Chapter 3 San Francisco State College Striking for Community

Defining Community Involvement at SFSC

In the first part of the 1960s, student activists at SFSC agreed: the institution should be more involved in the community. But what was the goal of community involvement, both for the students and the institution? Jimmy Garrett, the Black Student Union student president, understood community involvement as a form of political education. This belief was rooted in an education that occurred more in the streets and rural backroads of Black communities than in the classroom. Growing up in Dallas, Texas, Garrett witnessed the mass demonstrations by the NAACP Youth Council at the Texas State Fair. The experience led him to become actively involved in the NAACP Youth Council and participate in the sit-ins and freedom rides in Houston. He also joined SNCC, serving as a Freedom Summer volunteer for the Mississippi Summer Project. Like others of his generational cohort, he was inspired by the Freedom School model, with its emphasis on readings in Black culture and history and its connection to community organizing in the Black community. He believed the Freedom School represented a new model of community-based Black studies at the university.4 At SFSC, Garrett argued that the goal of community involvement was part of the broader process of political consciousness raising that connected the Black cultural resources to the experience of organizing in the community.

In his first year as president of the Black Student Union, Garrett transformed the community-based tutorial program—an institutionally supported effort run by the Associated Students—into a hub for political recruitment and organizing. He connected the tutorial to the institution’s Educational Opportunity Program, a modest affirmative action program that waived admissions criteria for 2 percent of incoming students. The combination enabled Garrett to develop a tutorial project relevant to the community and political concerns of young Black residents in the Bay Area while also providing a channel for those students to attend higher education after high school. The recruitment of Clarence Thomas demonstrated the effectiveness of Garrett’s efforts.5 Garrett helped Thomas get into SFSC through the Educational Opportunity Program and the community tutorial. As part of his admission, Thomas participated in a Black Student Union–organized seminar that included readings by Che Guevara, Frantz Fanon, Nathan Hare, and W. E. B. Du Bois. He also engaged in community organizing in the Black community. The whole experience, Thomas believed, exemplified “Black Power in action.”6

In contrast to Garrett’s efforts with the Black Student Union, Karen Duncan’s ideas of community involvement were defined in terms of making academic education more personally and socially relevant to a student’s education. Duncan interpreted the Freedom Summer in much the same way many other White volunteers did: as a commitment to public service. She also believed it was a commitment that was missing in the regular curriculum. While enrolled at SFSC, Duncan was a member of the National Student Association, where she helped develop the “community action curriculum.” The goal of her efforts was to encourage university faculty and administrators to develop programs that provided students with “direct experience” in existing community organizations while also offering “valued assistance to a desiring community.”7 Duncan cited the University of Chicago Public Affairs Program as the ideal model. The program allowed students to work temporarily in organizations involved in problems of public concern while still receiving academic credit.

The differences between Garett and Duncan paralleled those among activists associated with SFSC’s community involvement programs. Jo Ann Ooiman, a fellow Freedom Summer volunteer, supported Duncan’s framing of the “community action curriculum.” Ooiman believed that the Freedom Summer was a valuable form of political experiential education. Yet, she was critical of a common refrain during the summer, what she described as an effort to make everything “unacademic.” As a result, she worried, the treatment of academic as a dirty word had led her to teach “lies half the summer” and “propaganda the other half.”8 Working within the Bay Area Friends of SNCC, Ooiman believed that what was missing from the movement’s education was a deeper commitment to academic forms of inquiry that would serve as an aid to community organizing while also endowing a student’s education with political meaning.

Others associated with SNCC had reservations about efforts to connect the university to community organizing in the Bay Area. Jim Nixon and Tom Ramsay, two Bay Area SNCC activists, were skeptical of efforts that defined community involvement as a way to enhance academic education. As both Nixon and Ramsay argued, many “SNCC people will say to the student, ‘who are you; what are you doing; what are you in this for? You don’t have the same stake in this as most of us do; you can pull out of being born in a ghetto.’” Ramsay wanted “students who will come into the community as people who are able to go to work,” rather than “kids who are ‘learning’” as part of a university-sponsored program.9 Ramsay’s concern was that students who did not have a racial or cultural connection to the community or could not empathize with the conditions in the community would just use the experience of working with the poor as a means for their academic education and that the experience would reinforce rather than challenge economic and racial inequities.

Some students deeply engaged in the planning and funding of community involvement programs at SFSC did not see the positions of Garrett and Duncan or those that emerged between students and community organizers as inherently at odds. Rather, they believed there was a middle-ground interpretation of community involvement for students, one that balanced the needs of the student, political organizer, and resident. Michael Vozick was a student activist who participated in the Route 40 freedom rides in Maryland. At SFSC, he was the Associated Students president and played a prominent role in developing SFSC’s portfolio of student-supported community involvement projects. He believed that students and community organizers needed to see beyond a simple dichotomy between the college and the community. “The real difficulty is in trying to work inside and outside at the same time,” he argued, “the really radical experiment is trying to be both places.”10 Vozick’s view included the other goal of community involvement programs. Such programs were created not just to engage students in the process of community organizing or service but also to transform SFSC as an educational institution.

