The Berkeley Faculty Association joins widespread condemnation of the brutal attacks on Black people in the United States, including this letter supporting the Law Students of African Descent (LSAD) in their stand against police violence. The BFA’s mandate is to defend the public university, to expand public access and relevance. Urgent times push us to reflect on how we best advocate for that mandate when we know that the university, like the country, is built on compromised foundations.
Universities formed through the land grant system, like the University of California, rest on the dispossession of native peoples. At its inception, the “public” university was firmly white and mostly men; not until the early 20th century were a few Black students admitted.
The 1960 California Master Plan for Higher Education notably sought to broaden public access to “baby boomers.” In the same era, Black people were still fighting for substantive rights to vote and equal access to education, a long and bloody century after emancipation from slavery and the betrayal of Reconstruction. Partly in response to the long Black Freedom Movement and linked struggles, in the 1970s the University of California, aiming to become a more “public” and diverse institution, pursued raced-based affirmative action in hiring and admissions. Then, in 1978, the turn to a regressive tax regime under Proposition 13 undercut the fiscal basis of progressive reform. This was precisely the time a global shift to neoliberal economic policy exacerbated the urban crisis in inner cities, deepening the structural racism that limited African American lives. The University’s own progressive efforts were undercut by the perniciously named Civil Rights Initiative, Proposition 209 of 1996, which prohibited the university from considering race, gender or ethnicity in employment or student admissions.
This dynamic, in which every advance made in extending the benefits of public education to racially marked populations is undercut by a drastic defunding and accompanied by a rhetoric of individual and property rights, suggests that the individual who gets protected in the neoliberal era is clothed in white, heteropatriarchal, ableist and class privilege. We see the latest incarnation of this dynamic in the conservative “defense” of free speech — really an attempt to elevate the “civil rights” of privilege. The key point is that as access to the public university is widened by progressive mobilization to include a more diverse population, regressive forces have ensured that it has been defunded and dismantled, further denying Black, Latinx and Indigenous people access to a public good.
Can we leave it to the state to define what “the public” should be? Clearly not. The repressive aspect of state power is so deeply rooted in histories of racial injustice — in genocide, slavery, colonization, and militarism — that its ideological apparatus is unable to think beyond it. The limits to the state’s “pastoral” or welfare function are evident in its inability to contain the rapid spread of Covid-19, in the disparate effects of the virus on people with inadequate access to health care, and in ongoing violence against Black lives.
Even as we acknowledge that the University of California is part of the state apparatus and its racist legacies, we can still commit ourselves to reaffirming and reimagining the concept of a truly “public” university through a bold reconstruction plan for the University of California-one that refuses austerity and builds an actually inclusive public university.
Sharad Chari, Leslie Salzinger, Celeste Langan and Michael Burawoy for the Board of the Berkeley Faculty Association