The word was out. The students were going to try to break up an ROTC drill. A volunteer group of students, faculty and staff conferred with administrators in Mrak Hall, deciding to be ready to prevent a full-scale confrontation. The Davis Irregulars marched to the drill ground. I made sure to position myself near Mel Posey, one of the leaders of the Black Students' Union who, I figured, would know better what to say and how to handle himself than I would. It was a sunny day; students were scattered on the drill field, tossing Frisbees. A jeep with a loudspeaker was in the corner of the field, near the ROTC building. The martial music gave the scene a surrealistic air, somewhere between "Hogan's Heroes" and From Here to Eternity. The ROTC students marched out, wearing drill uniforms and carrying unloaded rifles. (Elsewhere, at Kent State, Ohio, the young men would be in the National Guard and the rifles would be loaded.) As soon as the drill squad formed a line in the center of the field, the Frisbee-throwing students positioned themselves opposite the ROTC students, one on one. We moved to stand beside them. I stood next to a beatific flower child with maxi dress, long hair and the most gentle, least military expression imaginable. The young soldier stood at rigid attention while the girl slowly and thoroughly rubbed her body up and down against his, as if they were dancing in place doing a new vertical step. Perspiration sprang up on his face.
My visions of ugly confrontations dissolved in this battle of military honor versus femininity. "Make love, not war!" took on a new dimension for me that afternoon. Ingenuously, I blurted, "Why are you doing this? What are you doing here?" Her answer was both simple and profound. "Where else should I be?" I had no better an answer then, and I have none now.
The winds of change sweep but rarely sweep clean the corridors of history. What is the legacy of the Free Speech Movement and the days of student protests? At UC Davis there remains a sense of community. We accept the right of students to be treated as adults, to make the campus their home. Strictly speaking, free speech triumphed, even as the Free Speech Movement passed into history. Today, activists run their tables, protesters freely reserve the Quad, students serve on virtually every faculty and administrative committee, there are no dormitory hours or sexual discrimination in student housing.
"Davis? What happened at Davis?" Be thankful we need no monument to those expelled, injured or dead in tragic conflicts, like the one dedicated at Kent State in 1990.
What did I learn? I learned that education is more than the transfer of facts in a knowledge factory; it is also a process of providing people with the tools of lifelong learning, of helping them to ask questions rather than merely memorize answers. I deepened my belief that a university thrives on the free exchange of ideas. To the extent that ideas are controlled and censored, the freedom of students and faculty to learn together is diminished and the ability of the institution to uniquely aid society is compromised. Without freedom of speech, there can be no freedom of thought, and without freedom of thought we become slaves to the ideas of others, slaves to the mistakes of the past.
Are there free speech issues today? What about offensive speech on campus? I fear I may be politically incorrect by distinguishing between speech and action. To me, epithets may be more a matter of taste than violence. If bad taste were a crime, most of us would be speaking from jail cells. But in exercising my freedom of speech, I do think it wrong to restrict the speech of others by deliberately insulting them. I do not support rabble-rousing for its own sake. The analogy used by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes was to not shout "fire" in a crowded theater. Legalities aside, I would rather shout "love."
Affirmative action is a vexing matter and a social powder keg. I hope that when the bitter battles are over, American universities will have found a way to do more than "talk the talk" about equal opportunity and that we will have found how to "walk the walk" to provide a top-quality education for all citizens, without pitting one group against another. The California of today is not the California of 30 years ago; immigration of Southeast Asians and other ethnic groups has changed its face forever. The Statue of Liberty may shine her lamp in New York Harbor, but her light falls gently on a rainbow race of Californians.
What about student protests? Many of the problems that exercised the students of the '60s are still with us. Grinding poverty, ignorance, drugs, racism, wars and suffering have not melted away. Today, the "People's Parks" are filled with the homeless; beggars haunt our streets; in inner cities problems with race relations are superseded by those of gangs and drugs.
Are students apathetic? There is no draft, no major war. Is there no unifying issue so abhorrent as to bring young people together to harken to Mario Savio's call to "put their bodies on the gears"? Many students are very concerned with studying for examinations, with looking for where the jobs are, with just trying to grow up in an America they have been told will offer less to them than it did to their older brothers and sisters, parents and grandparents.
But resentments mount, and a new earthquake may come. Where and when I do not know. But I do not think it will be to provide free speech and privileges to those wealthy enough to afford the tuition or those willing to go into the considerable debt necessary to attend what was once a tuition-free great public university. It will not be to provide islands of the educated few in a sea of the uneducated and unemployed. Is it not distressing that we spend more for prisons than for education? Regardless, when it comes, it would be a great tragedy if today's university administrators repeat the mistakes of the past and base their policies on administrative authority and police power instead of on dignity and trust. The analogy of a "fact factory" failed Clark Kerr and the rest of us. In the Aggie tradition, we might consider the image of UC Davis as a seed bed for ideas and for people, an institution where students are the fruit and flowers and all of us the gardeners.
Whatever the future holds, be assured that knowledge, like courage and love, will never be out of date.
This story ends with the beginning of the 1970s even though the protests went on for another half a decade. Stories for another day. Space does not permit listing the many students, faculty and administrators who played important roles in the UC Davis response and in my continuing education. My respects to the late Chancellor Emil Mrak, to Chancellor Emeritus Jim Meyer and their families. Their belief in the fundamental dignity, sensibility and honesty of students was never shaken.
Oh yes . . . that 4-year-old boy I left crying in the driveway? Sean is now a Ph.D. student in physiology here at UC Davis; we teach a Science and Society freshman seminar together.
*
Barry Wilson is a professor of avian sciences and environmental toxicology.
