San Francisco, California
May 19, 1999
American Law Institute Address
By Robert M. Berdahl
Chancellor
University of California, Berkeley
Thank you, Herma (Dean Herma Hill Kay), for that very generous introduction. I have truly enjoyed working with you and the faculty at Boalt Hall during the past two years.
Charlie Wright, it is wonderful to see you again, even if it has to be in a context such as this - surrounded by lawyers. That may sound harsh and insulting, which is not the best way to win an audience. So I want to assure you that I have nothing against lawyers; I frequently feel surrounded by lawyers. At times, I feel like a professional defendant. Once, when called for jury duty, I was asked by one of the attorneys in the case if I had ever been sued. He seemed astonished at my nearly uncontrolled laughter at the question. But some of the best advice I have received in my current profession has been from lawyers; it is usually the same advice: "Settle!" But if the truth be known, I almost became one myself. My entire family expected me to become a lawyer and ultimately end up in politics. But I followed a different course, as Charlie indicated in his introduction. I went to graduate school, became a professor, then a university president and chancellor and ended up pretty much in the same place - in politics!
As Charlie has indicated, he and I became acquainted when I was president of the University of Texas at Austin. He has been there for many years; I lasted only four-and-a-half before coming here to Berkeley. The reason he has endured, while I did not, is that he has mastered the heavily nuance world of Texas politics, namely football. Charlie served as coach of the UT Law School football team. In Texas, you see, even the Law School has a football team. Believing that blocking and tackling were essential skills for successful lawyers, Charlie handpicked the recruits for his team. There are rumors suggesting that it is the way in which the UT Law School has avoided the constraints imposed on admissions by the Hopwood decision. In any event, he was most successful, winning several intramural championships. Nothing succeeds in Texas like a winning football team.
I, on the other hand, never mastered the art. By the standards of most universities, I didn't do too badly. In the four seasons over which I presided as President of UT, we played in three post-season bowls, winning, alas, only one of them. The ignominy of my failure was a source of constant criticism. One fan wrote of my obviously misplaced values, "Ever since Daryl Royal stopped being the UT coach, academics have had the upper hand. You've got to change that," he counseled. Another called and lambasted me for five minutes without interruption. When he finally paused for breath, I commented, "Well, a university is much more than its football team." "That's the kind of goddamn thinking that's got us in this ditch," he replied. So, after four seasons, I moved on to Berkeley, where the politics of football are not complicated.
I discovered, however, that the politics of Berkeley are, in their own way, just about as complicated and that they are, as well, a contact sport. It is about this that I want to talk with you briefly today.
In Berkeley, the contact sport is not football, but protest. As those of you who live in the Bay Area know, and others may have gathered if you happened to read my op-ed piece in the San Francisco Chronicle this morning, during the last two weeks of April we had a fairly vigorous protest going on in Berkeley over the status and future of the Department of Ethnic Studies. In order to understand what I believe was the subtext of this protest, you need to know something of its chronology. It began with the celebration of the 30th anniversary of the protest of 1969, in which the demands for what was called a "Third-World College" were first voiced, and from which the programs in Ethnic Studies and African-American Studies first developed. So, the protest had a strong note of nostalgia from the outset, with students studying 1969 - the year in which People's Park was created and helicopters tear-gassed the campus. The determination to experience what an earlier generation had experienced was an important aspect of the protest. Then, on April 14, protesters occupied an academic building and had to be removed by the police. Their demands, voiced during the demonstration, included a demand for amnesty. It was the first time I had seen a demand for amnesty prior to the commission of any crime! But this demand for amnesty, supported by the departmental faculty, became a precondition for any substantive discussions to resolve the problem. Because I refused to grant it, no discussions took place for two weeks.
On April 29, six students declared themselves to be on a hunger strike and a subsequent rally in support of them brought about between 50 and 100 students into an illegal encampment in front of the campus administration building, California Hall. Again the demands were for more resources for Ethnic Studies, a program the protesters said was being "starved to death." Hence, the hunger strike.
Now some facts are important. First, Ethnic Studies had never suffered any permanent reductions of faculty; indeed, it was one of only three programs in the entire Division of Social Sciences that did not suffer some lost faculty positions during the past decade. It did have three vacant positions, out of the 18 assigned to the department. Some faculty have announced their intention to retire in the next year, but we always expected that they would be replaced. The annual budget of the department fluctuated somewhat from year to year, depending on how many visiting scholars were hired, but the permanent budget of the department had never been cut and we had no intention to cut it.
The enunciation of these facts did not seem to matter. The strike and encampment continued. An agreement with the chair and members of the department was ultimately rejected by the students. On the fifth day, the police removed the encampment, arresting 83 students. But the next day, they were back and the impasse continued. The controversy was finally resolved after the eighth day of the encampment and hunger strike. Ironically, the final settlement provided virtually nothing that we would not have been prepared to give under the normal processes of resource allocation on the campus. We simply assured the department that, following the normal review by the dean, the campus administration, and the Budget Committee of the Academic Senate, we would authorize the immediate filling of the three vacant positions and support five additional searches to fill anticipated retirements over the next five years. We also agreed to provide seed money for an interdisciplinary research center dealing with issues of race and gender.
So, what was it all about? Why a building occupation, an eight-day hunger strike, an illegal encampment, more than 100 arrests, and considerable disruption when it could all have been resolved, I believe, without it?
One answer, of course, is that some people simply enjoy raising hell. I'm sure that was true of some in this event.
A more profound answer, I believe, lies somewhat deeper than might be obvious from the chronology outlined above. And it goes beyond the romantic effort to re-enact the experience of the '60s. It reflects some of the deeper currents of American life and changes in American higher education.