Indeed, even as students defined the goal of community involvement differently, they agreed that building connections to the area would transform the college. Both Garrett’s and Duncan’s critiques of the university shared a common theme: the university’s curriculum and approach to education were irrelevant to community issues. At the university, Garrett argued, “intellectual curiosity” was too often “‘channeled’ into academics and abstractions so that real questions aren’t related to the lives of students.”11 Likewise, Duncan argued that the modern university had two interrelated issues: the irrelevancy of education to community life and the lack of involvement in community issues by students and faculty. Duncan explained that education at the university rested upon a theory that assumed “that experts create knowledge and teachers transmit it and that students are the passive objects of that transmission—i.e. the receivers of ‘the Truth.’” She argued that this dichotomy tended to serve an institution “that wants to reflect rather than evaluate the norms of society” and acted as a filter that allowed “certain ‘qualified’ people to receive certain ‘important’ information.”12 Even Ramsay, who expressed reservations about linking SFSC to SNCC, shared the critique of the institution. Prior to joining SNCC full-time as an organizer, he was a student at SFSC, where he helped develop the Experimental College that offered an alternative approach to education.

The critique of the university served as a common thread across the different ideas of community involvement and also garnered support from faculty members at SFSC. Fred Thalheimer, a professor of sociology, and Eric Solomon, a professor of English, believed that student efforts in the community offered a means to reimagine the curriculum at SFSC. “Students working in the community,” Thalheimer noted, “were returning to campus with serious questions about the relevancy of their education.” In Thalheimer’s view, the problem was that the structure of the university—both the organization of intellectual life into disciplines and the administrative process—limited experimentation in the curriculum. Indeed, Thalheimer redefined student efforts in the community, seeing the experiences not as being confined to student affairs but as central to the core curriculum of the college. “Student activity off the campus had been regarded as extra-curricular,” but, Thalheimer argued, “many students found that the bulk of their educational experiences were happening outside the confines of the institution.” Thalheimer continued, “If students were in learning situations off the campus, then the institution should recognize that activity as a valid, co-curricular activity and provide assistance and support.”13

Thalheimer’s discussion of the educational value of community involvement was part of a broader proposal cowritten with Garrett for developing an institute for community involvement. The core idea of the proposal was to expand and organize the various campus-community programs run by the students into a single institute. In doing so, students envisioned reorienting the university to make it more “responsive to individual human needs” and provide outlets that “enable individuals to effectively confront and engage the critical problems of American culture and society.”14 SFSC president Summerskill supported the new community involvement program. “They wanted a different society and they were prepared to work for it,” Summerskill believed, and “they should have all the constructive opportunity they could handle.”15 Like the faculty members, he understood community involvement as being in line with the liberal spirit of the American college and intellectual life. As Summerskill noted, students wanted to understand the world “not only through analysis but through experience.”16

This was more than a fleeting proposal. Summerskill provided university support for a two-day conference on experimental studies and community involvement programs with a focus on the relationship of the college to local and national issues. What emerged from the initial proposal and conference was the Community Service Institute (CSI), which served as a link between the different community efforts. The CSI was a joint operation between the Associated Students, the governing body of students, and the School of Education. Through campus seminars and planning sessions that involved local residents as instructors, students would create a “basis of cooperation” of different student organizations and community efforts.

In its first two years of operation, the CSI was led by Sharon Gold, a graduate student in the humanities at SFSC. Prior to attending SFSC, Gold worked as an SNCC volunteer in 1965, teaching in a Freedom School in Selma, Alabama. Gold made two important theoretical and practical interventions that addressed the internal tensions within student efforts. The first intervention was reconciling the educational goals of the students with the political goals of the organizers or residents in the community. In explaining the purpose of the CSI, Gold emphasized the educational value of community participation but underscored that such involvement must be directed at broader political struggles. “It would assume that participants in the process of the Institute would accept the responsibility to use their intellectual resources not only to analyze and describe contemporary problems,” Gold argued, “but also to attempt to solve them” through student involvement and community organizing.17

By combining formal education with political activism, it would, Gold believed, reconstruct the relationship between the college and the community. Residents had “a great deal of hostility to college students and other members of the academic community,” and many had told them that they “resent having outsiders tell them what their problems are and how to solve them. They do not want ‘experts’ to take over leadership of their organizations because then the organizations no longer belong to them.” Moreover, Gold continued, community members “do not like to be studied particularly when they do not know who wants the information and for what purpose it will be used. Often, in fact, this information is used by agencies for purposes which are viewed by the residents as inimical to their interests.” Gold thus envisioned the CSI as a way to “alter this distorted relationship” by involving community residents in the operation of the center, which would include facilitating seminars and determining how the resources of the university would be used to address issues in the community.18

The second intervention centered identity as a means to enhance rather than inhibit the educational process. In the context of broader debates concerning the role of White activists in the civil rights movement and the transcendence of Black Nationalist and Third World politics, Gold was sensitive to the relationship between racial identity and student involvement in different communities. Indeed, the emphasis on community was not a universalist claim; rather, it was about the particular. The key student groups who organized community involvement projects within the CSI—the Black Student Union, La Raza, the Philippine American Collegiate Endeavor, and Inter-Collegiate Chinese for Social Action—prioritized their cultural and racial identity. At the same time, the CSI was run through the Associated Students, SFSC’s student government whose leadership was predominantly White.

