The Berkeley Rebellion and Beyond: Essays on Politics & Education in the Technological Society

The essays in this volume were written for The New York Review of Books over the course of the last six years. During those years, American society moved into a time of troubles deeper than any since the Civil War, and American higher education plunged into storms more turbulent than any in its history. There are few signs that the storm is lifting: in so far as the campuses are barometers reflecting conditions outside, there is every sign of harder weather ahead.Three of the essays center around the events on the Berkeley campus of the University of California, where, it is generally agreed, the campus troubles began. Both authors were members of the Berkeley faculty for more than a decade, and reported events from that embattled position. Two of the essays survey scenes and events of broader scope. But even the "Reports from Berkeley" rested on the assumption that what was happening there was diagnostic of what was happening or might happen elsewhere.It became clear during these years that the Berkeley troubles had a broader meaning, but the question was, was Berkeley symptomatic or causal of maladies elsewhere? In either case, what began at Berkeley soon became epidemic. From Berkeley's Free Speech Movement of 1964 to Kent State's massacre of 1970, over three hundred campuses experienced degrees of disorder ranging from polite protest to savage violence, and ranging in content from questions of fairness in campus disciplinary hearings to university involvement in war, racism, and urban deterioration. -- from the Introduction