Talboito.com

Mother Jones Magazine has released their list of the Top 10 Activist Campuses. They put Berkeley 9th, behind the California Community Colleges of all things.

Presumably such a low ranking will get some people riled up. Berkeley has a reputation as this special, protest haven. There is a small percentage of students who come for the protest flavor, but most attend Berkeley merely because it’s a damn fine school. It follows then that most students are just as apathetic as any other contemporary, modern American youth.

The article itself goes more than a touch into the realm of the absurd. Here is Berkeley’s entry:

9. UC Berkeley: True to form, 1,500 Cal students rallied at Sproul Plaza as the Iraq war began, demanding that Baghdad University be declared a sister school and that Berkeley refuse to provide student records to federal authorities. And 98 students were later arrested as they staged a four-hour sit-in, effectively bringing school business to a halt. “In many cases the students did not walk,” says police captain Bill Cooper, “so the officers had to drag them out.”

First, I would have been at the protest, but I had a lot of work to do that day. Thus, I can testify to the fact that the phrase “effectively bringing school business to a halt” is quite the overstatement. There was probably some work that didn’t get done in some offices in Sproul Hall. Undoubtedly, some classes and sections were cancelled. For the most part though, business-as-usual was the attitude that reigned over campus that day.

Second, it seemed like the protest happened because people expected a protest. How else could Berkeley maintain its place on these Mother Jones type lists? Maybe the policemen did have to drag a couple people out of Sproul Hall, but the majority of protestors left peacefully. None of the organizers’ demands were ever met. Chancellor Berdhal had already come out against the war. All criminal charges were dropped against the protesters.

The protest organizers are being charged with violating the student code of conduct, but that is a whole other blog post. All in all, the protest was the usual thing, put on to maintained a reputation upheld by magazine articles like Mother Jones’.

Tags: No Comments