groups that banded together and created the FSM began as a struggle for the right to engage in political activities. As the protestors’ understanding grew, they began to see that the university’s operational model as the fundamental source of the problem. The students were angered by the notion that their role in this scheme was as feedstock for corporate America’s workforce rather than as human beings possessed of citizens’ rights and deserving of a thoroughgoing and well-rounded education.

During the year before the dramatic actions that form most of Draper’s history here, the Berkeley students were highly active in protests centred around the Civil Rights Movement. Actions included picketing and protest at various nearby businesses with racially discriminatory hiring practices, a sit-in at the US District Attorney’s office to protest federal inaction on investigations into the murder in Mississippi of three Freedom Summer volunteers and a picket line at the Oakland Tribune run by William Knowland. Knowland was the state manager for the deeply conservative Republican Presidential Nominee and later Presidential Candidate, Barry Goldwater. Additionally, some students were collecting money on campus in support of a more moderate candidate. This violated the oppressive university rules on engaging in political action and on seeking donations for the same. Note that the students in these particular actions must surely have been Republicans, illustrating that all shades of the political spectrum were being affected.

These last student actions against Knowland’s newspaper and Goldwater are thought to be the trigger for the piling on of pressure on the UC administration to come down hard on the students which it duly did. Clearly, the students were annoying a wide range of powerful establishment figures who responded by exercising their own free speech rights in the hidden and highly effective ways available to the powerful and influential. They insisted that the university curb their students.

The administration then embarked on heavy handed enforcement of its rules with a level of ineptitude that almost defies belief. For example, they would attempt to impose harsh penalties while circumventing any disciplinary procedures prescribed in official and long-established university rules. They would impose these penalties on a selected few ‘offenders’ (read ‘student leaders’) while rebuffing others who were openly confessing to the same rather trivial crimes and demanding to be similarly punished. They would unilaterally alter the rules but, so often, would shortly after have to retract or modify them because of flaws within them such as logical impossibilities. The litany of missteps just goes on and on from the start to the finish of the whole affair. The administrators seemed never to learn from their mistakes.

Draper points out that this tremendous incompetence on the part of the administration helped immeasurably in the ultimate triumph of the students’ efforts, especially at some crucial junctures. At times, the student movement was on the point of exhaustion or despair when the administration swooped in with another completely outrageous assault that reinvigorated the movement.

This brings up something of a puzzle in Draper’s views of Kerr’s political nous. Draper portrays him as clumsy in his handling of the dispute with the students, but later credits him with considerable understanding and cunning around the time Kerr resigns.

All this is not to say that the students ran a smooth, efficient and straightforward operation. Draper puts it nicely, in the following, concerning the Free Speech Movement:

Even in the first stage, one of the most prominent characteristics of FSM functioning was the interminable, indecisive discussions of the leading committees at critical junctures. The picture of the FSM drawn by some in terms of sinister superefficiency and generalship so brilliant as to put the administration to rout, is one of the most ludicrous misrepresentations in this story. Time and again, the Executive Committee and

Steering Committee of the movement discussed literally for days, coming finally either to no firm decision or to a decision which was negated the very next day by events, so that the actual policy was improvised. At such times the policy problems of the FSM were most often solved not by its councils but by some new ‘atrocity’ by the administration. (p. 190).

Nevertheless, the FSM campaign was run with high levels of inclusivity and thoughtful analysis, as the Voices from Berkeley section of the book shows.

Draper also advances another reason for the students’ success and that is ‘They were able to win so much because they didn’t know it was ‘impossible.’ A certain amount of naivete and inexperience was as a shield and a buckler to them.’ (p. 189). Had the students known the power of the forces ranged against them, they might well have given up before they started. Certainly, they were told by many that they couldn’t win or were ‘asking too much’.

About the students

Several notable comments can be made about the participating students’ attributes and their behaviour as the revolt unfolded.

In his Introduction, Savio says of the student population, ‘Of course, there is a natural receptivity for politics at Berkeley simply because this is a state-supported university: a good percentage of the student body comes from lower-middleclass or working-class homes; many who can afford to pay more for an education go, for example, to Stanford.’ (p. 3) Thus the students were drawn from social backgrounds likely to predispose them to take action on issues bearing on social justice. Indeed, Savio was a machinist’s son.

The broader US political and legal environment also played a part. The United States Constitution confers a number of rights on its citizens. Among these are the 1st Amendment which protects free speech against government censorship and the 14th which provides for equal treatment under the law and prohibits the imposition of laws that deny citizens their rights. As we keep hearing, these protections are taken very seriously by US citizens. Elsewhere in the world, protests aimed at overturning unjust laws or demanding fair and equal treatment do so on the grounds of natural justice. By contrast, the students undertaking the protest actions of interest here were in fact demanding that the law be upheld. This didn’t stop opponents charging that Anarchy was breaking out at Berkeley or that Law and Order must be enforced, meaning their protests ought to be suppressed.

They were a very intelligent group and brought their intellectual prowess to bear on solving the problems they faced during the campaign. In fact, surveys showed that there was a positive correlation between student involvement and high academic achievement. They produced canny tactics, clear thinking and flexible manoeuvring that outshone their opponents in the university administration time and again.

Many of them were ‘first timers’, that is, they had not previously engaged in any similar action. In spite of this, they showed tremendous discipline, sense of community and mutual support with their fellow students. Even when the going became intense with students threatened with disciplinary action, with significant police brutality, with the need for longitudinal commitment, they were steadfast.

The students’ detractors had difficulty berating and dismissing them outright. Typically, the students were high achievers rather than ‘drop-outs’ or ‘beatniks’. Also, the movement was clearly not directed or led by Communists or other establishment bêtes noires.

