“There’s a time and place for everything, and it’s called college.”

–Chef

Eleven people were arrested late last night as police raided an off-campus fundraiser in support of Berkeley student protesters.

The fundraiser, a dance party held at the Exit 154 Gallery in San Francisco, was scheduled to begin at 10 pm. According to a first-person account I received via email, police and fire marshals arrived on the scene sometime after midnight, and an altercation followed.

The blog Occupy CA is reporting that there were eleven arrests and multiple injuries at the party, with four people held in custody overnight. They say that nine of the eleven are facing misdemeanor or felony charges.

Update | A student newspaper report on the incident describes a chaotic melee — cops brawling with partygoers while bystanders chanted “fuck the police.” The paper says that the party was organized by student activists from SFSU, UC Berkeley, UC Davis, and UC Santa Cruz, and that one of their reporters, a San Francisco State student, was arrested as she photographed the fracas.

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.

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