UC Berkeley Web Feature
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Ronald Reagan and Nancy Reagan aboard a boat in California, August, 1964
(Ronald Reagan Presidential Library)
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Ronald Reagan launched political career
using the Berkeley campus as a target
By Jeffery Kahn, NewsCenter
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8 June 2004
BERKELEY
– Ronald
Reagan launched his political career in 1966 by targeting
UC Berkeley's student peace activists, professors,
and, to a great extent, the University of California itself.
In his successful campaign for governor of California,
his first elective office, he attacked the Berkeley campus,
cementing what would remain a turbulent relationship between
Reagan and California's
leading institution for public higher education.
"This was not a happy relationship between the governor
and the university — you have to acknowledge it," recalled
Neil Smelser, who was a Berkeley professor of sociology
during the Reagan years. "As a matter of Reagan's
honest convictions but also as a matter of politics, Reagan
launched an assault on the university."
As the Vietnam War expanded and the death toll climbed,
students at Berkeley launched a determined and, at times,
confrontational attempt to stop the war with demonstrations
and protests that eventually spread to college campuses
across the country. Years later, much of the public came
to agree with the students but in 1966, those opposed to
the war were a distinct minority in America.
Candidate
Reagan
capitalized
on this.
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"Just show me one of
them Beatnik varmints."
(A political cartoon from the San Francisco Chronicle,
reprinted in Clark Kerr's "The Gold and the Blue")
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Smelser, assistant chancellor for educational development
at the time Reagan ran for office, recalled that "Reagan
took aim at the university for being irresponsible for
failing to punish these dissident students. He said, 'Get
them out of there. Throw them out. They are spoiled and
don't deserve the education they are getting. They don't
have a right to take advantage of our system of education.'"
Reagan had two themes in his first run for office. The
man who later became known as "The Great Communicator" vowed
to send "the welfare bums back to work," and "to
clean up the mess at Berkeley." The latter became
a Reagan mantra.
Earl Cheit, dean emeritus of the Haas School of Business,
was executive vice chancellor at Berkeley from 1965 to
1969. Like many at Berkeley, he remembers being at the
wrong end of Reagan's political broom.
"Incidents of campus disruption and reports about
what was going on here – often exaggerated reports– became a standard part of his campaign rhetoric," said
Cheit. "Reagan also argued that the faculty was too
permissive, or supportive, of the students. One of his
great skills was to understand popular feeling. He really
tapped into the discontent people felt about what was happening
on the campus. I have no doubt that this was a big factor
in his election as governor."
After defeating incumbent governor Edmund G. "Pat" Brown,
Reagan did not relent in his campaign to "clean up
the mess" at Berkeley.
Said Smelser, "The governor could not intervene directly
in the administration of Berkeley. The two weapons he had
were verbal abuse and the budget. He heaped a great deal
of abuse on the Berkeley campus, and particularly on liberals
and liberal faculties. He even singled out sociology and
philosophy as hotbeds. He tried to cut the budget. And,
he did get Clark Kerr fired as UC president."
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"One
for the gipper."
(A political cartoon by Bob Bastian published in Clark Kerr's "The Gold
and the Blue")
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Kerr was fired three weeks after Reagan took office. The
act was the culmination of a process that began long before,
when then-FBI director J. Edgar Hoover first tried to persuade
Kerr to crack down hard on Berkeley students involved in
the 1964 Free Speech Movement, which Hoover alleged was
a front for communist sympathizers. Unable to convince
Kerr, Hoover turned to gubernatorial candidate Reagan,
a rising conservative star. As revealed by a 2002 investigation
by San Francisco Chronicle reporter Seth Rosenfeld, Reagan
and the FBI interacted throughout the campaign about dealing
with Kerr and the student protesters.
Cheit said Kerr's firing galvanized the campus. "The
firing of Clark Kerr really caught the attention of everybody
on campus and to a great extent unified the students and
faculty. It was a very emotional time. Most fundamentally,
because of the constitutional independence of the university,
the idea that a governor could force out a president was
very disturbing."