Informed by the particular context of the diverse student groups at SFSC, Gold concluded that students had to work in communities that aligned with their racial backgrounds, believing it would enable students of color to “acquire the skills, information and perceptions necessary to work effectively” and “to assist residents in their efforts to gain more control over the quality of their daily lives.” She also argued that the emphasis on working in communities that aligned with a student’s cultural and racial background served a similar purpose for White students. Community involvement would “provide a process of reeducation for white students so that they may experientially understand the culture and society for which they are responsible.” In particular, she believed the experiences would provide White students with “skills and abilities necessary to confront the inhumanity, racism and oppression” perpetuated by members in their own communities.19 The underlying assumption was that students would be better equipped with insider knowledge and cultural empathy, enabling them to understand the concerns of the community more intimately.

Gold developed a flexible philosophy of community involvement that was attuned to the racial and cultural identity of the student while still committed both to the political project of community organizing and transforming the SFSC as a community college. The philosophical flexibility in the CSI attracted wide-ranging support among students at SFSC. In 1967, when the CSI went into full operation, over four hundred students worked in twenty-two different communities across San Francisco. One of those students who participated in the summer session was Wendy Alfsen. A White student from rural Southern California, Alfsen attended SFSC because of its urban setting and diverse student population. Conversations with La Raza president Roger Alverado during her first year inspired her to get involved in the CSI, where she worked in the South Market Community Center. Self-identifying as a “third generation activist” of the 1960s, Alfsen developed a political awareness through her conversations with the residents of South Market, especially around issues concerning housing discrimination and poverty. The CSI encouraged students like Alfsen to see the work beyond community service and learning as part of a broader social movement attempting to transform American society. “It was all about social change,” Alfsen explained, both at the community and institutional level.20

A Financial “Strike” against Community Involvement

The program mission of students’ community involvement program—especially the explicit focus on challenging power structures—concerned state-level policy makers in California. This was not a perceived concern, either. Indeed, the new politics of higher education in California further constrained what was already a financially limited set of community involvement programs. At the same time that students began to expand community involvement programs, new policies in the California system of higher education began to curtail those very efforts. In 1966, California elected Ronald Reagan as governor. Part of Reagan’s campaign focused on what he saw as the political leniency of university presidents and administrators, especially in response to the 1964 sit-in at the University of California, Berkeley.21 Reagan’s 1968 state higher education budget sought to constrain student efforts in the community. Chancellor Glenn Dumke outlined a new funding proposal that aligned with Reagan’s budget. Two key elements of that budget concerned student activists at SFSC. The first involved funding cuts to the Educational Opportunity Program. In 1968, Reagan struck $250,000 from the program, and his next budget did not include the $2.5 million recommended for it to operate.22 The second expanded the authority of the chancellor, who had final say in how certain funds for student programming could be used by students, even if the funds were raised by students themselves.

Students active in the community involvement programs expressed concern about the potential impact of what became known as the Dumke plan. Russell Bass, the president of Associated Students in the fall of 1968, argued that Dumke’s funding proposal “effectively eliminates or curtails student . . . autonomy.” Alverado expressed concern about its impact on students’ various efforts in the community. He explained that “the proposal takes away from the college whatever autonomy it may have had in its own activities—not just fiscal authority but authority over the kinds of activities it may sponsor as well.”23

Alverado and Bass were not alone. Other students were worried that the new policy was intentionally designed to limit student activities in the community. The policy, SFSC students argued, directly challenged the needs of student organizations and their autonomy. “The sustained growth of student participation in their education and communities over the past few years,” they wrote, required “increasing necessity for greater decentralization and sharing of institutional controls by those individuals directly involved in the college.” However, the new regulation was “an extremely sophisticated and well-organized plan to thwart this present trend of student activism by instituting a system of hierarchical decision making and centralized policy.”24

University leaders likewise expressed concerns about the new policy. Even though Summerskill provided institutional support, it mostly came in the form of access to campus spaces. Despite his advocacy with other college presidents in California, Summerskill was never granted more money or institutional flexibility with how the money was spent. The grant proposal to the Carnegie Foundation was not awarded either. When Reagan was elected governor, Summerskill interpreted his higher education policy efforts as a deliberate scheme to expand financial control over the institution. “The trustees and the chancellor,” he concluded, “wanted to keep tight control of expenditures.” In particular, he noted, the trustees and chancellor were concerned that “state money would be spent for programs that might be politically unacceptable.”25 Given these limitations, Summerskill resigned in early 1968, blaming the increasing volatile campus situation on state interference. In his resignation, he underscored the lack of support—and funding flexibility—for community involvement programs. “In the midst of a city with a human rights revolution,” he explained, “it is impossible when you do not have the discretion to spend $1000 here or $20,000 there to solve a problem.”26

