The Rhetoric of Remediation: Negotiating Entitlement and Access to Higher Education

CHAPTER 5: “The Hordes . . . Invade the Campus”

C H A P T E R 5 “The Hordes . . . Invade the Campus” It is regrettable that we permit so many students to secure a degree from this institution when their ability to use their native language is as poor as it often is. A. R. Gordon. Committee on Educational Policy Meeting Minutes, July 18, 1946. UC Berkeley Library Archives. Born so soon after California’s crippling general strike and her first (but certainly not last) Red Scare, this new system of regional colleges, rechristened “state colleges” in 1935, was assigned heavy political duties. According to the State Board of Education in 1939, “The state colleges more than any other group of institutions in California, face the task of interpreting democracy to society . . . [The state colleges] are qualified to assume leadership in the development of the spirit of democracy on this West Coast of America.”₁ Meanwhile, on the University of California’s patch of West Coast, students were interpreting democracy through such activities as straw polls favoring the U.S. maintenance of an isolationist position in the European war, vigorous participation in peace rallies, and the opposition to compulsory ROTC (Pettitt 1966). University of California President Sproul, in his 1940 commencement address at Berkeley’s Greek Theater, undertook| 61 | to change students’ minds, advising “American preparedness” as the “only practical course” (Stadtman 1970, 305). Shortly after that speech, Sproul proposed that UC be named an “agency of the government,” and in a subsequent meeting of the Academic Senate, he pledged “the full resources of the University in service to the President and Congress” (Pettitt 1970, 305). Sproul had strong personal convictions about America’s duty to fight Hitler. He also had a strong sense that it was the university, far more than the emerging state colleges, that was qualified to promote the spirit of democracy in California. To that end, he took his campaign against neutrality to the airwaves, making numerous radio addresses. Additionally, he closed some of UC Berkeley’s laboratories to foreigners, he granted leave to several of the university’s physics faculty members to undertake war research at MIT, and he placed the university’s cyclotron and its products at the disposal of the federal government (Stadtman 1970, 307). In early 1941, Sproul announced in a press conference that the university was offering substantial assistance to California’s aircraft industry by training aircraft engineers and aerospace technicians, in offering accelerated courses in engineering, foreign languages, and weather prediction, and in conducting medical research on such problems as shock and infection (Stadtman 1970, 307). However, not all elements of the University of California’s role in the war effort were announced—or announceable. By mid-1941, the regents had begun negotiating contracts for top secret research, and, by 1942, had committed the energies of Ernest O. Lawrence and his colleagues to conduct research on the separation of uranium-235. By mid-1943, the University of California’s war contracts with the federal government, secret and publicly disclosed, amounted to just under $10 million (Douglass 2000). In 1943, as well, the Manhattan Project, guided by physics professor J. Robert Oppenheimer, brought the university substantially—and fatefully—closer to being an agency of the government, as Sproul had proposed. Overall, between 1940 and 1945, the University of California received over $57 million in war contracts with the U.S. government (Douglass 2000). The university was certainly not alone in hurling its energies into the war. California herself received in excess of $10 billion in war production grants during that period (Beck and Williams 1972). World War II was profoundly transformative of California’s economy, wrenching her out of “The Hordes . . . Invade the Campus”| 62 | the Great Depression. Between 1939 and 1944, California agriculture rebounded , and then some, with total production increasing 300 percent (Douglass 2000). In 1944, California’s agricultural output reached well over $1.5 billion (Douglass 2000). Many agricultural workers had migrated to the war-fueled manufacturing sector, and many, of course, to the theaters of war. The resultant labor shortage improved what had been grim working conditions in the fields, packing sheds, and canneries. The shortage of workers also accelerated the mechanization of planting and harvesting processes. Because of the war, California’s manufacturing was similarly sprung from the torpors of the Depression. As early as 1938, Lockheed was flush with orders from abroad, filling an order for Japan for...