“History keeps me awake at night.” (David Wojnarowicz, 2018)
“The ghosts of forgotten history haunt America’s heartland, begging to be remembered and exorcised.”
(Philip Deloria, 2020)
“History is an argument about the past, as well as the record of it, and its terms are forever changing.” (Raphael Samuel, 1994)
Some arguments to grapple with:
Berkeley’s long history of activism is obscured by the tendency of our contemporary movements to have a short memory, as well as by the effectiveness of Cal’s public relations machinery in branding Berkeley as force for Progress and a “public” university committed to “social justice.” We don’t do a good job of transmitting knowledge from previous movements to the next generation about what it takes to be effective organizers and what we’ve learned about how the University exercises its power.
There’s so much to learn from generations of Berkeley activists who in the early 20th century protested obligatory military service and a university requirement to take classes on military strategy; who in the 1910s resigned or lost their jobs after refusing to sign a loyalty oath to the United States and against Germany; who in the 1920s and 1930s organized strikes on campus against the university’s institutional commitment to the American war machine; who, like the poet Robert Duncan in 1937, joined his friends’ “conspiracy against the army,” pledged loyalty to “the authority of the poem,” and left the university; who in the 1940s – admittedly in small, brave numbers – opposed the University of California’s essential involvement in creating the atomic bomb, in depriving New Mexican Tribes of access to ancestral cemeteries in Los Alamos, and in selecting the civilian populations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as targets for the first weapon of mass destruction; who also in the 1940s – and, again, in very small numbers – opposed the rounding up and imprisoning without trial, of more than 1,000 Japanese American students and their families who lived in Berkeley; who after the war – yet again in small numbers – opposed a university requirement that faculty pledge that they were not members of the Communist Party; who in the 1960s mobilized the Free Speech Movement to defend a specific kind of political speech on campus, namely against the city’s racial discrimination in hiring and racial redlining in housing – policies that the University shaped and wholeheartedly endorsed; who in the 1960s and 1970s, successfully organized against the war against Vietnam (starting with a three-day, antiwar campus teach-in that gathered 30,000 people in 1965 and surviving infiltration by federal agents and teargassing by police helicopters called in by the Regents), and campaigned to begin to diversify the faculty and democratize knowledge, to force the white boys’ club to relinquish a crumb of privilege; who in the 70s fought (unsuccessfully) against the university’s abolition of the School of Criminology where a minority of faculty and majority of students advocated abolition of prisons and an end to police racism and violence; who in the 1980s successfully and against all odds made the Regents divest its investments in South Africa’s apartheid regime; and who in 2024, against even greater odds, educated the campus about the University’s role in legitimating Israel’s murderous apartheid regime.
What have we learned from these movements against war and for social justice? We’ve learned that that the University of California not only serves power but is a powerful, ruling class institution in its own right, literally owned and un-democratically governed by absentee Regents; that today the University of California is one of the state’s largest landowners with an investment portfolio of $169 billion; that, from requiring students to be soldiers in the 19th century to co-management today of the country’s leading nuclear weapons research facilities, militarism is central to the University’s identity.
We’ve learned that, despite its woke reputation and self-branding, Cal Berkeley has a long and consistent tradition of trying to repress and regulate activism on campus. “Sometimes,” recalled former Berkeley Chancellor Albert Bowker in a candid moment, “you have to crack a few heads.” Actually, quite a lot of heads.
We’ve learned that some of our most successful movements – the right to organize politically on campus, to end the war against Vietnam, and to dis-invest in South Africa’s apartheid regime – involved the participation of students, staff, faculty, and community. It was not far from here, a few blocks away on Telegraph, that the disability rights movement was hatched and then launched on campus. Until recently, the South-side was a neighborhood of low-income housing, cultural vitality, and political activism. The University’s destruction of People’s Park represents its latest effort to try to sever the gown from the town and to undermine the solidarity of our movement.
We’ve learned that the struggle for justice is a long and difficult road. We have much to learn from California’s Tribes whose lives and deaths are inseparable from the university’s foundations. Without their land, their patrimony, and their blood, this University would not exist. And yet, despite genocide, despite dispossession, despite criminalization, despite the University's plundering of thousands of ancestral graves, they survive and thrive, teaching us that we need the persistence, stamina, and vision of long-distance runners.
To paraphrase Langston Hughes, our challenge is to make the University into a place “that never has been yet/and yet must be.”
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Talk given in Sproul Plaza, U.C. Berkeley, on April 17, 2025, as part of national day of protests against Trump's attack on universities.