Robert Smith, a professor of education at SFSC, was appointed as Summerskill’s temporary replacement. Like Summerskill, Smith engaged the students, seeking ways to constructively expand the programs. Smith met with Bass and Alverado, both of whom highlighted the language in the proposed Dumke plan. The budget, Bass and Alverado argued in their meeting with Smith, set limits on what students could do on campus and in the community. “The proposal specifies that no student funds can be allocated to a student program or an activity if that program deviates from Trustee policy,” Bass noted, because the report sets up “the Chancellor’s Office as interpreter in this matter and requires his specific approval to any program or activity using student organization funds.” Bass called the phrase “in accordance with college policy” the “catch-22” of the document.27 Believing these changes were the results of political pressures in Sacramento, Bass argued that the proposal was intended to provoke students. “The trustees are inciting the students to riot,” Bass argued. “The pattern of events since July bears that out, and this proposal is consistent with that direction.”28

Student concerns proved prescient. After learning about the budget cuts and the limits on student funds, the Black Student Union and the Third World Liberation Front, a coalition of student organizations who helped run the CSI, went on strike on November 6, 1968. The tipping point for the strike was the firing of George Murray, the graduate assistant who helped oversee the Educational Opportunity Program. In addition to the rehiring of Murray, the Black Student Union and the Third World Liberation Front and its supporters demanded an increase in both the admissions of “Third World students” and funding for students’ various community involvement efforts. The students’ broader appeal—what became the demand for a School of Ethnic Studies—emphasized a program of study within the context of community and political organizing. Thousands of students refused to attend classes and occupied campus spaces and buildings. The strike garnered wide-ranging support because of student activists’ earlier efforts of coalition building around the CSI and among select faculty. With support from the Longshoremen Union and the American Federation of Teachers, the Third World Liberation Front and Black Student Union sustained the strike until March 20, 1969.

The strike knitted together student concerns about policy efforts with their belief in the educational value of activism. Indeed, students argued that the strike was a response to the administrative strike in the form of the Dumke plan against their education, both in the community and on campus. The students argued that “the real disruption of the educational process (what little there is) came from Chancellor Dumke and the Trustees, bent on crushing the black and white student programs like Tutorial, CIP, Experimental college, special admissions.”29 In their press release, student strike leaders further argued that the various measures passed to limit student autonomy and community involvement programming revealed the priorities of educational institutions. “The educational system is less concerned with freeing people,” the students wrote, “than with perpetuating a given social system, of which institutionalized racism is a functioning part.”30 Even as students refused to attend classes, they maintained throughout the strike that their education continued. Indeed, the motivating belief was that the strike itself was a form of education. SFSC students understood their organizing on campus—the sit-downs and protests as part of the strike—as expressions of their philosophy of community involvement.

The extent and scale of the strike confronted Smith with a profound institutional dilemma: What was the right response? Having met with student activists and supporting their various programs through the school of education, he saw their demands as in line with the broader experimental efforts at the college. Smith organized a convocation early in the strike, one that brought together faculty, administrators, and students to discuss the core issues on campus. The campus-wide event proved educational for the faculty. Arlene Kaplan Daniels, a professor in sociology, learned that “the student strike was not just an educational experience for young radicals; it was a serious protest over long-standing grievances.”31 One of those grievances that stood out to Thomas Kroeber, a professor of psychology, was the lack of ongoing institutional support for students’ various community involvement programs. “The student strikers made very clear,” Kroeber noted, “that the source of their energy and the focus of their work were outside the college. Their connection and interest were in the community or communities from which they had come or where they were spending most of their energies.”32 In Kroeber’s view, this conception ran counter to a traditional view of the college as an ivory tower and would make it difficult to “keep political issues from damaging the openness of their inquiry.”33 Even so, Kroeber also acknowledged that the isolation of the college did not prepare students to engage critically with the problems in the area. The problem, Kroeber concluded, was competing understandings of the public mission of the college.

What became clear from the SFSC faculty and administrator perspective was that the dilemma was more about the institution’s educational philosophy than the political actions of the students. David West, who oversaw the Educational Opportunity Program, believed the conflict came down to a question of values and the purpose of education. Although he disagreed with the tactics of some students, particularly those who turned violent as a result of the increased police presence on campus, he argued that the issue that arose came down to “‘tradition’ vs. ‘what’s right.’” Many of the students, influenced both by civil rights activism and their experiences growing up in marginalized communities, sought ways to evolve the “traditions” of education to address social or moral concerns and realize “what’s right.” Yet, West argued, “the majority of college administrators dwelled more on tradition rather accept the challenge of making the colleges and universities address themselves to the needs of the students.”34 In West’s view, university officials tended to prioritize the perceived tradition of the institution over students’ critiques of the university’s education and the institution’s relationship to the community.

