The Berkeley Rebellion And Beyond (Wolin & Schaar)

I wish I had a more attractive picture of this book to offer you, but library bindings pulled from the stacks of  university libraries are never that elegant. The Berkeley Rebellion And Beyond is a collection of essays published in 1970. The authors focus, at the start of the book, on the student strikes and protests at Berkeley University during the mid to late 1960s. They analyse the student movement from a time and place very much still within the movement. Yet, their analysis contains much clarity. The later essays in the book move more towards student rebellion, the probability (or lack of probability) of revolution and the purpose of the educational system as a whole. 

The authors notice that much of the tension on campuses has its roots in--not only the current political events of the time--but a crisis of purpose. The university, as an institution, was no longer primarily a place to receive knowledge, but rather a place to create knowledge for the rest of society. I came across this line, which I really like because it speaks to the tension between what businesses, corporations and governments want from universities and what students and scholars have understood, traditionally, university to be for: "The bureaucratic search for understanding does not begin in wonder, but in the reduction of the world to the ordinary and the manageable."

Students did not want institutions to behave as manageable bureaucratic structures to produce the right studies and technology for the right businesses and government departments. Instead, they wanted institutions that served students. The Berkeley rebellion was about student power, as much as it was about Vietnam or the vacant lot of land community members had turned into a park. 

Interestingly, the key issues in this collection of essays have not died. Sure, in North America students are no longer being clubbed, gassed and shot by police for protesting, but the question of what the university is for still remains. Do universities exist to aid governmental and corporation research? Are universities factories for future professionals? Are students there to learn about themselves and begin to construct the kind of society and space they see themselves living in someday? Do they exist  for the sole purpose of building human capital? 

Students have, at least from my point of view, as little influence on their own campuses now as they did back in 1966 or 1968. 

Campuses are not designed for intellectual growth, they are designed for knowledge production. Corporations and governments lay down their money and wait for the results and technologies that will benefit them to materialize. Young people enter institutions and become tools of production. Business women and men, engineers, and accountants are mass produced. Students have as little power today to prevent their universities from forming alliances with arms companies or Israeli institutions as they did in the 1960s to prevent military propaganda and police brutality on their campuses. 

I wish I could tell interested readers to go out an purchase a copy of this book, but the best I can suggest is to scour the second-hand online book shops. As far as I can tell, The Berkeley Rebellion and Beyond has not been reprinted since its original production in 1970, which is a shame. This book should really be reprinted.