Between 1963 and 1964 the number of entering freshman at the University of California at Berkeley increased by 37 percent. In the previous decade students majoring in the more socially conscious humanities and social sciences had jumped from 36 to 50 percent. Clark Kerr, president of the multicampus University of California system, had planned for the arrival of masses of new students. But he failed to see the attendant problems. He presided over an institution, committed to acting in loco parentis, that in this new time of student ferment and enormous growth could no longer do so. Academic conservatives complained that administrators and faculty members were no longer supervising their young charges thought and behavior; students were soon complaining of the vestiges of that supervision. Kerr, a liberal Quaker and a Democrat, had helped squelch a faculty loyalty oath imposed by the California legislature back in the McCarthy era. Yet he often compromised. In 1961, he refused to allow Malcolm X to appear on campus; his grounds were that Malcolm was a sectarian religious leader. But he did not block the less controversial Billy Graham, the prominent evangelical preacher. On another occasion he kept Herbert Aptheker, editor of the American Communist partys theoretical journal, from speaking. In 1963 Kerr lifted a ban against communist speakers, but to get the university Regents approval he instituted a yardstick he himself disliked: spokesmen for traditional views would have to follow controversial speakers. In all, he was a prototype of the liberal who would be caught in the conflicting demands of his time. That is likely a fair description of much of the administration at Berkeley. The maneuvers, at times ham-handed and at others conciliatory, of Berkeley officialdom in 1964 and 1965 attest to the dilemmas of liberals confronted by a radicalism that they had neither the wish to stifle nor the will to embrace.
Posted on: Sun, 07 Dec 2014 07:03:54 +0000
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015