At the core of the protest is the question of access to Berkeley and the question of whom the University serves. Throughout the protest, the rhetoric repeated the phrase, "This is our University." Or, "We are taking back our University." Or, "This University belongs to all of the people of California." These statements reflect, I think, a strong sense among these minority students that they were being systematically excluded from Berkeley. The underlying issue was not Ethnic Studies itself, except that its future depended, the students believed, on access to the University by students of color. The underlying issue was the perception that the University was becoming increasingly exclusive and they were the ones being excluded.
First, there is the obvious issue of the end of race-sensitive admissions policies, expressed in the University of California by the action of the Board of Regents, then followed by the statewide passage of Proposition 209. A similar measure has passed in the State of Washington and efforts are ongoing elsewhere. In Texas, of course, the Hopwood decision of the Fifth Circuit has had an identical effect and other cases are going forward, with the University of Michigan probably the next on the docket.
For a selective university such as UC Berkeley, in which three out of every four undergraduate applicants are rejected, the effect of Prop. 209 has been to reduce by more than half the number of Black, Chicano, and Latino students admitted. Take whatever position you will on the efficacy or justice of a race-sensitive admissions policy, that dramatic decline in numbers of Black and Hispanic students enrolling at Berkeley is a fact and it is a fact that some interpret as a deliberate effort to exclude them. None of the many efforts and the millions of dollars the University spends on outreach efforts to improve the performance and opportunity of students in disadvantaged and inner-city schools is capable of assuaging their sense of seeing their brothers and sisters excluded. This is, in part, what was meant by the claim, "This is our University."
There is a second factor at work here, as well, and that is the coincidence (perhaps it should be pronounced the coincidence ) of Proposition 209, demographic change, and the disinvestment in public education in California in particular, and the nation generally.
The school-age population of California has been changing dramatically. Here are some interesting data. California is adding to its population base enough new residents to populate a city the size of San Francisco every 14 months. The fastest growing sectors of our population are the young and the old, neither of which adds to the economic base. The percentage of Asian and Latino Californians is burgeoning, while the percentage of whites is declining correspondingly. In San Francisco, a majority of students in the district are Asian-American; whites comprise 13 percent. Across the Bay, in Oakland, a majority of students is African-American; whites comprise only 6 percent. Statewide, Hispanic students outnumber whites and Black and Hispanic students together constitute a majority of the school-age population. The student population is entering California schools speaking nearly 100 different native languages.
Add to this dramatically changing mix of populations the fact that, since the passage of Proposition 13, the property-tax limitation measure, there has been a reversal in the pattern of investment in public education. California fell from being one of the top 10 states in its per-pupil expenditures during the 1960s to 43rd in 1997. From the end of the Second World War until 1978 people flocked to a California committed to a massive investment in schools, libraries, highways - public goods. When the population growth changed color, the investment in public entities was reversed. In an insightful book entitled Paradise Lost: California's Experience, America's Future, Peter Schrag has chronicled this change. He sees the inherent danger in this drift, writing that California "represents the first major test of the democratic viability and potential of a major society that is not merely diverse but where white Europeans - the creators and, until now, always the possessors, of the system - constitute a distinct minority of the population."
The decline of schools as a public good has resulted in the growth of private schools. Today, for example, 20 percent of the applicants to UC Berkeley come from private high schools.
The gradual privatization of education continues throughout the system, evident in higher education as well. Today, for example, 34 percent of UC Berkeley's total operating budget comes from the State of California, down from more than 50 percent slightly more than a decade ago, and down from more than 70 percent in the golden years of the 1960s. We are not unique. When I left The University of Texas at Austin, the percentage of general revenue had fallen to roughly 25 percent; the University of Michigan is virtually private, with only 11 percent of its budget coming from the state.
Some of the private support that has made up the difference in these universities has come from private gifts and endowments. Berkeley, for example, is currently engaged in a $1.1 billion capital campaign and has already raised over $1 billion. Impressive as that is, it actually represents a small percentage in the growth of "private" support for our operating budget. By far the largest percentage comes from the substantial increase in fees (we don't call it tuition in California) paid by students. Increases have recently been frozen or rolled back; still, when compared to the $25 per year paid by the postwar generation, the $4,000 per year today represents a substantial increase.
When you put these factors all together - the elimination of race-sensitive admissions, the rapid growth of minority populations, the disinvestment in public education and the concomitant growth of private education or the increasing privatization of public higher education - when you put all of these together, you begin to understand some of the fear and frustration about access to Berkeley that fueled the protest. As some of the more radical students wrote in the student paper, The Daily Californian, after the resolution of the hunger strike, "The motto at the time was 'no more business as usual.' By 'business as usual' we meant the not-so-slow death of Ethnic Studies and other humanities and social science programs; the low numbers of working class/students of color; …the overwhelming privatization of UC Berkeley operations."
As a historian, I have spent much of my life studying social change, the development and function of ideology, and the nature of revolutionary movements. I know that reality is always interpreted through the prism of perspective and self interest; I know that truth is usually the first casualty of a revolutionary mentality; I know that social actions and protest are fed as much by rumor and misinformation as they are by fact. But I also know that the subtext of such actions often constitutes a reflection on the profound changes taking place in society and the values which are asserted in response to those changes.
I believe we need to consider seriously the consequences of the decline of investment in things "owned" by the public, above all education. I believe we need to consider how our public policies appear to those who have historically been excluded from access to this ever more essential means of social mobility. I believe we need to consider the remarkable demographic transformation of American society and how it can best be employed to build a more perfect union of these United States. Thank you.