A notable yearning of today's college students is for broad courses that cut a swath across academic disciplines and focus on major social issues. One problem, however, is that there is rarely a niche for such freewheeling scholars in the modern, highly compartmentalized university. Berkeley Lecturer Ernest Becker, 42, who attracted overflow crowds into a 900-seat auditorium for a wide-ranging course embracing religion, anthropology and sociology, was reminded of that disturbing fact last month when Cal's anthropology department failed to rehire him.
At Berkeley, students have a knack for getting what they want. And what they clearly want is Ernest Becker. Calling him a "stimulating" teacher, a "fantastic speaker," and a man who "makes you go out of his class thinking," several hundred of his students last week staged a two-hour "teach in" after one of his lectures. They also organized a march on the chancellor's office, presented a petition signed by 2,000 students demanding that Becker be retained. When the anthropology department faculty insisted that they had neither the necessary funds nor the staff allotment to keep Becker on, students then simply took the matter into their own hands. The Berkeley student government coolly voted to spend $13,000 out of its own treasury to pay Becker next year to take over a newly created "Visiting Scholar Chair."
Although Becker defies pigeonholing, his scholarly credentials are impressive —and he is admired by many Berkeley professors. He has a doctorate in cultural anthropology from Syracuse, served on the staff of the U.S. embassy in Paris, taught at the State University of New York for three years before moving to Berkeley in 1965. He has four books to his credit, including a study called The Revolution in Psychiatry that California Social Psychiatrist Martin Hoffman rates as "one of the most important theoretical works written in psychiatry in the last quarter-century." Becker has also written a primer on Zen and a critique of U.S. education that the Daily Californian praised as "a manifesto for academic revolution."
Quietly pleased by his classroom support, Becker is weighing the unusual offer against bids for his services from other schools around the country. Although impressed by such overwhelming student support for a good teacher, Berkeley officials are reluctant to interfere with the faculty's exclusive right to select members of its staff. If no room for Becker can be found in any of Cal's departments, the university apparently has no objection to his staying on to give noncredit courses, as what one official calls "an educational consultant" to the students.