Author Archive

I guess I should be writing about Howard Zinn today. Zinn, who as a professor at Spelman College in the late 1950s and early 1960s, was an early faculty supporter of student civil rights agitation. Zinn, who wrote SNCC: The New Abolitionists, one of the first books on the student organizing of the sixties. Zinn, who was fired from his — tenured — position at Spelman for siding with student activists against the administration.

But I don’t want to write about Zinn today, as much as I love his work and his story. I want to write about JD Salinger.

I don’t know when I first read The Catcher in the Rye. Probably it was in junior high school. I knew about Elvis Presley by then, and Buddy Holly. I wouldn’t have seen Rebel Without a Cause yet, though, so Holden Caulfield was my first real introduction to 1950s teen alienation.

When right-wingers wax nostalgic about the “simpler time” of fifties myth, segregation and sexism are the standard rebuttals. But Holden Caulfield taught me early that the era was no picnic even for white boys. I never bought into the idea of the 1950s as a golden age, and Holden Caulfield was a big part of why.

Catcher, published in 1951, belongs to the postwar forties as much as the fifties, but Franny and Zooey and Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters, Salinger’s two final books, occupy the same space between the fifties and the sixties as the television show Mad Men. (Each book was published in the early sixties, and each was assembled from material written in the mid-to-late fifties.)

When I became interested, like any young radical, in the activism of the sixties, I was drawn to the stories of the early part of the decade: the Freedom Riders and the Free Speech Movement and those wonderful dorky photos of neatly groomed early-sixties SDSers grinning and half-embarrassedly raising their fists. For me, the sixties was always more Bob Moses and Casey Hayden than Jerry Rubin and Bernardine Dohrn, and so when I became a historian of that era, it was natural for me to stretch it out, to step back to a larger view. (My dissertation, a history of a major student activist organization, opens in 1946, and continues through the end of the seventies.)

JD Salinger was never particularly political, and by the early sixties he had retreated out of sight to his New Hampshire compound. But his books sold millions of copies throughout the decade, and his characters spoke to that generation’s young people in a powerfully intimate and immediate way.

JD Salinger, creature of the fifties, helped in a very real way to bring the sixties into being. I’ve understood this, and argued it, for a long time, but it never struck me until today how much my own youthful Salinger fandom shaped my understanding of both decades, and how much it smoothed the way for the historian’s understanding of postwar youth culture that I would eventually embrace.

Thanks, Jerry.

The arrest of more than two hundred California student activists over the course of twenty-three days of mostly peaceful protest was one of the biggest — and most troubling — campus stories of the fall semester. One hundred and eighteen of those arrests came at UC Berkeley, whose chancellor, Robert Birgeneau, had just weeks earlier told the New Yorker that students were welcome to “occupy any [campus] space they like, that’s fine. Unless they damage a building, in which case they’re breaking the law.”

Birgeneau’s comment demonstrates what a startling and abrupt departure from precedent the California arrests represented. In September, thousands of Berkeley students swarmed into the streets after a protest, snarling traffic, but no arrests were made. In December sixty-six Berkeley students were busted without warning as they slept in an unlocked campus building which they were occupying peacefully and without incident.

Often, charges against arrested student activists have been quietly set aside in the protests’ aftermath. That was the case for fifty-one of fifty-two of those arrested at UC Davis’ Mrak Hall in late November, as well as all eight of those arrested on the night of December 11 at Berkeley, among others.

The decision not to bring charges against students who have been peacefully protesting is always a welcome one, but these California arrests remain troubling for three reasons:

First, these activists never should have been arrested in the first place. An independent student report on the sixty-six arrests at Berkeley’s Wheeler Hall on the morning of December 11, for instance, found that the university had conducted those arrests not, as it claimed, to secure the building for finals the next day, but to prevent the arrested students from mobilizing elsewhere on campus after the Wheeler occupation ended. Given this, the local branch of the ACLU expressed concern that the purpose of the arrests may have been to prevent students from exercising their First Amendment rights, or to punish them for doing so.

Second, criminal charges, once withdrawn, should not be held in reserve as a deterrent to future organizing. At Davis, students had asked the university to intervene with the district attorney to get charges against students dropped, and administrators had promised to do so. But when the DA’s office acted, they merely set aside the charges for a year, contingent on the good behavior of those who had been arrested. This is a tactical use of police power — the deployment of a vague and open-ended threat to impell students to regulate and limit their own legitimate campus activism.

Third, meritless criminal charges should not be used as the basis for campus disciplinary action. Of the eight people arrested at Berkeley on the night of December 11, two were Berkeley students, and both were placed on suspension as a result of the arrests. The DA, however, declined to bring charges against any of the eight. When the first of the two Berkeleyites, Zach Bowin, faced a disciplinary hearing, he brought a lawyer, and the administrative restrictions on his activities were greatly loosened. But the second student, Angela Miller, was given only minimal notice of her hearing, and was not able to secure legal counsel. She remains under suspension, has been evicted from her residence in a student housing co-op, and is barred from communicating with Berkeley students, faculty, or staff.

The hundreds of arrests of California student activists last semester have produced no criminal convictions, no trials, no fines or long-term imprisonment, and it is becoming increasingly obvious that such sanctions were never the point. California’s public universities are using their police power not to protect public safety or to punish criminals, but as a quasi-legal weapon in their campaign against student protest and student expression.

This is not a legitimate use of the power of the state, and it is not the way a university should behave.

An article in the San Francisco Chronicle that this site wrote about last week has sparked confusion and disagreement about the role of the University of California’s president and regents in upcoming organizing around the UC budget.