John Douglass, a historian and senior research fellow
at UC Berkeley's Center for Studies in Higher Education,
faulted Reagan for a "failure to understand the importance
of the University of California in the life of the citizens
of this state." Douglass said that after his election
in 1966, Reagan proposed cutting the UC budget by 10 percent
across the board. He also proposed that, for the first
time, UC charge tuition and suggested that Berkeley sell
collections of rare books in the Bancroft Library. By and
large, Douglass said, these measures were not approved
by the Legislature, but lesser funding cuts were imposed.
Ray Colvig, the chief public information officer for the
campus during these years, said the notion to sell rare
books was quite telling. "Reagan did not think you
needed a great university supported by public funding," said
Colvig. "He thought if you wanted a world-class university,
let the students pay for it. The idea of selling rare books
went along with that."
In some sense, said Colvig, "Reagan's bark was worse
than his bite about the university. He wanted to establish
a special process to select faculty in several disciplines.
In other words, he wanted to set a political standard for
appointing faculty members. This idea was widely opposed,
and it went away. Often, nothing came of these things.
But sometimes it did. The financial cuts were real, and
they introduced new special fees that, in effect, were
the beginning of charging tuition."
May 1969 was the low point in the relationship between
Reagan and UC Berkeley. Students and activists had begun
an attempt to transform a vacant plot of university property
into "People's Park." Attempting to head off
the activists, the university engaged a fencing company,
accompanied by 250 police, to erect a chain-link fence
around the land at 4 a.m. on May 15, 1969. Five hours later,
a rally was called on Sproul Plaza to protest the action.
Resource,
a current UC Berkeley reference
guide for new students, relates the story of how Reagan
intervened, sending
in the National Guard:
"The rally, which drew 3,000 people, soon turned
into a riot, as the crowd moved down Telegraph (Ave.) towards
the park. That day, known as Bloody Thursday, three students
suffered punctured lungs, another a shattered leg, 13 people
were hospitalized with shotgun wounds, and one police officer
was stabbed. James Rector, who was watching the riot from
a rooftop, was shot by police gunfire; he died four days
later.
"At the request of the Berkeley mayor, Governor
Ronald Reagan declared a state of emergency and sent 2,200
National Guard troops into Berkeley. Some of these guardsmen
were even Cal students. At least one young man had participated
in the riots, been shot at by police, gotten patched up,
and then returned to his dorm to find a notice to report
for guard duty. In the following days approximately 1,000
people were arrested: 200 were booked for felonies, and
500 were taken to Santa Rita jail."
From the standpoint of campus administrators attempting
to manage the situation, Reagan's actions were counterproductive.
Said Cheit, "The campus and other academics were
appalled that the Guard came in, that tear gas had been
sprayed on campus from a helicopter. Sending in the Guard
was quite peremptory. There were local and campus police
available. The Guard, in some ways, inflamed the situation.
Within the administration, this was considered provocative.
To the outside observer, it might have appeared justifiable.
To those of us who were trying to control the situation,
it seemed to exacerbate it."
Cheit added that, ultimately, "Reagan's political
career owed a lot to the people who used the campus as
a radical base for political activity. It is an irony that
helped elect him."
The late Clark Kerr agreed with that assessment. In
The
Free Speech Movement: Reflections on Berkeley in the 1960s
,
an anthology of essays edited by Robert Cohen and Reginald
Zelnik, Cohen discusses Kerr's essay for the volume. Kerr
details the progress he had made in expanding free speech
at the university and ending the "repressive 1950s" at
Berkeley, documenting his battles with the Regents and
the Legislature in defense of the principle of free speech.
"In the Kerr narrative," writes Cohen, "it
is the FSM [Free Speech Movement] and its heirs that set
in motion the political backlash that allowed Ronald Reagan
to capture the California governorship by promising to 'clean
up the mess in Berkeley.' According to Kerr, the
FSM's significance rests less with its role in the emergence
of the New Left than with its displacing his careful, effective
liberalism by a reckless mass movement that inadvertently
facilitated the ascendancy of the New Right."
Ronald Reagan is an icon of conservatives. He will be buried
on June 11.