At Berkeley in the Sixties: The Making of an Activist

12 The SLATE Supplement

SLATE was willing to provide of¤cial sponsorship and do the work, but we weren’t willing to raise the money the university required as we had for Malcolm X. Forbes had to pay for Harmon Gym, the PA system , and the police. It still took a lot more work to sponsor Forbes than Malcolm X. For one thing, we couldn’t ¤nd a faculty moderator. Few faculty would moderate forums they weren’t personally interested in attending ; while any chancellor could waive this requirement for select speakers, ours wouldn’t. The previous October we had had to cancel a rally featuring SNCC ¤eld secretary Mike Miller because he was a former student and we could not ¤nd an available tenured faculty member by the deadline for reserving the space.12 With Forbes we had plenty of lead time, but none of the prominent faculty members who had spoken out against the speaker ban and on related civil liberties issues would agree to moderate a Nazi speech; they didn’t want to be tainted by that close an association with something they abhorred. Dean Towle suggested we ask Van Dusen Kennedy, an obscure professor in the Business Administration Department, to sign the papers and make the formal introductions . After a lot of sound and fury, Forbes’s appearance before an audience of 7,000 in Harmon Gymnasium was an anticlimax. Rather than a riot, as some had predicted, students greeted Forbes’s speech with silence or laughter. That’s all. Nothing happened.13 12 The SLATE Supplement SLATE had more on its agenda than just the speaker ban. One of our ongoing concerns was the quality of education at Cal. Personally, I liked most of my classes because they made me think; in high school, rote memorization and repetition was what was required. But Cal was imperThe SLATE Supplement l 63 sonal. With most of the introductory courses taught in auditoriums that held up to 1,000 people, it was easy to get lost. I never met most of the professors from whom I took required courses, even in my major; they were just distant ¤gures on a stage or, occasionally, a TV screen. Our high schools did not prepare us for the degree of anonymity we experienced at Cal. Although most of us went to class, it wasn’t necessary. To cram for exams one could just buy the course notes from a commercial note-taking service. As for papers, everyone I knew wrote their own, but we heard about “paper ¤les” in the Greek houses to help little brothers and sisters keep their grades up without cutting into party time, and some of the dorms had rudimentary ¤les. It was a little harder to skip section meetings, which had about twenty students in each and were taught by graduate student teaching assistants. Most TAs were inexperienced (though some had been teaching for years). While some were good teachers, and they did know our names, they were mostly concerned with meeting the requirements of their own graduate programs and were, well, inexperienced. We had come to Cal, with its reputation for excellence, with high expectations about the education we would receive. Not a few were disappointed . Learning was a passive experience in which we read, went to lectures, and read some more. Students wanted more of an active, participatory education than Cal was equipped to provide, at least for those in the humanities and social sciences. We thought it would be better if classes were all taught by professors rather than TAs and that professors should be rewarded for good teaching rather than publishing. After I endured ¤ve years of grad school in a university which did not have TAs and four years as a professor learning how to teach with no support or supervision, I concluded that our expectations were naïve and unrealistic. Cal balanced competing needs and utilized limited resources reasonably well. One could get—indeed I got—a very good education. But as undergraduates we did not appreciate what Cal had to offer; we thought we deserved better. In the spring of 1963 SLATE published a special issue of the Cal Reporter on education. Identi¤ed as Vol. 4, No. 1, this was the ¤rst issue since 1960 (and the last). The headline over the lead article by Brad Cleaveland read “Students Indict Cal!” Other articles were entitled “University Abdicates Social Responsibility,” “UC Freshmen Find Idealism Soon Shattered,” “The University—A Cog in the War...