Students: Striking Out at Berkeley

This fall, student dissidents were expected to create more chaos on more campuses than ever. But they have failed to disrupt the University of California at Berkeley, where the wave of rebellion began four years ago. Last week a call for a campus-wide strike was heeded by less than 20% of Berkeley’s 28,000 students, even though the activists had an issue far more provocative than anything enjoyed by Mario Savio and his 1964 Free Speech Movement.

The rebels’ cause was a ruling by the California regents that Black Panther Leader Eldridge Cleaver could not deliver ten lectures for a credit course on racism. This decision clearly violated powers over curriculum that had been held by the faculty since the 1920s. To the students, the regents also appeared to be trying to restrain the expression of Black Power sentiment. The course, Social Analysis 139X, was de-signed to let Cleaver have his say; but his arguments were to be dissected in section meetings by full-time professors. The regents decided that the course could not be given for credit.

Full Credit. The faculty protested the decision and recommended that full credit be given for the course. Chancellor Roger Heyns backed up the professors and advised that Cleaver could give the ten lectures while talks with the regents on the credit question continued. To militant students, the regents’ curtailment of the Cleaver course amounted to a politically motivated interference with academic freedom. Uni-versity administrators feared a worse disruption than in 1964. Several thousand aroused students attended a meeting to organize a protest movement. Opposed to any strong central authority, even in their own cause, they split into small groups, and their organizational meetings degenerated into bickering over goals and tactics. The rebels might have been able to marshal more support if they had faced an unreceptive administration. But Heyns readily agreed to meet with the protesters and expressed his concern about the regents’ anti-Cleaver decision—although he also warned that he would not tolerate any campus disorder.

Retrieving Books. True to his word, Heyns called in campus police to arrest 105 students who had occupied Sproul Hall for ten hours. The students did not resist arrest and the cops were so polite that one demonstrator was even led back inside to retrieve his forgotten books. When more militant demonstrators next occupied Moses Hall, damaging furniture and files, Heyns got tougher. He summoned off-campus cops to grab 72 of them in a predawn raid; although they submitted meekly, he immediately suspended all of them. The protesters then issued their call for a strike by students and faculty but had trouble even getting enough supporters to man picket lines.

Berkeley’s relative calm, despite a potentially explosive issue, was a tribute to the skill of Chancellor Heyns in pacifying key groups on campus. Since taking office in 1965, Heyns has been able to isolate the more militant groups by dealing firmly with extremist tactics, while remaining open to orderly protest. He has been helped by the fact that Students for a Democratic Society is surprisingly weak at Berkeley, while other militants refuse to coalesce behind any single leader.

In the current case, Heyns’ stand against political interference earned faculty support. His open-door policy of reasonable dialogue disarmed the dissidents and won broad student sympathy. His crackdown on the sit-in demonstrators pleased the regents without antagonizing the moderate majority of students. The radicals might yet find a way to use the unresolved Cleaver case to inflame the university. But the encouraging point of the restraint at Berkeley—reinforced by rejections of confrontation politics this fall at N.Y.U. and Columbia—may be a growing student awareness that change can be more quickly achieved by cooperating with tolerant administrators than by resorting to force and inviting repression.