The movement was supported by clubs and students of all political colours even though the public generally thought of the movement as left-wing. Although many were politically inexperienced, there was nevertheless a solid core of experienced activists whose knowledge of protest techniques and campaigning were vital to the movement’s success. In particular, there were those, such as Mario Savio, who had experienced the political turmoil and violence of the Freedom Summer project that was part of the Civil Rights struggles in Mississippi. The techniques of passive resistance learned there were a vital element of the students’ armoury at Berkeley.

Then there were those, such as Draper, with skills in political analysis as demonstrated by the extensive analysis from Draper and others in the final section of the book. Thus, those directing the movement’s progress gained from a refined analysis of the issues and options available to them.

Initially, only undergraduate students were involved. Part of the reason for this was that the administration, under President Kerr, had managed to hive off the graduate students from ASUC some time before. Once the movement gathered pace though, graduate students became interested and involved. Many graduate students worked as Teaching Assistants (TA) and were therefore both students and staff members. One of the longer term outcomes of the action was that the TAs formed a union affiliated with the American Federation of Teachers.

Faculty support was slow in coming but was fulsome when it did and played a significant supporting role in the final stages of the main events of the revolt.

Mario Savio

Mario Savio’s role in the actions deserves special mention (see Wikipedia, 2020). As mentioned above, he had experience gained with the Freedom Summer project in Mississippi. More than that, he was clear and firm in his views on the need to tackle the social problems he saw around him, and he knew how lead in the best sense of the word.

The students seem to have quickly recognised his leadership talent and responded enthusiastically to him. There were a number of other influential leaders, but he was pre-eminent among them. So much so that, according to Wikipedia, the news media in 1999 revealed that the FBI tracked him over the decade following as the nation’s most prominent student leader, covertly collecting information on him and placing him on a list of people to be detained without a judicial warrant in the event of a national emergency.

Draper attributes Savio’s natural elevation to leadership and the students’ acceptance of it by saying of Savio, that he is

Not a glib orator, retaining remnants of a stutter, rather tending to a certain shyness, he yet projected forcefulness and decision in action. This was the outward glow of the inner fact that he was not In Hiding – he was in open opposition, and he had no doubts about it. (p. 44)

The Board of Regents

In mid-November 1964, the University of California Board of Regents also played a direct and open role in the affair supporting the ‘no negotiation’ approach of Strong and Kerr that pertained throughout the whole period. The Board acceded to Strong and Kerr’s suggestions to launch new legal actions against the students, to shrink the already narrow limits of their political freedom and to increase the severity of the administration’s response to protest. In his article the ‘The Regents’, in the book’s last section, Marvin Garson provides a long list of the links of many of the Regents to powerful business interests. He then argues that, when students and faculty challenge vested interests, they should expect the Regents to side with the latter rather than support university independence of thought and free speech.

Indeed, this is the subject that makes up the bulk of Savio’s famous and inspiring ‘bodies on the gears’ speech at a noon rally on December 2, 1964 (see Wikipedia, 2020) made, unrehearsed, as he reported on the Board’s complete rejection of the protester’s demands ahead of the huge sit-in, mass arrests and police brutality in the pre-dawn of the next day.

Big sit-in, mass arrests, trials & convictions

The students won their fight but at quite a cost. In the penultimate mass action of the revolt, approximately 1000 students staged a peaceful and mostly self-organised mass sit-in in Sproul Hall. Governor Brown sent in 600 police at 2 a.m. on December 4. Brown, by the way, was ex-officio on the UC Board of Regents. The police allowed anyone who wished to depart to do so and avoid arrest. About 200 students left after warnings from the Chancellor and the police but 800 or so remained and were arrested. It is a tribute to the passion, conviction and bravery of the students that they suffered what they did for their beliefs. The police spent the next 24 hours arresting the remaining students, with considerable police brutality, and carting them off to a nearby prison for charging.

As Draper notes, in spite of vindication of the students’ struggle, the arrested sit-inners were convicted of trespass and resisting arrest – going limp = guilty, mind you – and punished with fines and, in some instances, gaol sentences. In keeping with the University’s approach of targeting the leaders, the list of penalties shows that Court punished leaders more severely than others.

Appeals were pending at the time Draper was writing. I haven’t been able to chase down the result of these amongst the mountain of information on the Movement and the protests. This is but a book review after all. The lengthy court proceedings were nevertheless, in themselves, considerable punishment for peaceful protesters trying to secure their political rights.

Conclusion

The Revolt was a highly influential action that made great strides for the cause of the right to peaceful protest. The book provides us with a great deal of information about the actions and times and conveys the excitement, uncertainty and passion of the Movement. The students certainly received an important and unexpected education.

Neil Mudford is an Adjunct Senior Fellow with the University of Queensland. He was a ‘first-timer’ student protester at La Trobe University in the late 1960s and a veteran of the second Waterdale Road anti-Vietnam War march of 16 September 1970 (www.moadoph.gov.au/ blog/asserting-the-right-to-protest-the-waterdale-roadmarches/#). This had significantly less international influence than the Berkeley protests but did have a single ‘one up’ on Berkeley: one La Trobe protestor, Larry Abramson, was arrested at gunpoint. He was charged with offensive behaviour. Contact: neil.mudford@bigpond.com

References

Kerr, C. (1963). The Uses of the University. Harvard University Press. Retrieved from https://books.google.com.au/ books?id=RSGdAAAAMAAJ

Wikipedia. (2020, November 25). Mario Savio. Retrieved from Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mario_Savio