I bring to you here Prof. T.J. Clark (one of the leading figures in Art History) speech in a rally at UC Berekely, on a topic which is close to the hearts of many people here:
My
name is Timothy Clark. I came to Berkeley in 1988, and the 21 years I
have taught and researched here have been in many ways the most
rewarding of my life. Therefore my feelings are painfully
contradictory, you can imagine, as I look out at these old and new
friends. It is an honor and a privilege to make the first speech on
this occasion, but at the same time a tragedy.
Let
me speak to the honor first. What I see in front of me – the banners,
the faces, the demands – is the life of the university as I understand
it. It is the university taking on form in the public sphere – escaping
from the academic boardroom, shrugging off the jargon of the
entrepreneurs and patent-seekers, and reminding us what a university
really is. A university is not a brand name. It is not an umbrella
organization for a 150 assorted corporate laboratories, with the
faculty inside each striking bargains with their funders about how much
or how little of the new knowledge they produce is immediately going to
be “privatized.” A university – a public university – is not a
finishing school for the sons and daughters of the shrinking few able
to afford the fees. A university does not build its future on the backs
of those most vulnerable in its midst – the men and women who keep the
places we learn in safe and clean and continuing to function. A
university – this is the last and vital element in its moral and
intellectual life – does not see its crisis in isolation from the one
that is threatening the state as a whole. It knows what is happening in
schoolrooms in Richmond and Oakland and San Jose. It feels the despair
of those for whom community college or the Cal State system seemed to
offer a way forward, and who now see their courses cancelled and
buildings shuttered. And all this – this is what is unforgivable – in a
state whose concentrations of private and corporate wealth remain
immense, but which a failed political system has put off limits even
when the very life or death of our society is at stake.
People
will say that in comparison with the hard times in California at large
the university still has it good. I have two replies. First, of course
we are not claiming parity in suffering with the truly disadvantaged
and vulnerable, who are bearing the brunt of the state’s financial
meltdown. We acknowledge the things we still have – but at the same
time we know that a system of public education in a great state
likeCalifornia is a complex, interdependent unity, and that we should
fight with all we can, without apology, to preserve its whole fabric.
The UC system is a precious resource – a public resource – built over
more than a century with taxpayers’ money, private generosity and
shrewdness, and the intellectual energy of generations of students,
teachers, and staff. A state in its right mind does not destroy that
resource when times get tough.
But
this, make no mistake, is what is happening. How many times in the past
two weeks have students found their department office closed, when they
urgently needed advice on courses and requirements – “due to staff
shortage”? How many times have you had to remember that if you needed
to study in the library the coming weekend – that basic need of a
university life – you should think again, for libraries
at Berkeleycannot afford to open on either Saturday or Sunday? (Unlike
those at the Universities of Mississippi and Alaska.) A colleague told
me yesterday of a conversation she had had – one of many such
conversations this week – with a trusted and dedicated member of staff
in her building: the one person spared the layoff, asking her, with
real desperation in his voice, “But how am I supposed to do the job
now? How can one person prevent the whole facility from deteriorating
to the point of no return?”
This
is no time for the politics of denunciation. I know that many of these
decisions are being forced on deans and chairs who can see no other way
to do what has been mandated from the top. But as an overall policy,
what we are living through makes me choke with anger. It is destructive
and deeply unfair. It steers too close – if I may borrow an infamous
phrase from a famous member of our faculty – to an “organ failure”
model of crisis management. And if our leaders in UCOP think that in
the end they will wear us down by using the oldest tactics in the
reactionary playbook– Divide, Deceive, Conceal, Demoralize – they are
deeply mistaken. We shall fight back.
Finally,
then, let me offer the bare outlines of an alternative. There is a real
emergency, we recognize, and many of us are willing to help address it.
What do we want? What would bring us on board, as active participants
in a work of reconstruction?
Well,
supposing we were presented with an honest and transparent and coherent
plan for the preservation of the public university in hard times…
Supposing the plan was one in which sacrifices really were shared – in
which the pet projects and inflated building programs and hidden
overhead were no longer off limits when cuts were discussed… Supposing
the profit-generating parts of the UC system (and they exist, by the
way) were asked – maybe temporarily, as part of the true emergency – to
contribute a proportion of their surplus to the urgent needs of the
university’s teaching heart… Supposing the preservation of the true
economic, racial, and ethnic diversity of UC’s student body was an
absolute priority, an un-negotiable part of our institution’s
character… Supposing it was simply unthinkable for the university’s
future to be decided, as Yudof and the Regents are planning, by a
commission of professional school managers and technicians who seldom
or never face an actual classroom or a lab…
Then we
would come on board. And this can still happen, my friends. We are at a
moment of near-breakdown, and no one is pretending that the way out of
it will be pain-free. An immense amount depends on the wider politics
of the state. It is up to us to argue the case for a public university –
for public education — in a democracy in crisis. The crisis is real.
But crises produce choices. They shine a light on managers and
management-speak. They make another vision possible. They remind us of
why we think teaching and learning and the production of new
knowledge matter – why they are vital to the life of society at large – and they call us to fight to preserve the space in which they can thrive. The fight has begun.
September 30, 2009 at 7:53 PM
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