[Shadow_Group] Fw: [Left Hook] American Students today "rebels without a cause?"

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Subject: American Students today "rebels without a cause?" 


The Berkley Free Speech...Cafe...this is ridiculous.
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http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-berkeley1oct01,1,2350193.story?coll=la-home-local<http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-berkeley1oct01,1,2350193.story?coll=la-home-local>


Free to Be Silent at UC Berkeley
* Forty years after a seminal movement was born, students focus on their 
studies more than social, political causes.

By Rone Tempest, Times Staff Writer

BERKELEY — At the Free Speech Movement Cafe on a recent afternoon here, 
students silently sipped lattes and smoothies, oblivious to enlarged 
photographs on the walls of historic campus demonstrations.

A documentary film on the radical era, "Berkeley in the '60s," flickered 
unwatched in one corner of the terraced cafe, where an intense new 
generation of scholars hunched mutely over wireless laptops.

The cafe decor, which features a picture of an impassioned student 
leader addressing a crowd from the roof of a police car, is a reminder 
that 40 years ago today, modern campus political activism began here at 
UC Berkeley.

The studious atmosphere inside the cafe, endowed by a wealthy admirer of 
the movement and dedicated in 1998 as part of the Moffitt Undergraduate 
Library, symbolizes how much California's flagship public university has 
changed in four decades.

On Oct. 1, 1964, students protesting the noontime arrest of a civil 
rights activist surrounded a university police car and staged a 32-hour 
sit-in, an event that not only ignited the Free Speech Movement here but 
also inspired countless other movements under different names and forms 
on campuses around the world for years to come.

"In the fall of 1964," states a panel at the entrance of the cafe that 
reads like a message from a time capsule, "a student protest movement 
galvanized this campus and shocked the nation. It soon resonated on 
campuses around the United States."

But except for a few graduate students quietly discussing the works of 
Virgil, there was virtually no speech at all on the recent afternoon at 
the Free Speech Cafe. The only other audible voice was that of a cashier 
barking out food orders in Spanish.

The university still boasts hundreds of student organizations. But their 
causes, reports historian Lisa Rubens, 58, a Berkeley graduate and 
veteran of the Free Speech Movement, tend to be more personalized, 
centered on issues of gender, ethnicity and narrower political and 
environmental concerns.

"You don't see the constant mass public demonstrations that tended to 
characterize the late '60s," Rubens said. "Today's concerns are much 
more sophisticated and targeted, reflecting the era of identity politics."

*'Nothing but a Cafe?'

*Faculty and students say that increasingly selective admissions 
standards, higher costs, onerous academic workloads and a largely 
apolitical Asian student population are some of the reasons behind the 
change in campus politics.

During a public radio program broadcast from the campus this week to 
commemorate today's anniversary, host Michael Krasny wondered aloud: "Is 
the Free Speech Movement nothing but a cafe?"

One of the panelists on the program, distinguished Berkeley philosophy 
professor John R. Searle, responded instantly: "Yes, and that is very 
healthy."

Searle, now 72, embraced the Free Speech Movement as a young faculty 
member but was critical of its more radical offshoots. He said the 
institutionalization of the movement was a good thing.

"The way healthy societies work," said Searle, interviewed later at his 
Moses Hall office, "is that they assimilate. What was once a threat is 
now part of the mainstream. In a sense it has been domesticated."

Searle predicted that one day there would even be a statue of the late 
Free Speech leader Mario Savio, who died in 1996, on the campus next to 
the monuments to Free Speech era Chancellor Clark Kerr — who blamed the 
protests on "Mao-Castroite" influences — and legendary football coach 
Pappy Waldorf.

A couple of students on the Krasny radio panel explained why today's 
students couldn't actively engage in politics.

"It's not necessarily a lack of interest," said student association Vice 
President Liz Hall. "There is higher tuition and less financial aid, 
which means more and more students on campus who have to work."

But Kalin McKenna, 21, a combined history and premed major from Lake 
Forest, said busy students had found a new way to agitate.

