Freedom under Clark Kerr
LETTERS
From: H. M. Richmond, Ron Weidberg, Frank Gee, John Riggs-Davison, MP, Miss Elizabeth Butithatn, Robin Symonds, F. Neuland, Kevin McAndrews, M. J. Freeman, T. W. Hutchison.
Sir: My copy of the SPECTATOR for 3 February has just reached me by its usual slow and some- what circuitous route; but despite the delay I am impelled to write you a few reflections on Dr Bryan Wilson's article on Berkeley. As it is only the latest of a series of such misleading accounts of the University of California at Berkeley, and typifies misrepresentations of the USA by visiting British correspondents, the delay may not be so significant: other misrepresenta- tions are bound to follow unless some authentic statements make their way into print. Dr Wilson is about as sensitive to conditions in Berkeley as his colleagues at All Souls are to those in Oxford. My own impressions are based on a ten-year stint at the Berkeley campus, where I am now a tenured associate professor (to which I came directly after a career at Oxbridge).
Supposedly, according to the press, Berkeley has continued in a state of protracted tumult over the last few years, with disastrous results on its standards, efficiency and status: one of your correspondents even incredibly wrote recently of 'the death of Berkeley.' In fact, apart from two isolated incidents, there has been no ominous physical activity on the campus at all, and the supposed disturbances extended to only a tiny pro- portion of the students, who were sitting down in corridors for an hour or two! There has cer- tainly been no dangerous personal violence—in fact, no violence at all, that I can determine (unless one believes the hearsay that a girl student bit a policeman's left hand a few months back). I favour dignified protest that extends to picketing. and orderly mass demonstrations, but, frankly, I have seen almost none of these things on our campus during the last few years—far less than at most large metropolitan universities. I have taught all kinds of classes in this period. Not a single one was affected in the least during the supposed disruptions (I believe one student did once tell me he had to go to a strike meeting, but that is the solitary exception I know of).
As for status, the American Council of Edu- cation recently announced that Berkeley rated above Harvard and all other American universities in the quality of its advanced programmes. Yester- day it was announced that Guggenheim awards made to faculty members in the University of California as a whole totalled twice those for the university rated second in this competition; and the Berkeley campus alone easily led the rest of
the country. No faculty members have recently left Berkeley because of the supposed 'troubles.'
and the handful who may have left earlier for such
reasons had substantial ulterior motives (as with the egregious Professor Feuer, who is accepted as an impartial authority in your columns). The
Berkeley undergraduates rate this year, as fresh- men, with third-year students at other universities in the USA. Despite this high intellectual potential,
and its inevitable heightening of all relationships within the university, there has been no 'seething resentment' or 'boisterousness' in Berkeley since Clark Kerr's dismissal. The New Left has been largely abandoned by popular support now that its negative practical results have been demon- strated.
Apart from the failure to recognise these simple facts of the climate of feeling in Berkeley, Dr Wilson is also grossly misleading about the pattern of instruction on the campus and in America generally. It is simply not true that `American universities have nothing resembling a tutorial system.' Most private universities of real standing here favour it; the new University of , California campus at Santa Cruz is exclusively modelled on the Oxbridge pattern. Even here at Berkeley tutorials are normal practice in several major departments, including my own, which is probably the biggest. Despite a handful of big lecture courses, the university has mostly small classes, particularly with the reduced schedules of the new quarter system. In English we have only one course (in the modern novel) with much more than 150 students, a half-dozen with more than one hundred. More than two thirds of our courses are limited to twenty-five students or fewer and many of these have fifteen or fewer. All faculty members conduct personal tutorials of one kind or another with both undergraduates and graduate students, and this mode of instruction occupies a specific and important place in our scheduled list of courses.
The only valid observation in Dr Wilson's article is that all large universities have certain problems arising from their size: but this is the correlative of enormous range and opportunity for both students and faculty. This most students realise: a recent poll showed that almost all undergraduates on any big campus in the USA prefer this sense of opportunity to the constraint and limitations of small-scale institutions. If there are tensions in American institutions, they are largely for non-academic reasons: the debates over civil rights and Vietnam. In these areas Ber- keley is not uniquely disturbed; in fact, recently I have been worried about student indifference to these matters. Some time I must also try to clarify these vexed questions from an American point of view, for your readers. However, at the moment I shall be content if your readers examine further
dispatches from the 'battlefront at Berkeley' with a grain of scepticism, as a result of some informed first-hand comment on the historical reality.
H. M. Richmond 1280 Grizzly Peak Boulevard, Berkeley, Cali- fornia 94708, USA
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