WHAT DO YOU THINK OF WHEN someone mentions the turbulence of the 1960s? Is it UC Berkeley, where all the protests were? What about UC Davis? "Oh, nothing happened there; it was the Quiet Campus." Well, it took a helluva lot of work to keep UC Davis peaceful.
Others write memoirs about days of wine and roses. Mine is about the days of sticks and stones, fists and noses. Remember the children's rhyme, "Sticks and stones can break my bones, but words can never hurt me"? A legal equivalent might be, "My right to swing my fist ends where your nose begins." You may not agree with everything I say, but in the spirit of free speech, I will be disappointed if you disagree with my right to say what I saw, heard, thought and learned 30 years ago, during the student protest movements of 19641969 at UC Davis.
I joined the faculty of UC Davis in 1962, fresh out of graduate school, looking for scientific worlds to conquer and proud to be part of a great tuition-free institution of higher learning.
The students were coming! It was a time of growth for the state and the university. We needed more of everything: professors, classrooms, dormitories, libraries and laboratories, student unions, gymnasiums and administrators. "Football for the students and parking for the faculty," quipped UC President Clark Kerr. The University of California was on a roll and I was rolling with it.
Many envisioned (and many still do) a university as an institution where knowledge is transferred from professors to the young. Kerr likened UC to a great knowledge factory, an important cog in the industrial might of American society. It was a simile that would return to haunt him.
The world of the early '60s was a study in contrasts--the Cold War, revolutions, poverty and racism vied for headlines with the latest medical cure, the newest electronic marvel, and the freshest rock and roll star. Increasing numbers of Americans demanded access to higher education, the ticket to the new world of marvels and prosperity.
Outside the university a social revolution was in progress; America had become more urbanized and suburbanized, its youth were more mobile, drug conscious and sexually aware than their parents. Racial and economic tensions seethed just beneath the surface. Post- World War II universities, on the other hand, were much as they were before the war, only bigger. With few exceptions, they were dominated by a white male hierarchy of professors and administrators. But rules designed for a previous generation now seemed too restrictive. Bans against political activity on campus, controversial loyalty oaths, restrictive dormitory hours, and separate living rules for men and women chafed an ever-more sophisticated and independent-minded student body.
No matter what the issues, though, political action was the province of the few, the "activists." Confrontations at universities were usually between faculty, politicians and boards of trustees like the UC regents. Headlines were captured by professors like Linus Pauling (Cal Tech two-time Nobel Prize winner) and Edmund Teller (then at Lawrence Livermore Lab) who drew national attention to their argument over control of nuclear weapons. Students were as much passive participants in the processes of protest and political action as they were in their own education.
Then the earth shook. A youth revolt swept Europe and the United States. Just as an earthquake is a dramatic shift in the land that relieves pressures building for many years, the social quakes of the turbulent '60s and '70s altered the face of American society and the universities with it. The ivory towers of academe were swept into struggles about civil rights, farmworkers and pesticides, legalization of drugs, abortion, sexual liberation, gay rights, environmental pollution, and the divisive, bitter issues of the draft and Vietnam.
Violence was everywhere; assassinations of national leaders, police batons and students' rocks and bottles punctuated social debates. A succession of crises that culminated in the protests against the draft and the war in Vietnam battered universities, subjecting them to a seemingly never-ending series of social tidal waves.
