Universities: Berkeley, One Year Later

“Yippee!” shouted the petite Berkeley coed, her braid flying as she leaped into the air. For Bettina Aptheker, 21, a junior studying history at the University of California, happiness is having the U.S. Supreme Court rule that Communists do not have to register with the Government. “I have been for a number of years, I am now, and I propose to remain a member of the Communist Party of the United States,” she had written a few days before in a letter to the campus newspaper. Under the $10,000-a-day provision of the 1950 McCarran Act, she said, this admission made her liable to a “fine of $12,150,000 and 5,075 years in prison” for failing to register as a Communist—until the court ruled otherwise.

Girlish glee goes with grim ideology in Bettina. “Everyone said we were finks for supporting Johnson in 1964,” she says, but Communists had to back L.BJ. because “Goldwater was a neofascist.” Now she says that “President Johnson and Secretary of Defense McNamara and the whole damned Administration are hypocrites and liars and have betrayed the American people.”

As a child, Bettina swallowed Communism along with the food on the dinner table of her family’s apartment in Brooklyn: her father, Herbert Aptheker, is the American Communist Party’s leading theoretician. Bettina went through the public schools without notable ostracism, although in the sixth grade one teacher “was very nasty because my father was a Communist” and “turned all her prejudices on me.” At Cal, she has repeatedly marched, protested and demonstrated, getting arrested twice. She was a top leader of last year’s Free Speech Movement, which, in the memorable words of Student Leader Mario Savio,* forced education at Berkeley to “grind to a halt.” The movement foundered last spring after some of its members shouted obscenities, insisting that this was free speech. Bettina succeeded to the eleven-member board that runs F.S.M.’s muchdiminished reincarnation, the Free Student Union.

As a result of such single-minded devotion to protest, Bettina has acquired an effective political following of campus left-wingers and others who see her as a symbol of rebellion. Last week their votes were enough to win her a place on the student-faculty rules advisory committee that Berkeley’s new chancellor, Roger W. Heyns, counts on to be a key force in his effort to stabilize the school. Under the complicated Cambridge Preferential Voting System, Bettina topped the list of nine contestants for the three undergraduate seats on the committee—in an election that drew only 4,582 of the 16,610 Berkeley undergraduates.

Open Forum. Heyns has made it his business since he went to Berkeley from Michigan last August to defuse the kind of political explosions that Aptheker & Co. cherish. His specific concern is the hundred or so students, plus many nonstudents drawn by Berkeley’s reputation as a swinging place for protest, who make and dominate the chaos. Heyns aims, by “controlling time, place and manner,” to “assimilate political activity into the normal life of the university”—that is, play it down and play up academic effort.

This does not mean choking off what he calls “open-forum politics.” University-supplied public-address systems still fill the noontime air at Cal with way-out views of every kind. Heyns’s approach is also conciliatory in his choice of an “assistant for student organization”: Philosophy Professor John Searle, who last year outspokenly supported the F.S.M. And the new rules committee is supposed to redefine what is sound and permissible in political activity on the campus—the issue that racked Berkeley last year.

But Heyns’s administration tempers its understanding with firmness. When students wanted permission to take over Sproul Hall for a commemoration of last year’s Dec. 2 sit-in (which ended in the arrest of 814 students), the dean of students pronounced the idea as tasteless as “commemorating President Kennedy’s assassination by reenacting it” and turned them down. To show opposition on an issue dear to Vietniks, Heyns was the first volunteer for a recent “bleedin” sponsored by Cal’s Interfraternity Council for G.I.s in South Viet Nam. And to show sympathy for the vast majority of the university’s 27,000 students to whom the ordinary concerns of college life come before alienation and protest, Heyns has been known to rise before dawn and see the football team off on a game trip. So far, his strategy seems to be working. The most recent protest march against the war in Viet Nam drew 2,500 students—far fewer than those who drove to Palo Alto the same day to see Cal’s football team fall to Stanford 9-7.

A New Culture. Heyns believes, however, that he faces a problem too complex to be solved solely by a show of firmness. “Those who work in American colleges today,” he told members of San Francisco’s influential Common wealth Club recently, “simply cannot escape the conclusion that we are confronting a new culture, a culture that is as marked in its characteristics as the youth culture of football, the flapper and the flask of the ’20s, or that of the socialist and pacifist radicalism of the ’30s.” This attitude “combines the moral temper of the prophets of old with the personal behavior of the romantic poet”; but contrary to popular opinion, “the new student does not have a conception, however Utopian, of what society ought to be. Like the prophet, he criticizes us in terms of the values which our society professes: democracy, racial equality and peace.

“The vital center of student politics is the gap between what society says its values are and how it acts,” Heyns observed. “That is why ‘hypocrisy’ is the focus of the new generation’s moral critique. That is why its angry negations—like those of the prophets—are stronger than its affirmations. Prophets are not redeemers.”

Heyns clearly is seeking to channel the radicalism of Berkeley’s students into avenues of social protest within the framework of established U.S. institutions. Bettina Aptheker, who candidly puts her faith in revolution, of course resists the channeling—although an irony of her position is that many Berkeley “New Left” students think Communism anachronistic. She has to keep explaining that her party is “in the forefront of social advances,” and that other left-wing movements tend to be “too left—so left they’re absurd.”

Heyns has had a free hand from the regents, and University of California President Clark Kerr says that the state of Berkeley “is a good deal better than it was a year ago.” Says the Los Angeles Times: “Heyns appears to have given Berkeley the leadership it needs to take the first steps toward solutions.”

*Now in England studying philosophy at Oxford.