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by Amanda Armstrong, Rhetoric Department, UC Berkeley.  5th  of 5 talks from  The Operation of the Machine panel , UC Berkeley October 1,  introduced  by Prof. Colleen Lye.   Cross-posted from Reclaim UC Photo: Outside the office of UC Berkeley's Vice Chancellor for Real Estate, October 1, 2014  I’m going to be talking today about the operation of the UC machine  then , versus its operation  now . But not then  as in 1965. More like  then  as in 2009. I still have  vivid memories  from fall 2009—a semester when students, workers, and professors built assemblies, walked out of classes, and took direct actions to challenge austerity measures being imposed by the newly-appointed UC President, Mark Yudof. These austerity measures included a 32% tuition increase, furloughs for faculty and staff, and layoffs of over 2,000 service workers across the UC system. At one of the first walkout planning meetings I attended that fa...

Chris here: This was too long for the comments section for Free Speech and Fre UC so I've posted it. First, faculty attitudes themselves: The most systematic research shows that a majority are moderate liberals, that leftists are a very small minority.  See reporting on Gross & Simmons here  and here  (showing faculty centrism, rejection of political influence over hiring across the political spectrum, and the anti-"PC" views of a majority of faculty "stars").  These studies were conducted by investigators who went out of their way to find evidence of radicalism and PC views.  They found moderation, professionalism, and increasing conservatism as one rises in status and influence. (I also work through studies endorsed by David Horowitz and others in a late chapter and appendix of Unmaking the Public University.) This and similar research has been around for years.  It shows a relatively small number of self-identified conservatives on faculties, and mo...

by Chris Newfield, UC Santa Barbara 4th  of 5 talks from  The Operation of the Machine panel , UC Berkeley October 1,  introduced  by Prof. Colleen Lye Members of the FSM had to fight for free speech on campus, as we still must. But they did not have to fight for a free university.  They already had one. They succeeded at winning specific free speech protections.  The free university, they took for granted.  For UC students in 2009 and 2011, Free UC was a nostalgic memory, like 78-RPM records and episodes of  Marcus Welby, MD . They had to fight to block massive tuition hikes.  They succeeded too—not in blocking those hikes, but in raising the political cost of hikes so high that UC & CSU tuition has been frozen for the past several years.  The University isn’t really that happy about this.  They’ve used tuition hikes to top up revenues for decades now.  Faculty aren’t really that happy about it either.  Some of us opp...

by Wendy Brown, Political Science, UC Berkeley 3rd  of 5 talks from  The Operation of the Machine panel , UC Berkeley October 1,  introduced  by Prof. Colleen Lye I want to make two brief points this afternoon, one about freedom and one about speech.  If forced to compress into a few sentences the contours of student freedom and its limits in public universities 50 years ago and now, those sentences might go this way: Then:  Because developing the next generation of Californians as educated individuals, citizens and contributing members of society was widely valued as a public good, the university offered a free, high quality education to qualifying (mostly white) middle class and working class students.  Faculty (also mostly white and male) had significant power over large domains of university policy-- they determined what was to be learned and how, what counted as an educated person worthy of a degree, and much more.  But the university adminis...

by Leigh Raiford, UC Berkeley with thanks to Michael Cohen and Nzingha Dugas Photo credit: Harvey Richards 2nd of 5 talks from The Operation of the Machine panel , UC Berkeley October 1, introduced by Prof. Colleen Lye Fifty years ago today, Jack Weinberg, a student activist, set up a table outside of Sproul Hall in direct defiance of the campus ban on political speech.   What followed is of course well-known: a campus police car drove into the middle of the plaza to arrest Weinberg, students surrounded the vehicle and occupied Sproul Plaza for the next 33 hours, Marios Savio climbed atop the car and gave a powerful speech….  And the Free Speech Movement was born. What perhaps is not so well-known about this moment is that Jack Weinberg was the head of UC Berkeley’s CORE chapter.   CORE—the Congress of Racial Equality—was a frontline civil rights organization, that along with SNCC—the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee—had organized the massive black voter re...

By Colleen Lye, English Department, UC Berkeley, and Co-chair, Berkeley Faculty Association. This fall marks the 50 th anniversary of the Free Speech Movement (FSM) at UC Berkeley, a student movement that since Mario Savio’s death in 1996 has gained increasing institutional acknowledgement as part of the campus’s celebrated history.   The 50 th anniversary commemorations, however, got off to an unexpectedly rocky start with Chancellor Nicholas Dirks’s campus-wide message on civility. The free speech rights won by students in 1964 became the basis for time, place and manner regulations governing student conduct. It appeared to some that Chancellor Dirks’s comments suggested a misunderstanding of those rights , or a new policy reversal of them. With media attention already trained on campus because of the FSM anniversary, combined with the fact that the Salaita case at the University of Illinois had, over the course of the summer, turned “civility” into a hot-button word in a debate...