The F.S.M. has always applied coercion to insure victory. One-party “democracy,” as in the Communist countries or the lily-white portions of the South, corrects opponents of the party line by punishment. The punishment of the recalcitrant university administration (and more than 20,000 students who avoided participation in the conflict) was to “bring the university to a grinding halt” by physical force.
To capitulate to such corruption of democracy is to teach students that these methods are right. President Kerr capitulated repeatedly. …
Kerr agreed the university would not control “advocacy of illegal acts,” an abstraction until illustrated by examples: In a university lecture hall, a self-proclaimed anarchist advises students how to cheat to escape military service; a nationally known Communist uses the university facilities to condemn our Government in vicious terms for its action in Vietnam, while funds to support the Vietcong are illegally solicited; propaganda for the use of marijuana, with instructions where to buy it, is openly distributed on campus.
Even the abstraction “obscenity” is better understood when one hears a speaker, using the university’s amplifying equipment, describe in vulgar words his experiences in group sexual intercourse and homosexuality and recommend these practices, while another suggests students should have the same sexual freedom on campus as dogs. …
Clark Kerr’s “negotiation”—a euphemism for surrender—on each deliberate defiance of orderly university processes contributes not to a liberal university but to a lawless one.
David S. Landes, Professor of History, Harvard University, made an interesting observation in a letter to The New
York Times (December 29, 1964). Stating that the Berkeley revolt represents potentially one of the most serious assaults on academic freedom in America, he wrote:
In conclusion, I should like to point out the deleterious implications of this dispute for the University of California. I know personally of five or six faculty members who are-leaving, not because of lack of sympathy with “free speech” or “political action,” but because, as one put it, who wants to teach at the University of Saigon?
The clearest account and most perceptive evaluation were offered in an article in the Columbia University Forum (Spring 1965), entitled “What’s left at Berkeley,” by William Petersen, Professor of Sociology at the University of California at Berkeley. He writes:
The first fact one must know about the Free Speech Movement is that it has little or nothing to do with free speech. … If not free speech, what men is the issue? In fact, preposterous as this may seem, the real issue is the seizure of power….
That a tiny number, a few hundred out of a student body of more than 27,000, was able to disrupt the campus is the consequence of more than vigor and skill in agitation. This minuscule group could not have succeeded in getting so many students into motion without three other, at times unwitting, sources of support: off-campus assistance of various kinds, the University administration, and the faculty.
Everyone who has seen the efficient, almost military organization of the agitators’ program has a reasonable basis for believing that skilled personnel and money are being dispatched into the Berkeley battle. . . . Around the Berkeley community a dozen “ad hoc committees to support” this or that element of the student revolt sprang up spontaneously, as though out of nowhere.
The course followed by the University administration … could hardly have better fostered a rebellious student body if it had been devised to do so. To establish dubious regulations and when they are attacked to defend them by unreasonable argument is bad enough; worse still, the University did not impose on the students any sanctions that did not finally evaporate. . . . Obedience to norms is developed when it is suitably rewarded, and when noncompliance is suitably punished. That professional educators should need to be
reminded of this axiom indicates how deep the roots of the Berkeley crisis lie.
But the most important reason that the extremists won so many supporters among the students was the attitude of the faculty. Perhaps their most notorious capitulation to the F.S.M. was a resolution passed by the Academic Senate on December 8, by which the faculty notified the campus not only that they supported all of the radicals’ demands but also that, in effect, they were willing to fight for them against the Board of Regents, should that become necessary. When that resolution passed by an overwhelming majority—824 to 115 votes—it effectively silenced the anti-F.S.M. student organizations. …
The Free Speech Movement is reminiscent of the Communist fronts of the 1930’s, but there are several important differences. The key feature, that a radical core uses legitimate issues ambiguously in order to manipulate a large mass, is identical. The core in this case, however, is not the disciplined Communist party, but a heterogeneous group of radical sects.
Professor Petersen lists the various socialist, Trotskyist, communist, and other groups involved. His conclusion is:
The radical leaders on the Berkeley campus, like those in Latin American or Asian universities, are not the less radical for being, in many cases, outside the discipline of a formal political party. They are defined not by whether they pay dues to a party, but by their actions, their vocabulary, their way of thinking. The best term to describe them, in my opinion, is Castroite. [This term, he explains, applies primarily to their choice of tactics, to the fact that] in critical respects all of them imitate the Castro movement….
At Berkeley, provocative tactics applied not against a dictatorship but against the liberal, divided, and vacillating University administration proved to be enormously effective. Each provocation and subsequent victory led to the next.
Professor Petersen ends his article on a note of warning:
By my diagnosis . . . not only has the patient [the University] not recovered but he is sicker than ever. The fever has gone down temporarily, but the infection is spreading and becoming more virulent.
Now let us consider the ideology of the rebels, from such indications as were given in the press reports. The general tone of the reports was best expressed by a headline in The New York Times (March 15, 1965): “The New Student Left: Movement Represents Serious Activists in Drive for Changes.”
What kind of changes? No specific answer was given in the almost full-page story. Just “changes.”
Some of these activists “who liken their movement to a ‘revolution,’ want to be called radicals. Most of them, however, prefer to be called ‘organizers.’ ”
Organizers—of what? Of “deprived people.” For what? No answer. Just “organizers.”
Most express contempt for any specific labels, and they don’t mind being called cynics. . . . The great majority of those questioned said they were as skeptical of Communism as they were of any other form of political control. . . . “You might say we’re a-Communist,” said one of them, “just as you might say we’re amoral and a-almost everything else.”
There are exceptions, however. A girl from the University of California, one of the leaders of the Berkeley revolt, is quoted as saying: “At present the socialist world, even with all its problems, is moving closer than any other countries toward the sort of society I think should exist. In the Soviet Union, it has almost been achieved.”
Another student, from the City College of New York, is quoted as concurring: ” ‘The Soviet Union and the whole Socialist bloc are on the right track,’ he said.”
In view of the fact that most of the young activists were active in the civil rights movement, and that the Berkeley rebels had started by hiding behind the issue of civil rights (attempting, unsuccessfully, to smear all opposition as of “racist” origin), it is interesting to read that: “There is little talk among the activists about racial integration. Some of them consider the subject pass6. They declare that integration will be almost as evil as segregation if it results in a complacent, middle-class interracial society.”
The central theme and basic ideology of all the activists is: anti-ideology. They are militantly opposed to all “labels,” definitions, and theories; they proclaim the supremacy of the immediate moment and commitment to action—to subjectively, emotionally motivated action. Their anti-intellectual attitude runs like a stressed leitmotif through all the press reports.
An article in The New York Times Magazine (February 14, 1965) declares:
The Berkeley mutineers did not seem political in the sense of those student rebels in the Turbulent Thirties. They are too suspicious of all adult institutions to embrace wholeheartedly even those ideologies with a stake in smashing the system. An anarchist or I.W.W. strain seems as pronounced as any Marxist doctrine. “Theirs is a sort of political existentialism,” says Paul Jacobs, a research associate at the university’s Center for the Study of Law and Society, who is one of the F.S.M.’s applauders. “All the old labels are out. …”
The proudly immoderate zealots of the F.S.M. pursue an activist creed—that only commitment can strip life of its emptiness, its absence of meaning in a great “knowledge factory” like Berkeley.