Even as Smith encouraged honest deliberation about the core issues of the strike, his position was limited by the chancellor’s office. Dumke did not allow Smith to affirmatively negotiate with the students. The message from Dumke and the board of trustees was to reopen the campus. The convocation thus had a countervailing effect on the students. Without the power to negotiate and address the demands for student program autonomy, financial independence for community involvement, and programs in Black and Ethnic studies, students interpreted the convocation as a farce, leading to further frustration. This also frustrated Smith. Like Summerskill, Smith resigned due to the constraints placed on him. “I quit as president mainly,” he later reflected, “because we failed in six months of strenuous effort on the part of the administrative staff and me to get from the chancellor and the trustees the resources and kinds of decisions I felt we needed.”35

Upon the resignation of Smith, Hayakawa was selected as the new president of SFSC without the faculty selection committee. Arlene Daniels, the sociologist who participated in Smith’s convocation, interpreted the hiring of Hayakawa without faculty consent as a “clear sign that the trustees meant to run our college without campus consent.”36 Indeed, Hayakawa was responsive to the board of trustees in ways that both Summerskill and Smith were not—specifically around the use of police to force the college open. Both Summerskill and Smith utilized city police in response to student protests, but action was minimal. Summerskill believed that students had a right to political action, even if directed at the institution. “I believe,” he underscored, “that students have the right to assemble, rally, protest, teach-in, sit-in, and otherwise fight for their convictions.”37 Smith similarly believed that the use of police was for extreme situations on campus. “Our plan: use police only minimally to maintain safety and arrest lawbreakers,” he later explained, “continue to seek ways of mediating the demands, and so keep communications and decision making open through department-student meetings, convocations, and other means.”38

The differences between Summerskill and Smith and Hayakawa ultimately came down to degree of use. Both Summerskill and Smith were troubled by some actions of students—especially the minority of students who utilized violence as a form of intimidation as part of their political demands. In those situations, they called in the police. But what Summerskill and Smith interpreted as a small and rare form of political action state policy makers and Hayakawa interpreted as the dominant problem, and they used it to justify the need for an increased presence and response by the city police. In contrast to Summerskill and Smith, Hayakawa utilized city police as a primary tactic. He saw it as a means to end what he defined as student disruption and ensure that the institution returned to what he believed to be its normal function.

Under Hayakawa, the narrative of the strike changed. Foremost, Haya­kawa framed student actions as counterproductive and outside the normal function of the university. Hayakawa attracted the attention of the Reagan administration for his outspoken views on the sit-in at Berkley in 1964. “The FSM [Free Speech Movement] is clearly not interested in orderly debate and rational argument,” he wrote; “sitdowns, picketing and mass demonstrations are not forms of argument” and “are entirely out of place in the university.”39 He employed the same institutional logic in response to students at SFSC. “For the past two weeks faculty and students have engaged in a number of activities—convocations, rallies, bull sessions, etc. to confront ‘the real issues,” he noted, claiming that these are “‘educationally more relevant’ than scheduled classes.” But, he argued, “such rationalizations for evading one’s educational responsibilities will not be accepted.”40 If students understood their political actions as integral to their education, Hayakawa drew a sharp distinction between political action and education. He argued that the problem was the students’ efforts to politicize the university rather than the administrative overreach by state-level higher education officials.

Faculty supporters who took on leadership roles in the academic senate’s ad hoc committee during the strike—Jordan Churchill, Jules Grossman, Ann Paterson, and Ray Simpson—sought to maintain the focus on the educational basis of the strike and the critique of the state’s administrative control. In their state of the college address, they argued that “the crisis is founded in a series of unresolved and fundamental issues which dramatize the general failure of education to serve adequately the needs of all of the people.” The problem, however, was that the college “has yet to engage the basic issues in any profound way.” Outside of the small Educational Opportunity Program (EOP) and the CSI, they wrote, “our responses have been limited to administrative accommodation.”41

The faculty worried that the critique of the college was increasingly drowned out by the reporting on campus violence provoked by the presence of police. “Police force,” the faculty committee also wrote, “is a wholly inappropriate and ineffective response to the needs of ethnic minorities.” When police are used “to protect and continue a situation seen by students as a determined and continuing denial of rights,” they argued, “police force serves to influence feeling, harden attitudes and to encourage vandalism and violence according to opportunity.” A small cohort of students did take advantage of the situation by using the presence of the police to highlight the repressive response of the institution. However, their actions—including raiding classes, setting off bombs, and slashing tires—proved counterproductive to the goals of the strike. As a result, the faculty worried, “the basic problems are obscured by violence and the reactions to violence.” They asserted that an “immediate resolution of conflict demands acknowledgement that violence is not the fundamental issue, but rather that profound educational issues have yet to be confronted by the college.”42

The faculty members’ appeal fell on deaf ears. Outside the college, the educational issues were lost to the narrative in the press, which largely adopted Hayakawa’s logic that the students were the cause of violence and a disruption to the college. Most reporting on the strike put the blame on students from the Black Student Union and the Third World Liberation Front, creating an artificial distinction between students involved in the Third World Liberation Front and students in the Associated Students. A report by Ron Moskowitz for the San Francisco Chronicle presented students involved in the CSI and Experimental College as the “good guys” who worked constructively through the institution, as opposed to the “bad guys” of SDS and the Black Student Union. In a letter to the Chronicle, students from the CSI and Experimental College wrote that Moskowitz’s framing was a “vicious distortion,” arguing that such interpretations misconstrued students’ shared critique of the modern university.43 Other reports interviewed students from a small organization called the Silent Majority Against Revolutionary Tactics, or SMART. Connected to other campus organizations in the Bay Area, the group called for the arrest of student radicals, the reopening of the university, and the maintenance of “qualification standards” for admission to SFSC. Reagan’s support, the narrative in prominent media outlets, and the presence of SMART substantiated the views of Hayakawa, who largely saw the various efforts of student activists as outside the university. Alex Forman, an SFSC student striker, believed the more important question that grew out of the student movement and strike at SFSC had been lost. “The question,” he explained, “was what was the campus being used for? What were the resources used for?”

