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"Everything I Love." After giving Heyns a standing ovation, the faculty heard the student-government president, Dan Mclntosh, concede that the strike should end. Various faculty members then rose to make comments. Biochemist John B. Neilands, noting that the use of police had injected much of the emotionalism into the dispute, called the police's conduct a "brutal and obscene sight." Chemistry Professor George Pimentel countered that only civil law could deal with "demagoguery, vituperation and threats," said that "everything I love at Berkeley is at stake." Electrical Engineering Professor Charles Susskind compared the agitators with "the Nazi students whom I saw in the 1930s harassing deans, hounding professors and their families." The senate finally voted 795 to 28 to deplore the use of external police "except in extreme emergency" but to urge an immediate end of the strike and "to affirm our confidence in the chancellor's leadership."
Next day the university regents, summoned to a meeting near Oakland airport, heard Heyns cite the faculty vote as an indication of growing "solidarity on the campus." Regent Edwin W. Pauley, a Los Angeles oil millionaire, demanded the firing of all faculty members who took part in the strike—chiefly teaching assistants. But he drew only three votes. The regents instead ruled that teachers would be fired in future if they failed to "meet their assigned duties." They also voted to "regret the necessity" for the use of police but to "reject the view that a campus should be a haven for unlawful conduct."
Neatly Isolated. Meanwhile, the student government, the teaching assistants union, the strike committee and the student newspaper all abandoned the strike. The Daily Californian argued that "the strike must not continue because it cannot win." Students were putting their trust in Heyns, it said, while warning that "he can look forward to a long period of conflict if he sells the student demonstrators down the river."
Mario Savio, who had been neatly isolated by Heyns, nevertheless claimed victory. Crying "student power," he contended that the regents could have taken reprisals, but were "too damn scared." Now, students and labor, symbolized by the assistants union, had been united, and they could close down "the great and profitable university" if it did not "concede to our demands." Actually, the new fuss had alerted most of Berkeley to the fact that the freedom of students and faculty—and the intellectual luster of the entire university—would certainly suffer unless order is maintained. The nonstudent thrill seekers had unwittingly strengthened the hand of Chancellor Heyns.