In the article, published last Thursday, several regents were quoted as saying that they would be participating in the March 4 Day of Action in Defense of Public Education, but that appears to have been a reporting error. According to UC student regent designate Jesse Cheng, the regents will be participating in a separate March 1 lobby day, not the March 4 Day of Action.

The article also raised the question of student activists’ stance toward administrators. The Chronicle quoted Victor Sanchez, president of the systemwide University of California Student Association (UCSA), as saying that he hopes that the regents and students “can meet each other halfway.” The article also suggested that Sanchez and UC administrators “agreed they have a common goal” in legislative lobbying.

But Sanchez, who has been criticized for those sentiments by other activists, claims that he was miquoted and misrepresented. In an email to this site, Sanchez said today that legislators and administrators share responsibility for the current crisis in California higher education, and that neither he nor UCSA have any intention of “letting them off the hook.” Activists “will not,” he pledged, “compromise on our issues for the sake of ‘working together.'”

An open letter from Sanchez to the students of California, released in response to the article, appears below.

Read the rest of this entry »

This week’s updates to the Student Activism map come from an incredibly comprehensive global review of 2009 education protests that’s just been published at Emancipating Education for All.

I found eight US actions from this fall on their list that hadn’t made mine, and of course they’ve got great coverage of overseas stuff, too. Go check it out.

I’ll get back to new stuff with next week’s update — I’ve got a lot in the pipeline, and I’ll be putting it up as the week progresses. As always, a list of updates follows the new map.

December 17: Seven hundred students, parents, and teachers protested city plans to shut New York’s Jamaica High School.

December 4: Two hundred students rallied at Michigan State University to try to save MSU’s deaf education program.

November 18: Twenty students picketed a meeting of the UNC Chapel Hill regents as the regents approved an $1162 hike in out-of-state tuition.

November 17: The SDS chapter at the University of North Dakota held a teach-in on student empowerment as part of a global week of action against the corporatization of education.

November 17: Students at New York’s City College held a demonstration and rally against budget cuts and tuition hikes.

November 15: A three-day students of color conference at UC San Diego was capped off by a rally against fee increases and enrollment cuts.

November 3: More than five hundred students joined faculty and staff in walking out of classes to protest budget cuts and furloughs.

October 11: Students at CSU Northridge held a silent protest against budget cuts.

I recently rewatched The Wire from start to finish, and it got me thinking.

(Warning: spoilers ahead. If you haven’t watched the show yet, go do it now.)

The Wire is often accused of being a pessimistic show, of depicting efforts to make social change as futile and doomed, and there’s some truth to that charge. The series’ five seasons are strewn with noble failed attempts to reform massive impersonal institutions.

But there’s another, more subtle and more hopeful, message lurking in that rubble, and it’s a message that’s got real relevance to student activists.

It’s true that The Wire depicts very few large-scale victories. But this is, I think, less a function of any intrinsic pessimism than of the demands of drama. If any of the schemes the show nodded to had been successfully implemented, The Wire would have risked becoming a mere policy paper for specific reforms, an axe-grinding exercise in “this is what you should do.” That would have been an artistically and intellectually unsatisfying path.

Could The Wire have done more to offer solutions to the problems it raises? Yep. This article, among others, suggests how. But its failures and defeats aren’t, for the most part, presented as inevitabilities. Yes, it argues, there are profound structural and institutional impediments to positive change. Yes, human frailty and weakness — and sheer bad luck — can undo the work of years in an instant. Yes, progress is fragile and regression is a constant threat. But it does make room for hope as well.

The Wire’s biggest, most compelling characters tend to be hacks or heroes.

The hacks — Clay Davis, Marlo, Herc, Levy, Burrell, and so on and on — are out for themselves, and uninterested in anyone or anything else. They generally prosper, though sometimes they do get eaten by bigger fish.

The heroes — McNulty, Omar, Stringer, Freamon, Sobotka — want the world to be different, and they’re not satisfied just wanting. They’re smart and savvy enough to see how things work, and audacious enough to try to fix what’s wrong. They’ve seen what happens when they try to go through channels, do things the way things are done, and they don’t have the patience for that. So they bend the rules, and then they break them.

The Wire’s heroes all fail, and it’s this fact, as much as anything else, that prompts the charges of cynicism leveled at the show. Some of the hacks thrive, and some of the hacks get taken down, but by the end of the fifth season, all the heroes are out of the game. (Those who work for the police have all been fired or forced to quit, and those who live outside the law are all, without exception, dead.)

But there’s a third category of characters in The Wire who collectively meet a very different fate. They’re with the heroes in seeing the flaws in the world as it exists, and in wanting the world to be different, but they’re not temperamentally inclined to go cowboy. They look for their chances to make small differences, stand up for what’s right when they can, and absorb all the punches they can absorb. They don’t have much use for grand gestures, and they’re skeptical — if at times admiring — of those who do. They just keep plugging away, doing what they can.

And at the end of the series, all of these pluggers are still plugging away. Kima and Bunk are still working homicides. Carver is rising through the ranks. Bubbles is still clean, and Walon is still running his meeting. Alma is still covering stories. and Gus is still editing them. Cutty has his gym, Prez has his classroom, and Pearlman has landed a seat on the bench. They’re all getting up in the morning, going to work, and doing what they do, and each one of them is making a difference in his or her own small way.

In the world of The Wire, as in the world of … well, the world, work is what makes stuff happen. You pay attention to the details, you learn from your mistakes, you check yourself and those around you, and you get stuff done. Probably not big stuff, probably not all the stuff you’d want, but you get stuff done.