Reagan and Berkeley

While campaigning for the governorship of California, Ronald Reagan promised to do something about radical student activities at the University of California's Berkeley campus. Liberal fears of an attack on academic freedom grew after Reagan was elected, and The New Republic printed a pithy addendum to two articles on university crackdowns in Argentina and Rhodesia that asked: "Could it happen here?"

Few observers in California think so, but some marginal restrictions on student activities seem to be on the way. The governor-elect has asked John McCone, a former CIA head who reported on the Watts riots for the Johnson administration, to choose 15 prominent men willing to serve on a committee to investigate controversial student problems at Berkeley. The University's Board of Regents, Reagan proposes, would then pick five from the group who would write a report which the Regents could, in the end, deal with as they saw fit.

The Regents, as Reagan admitted this summer, "could legally sell the University if they wanted to." Although he chairs the body, most of the other members are prominent citizens appointed, in many cases by the Brown administration for long terms. The Regents have in the past been very careful to leave matters of student conduct up to the university administrators. When asked last year by Governor Brown to investigate charges of treasonable demonstrations, sex, and drug sprees on campus, the Regents soon returned a short report leaving the whole matter to Berkeley Chancellor Roger Heyns.

Reagan is probably willing to let it go at that again, just so the Regents approve, as they are sure to do, enough of an investigation to honor his campaign promise. He insists that he promised an investigation only to allay Californians' anxiety about the University. He would also like to get some of the Democratic appointees off the Board of Regents, but the law prevents him from doing that for some time.

Reagon occasionally expresses a curious sympathy for student radicals. "I worry about the students who get lost in a big University like Berkeley," Reagan said this summer. "I went to a small school myself. Everyone there had to get involved. I can imagine the appeal some of these university student groups must have. For the first time someone is reaching out and saying: "We want you."

Nonetheless he rarely hides his distaste for anti-Vietnam protests or other signs of what he feels is moral and political decay. Reagan would like to see the noon-time political rallies moved from the Sproul Hall steps--near a major entrance to the University campus--to a more remote location where "no one will be forced to listen." Chancellor Heyns, to help the state government resist the temptation to interfere, may do just that.

Heyns admitted recently he was considering relocating the rallies, and on election day announced that he would limit their length to 40 minutes. "We are intentionally fostering," he said, "a style of speech that is often vicious in intent, dishonest, laced with slander and character assassination, indifferent to evidence and truth, contemptuous of disagreement and often charged with hatred."

Bettina Aptheker, Mario Savio's heir-apparent as leader of the anti-administration movement, called Heyns "a liar" for that statement. But in a gesture indicative of Heyn's success in curbing student outbreaks these last two years, Miss Aptheker did nothing but submit a petition protesting his restrictions.

The Regents, with or without Reagan's influence, are liable to be unsympathetic with a Free Speech Movement revival, knowing what political trouble the original cost them. By the same token, the anti-Goldwater, pro-civil rights sentiment that sparked such wide student support for the dissenters in 1964 will be absent from any FSM revivals. The Berkeley faculty and majority of the student body are likely to support slightly greater restrictions on campus political activity now than they would two years ago. Middle-man Heyns realizes this and appears to be maneuvering towards a solution which will satisfy both the students and the new administration in Sacramento.