A New Long March Begins

The 1960's Culture of Protest Gets a New Lease of Life in 1999

Today’s guest post at Year Zero revisits a little remembered moment in the history of ideological succession, when self-described Third World de-colonial activist students operating on the basis of largely confected grievances proved themselves able to bring to heel a university president intent on standing his ground with most faculty and student sentiment at his back. The UC Berkeley Ethnic Studies strike of 1999 was largely seen as a bemusing curio at its time, a backward looking throwback to the 1960’s rather than a portent of the world to come. Only in retrospect are we able to see what it brought into focus: that whatever could portray itself as “anti-racist,” however frivolously, would always hold the trump card in academic settings; only in retrospect can we see that under the right circumstances, the grounding assumptions that produced this outcome in academia could encompass the rest of America.

By Ethan Rundell

Ethan Rundell is a translator, journalist and alumnus of UC Berkeley and the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales. He lives in North Carolina.

On April 14th, 1999, several dozen student-activists entered Barrows Hall, a brutalist, ten-story structure on the campus of the University of California, Berkeley and chained the doors shut behind them. The occupying students were on a mission to save the Ethnic Studies Department, which they had come to believe the Administration had targeted for elimination through a deliberate strategy of attrition. Founded in 1969 as the compromise resolution to a violent, two-month-long movement demanding the “decolonization” of the university and the establishment of a “Third World College”, by the late 1990s Ethnic Studies was languishing, a victim of stagnant enrolment and chronic staffing problems. Encouraged by their professors, the students sought to revitalize their project through a return to the protest tactics essential to its creation.

From the building’s lobby, they issued a ten-point list of demands.1 With Berkeley’s chancellor, Robert M. Berdahl, away on business, the job of meeting with their representatives fell to University Provost Carol Christ. Provost Christ immediately agreed to three demands and proposed that discussions resume the next morning to go over the others. But the protesters were intransigent: nothing short of full acceptance of all demands, immediately and in writing, would persuade them to end the occupation. As the students chanted, their arms locked – “What do we need? Ethnic Studies! When do we get it? Now!” and “Christ, you liar, we’ll set your ass on fire!” – the university police moved in, clearing the building and making over 40 arrests.

Thus began the Berkeley Ethnic Studies strike of 1999. Little remarked at the time outside of California, the strike serves as an illuminating case study in the dynamics of institutional capture as they have played out in the American university system.

In the two weeks that followed the Barrows occupation, each side settled into a war of position. Under the banner of the “Third World Liberation Front” (TWLF) – the same name used by the coalition of ethnic student groups behind the 1969 strike – the protesters held daily demonstrations on Sproul Plaza and carried out a series of small-scale actions, including the disruption of a speech by then-Governor Gray Davis, in town to celebrate the 131st anniversary of the university’s founding. The department’s faculty, meanwhile, unanimously adopted a resolution in support of the protesters, refusing further negotiations with the Administration until it had granted full amnesty to all students arrested and questioning its commitment to on-campus diversity. If the Administration really valued diversity, it would place Ethnic Studies at the center of “the diversity project and on its list of priorities”.2

Back in Berkeley, Chancellor Berdahl sought to rally campus opinion behind the Administration, taking out a half-page advertisement in the Daily Cal, Berkeley’s free student newspaper, to press its case.3 While expressing pride in the department’s achievements and praising the “passion and dedication” of its students, Berdahl presented the protesters’ demands as largely baseless. Some of what they wanted was already in the planning phase (a new research center, additional student life facilities); other demands could be satisfied by following the proper channels and procedures (faculty recruitment). On one point, however, Berdahl was categorical: there would be no blanket amnesty for students arrested in the course of protests, as TWLF (and now the department) had demanded.

With semester’s end rapidly approaching, it looked for a time like Berdahl would be able to run out the clock on the protests. This being Berkeley, however, they had already caught the attention of various activists from across the Bay Area, among them a young social movement entrepreneur by the name of Van Jones. Long before Van Jones the Show, there was Van Jones the freelance agitator, a Rockefeller Next Generation Leadership Fellow, Bay Area PoliceWatch organizer and founder of something called Standing Together to Organize a Revolutionary Movement (STORM). To the chagrin of some student-activists, who felt their more revolutionary projects had been sidelined, Jones persuaded the leadership of TWLF to change tactics and opt for a hunger strike.4

On April 29th, several hundred students and community members gathered for a candlelight vigil outside California Hall, home to the Chancellor’s Office, to mark the start of the strike. Six students – five from Berkeley and one from UCSF – had volunteered as hunger strikers.5 Jones addressed the crowd: “There are thousands of worthless people here signing off checks to the administration to get their worthless degrees,” said Jones (BS, University of Tennessee, Martin; JD, Yale Law School), “you’ve got the sense to fight for what you really want!” The strikers’ message was simple. As one TWLF activist present at the vigil explained, “students are starving because Berdahl and Carol Christ are starving ethnic studies.”6 The Daily Cal described the scene this way:

“Amid the landscape of tents, sleeping bags, banners and a small altar of flowers and candles, pets and children frolic. Before the backdrop of eight paper tombstones representing eight ethnic studies classes cancelled the next semester, boom boxes blast hip hop beats, circles of committees meet and discuss the developments, groups of students – donning armbands – play sports.”7

The spectacle brought the Administration back to the negotiating table. Though Berdahl made additional concessions to the protesters over and above those promised by Provost Christ on April 14th, the demand for a blanket amnesty remained a sticking point, as did TWLF’s insistence that Ethnic Studies be granted divisional status (the old Third World College demand of 1969) and new faculty lines be awarded it. Negotiations quickly collapsed over these issues; the hunger strike continued. At a press conference held the next morning, Berdahl’s anger was evident. “Major decisions regarding departmental funding and autonomy would not be discussed on the street with students,” Berdahl remarked of the impasse. “There is nothing more that I can or will do. We have an authoritative structure at the university. We cannot have anarchy.”8