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

CHAPTER 4: “Beautiful but Dumb”

C H A P T E R 4 “Beautiful but Dumb” Some of our students are as brilliant and as ambitious as any scholar of medieval times. Some have the mind but little desire to use it. Some are beautiful but dumb, and some are not even beautiful. But we try to educate them all by similar means—an unattainable purpose. Robert Gordon Sproul, Address to the Commonwealth Club of California, July 25, 1930 (Pettitt 1966, 185). Robert Gordon Sproul took over the presidency of the University of California at the beginning of the Great Depression. California’s economic health was already in weakened condition, and had been for some years, before the crash of October 24, 1929, so the shock waves from that economic implosion hit the state hard. In the 1930s, California still derived most of her wealth from agriculture . Then, as now, her agriculture was large scale, dependent on heavy capital investment, and burdened with high operating costs. At that time, some 60 percent of California’s agricultural land was owned by 2 percent of her farmers (Beck and Williams 1972, 392). California’s agriculture was dependent, as well, upon armies of migrant laborers, and as the Depression deepened on the Plains, migration to California intensified. In the first few years of that grim decade, some 300,000 agricultural laborers worked these “factories in the field” (McWilliams 1970), most of them in-| 49 | migrants, “tractored-out” from dustbowl states, all of them laboring under appalling conditions, scrabbling for pitiful wages. By 1933 the prevailing wage had dropped 50 percent (Starr 1996, 67). By the second half of the decade, some 350,000 workers had migrated from the Plains, driven by desperation and by the exploitive inducements of growers’ representatives. Wages for agricultural workers, already depressed, dived to new depths of “sub-subsistence” (Starr 1996, 67). Not surprisingly, such conditions spawned bitter labor strife throughout the golden land. The decade saw huge strikes in California’s fields and canneries, as well as a massive—and bloody—police response. The 1933 strike of cotton pickers in the San Joaquin Valley saw eighteen thousand strikers brutally subdued, either forced back into the fields or arrested under the new strikebreaking Criminal Syndicalism Act. In 1934, striking apple pickers in Santa Rosa were beaten or burned back to their jobs (Beck and Williams 1972). Growers not only raised vigilante squads, they raised the specter of Communism. “Reds” were reported to be marching on Sacramento from various strike sites. “Minute Men to Fight Reds” shrieked a San Francisco Examiner headline on December 7, 1932, describing a standoff between a grower’s private militia and striking workers (Starr 1996, 72). The Communist threat arose again in May of 1934 in the massive waterfront strike that closed San Francisco’s Embarcadero, and indeed all West Coast ports from Seattle to San Diego. The longshoremen’s demand for a wage of one dollar a day quickly drew the support of other maritime unions, including the radio operators, seamen, and engineers. Describing the strike as “an insurrection which will lead to a civil war” (Beck and Williams 1972, 397), Governor Frank Merriam called in the National Guard. The Battle of Rincon Hill, waged on July 9, 1934, claimed the lives of 2 strikers and sent 266 more to hospital. In 1936, strikers in Salinas’s lettuce fields bore the organized ire of the police, the highway patrol, the American Legionnaires, and the growers‘ armies of hired muscle. California bled throughout the decade. Some six hundred thousand weary souls came to her for work, for food, for relief. Conservative Republican Governor James Rolph, elected in 1931, reacted to what he called “California’s cataclysmic deficit” of $42 million by cutting her budget to the bone. This was, of course, a wretched time to be responsible for the survival of a costly public institution dependent on the political will of a skeptical “Beautiful but Dumb”| 50 | legislature, but Sproul was the University of California’s best hope. His experience as university comptroller under President Barrows, and as vice president of business under President Campbell, had brought him before the legislature frequently to defend the university’s budget. California lawmakers had long harbored reservations about the University of California ’s ability to provide the right kind of higher education for the state’s young people, and the university had fought off a number of challenges from...