At Berkeley in the Sixties: The Making of an Activist

36 Energy

with sixteen faculty and four Regents at the Davis campus, where all the Regents were to meet the next day. Between them, they worked out a deal. Kerr told Strong about it in the morning, right before announcing it to the press. The Academic Senate appointed an ad hoc committee on student discipline to hear the cases against the eight, chaired by law professor Ira Michael Heyman. Six new members were added to the Study Committee: two more from the FSM, two to be named by the Academic Senate, and two chosen by Kerr. The key change wasn’t in personnel but in an understanding that each unit had a veto; a majority would not rule. Representing the FSM on the SCCPA were Mario, Bettina, Suzanne, and Syd. Peace reigned for three weeks.3 36 Energy As is typical of emergent social movements, the FSM released a large burst of spontaneous energy. This fueled the movement and also lit ¤res under people who weren’t coordinated by it or even direct participants. The FSM quickly became a 24-hour operation with a large volunteer staff. Not having an of¤ce, it turned Mario’s abode at 2536 College into FSM Central. During the sit-in around the car, Marilyn Noble, a grad student at Sacramento State College, had walked up to Mario and asked him “Who does your laundry?” Somewhat taken aback, he stuttered “I—I do.” “Not anymore,” she said. Marilyn quickly became housemother and housekeeper of Central, making sure that there was food, clean clothes, and places on the ®oor to sleep for everyone who needed them. Mario moved into an alcove at the front of the house. His roommates soon moved out. Some of the eight suspended students, no longer eligible to attend Energy l 177 classes, devoted all their time and energy to making the revolution on campus, a much more engaging prospect than classes had ever been. An informal division of labor developed among the volunteers; the women typed, cooked, and phoned, while the men wrote lea®ets, drove cars, and printed. I rarely went to Central, largely because it was such a long walk from my house, but also because I was still taking classes and researching my honor’s thesis on civil disobedience. When I phoned, I almost always got a busy signal. When there were meetings, Central phoned me, so I stayed loosely in touch. When Central became too crowded, it divided and multiplied. There was Print Central, Work Central, Communications Central, and Press Central. Later would come Command Central, Strike Central, and Legal Central. And then there was Nexus, which was supposed to be the Central of all Centrals, but it didn’t work. Rumor Central worked very well. The Steering Committee seemed to meet continuously, but Ex Com only got together every few days. The meetings lasted for hours; the job of the chairman was to make sure that everyone got to talk as much as he or she wanted but only one at a time. Votes were delayed until those left in the room were too exhausted to talk anymore. This almost always guaranteed that decisions would come from a consensus of those with the most time and the greatest tolerance for sleep deprivation. The FSM militants seemed to have more of both than the moderates did. The biggest expense was for paper and ink, which was used to print materials on a small but fast machine that the FSM rented from Hal Draper. The FSM passed out a lea®et almost every day for several weeks and sold several newsletters and pamphlets. Phone bills, stamps, envelopes , posters, and rental fees for meeting halls added up. Initially the money came from collections and personal funds, but sales of buttons and records soon followed. During the entire academic year, the FSM probably raised and spent about $30,000. Students energized by the con®ict went looking for things to do. Several started a newsletter, which published ¤ve issues between October and December.1 Another group was formed by Michael Rossman to make public the long history of con®ict over rules at Cal. Rossman had been a student since he entered as a junior in 1958 and knew better than the rest of us where our protest ¤t into university history. He inspired and supervised about 100 students who gathered documents from personal¤les and university archives to produce twenty studies. Only a couple hundred copies of the complete “Rossman...