Eric Langborgh

    The message to students at UC-Berkeley has been made clear: To overtake buildings and violently resist arrest in the name of a politically correct cause will grant you no more than a slap on the wrist while weak-kneed administrators will accede to your every demand. At least that is the message critics have taken in the wake of administrative and judicial appeasement of the actions taken last spring by the Third World Liberation Front (TWLF) at the University of California-Berkeley.
    The six students who were under arraignment—five from Berkeley and one from Laney College in Oakland—entered a plea of “no-contest” on January 26th in exchange for a settlement of “disturbing the peace” being entered into their records. This, despite charges of taking over numerous buildings on campus, assaulting police officers, and actively resisting arrest during last April’s protest on behalf of the school’s Ethnic Studies Department. The protestors had allegedly spit  and thrown bottles at police officers, and one reportedly attempted to grab an officer’s baton from his belt, as the police tried to arrest him.
    The ten-hour siege of Barrows Hall resulted in 51 students being arrested for tresspassing, though charges were subsequently dropped against 43 protesters with only a letter of admonishment given to each. Eight were punished more severely, with a 14-day probation placed on their campus activities (they were permitted access to campus only for academic purposes). In the end the school served only a letter of admonishment to the eight.
    Meanwhile, Berkeley Chancellor Robert Berdahl met with TWLF representatives and granted their many wishes for an increased Ethnic Studies presence on campus. Prompted by the take-over of Barrow’s Hall and then a ten-day hunger strike in which an additional 80 TWLF sympathizers were arrested for lodging, Berdahl agreed to bolster the department TWLF members claimed was being “starved” out of existence. Among his concessions:
    * Three faculty searches would be authorized immediately for the following year;
    *  Five additional faculty appointments would be spaced over the next three years in “anticipation” of coming retirements;
    *  The chancellor’s discretionary funds would provide $500,000 in seed money over five years for an Institute of Race and Gender Studies to be founded on campus;
    *  The campus would allocate an additional $40,000 a year to recruit minority students;
    *  The “equity” of space allocation for Ethnic Studies would be reviewed;
    *  Space and money would be provided by the campus for a “multicultural” student center; and,
    *  Berkeley would accept a celebratory mural in the space presently occupied by the Ethnic Studies Department in Barrows Hall.
    Curiously, administration officials are claiming that these concessions would have been approved even without the protests, though the budget committee was not asked for its opinion at the time. Said Berdahl in a letter to the San Francisco Chronicle, this “reasonable” settlement was “nothing that could not have been achieved by the normal process of allocating resources.”
    Far from being “starved” out of existence, as TWLF claims, official statistics indicate that Ethnic Studies has received special treatment. From 1989-90 to 1998-99, the number of permanent faculty positions in the department grew from 15.5 to 18, or an increase of 16 percent While the University was cutting its budget in the early nineties, both Ethnic Studies and its cousin, African-American Studies, were spared the cuts. All this despite the fact that the number of undergraduates in the two departments has declined.
    As a way of comparison,  Political Science has lost 1.5 positions and Psychology has lost three. Since Ethnic Studies encompasses 146 majors, the number of majors to faculty ratio is 8.0. In contrast, the Political ScienceDepartment with 480 majors and Psychology Department with 719 carried ratios of 12.8 and 19.4, respectively.
    A number of professors, then, have begun to voice concern over what they see as an illegitimate settlement and the coddling of student protestors who one professor labeled, “terrorists.” This culminated in a special vote by the Academic Senate on December 2nd to consider a resolution offered by political science professor Jack Citrin that would have submitted the Spring settlement to a mail ballot vote to determine whether the senate should declare it non-binding. Instead, the senate voted 143-43 to pass a substitute resolution supporting the chancellor’s actions, effectively killing Citrin’s move.
    The reason for the mail ballot vote resolution, Citrin told Campus Report, is to get “maximum participation from the eligible voters.” Those voters, comprised of faculty members and many former vice-chancellors, chancellors, and others, number approximately 1,500 compared to the only 186 who actually showed to vote (12%).
    “With an open voice vote,” Citrin explained, “a lot of people are reluctant to openly oppose the chancellor—out of fear, if nothing else.”
    Citrin also pointed to the highly mobilized nature of the minority academic Left, and to the strong possibility that anyone who “owes something to the chancellor” would be there. 
Supporters of Citrin’s resolution intimated that Berdahl’s settlement with the TWLF set a dangerous precedent against the principle of shared governance, since the chancellor neglected to seek the approval of the senate’s budget committee on faculty allocation issues.
    Berdahl, though, denied the charge, saying that all faculty hirings will be subject to the normal review processes, and that the normal “protracted” procedure of consulting the senate was not an option during the protest crisis.
    The important point, though, said critics, was that Chancellor Berdahl should have never given in to the TWLF. “Once you’ve given in to the demonstrators’ demands,” remarked Citrin, “you are in a pretty weak position to impose judgement, because it looks as if their protest was in some sense just.”

TWLF Holds Court
    Citrin’s concern that the lack of discipline exerted against violent protesters and the rewarding of their behavior with the settlement would only encourage future protests of an even more repugnant nature, has already proved true.
    October saw the TWLF take their protest of the charges against those who were now called the “Barrow’s Six” to the Berkeley Municipal Courthouse. During this pre-trial hearing, 23 protestors defied the judge’s command to sit down and not interrupt the proceedings. Instead, the TWLF marched to the front of the courtroom, forced the proceedings to a halt, managed to break the hinges on the doors in their effort to keep police out, and staged mock courtroom proceedings.
    All 23 were arrested and are currently facing charges of violating a court order, according to Colleen McMann of the district attorney’s office. Their case is pending.