Death Comes to Berkeley SIR,—Mr Beichman, uncritically following Professor Feuer's
Atlantic Monthly article on Berkeley, cavalierly announces 'the death of Berkeley.' What annoys me, though, is not so much the hasty obituary (there should be a journalistic law of habeas corpus) as the inclination to call the death murder. It is an elaborate, highly organised plot against the giant he reports, a New Left conspiracy mounted by a 'loose but effective student-faculty dictatorship' in league with 'an obscenitarian movement' and 'an estimated 2,500 "non-students." ' Of this last group, the 2,500, for example, he says, 'They took over the Vietnam Day Committee'—let me assure you that if the Vietnam Day Committee had ever had any- where near 2,500 members, non-student or otherwise, there would have been even more dancing in the streets of Berkeley than there has been as it is. Perhaps, here, I only point to a vice of Mr Beichman's sty le; perhaps his 'they' doesn't mean to refer to all 2,500, as the grammar implies it does. But the slip is so much of a piece with the rest of his inflation of the Berkeley situation that I imagine most of your readers missed it. And, in any case, it is really the style of Mr Beichman's piece (and the Feuer article that he draws on) that does the damage. The boy who printed the word on a sign and displayed it on campus becomes 'the founder of the obscenitarian movement' (Feuer's neologism). That was a happen- ing all right, bqt it was no movement. A New Left coalition has 'seized de facto control of Berkeley.' The phrase, with its vague echoes of generals' coups, is all wrong. Nobody has 'seized' anything.
It would be exciting, I suppose, if Berkeley were indeed in the throes of a genuine revolution, and the heightened language of foreign correspondents on third world assignments were appropriate to it. Certainly the local right wing finds such language convenient, and a Ronald Reagan victory in the California gubernatorial election in November might just be 'the death of Berkeley' Mr Beichman an- nounces. But as of now the place really deserves another sort of treatment, not, to be sure, a New Left whitewash, but not an hysterical elegy either. There is such enthusiasm here, such excitement, so much well-intentioned folly. Berkeley is an ideologi- cal Vanity Fair, where most of the hawkers try to tell the truth, and a few even manage to. It deserves satire, but not Mr Beichman.
Classes still meet, on schedule, and lectures are well attended. Mr Beichman doesn't go so far as to deny this, but I bet some of your readers are worrying.
JOHN TAYLOR
1937 Francisco Street, Berkeley, California 94709, USA
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