Saturday, April 30, 2011

Berkeley Protest

This was the last week of classes, and everywhere on campus you could see people on the grass enjoying the lovely spring weather:


 

Actually, those photos are not from this week.  They were taken in the first week of classes, back in January! Year-round good weather is one of the burdens that Californians must endure.

On Wednesday afternoon I walked past 25 or so students lying down or sitting on the grass. There was one indication that this group was not there to get a suntan: protest signs were lying on the grass nearby. I found out later that these students, who included 12 hunger strikers, were protesting  the proposed merger of three academic departments: Ethnic Studies, Gender and Women's Studies, and African American Studies. I am not sure what the combined department would be called: EGA studies?

An hour later I walked past the students again.  They were still lying on the grass, with more people standing behind them, as a retired ethnic studies professor read a speech to them:


Unfortunately for the protesters, they did not attract a large crowd, as you can see from a wider view:


The reason for merging the departments is due to very severe budget cuts that UC Berkeley faces from the state of California. The Daily Cal, which started reporting on the budgetary impact on social science departments in early March, had a couple of articles about the protests this week. An editorial yesterday in the newspaper concluded that this student protest was a failure, with goals that are neither realistic nor representative of the student body.

Was the protest realistic? A letter written in mid-March by students majoring in the three departments rejected every proposed cut in their departments in its entirety, as if there is no budget crisis at all. In the letter they wrote "Please note that we are not writing this letter to demand special treatment," but demanding that every proposed cut be completely reversed seems like special treatment. I found that letter and the administration's reply on a common blog page that people from the three departments created in response to the suggestion that they merge. It is ironic that the departments would criticize their merger through a joint website.

Was the protest representative of the student body? Certainly by attendance it was not.  Either few students care deeply about this or the students who do care did a poor job of promoting their protest. It's not for a lack of potential supporters. According to the Berkeley online catalog there are around 90 undergraduate degrees available at Berkeley and almost a quarter of them are in different kinds of "studies":

African American Studies
American Studies
Asian Studies
Asian American Studies
Celtic Studies
Chicano Studies
Conservation and Resource Studies
Dance and Performance Studies
Development Studies
Dutch Studies
Ethnic Studies
Gender and Women's Studies
Italian Studies
Latin American Studies
Legal Studies
Media Studies
Middle Eastern Studies
Native American Studies
Near Eastern Studies
Peace and Conflict Studies
Religious Studies
South and Southeast Asian Studies
Theater and Performance Studies


Admittedly students concentrating in Dutch Studies might not immediately see a kinship with classmates in Ethnic Studies, Gender and Women's Studies, or African American Studies, but I think we can all pick a few of the "studies" majors which would sense a close bond.

In what I've read about the proposed merger (which is not the first time something like this has been proposed for "studies" majors at Berkeley), I haven't seen any strong arguments about why the merger is bad from a scholarly point of view. Berkeley has had successful department mergers before. In the 1980s there were around twenty separate departments in different aspects of biology, and this diffusion of resources was starting to hurt the reputation of biology compared to other top schools. According to
a case study, in 1981 "some of the buildings that housed biological laboratories were so dilapidated that they harbored insects and small mammals who were not employed by the University, and who were not part of its research activities." After about a decade of work, Berkeley merged its biology faculty into 3 departments (integrative biology, molecular and cellular biology, and plane and microbial biology). That experience has been written up in some interviews.

On the website College Confidential I found comments by Berkeley students which indicated that, whether deserved or not, the "studies" majors do have a reputation problem. Here are two of the comments (click on the images to read them, unless you have good eyesight):


Students at UC Santa Cruz are now asking for an Ethnic Studies major there.  What do you think the chances are of that happening anytime soon?

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