Administering Community Involvement

In the aftermath of the strike, Hayakawa recast student commitments to the community. Shaped by a Cold War logic, he interpreted students’ efforts as akin to those of earlier Russian revolutionaries. It was a “sentimental identification with the downtrodden,” he believed, “just like the idealization of the peasant among Russian student revolutionaries in the early years of this century.” In framing their efforts as similar to those of Russian student revolutionaries, Hayakawa argued that student efforts in the community were a cover for what he deemed to be their revolutionary aspirations. “This sympathy with the underdog,” he explained, “gives a factitious moral base to justify their outrageous behavior.” He contrasted what he defined as the revolutionary minority with the “mass” of students who he believed genuinely were committed to serving the community. “The majority of students also identify with the underdog,” Hayakawa wrote, emphasizing that “the seriousness of their concern with social problems is one of the wonderful characteristics.” But he believed that seriousness was easily manipulated. “It is this seriousness,” he argued, “that makes them susceptible to revolutionary propaganda, with the result that many young people who genuinely believe in democracy are often led around by those who do not.” Hayakawa thus focused his efforts on promoting forms of community involvement that he believed genuinely identified with the underdog to help combat the “revolutionary” fervor of other student groups.44

Blaming the problem on a small cohort of “revolutionaries” influencing those truly committed to serving the community, Hayakawa believed that the role of SFSC was to develop new programs in community involvement that provided a genuine civic education for students. Indeed, like other presidents, Hayakawa argued that students misunderstood the legal mechanics and civic processes of political institutions in the United States. Despite the fact that leading activists at SFSC had been deeply involved in a variety of efforts, most expansively the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, Hayakawa believed the students did not understand “democratic processes.” He argued that student unrest “lies in the fact that too small a segment of our population has availed itself of similar opportunities—at school board meetings, in city council deliberations, before regulatory commissions with state and federal legislative committees.” The task ahead, he believed, was for SFSC to develop programs that allowed students to understand those processes and “build a faith among the young in those processes as vehicles for solving social and human problems.”45

Under the Reagan administration and the Dumke plan, Hayakawa also had new administrative power to determine appropriate forms of student involvement in the community. In the aftermath of the strike, William W. Harkness, the new dean of student activities, sent out a packet of materials to the incoming students for the fall of 1969 that made clear that certain activities were off-limits in the context of the university. “Any organization with a national, state, or local group shall not be recognized if the parent (or otherwise related) organization requires the local group to support a specific position in political, economic, or social issues which contravenes College polices,” Harkness emphasized in the letter. The administration framed this policy in the language of action and the pursuit of truth at the university, but with a caveat that maintained administrative power over student funds. “This college will encourage all forms of action,” except those that interfere “with the essential functions of the academic community.”46

One of the major changes was how student efforts were funded. After the strike, the university created a community service fund. The purpose of the fund was to develop “a positive approach to dealing with campus (unrest) problems.”47 The funding for student-sponsored programs had to align with Title 5 of the California Administrative Code, in particular Section 42659, which specified what “programs of cultural enrichment and community service” were appropriate and inappropriate on campus as determined by the chancellor’s office. When students attempted to fund new efforts at SFSC, they were restricted by the administration’s interpretations of the Education Code.48

In the context of expanded administrative power, SFSC continued to promote community involvement, but in a way that aligned with Hayakawa’s vision of good civics. In addition to requesting input on governance and the mission of the student activities department, Harkness also asked for input on efforts to “work out ways to involve more students in relevant volunteer service both on campus and in the community.” The emphasis on volunteer service was reflective of Hayakawa’s civic worldview. He promoted national service as a solution to campus unrest. In the context of SFSC, this took the form of Operation Outreach, which focused on engaging students in efforts to “extend our educational services into parts of the central city not now served by our College.” Hayakawa saw the program as a means to also benefit the community by providing skills training. “I believe that it should include many kinds of courses enabling working people to upgrade their skills and earning power,” he explained.49 In both ways, Hayakawa promoted community involvement and campus-community connections without the political organizing goals of students’ earlier efforts.

Hayakawa’s Operation Outreach created an institutional wedge in the collective efforts of the student groups. The student-led CSI balanced formal education, community service, and political organizing as part of the institute’s philosophy of community involvement. Hayakawa’s efforts split education and service from politics. Hayakawa sought to address the critiques of some students by promoting volunteer service as a way to update the curriculum of the college. The students, he rightly noted, were “tired of preparing for life” and demanded programs that enabled them to “tackle real problems, not classroom exercises.”50 By providing the opportunity to tutor or volunteer in the community, Hayakawa sought to address one of the major critiques by students. At the same time, the focus on volunteer service, especially tutoring services, also drew in students who were supportive of the strike. The students in the Philippine-American Collegiate Endeavor, La Raza, and InterCollegiate Chinese for Social Action all had developed distinct tutoring programs in their communities as part of their political organizing efforts. Participants in these groups continued to engage in community tutoring. But, in the context of Hayakawa’s Operation Outreach, students had to abide by the new institutional policy against political organizing and activism. What was a broad coalition was thus fragmented by SFSC’s new institutionally sponsored program in the community.