"There's more online activism now," said McKenna, national outreach 
coordinator for Mobilizing America's Youth. "A lot of people know they 
can get the information they need from a computer. Rather than attend a 
forum for an hour, they read a synopsis of the forum on the Internet 
that takes 30 minutes."

The contrast with years past is especially evident during the lunch hour 
on Sproul Plaza, the main student courtyard and entrance on the south 
side of the campus.

One of the primary achievements of the Free Speech Movement was winning 
the right to set up tables and distribute political tracts in the 
block-long plaza just outside Sather Gate.

For years, Sproul Plaza at noon was a battleground of competing 
political ideologies and sidewalk orators vying for an audience.

Today's version is a pale imitation.

The only orator on a recent afternoon was a shouting, dancing evangelist 
who identified himself as "David Temple, B.A., J.D. Apostle."

Except for the obligatory campus clubs of the Republican and Democratic 
parties and one ferociously anti-Israel Internationalist Socialist 
table, there were few overtly political tables among the several dozen 
flanking the plaza.

But there were tables for Jehovah's Witnesses and Campus Ministries, for 
Cal Bears for UNICEF and the Cal Ski & Snowboard Club.

The most numerous and active tables reflected the large Asian presence 
on campus: the Vietnam Students Assn., Pilipino American Alliance and 
Society of Hong Kong and Chinese Affairs, among others. About 40% of the 
student body is Asian, compared to less than 5% four decades ago.

Staffing the table of the Chinese Students Assn. was 21-year-old Peter 
Wang, a bioengineering major who described his organization as a "social 
club" that arranges dances, movie nights and karaoke songfests.

Asked about the legacy of the Free Speech Movement in his life, Wang, 
who was born in Taiwan and raised in Fountain Valley, said, "I never 
really thought about it, I guess."

But even if most of today's students don't commemorate that fading era, 
the university and community have.

A Free Speech Movement Oral History Project, headed by Rubens, is racing 
to record the memories of participants.

Over the next week, veterans of the movement are staging a series of 
activities on or near the campus to remember the events of 1964.



*Reenacting the Sit-in

*Organized by former Free Speech steering committee member and longtime 
activist Michael Rossman, the programs will include panel discussions on 
the lessons of the movement, political satires, speeches by Texas 
columnist Molly Ivins and investigative journalist Seymour Hersh and, on 
Oct. 8 in Sproul Plaza, a reenactment of the original sit-in that will 
be attended by senior university officials.

Among those planning to be present are Assemblywoman and former Los 
Angeles Councilwoman Jackie Goldberg and celebrated Berkeley chef and 
food guru Alice Waters, who were both Berkeley undergraduates during the 
Free Speech Movement.

"I'm going back to speak on top of the police car," said Goldberg, who 
was among those hopping onto the vehicle 40 years ago. "That event in 
1964 was probably the only really spontaneous thing I have seen in my 
long political life."

Waters described her exposure to the movement as a young undergraduate 
from New Jersey as "an empowering experience that completely changed my 
life."

Although she was only on the fringes of the movement, Waters said the 
experience showed her what people could accomplish when they tried. 
Indeed, it helped give her the courage to launch her own restaurant.

"Without the Free Speech Movement there would have been no Chez 
Panisse," Waters said.

Over at the Free Speech Movement Cafe, 19-year-old sophomore history 
major Lisa Shapiro was sitting at an outdoor table, intently reading a 
biography of a 19th century American slave.

Looking up from her book, Shapiro, from the nearby city of Orinda, said 
she could still sense the "aura" of the Free Speech Movement.

"When I first came here and saw the photographs, it gave me a kind of 
tingly feeling that something special had happened here," she said.

But Shapiro said the events 40 years ago had little relevance for most 
of today's students. Without the military draft, even the current 
occupation of Iraq is not as galvanizing an issue as it might have been 
in years past.

"You tend to get people now," she said, "who are more rebels without a 
cause."
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