At Berkeley in the Sixties: The Making of an Activist

49 Intermission

49 Intermission As 1965 began, some things changed and some stayed the same. A few people left my house and I found new housemates. One of them was Steve Weissman. His wife had kicked him out and he needed a room, fast. My housemates thought it would be cool to have Steve in the house, but he was never there. However, he gave out the house phone number to all and sundry, so we became Steve Weissman’s answering service. Some of the guys took to answering the phone that way, sarcastically, because 95 percent of the calls were for him. When he left in February to go on a speaking tour of southern schools, everyone was glad to get the phone back. I almost became a nonstudent, but not for violating any rules. One day Shelly Morgan, a friend who worked in the political science of¤ce as a secretary, frantically phoned me with the news that I was on the graduation list for February. She saw my name as she was typing the list of political science majors soon to be leaving. Did I know I was to graduate ? No, I didn’t, and what’s more, I didn’t want to do so before June. I wanted to ¤nish my honors thesis so I could graduate with honors in political science. Besides, I couldn’t leave Berkeley as long as the trial was pending. If I became a nonstudent I wouldn’t be able to continue as a member, let alone an of¤cer, of any “recognized off-campus student organizations ,” check books out of the library, or do most of the things I normally did. Initially we thought someone was doing this deliberately to get rid of me, but it turned out to be the usual application of bureaucratic rules about which none of us knew. All who ful¤lled the requirements for a degree, including those of their major, were automatically graduated. The state of California wasn’t going to pay for anyone’s education longer than it had to. As soon as I took ¤nal exams I would have suf¤cient units and would have met all the quali¤cations. I asked the department for a reprieve but was turned down. Rules were rules, I was told. Shelly found the solution. Two semesters of economics were required to major in political science. I had taken Econ 1A in the spring of 1963 but hadn’t gotten around to Econ 1B until summer of 1964, when I had to take an incomplete. I didn’t have enough money to buy the required books for the three courses I took that summer, and as luck would have it, Econ 1B was taught by a visiting professor who did not use the text I had bought for Econ 1A. His text was so new it wasn’t even in the library. Without a textbook, and having missed one-third of the class meetings for my Auto Row trial, I couldn’t take the exam. I had signed up for the Econ 1B exam for the fall course, which used the text I already had. Shelly canceled the test and rescheduled it for the spring. I was removed from the graduation list. As soon as the SLATE Supplement for the spring semester went on sale, another political science secretary phoned to tell me that Scalapino wanted to see me. He had been prominently misquoted on the front cover of the spring Supplement and, since I was listed as one of the editorial staff, I must know something about it. At the bottom of the bright red cover, bold white letters proclaimed, “No one wants this university to become an arena for controversy and debate.” In smaller letters off to the side appeared “Robt. A. Scalapino, Chairman, Dept. of Poli. Sci. at Berk.” I was grilled, but I honestly knew nothing; I had only written course reviews. I soon found out that the misquote came from the New York Times report of Scalapino’s December 7th speech at the Greek Theater . It was the Times’s error, but since many thousands had heard his actual words, a little skepticism was called for. A ®urry of angry letters soon appeared in the Daily Cal. The Supplement’s new editor had used the quote because it “represented the crux of the problem that faced the campus last semester—people who are afraid of controversy are very likely to want to stop...