The institutional responses and new programs constrained student activists’ more ambitious vision of SFSC as a community college. In the 1970s, students recognized that the key components of their earlier efforts—including the emphases on community knowledge, political action, and other elements—had largely been expunged from the institutionally supported activities. Tom Williams, who helped lead the Black Student Union with Garrett, attempted to resurrect the tutorial project along the lines of earlier practices associated with the CSI. The board of directors voted to deny Williams’s request to use the tutorial program, arguing that the Associated Students had already reactivated the community tutorial in line with the new protocols of the university. In his explanation of the board’s decision, Harkness argued that the Associated Students, under Henry Lehman, oversaw the tutorial program and had “proprietary right to such a name and program.” Run by Gilbert Robinson, an English faculty member hired after the strike, the new tutorial model was based on VISTA and related federal volunteer programs. It focused more on professional development of the students and charity goals than political empowerment.51 As outlined in the new handbook, the Associated Students tutorial program provided “the student considering a career in education with an introduction to the field while also providing him or her with the practical extramural experience essential to acquiring a teaching position in a tight job market.”52 Harkness encouraged Williams to fold his project into the institutionally supported one. But, as Williams argued, the program was drastically different than what he and other students had envisioned in initially developing the tutorial project and attempting to revive it in the 1970s. Williams was not alone. Solomon, a professor of English who supported the efforts of CSI and the Black Student Union, took a position at SFSC because the college had many “exciting educational ventures” that sparked student interest. But institutional responses “put out the flame,” and as a result, “the spark went too.”53

The university also created the volunteer bureau, a clearinghouse for referrals and information on student volunteer placements. In 1976, close to eight hundred students worked in the volunteer bureau, a reflection of continued student interest in connecting education to community work. Like the tutoring program, the bureau contrasted with earlier student efforts like the CSI. It was run by Bob Westwood, who viewed the bureau as a form of charity work that supplemented students’ education. Westwood believed volunteerism provided students with opportunities to build their professional profile. “It’s not only rewarding but students gain experience from it and it’s fun,” Woodward explained. “It’s set up to serve the individual student.”54 David Turner, a student who volunteered at Shriners Hospital, personified how the mission shaped students’ interpretation of their experience. “Money is not that important,” Turner explained. “I’d gladly give my time without being paid if it means something.”55

While professional goals replaced the political goals in the new community involvement programs, academic priorities constrained the new ethnic studies program. Along with developing the Operation Outreach initiative, the community service fund, and the volunteer bureau, Hayakawa also oversaw the formation of the School of Ethnic Studies, where community involvement was redefined. Nathan Hare, like Garrett, believed that Black studies required an experiential component of direct involvement within the Black community. In his view, the goal of Black studies was the development of a political movement, or what he described as “a mass movement and a mass struggle” that aimed “to rid the world of racism and achieve black self-determination.” In the context of SFSC, he attempted to redefine field research as community organizing. Involvement in “the community,” Hare explained, was akin to being in a “laboratory” in which one could learn the process of community organizing while also working “to transform the Black community.”56

Hare was not part of the development of the School of Ethnic Studies. Indeed, during its formation, Hayakawa prevented faculty who participated in the early community involvement programs or in the strike, such as Hare, from participating in creating the new ethnic studies programs. This did not mean that the community involvement component was lost. The dean of the program, James Harabayashi, believed the community-based component was central to the broader goal of ethnic studies. He explained, “one of the educational concerns of all the ethnic studies programs has been to relate much, much closer to the peoples of the community.” In contrast to what he saw as the way “traditional education separates itself from what is going on in the community,” the School of Ethnic Studies created programs “where education becomes much more relevant to present-day life,” especially in terms of “getting students out in the community, getting them more in touch with what’s going on.”57

Even as Harabayashi maintained a focus on community, community involvement was defined and practiced differently in the School of Ethnic Studies. One of the core demands was for the creation of community boards, similar to what Gold had developed within the CSI. The community board would connect students with residents and they would work with them on shared projects that addressed economic and racial inequality or challenged the abuse of power by local officials. However, Hayakawa prevented students and faculty from having the power to decide who was represented on the community board, largely making the board a defunct idea.58 The failure to realize a board was just one component of the limited idea of community involvement that emerged in ethnic studies.

Hare’s choice word—laboratory—also proved institutionally flexible. Indeed, the new faculty adopted Hayakawa’s idea of community involvement as either volunteer service or field research. In the context of Black studies, Mary Lewis, the head of the Black studies department, prioritized volunteer service in existing social service agencies. In other programs, the focus was on field research, with a coursework focus on teaching students research methodologies for data gathering in state and related social service agencies. Don Patterson, the chairman of the Native American Studies program, explained that the classroom was used to effectively prepare students for the community work. Rightly concerned with a “do-gooder” and “paternalism” tendency among researchers and students alike, Patterson focused on teaching students the “difficulties and ethics involved in research” in the community. For Patterson, the purpose of community involvement was fieldwork and ethnographic observation and teaching students to gather data and conduct research at the community level.59 Community involvement was redefined to primarily entail the academic development of the student while also collecting relevant data for social service agencies to better serve the area.

