“King George come on down, no more playing around!” the crowd shouted outside of Acting Chancellor George Blumenthal’s office window.
On May 24, 2007, these chants, complemented by the slogan “Defend Alette,” were the rallying cries for hundreds of faculty members and student activists who stood in front of the Chancellor’s Office holding signs and hollering slogans.
The scene was similar seven months earlier, when Alette Kendrick joined many of those same students outside the Humanities Lecture Hall in an effort to confront the UC Regents during their visit to the Santa Cruz campus—except this day ended with a brutal confrontation.
Pictures of police and protestors clashing in front of the new Humanities lecture hall made front page news, but all details were overshadowed by the aftermath. Kendrick was arrested and charged by the state with two misdemeanors, while the university handed her a three-year suspension that threatened to taint her university career.
Though police records report that Kendrick bit and spat at a police officer during the fracas, activists insist Kendrick—one of only a few black students at the rally—was targeted for the color of her skin.
And what’s more, students claim that this incident is indicative of much broader issues of inequality that the University of California can no longer afford to ignore.
The May rally would be the culmination of a campaign to overturn Kendrick’s suspension, but it also symbolized the struggle and discontent that many trace back to the university’s early days.
Faculty members spoke out about institutionalized racism at the rally, but arguably the most significant among them was Professor Angela Davis, whose own history of activism stems from around the same time the university was founded.
In the early 70s, Davis—a former Black Panther Party member—went into hiding after being linked to the murder of judge Harold Haley during a botched prison break in 1970. The ensuing manhunt sent the media into a tizzy, but struck a chord in people throughout the country who were inspired by her resistance.
Nearly two years later, she was acquitted of all charges, and in the early 80s she joined the History of Consciousness (HisCon) department at UCSC.
The HisCon department has its share of activist faculty and, in many ways, they provide a link to the activism of the past. For them, the Free Speech movement that hit UC Berkeley like a tidal wave in the mid-60s paved the way for protest at UCSC.
Professor Marge Frantz embodies the spirit of early UCSC faculty. She joined the communist party at the age of 13 and found herself in Berkeley during the mid 60s.
“I got completely involved in the free speech movement and all the things that were happening in Berkeley,” Frantz said. “In the middle of it I got so mad at the university because of the way it was behaving, that I just quit my job.”
She came to UCSC in 1972 as a 50-year-old graduate student in the fledgling HisCon department. She joined UCSC because of the school’s progressive reputation and the inspiring slogan, “An Ideal Becoming Real,” that was on all campus literature at the time. “The whole thing about [the campus being] a city on a hill was a big deal and [UCSC] was a great place to be, so I applied to come down here.”
The Free Speech Movement inspired the university to approach education like no other UC, and few other universities in the country had.
Bettina Aptheker, a leader during the Free Speech Movement, joined the UCSC HisCon department in 1979 and now teaches in the Feminist Studies department.
“[UCSC] had the college system, which Dean McHenry was really keen on, and second it would have narrative evaluations rather than grades and it would emphasize smaller classes, seminars, greater interaction between faculty and students,” Aptheker said. “These were all very burning issues in the mid-60s.”
The university is still fertile ground for activism because of professors like Aptheker and Davis who continue to pass alternative ideas to students in the classroom. “The campus tended to attract unusual students that are not interested in the mainstream, large, public university,” Aptheker said.
A World On Fire
John Isbister was a faculty member at UCSC in 1968 and taught until her retired in 2006. A former Economics professor and former Merrill provost, he has seen students come and go for many years.
“There were very bright students going here and what was going on in the world was very appalling [to them],” Isbister said.
The draft and the Vietnam war were the hot issues in the late 60s and early 70s, and they led many UCSC students to take action and mobilize a strong anti-war movement on campus.
Wally Goldfrank, a professor in the Latin American and Latino Studies department, came in as an associate professor in the Sociology department in 1968. Goldfrank explained how the Vietnam War affected early UCSC students and pushed many into activism.
“The fear and dread of the draft motivated a level of radical consciousness and risk-taking activism we’re not likely to see again unless there is a level of threat akin to the draft,” Goldfrank said.
The current war in Iraq has inspired many protests on campus, but none have escalated like the anti-draft movement in 1971.
After students burned their draft cards in the Quarry Plaza, they joined community members in a massive march down Highway 1 toward Fort Ord.
