Club-swinging policemen. Tear gas. Sit-ins and strikes. Demonstrations on Sproul Plaza.
The iconography of Berkeley in the 1960s has long since become part of America's cultural consciousness. Though strife engulfed campuses across the nation, Berkeley still epitomizes that decade's highly-charged student activism in the popular imagination.
But the legacy of Berkeley in the 1960s extends beyond mere imagery. The conflicts that provoked so much chaos, and the changes to Berkeley that ensued, reverberated across American academia in ways still felt today. Few had as much lasting impact as the Third World Liberation Front strike of 1969, a tumultuous event that marked the emergence of ethnic studies as a part of America's intellectual life.
To make sense of the heated atmosphere surrounding the first months of that year, one has to look across the Bay. At San Francisco State the struggle for more meaningful representation and recognition of black, Chicano, Asian-American, and Native American students and faculty had long since escalated into violence. One student blinded himself while trying to plant a bomb in a university building. Strikes among students and teachers brought the school to a standstill.
Some observers at the time saw envy of Berkeley--its funding, its students, its opportunities--as a major source of bitterness at SF State. But discontent over the status of underrepresented students at Cal was felt in the East Bay, too.
As at SF State, the battle at Berkeley began as an effort to establish a black studies department. In April 1968, the Afro-American Studies Union put forth a proposal for a Department of Black Studies to UC Berkeley chancellor Robert W. Heyns. The Heyns administration moved on the proposal with what some would call deliberation while others would say deliberate delay. By December of that year the College of Letters & Sciences Executive Committee found itself still unable to decide whether black studies should be a department or a program.
Meanwhile, student unrest over ethnic representation was growing. In August 1968, University dining services stopped serving table grapes following a campaign of the Mexican-American Student Confederation, acting in solidarity with striking California farm workers. In October, Governor Ronald Reagan ordered an end to the grape boycott.
By January 1969, with dissatisfaction growing, the Afro-American Studies Union and the Mexican-American Student Confederation joined with the Asian American Political Alliance to form the Third World Liberation Front (TWLF). With the new moniker, Berkeley students were explicitly identifying themselves with TWLF members at SF State who championed the establishment of a "Third World College" and advocated direct action as a means of achieving their goals. Later in the month, the Berkeley TWLF would follow SF State's lead one more time and go on strike.
Berkeley strikers issued five demands to the administration. The first called for the immediate establishment of a Third World College, which would include departments devoted to four major groups: Black Americans, Mexican Americans, Asian Americans, and Native Americans. The TWLF called for minority appointments to administrative, faculty, and staff positions; more financial aid, recruitment, and work-study for minority students; minority control of minority-related programs; and amnesty for all strikers. Teaching assistants went on strike in solidarity with the TWLF.
By the end of the week conflict between strikers and police erupted. California Highway Patrol Officers and Alameda County Sheriff's Deputies were brought in to break up pickets at Sather Gate. In February, clashes between students and police worsened as strikers and the administration failed to agree on an acceptable solution. Governor Reagan declared a state of emergency, and tear gas made its first appearance. By the end of the month, Reagan had ordered the National Guard to campus. It wouldn't be the last time.
Berkeley student arrests and suspensions continued. But by early March the administration had put forward its first full-fledged version of a Department of Ethnic Studies, which included the four areas of study originally demanded by the students. The department was set to begin instruction in Fall 1969.
And it did. Despite the almost inevitable bureaucratic wrangling and infighting, the Department of Ethnic Studies began instruction in October 1969, offering 34 courses to 990 students. In the coming years, new proposals for a separate Third World College were entertained but never realized. Afro-American studies broke away from ethnic studies in 1974 and became a separate entity under the College of Letters & Science[s]. The next year, a program in comparative ethnic studies was introduced.
Without a road map to guide it, the Department of Ethnic Studies charted its path with much the same spirit of debate and resistance that had defined its origins. By the time the department welcomed its first Ph.D. class in 1984, multiculturalism had become a defining force on college campuses across the country. Controversy was never far behind, with a conservative backlash under now-President Reagan and battles over political correctness reaching a sometimes steep pitch.
But universities would seldom boil over again as they had during those heated weeks in 1969 when ethnic studies at Berkeley was born. Still, the department remains politically engaged. It co-sponsored a teach-in against torture at the end of April this year. And it remains mindful of its roots. Remembering the students and teachers who risked arrest to bring ethnic studies to Berkeley, it calls its departmental newsletter The Rap Sheet.
– Marcus Wohlsen