In the 1970s, when reflecting upon efforts at SFSC, Hare argued that Black studies—like the School of Ethnic Studies—was drastically different than what he and others envisioned in the first part of the 1960s. Over the course of the 1970s, most courses in Black studies focused on content over efforts in the community. But Black studies, Hare argued, was never meant to be restricted to an academic and conceptual inquiry removed from the social and experiential context of the Black struggle. Ray Tomkins, a Black student who was the chairman of the Black Students Union during the strike, believed the new Black studies department—a success of their efforts—had largely been adapted to institutional norms of knowledge production and formal education. “The faculty don’t want to put their theories to practice, just want to theorize and intellectualize,” he lamented. “It ain’t helpin’ me or my community to sit there in a class for 30 minutes and trip on what you may think or how you may perceive the problems of the black community.”60

Urban Whitaker disagreed with Hare and Tomkin, believing they both ignored the institutional reality and political situation in California. Whitaker also taught in Black studies and served as the interim dean of the School of Ethnic Studies before Harabayashi. In his view, the vision of ethnic studies programs like Black studies was to develop a clear program of study that was a respected discipline within the college and aligned with the protocols of the new administration. Indeed, the new faculty focused on efforts to ensure the legitimacy of ethnic studies in the college. Whitaker acknowledged that “there are some students and some faculty who believe that the purpose of the program are to promote revolution and politization.” But, Whitaker argued, “the law requires and the Administration believes that the Black Studies department should conduct an educational program giving instruction in approved courses.”61 Whitaker’s key phrases—the law requires and politization—demonstrated the ways the new state-level policy and rhetoric set administrative boundaries on the vision of ethnic studies.

Legacy

When Del Stenson participated in the meeting among SFSC students and community organizers in the mid-1960s, he expressed skepticism about efforts to link community and political organizing to the college. Stenson worried that the connections to the university would inevitably limit the actions of organizers and students. “Organizers resent putting much hard work into a ‘safe’ program that’s designed to be acceptable to college big wigs,” he explained. “They’re not interested in safe things; they want to do radical, risky things.”62 From an organizer’s perspective, Stenson worried that integrating community political efforts into the operation of the college would mitigate those very efforts while also redirecting student political energies.

The meeting that Stenson participated in was part of the early discussions of instituting SFSC students’ various ad hoc efforts in the community. Over the course of the 1960s, a broad coalition of students sought to endow SFSC’s identity as a community college with political meaning. The community involvement projects culminated in the formation of the CSI, a campus hub designed to facilitate political organizing efforts both within and across different communities. Informed by their own political experiences in the civil rights struggle as well as their connections in the area, students developed a nuanced philosophy of community involvement that was attuned to racial and cultural context while still maintaining an emphasis on political activism. It was the latter emphasis—what Stenson described as the “risky things” of the collaboration—that concerned state-level policy makers associated with the Reagan administration. Stenson was right, but the concern was not necessarily about the college presidents. Indeed, both Summerskill and Smith did try to do “risky” things but were often constrained by the administrative apparatus and its employment by the new Reagan administration in California.

When student efforts in the CSI reached a critical consensus in the late 1960s, state-level policy makers empowered university leaders to limit both the nature and form of community involvement. Indeed, Reagan officials interpreted the institutional autonomy of the program in the same way they interpreted the Free Speech Movement: as a reflection of the liberal leniency of the college. In an effort to rein in student autonomy, the Reagan administration developed what became the Dumke plan, which empowered the chancellor’s office and university presidents to limit student funds and programs. It was these conditions—the financial independence of the students and the proposed administrative response—that served as the basis of the student strike that put SFSC on the political map in the 1960s. The student strike was in response to the administrative strike by state-level policy makers.

The administrative strike served as a basis for the broader process of disciplining democracy that developed at SFSC and in the California system. During and after the strike, the California system and SFSC developed a disciplining process with political teeth. During the strike, Hayakawa employed city police to restrain and, at times, violently arrest students. After the strike, Hayakawa utilized the administrative power granted by the chancellor’s office to limit how students utilized funds for their various efforts in the community. Even as the process of disciplining took on more explicit political forms at the state level, Hayakawa’s reasoning was rooted in a particular interpretation of the movement and the role of the college. Hayakawa believed the campus movement represented “antidemocratic” tendencies. In framing it this way, he justified his actions as a defense of the college’s role in a democracy. This also provided a justification for how he defined community involvement after the strike. In the 1970s, Hayakawa established new institutional programs that promoted community involvement through volunteer service and the extension of academic services into the community. These efforts both limited and replaced earlier community involvement programs. A similar process occurred in the School of Ethnic Studies, where community involvement was recast as a form of fieldwork research that taught students about the ethics of research in the community and helped collect data for existing social service agencies. To borrow from Stenson, the new institutional programs were much more “acceptable.”