The military base—which continuously sent young soldiers off to war—represented what many students feared.
“The state police ended up re-routing traffic around Fort Ord and came after us with tear gas,” Goldfrank said.
Mike Rotkin, a graduate student in the HisCon Department in 1969 (and former Santa Cruz city mayor) talked about how the anti-war movement affected campus life.
Now a faculty member in the Community Studies department, Rotkin recalled a march on Pacific Ave. in downtown Santa Cruz that attracted 1,800 of the then 2,000 UCSC student-body. The protestors demanded a representative be sent to Washington who would call for immediate troop withdrawal.
“In the spring of 1970 classes were cancelled,” Rotkin said. “Students met to study the war in Vietnam and students’ rights. They organized their university, they organized their own classes and invited teachers to come and speak to them about their fields of expertise.”
This sentiment was eventually carried into university courses.
“My very first year here [in 1968] I taught a class on social change that had almost 15 percent of the student body,” Goldfrank said. “A lot of them were involved in the anti-war movement, civil rights movement, and the women’s movement. The place was crawling with activism.”
The draft was a prime focus for student activism at the time, because it drastically threatened to disrupt students’ lives.
Institutional Activism
The 60s and 70s may have brought an end to the Vietnam war, but that wasn’t the end of activism at UCSC.
Dana Frank, now a History professor at UCSC, came here as an undergraduate in 1974. She attests to the fact that there was activism beyond the heightened tensions in the 60s and ‘70s.
“I can say as a student since 1974 that people said ‘the previous students were more radical and it’s not as activist as it used to be,’ and that’s absolutely untrue,” Frank said. “We did amazing activism, but there is a tendency with the ‘60s first new left generation to think that that was the only kind of activism.”
The UCSC feminist studies department – now one of the oldest in the country – is one example of other student movements. According to Professor Aptheker, “More than 2,000 students signed a petition for the chancellor to recognize Women’s Studies as a department.”
In addition, Aptheker continued, the struggle to end apartheid was another hot topic on campus. It eventually reached a boiling point in 1977 when students took over the building now known as Hahn Student Services and demanded that the university divest money from companies doing business in South Africa.
“The chancellor at the time was a man named Karl Pfister and he joined the protest because he agreed with the students,” Aptheker said. “They were sitting in at his office and he came in and sat down with them.”
The movement would last almost ten years, but it ended with the UC divesting close to $3 billion in stock holdings from American companies with ties to South Africa.
Nelson Mandela, the former South African president, would later state that UC divestment was pivotal in applying international pressure to end apartheid.
Our Campus Now
The severity of Kendrick’s suspension last year threatened a whole community of student activists.
But for many protesting with Kendrick in October, the threats began in the Spring of 2005.
On Apr. 18, a collection of student activists camped at the base of campus to protest what they saw as questionable university practices. Students who stayed there past assigned “free speech zone hours” were arrested by Berkeley riot police who used choke holds and pepper spray to subdue students. After those in attendance scrutinized the university’s violent response, UCSC administrators created the Demonstration Response Team (DRT). This group of faculty and administrators are present at all student protests on campus, and work to tame rowdiness and curb violent outbreaks.
Members of the DRT were present at both the Regents protest and the May rally and many students feel their presence and Kendrick’s suspension poses a threat to free speech.
In today’s world, circumstances are different.
The climate has definitely changed since the institutional activism of the past.
During the May rally last year, UCSC Acting Chancellor George Blumenthal was called out of the office and forced to address the crowd that had gathered outside. Rather than negotiate with students then and there, he was legally barred by UC policy from saying a thing.
A few weeks after that May rally, the university reduced Kendrick’s suspension to one quarter.
The six months that student activists fought on her behalf certainly kept her case in the limelight. And in its wake, more issues had room to rise to the forefront of UC concern.
Questions of the university’s judicial process will be a point of contention in the coming years, and this academic year is sure to see a renewed interest in ongoing issues like the Iraq war and military recruitment on campus.
Today’s issues are similar to those of the past, like the fight for Ethnic Studies, which has been neglected by the university for over two decades, and the perpetual anit-war movement that continues to live on.
But students have also taken new issues head-on, as the UC continues to change, like the university’s ties to nuclear weapons and the low wages paid to university service workers.
But whether the issue is old or new, there is no denying that activism has become an integral part of university life.
Old or new, there is no denying that activism has become an integral part of university life.
