It may soon take a computer to catalogue all the books and reports, mainly by outsiders, about the crisis of the University of California at Berkeley in 1964-65. Last week an official committee of insiders from the Berkeley faculty published the most practical report yet. It is a candidly critical 228-page analysis of what makes Berkeley buzz and what must be done if professors are to "rediscover the youthful spirit" and reach those many students who are "dissatisfied with their own unmotivated existence."
The report, compiled after a ten-month study by nine professors under the leadership of Medievalist Charles Muscatine, proposes 42 changes designed to maintain Berkeley's ranking as the nation's best public university campus. They pinpoint the ways in which a huge campus can generate what the report terms "a rich pluralism" in education, yet "preserve its integrity and stability while accepting change."
Latent Alienation. The report assumes that the campus-rocking Free Speech Movement was an event with a meaning worth discovering. One of its discoveries was that 80% of the students generally agreed with the F.S.M. goals of greater political independence and less impersonal education. About half felt strongly enough to boycott classes, although 50% said they opposed some of the F.S.M. tactics. "The ease with which a majority of students could find, however ephemerally, a commitment and a moral drive in opposing the university administration is evidence of a widespread, if latent, alienation," the report says. Furthermore, the committee found, Berkeley's brightest students were most active in the protests. "Whatever judgment is made of their behavior, Berkeley has to cherish this kind of student."
Conscience v. Status. The report says that most students express general satisfaction with Cal, yet even these "cannot isolate themselves from nonconformist attitudes and ideas: they react positively or negatively." The nonconformists believe that most American adults, including their teachers, are "sacrificing conscience to the quest for status" and that "a man must fight hypocrisy to live in a moral world." Yet their own obsession with "keeping cool" is also hypocritical, argues the committee. Their desire for "instant love, instant poetry, instant psychoanalysis and instant mysticism" is just a "form of escape from hard work," clothed in a "quasi-moral garb." The university must take these students seriously since "their picture of the world is not entirely a mirage"-but it must emphasize that "there are no short cuts to learning."