“Having a place in this society is far less important than creating a society in which one would want to have a place.” – Mario Savio

Early last year, I applied to spend a period of partially funded study at the University of California Berkeley. Now, five weeks into the programme, I’ve been asked to ‘share my experiences.’ Try as I might to subsume ‘my experiences’ within a prosaic recounting of campus events and activities, drafting this blogpost with anything resembling professional detachment proved impossible. Several frustrating false-starts led me to reframe the assignment as one of personal reflection, as an attempt to express this opportunity’s deeper ramifications for my work and academic ambitions.

A Series of First Impressions

If this piece’s theme is Berkeley’s gentle coercion towards my re-evaluation of academic life, it’s fitting that my early forays into the Bay Area were themselves compelled by others. Matt, my Canadian cousin, accompanied me on the cross-country trek from North Carolina to Berkeley, his sole demand being a chaperoned visit to a National Park. Within twelve hours of arriving, we were treading across the raised boardwalks of Muir Monument, weaving between redwoods whose sprouting predates the Magna Carta. The next day we visited San Francisco’s Museum of Modern Art; Matt, a modern art sceptic, was nevertheless genuinely excited to encounter a Rothko in the wild and determine for himself whether it lived up to the hype.

I further experienced the joys of second-hand novelty when Berkeley’s rival UCLA rolled into town. Though historically an intra-state matchup dominated by UCLA, I felt obliged to drag fellow Queen’s researcher Stephen Murray to his first college basketball game. To the surprise of many – the Golden Bears themselves likely included – a second-half-comeback brought the entire arena to their feet for the closing minutes. Eventual loss notwithstanding, I found myself caught up in the momentary rapture of collegiate sports’ espirit de corps… a feeling I’d purposefully eschewed during my own undergraduate tenure.

And I suppose it was somewhere amidst this miasma of experience, between the nature sojourns and last minute three-pointers, that an inchoate uneasiness took root in the back of my mind.

A Tourist on the Steps of the Great

It was a feeling I steadfastly avoided. Besides, I reckoned that if anything could shake that nagging feeling it would be my first solo pilgrimage to Berkeley’s Upper Sproul Plaza.

Below, I’ve dutifully included the requisite campus photos, the ones whose professional facsimile litter promotional materials: the clocktower where peregrine falcons roost; the classical buildings of granite and brick silhouetted by lush hills; glimpses of the Golden Gate caught by peering down promenades at awkward angles.

Full disclosure: none of those landmarks interested me much. My destination was set. I beelined toward the area between Sather’s Gate and Sproul Hall, a social space clogged with tabling students, their political causes all lineages passed down from Berkeley’s storied history. It was here that Jack Weinberg set up a Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) stand against UC’s edicts in 1964, launching the Free Speech Movement. On the steps of Sproul Hall that December, Mario Savio addressed over 1,000 students and decried the dehumanising effects of universities’ bureaucratisation and administrators’ stifling of political speech.

Today, Savio’s presence is purposefully entrenched on campus, especially inside the FSM Café, a popular meeting spot plastered in Etsy-fied reproductions of his quotes. And sure, while FSM’s commodification strikes me as somewhat gauche, it’s exactly the type gauche that I can never get enough of. But try as I might to escape through five dollar Americanos and clinical musings over yesterday’s student newspaper, I could not outstrip that nagging feeling, that unease which was developing into an intolerable angst.

Archives and Activists

So I deployed the strongest weapon in my arsenal: a practiced retreat into a research mindset. For weeks I turned inward and focused on work, activating the defence mechanism which has served me throughout the dissertation process.

I certainly wasn’t hurting for projects. Calling Berkeley’s archival repositories ‘vast’ borders on criminal understatement. I’ve spent dozens of hours digging through boxes containing detritus and memories, decades of pamphlets and position papers from social movements long past.  The diligent librarian faculty have, over the course of just a few weeks, helped me procure materials from as far afield as Wisconsin. I’ve networked with several professors specialising in comparative sociology, American studies, and modern European history, bouncing methodological ideas off them during office hours. I ate lunch on a rainy day in Sonoma, the vineyards concealed by heavy haze, and discussed my ambitions with Professor Doug McAdam, the person who quite literally wrote the book on contentious politics.

The Institute for European Studies, my sponsoring department, established a weekly colloquium where visiting fellows can share ideas and workshop our research. As a base of operations, IES provides an open forum which fosters an upstart research culture among its international cohort.

But this placement’s most meaningful opportunities developed away from campus proper. After years of Zoom meetings haunted by the twin spectres of high latency and inconvenient time-zones, sitting across from activists in Berkeley Hills’ foyers or Oakland kitchens was invigorating. Most interviewees represented an oft distorted and maligned caucus within an organisation I study, the Students for a Democratic Society. They reminisced in tones running the gamut from regret to pride and back again. They spoke of opportunities seized and missed with shared atmospheres of hard-earned reflection. And for many, their presents are logical evolutions from their pasts: sixty years on, they continue to write, to organise, and to agitate for a better, more democratic society, a society within which the academy is an integral if problematic element.

Bringing it All Back Home

It was the process of transcribing those interviews which forced a confrontation with my lingering malaise. As the grainy recording repeated stories from a past life, I became unbearably cognisant of my growingly cynical detachment. I had, I realised, spent an untoward amount of time acting as something of a voyeur, alienating myself from the lifeblood of both my research and personal interests. Even among Muir’s redwoods and the unselfconscious passion of basketball fans, I’d somehow defaulted to passive vicariousness. It felt as if, both on campus and off, I’d adopted the dispassion of an academic tourist.

Untangling my personal commitments to social activism and research objectivity has always been a tough circle to square. Berkeley, in its fundamental entwinement of those seemingly discrete ends, forced a reassessment of these ‘duelling’ identities and led me to construct, in the verbiage preferred by my interviewees, a dialectic.

For all this fellowship’s opportunities, none are more appreciated than its provision of an environment within which to frame such a process. My time at Berkeley has allowed me to evaluate the long-term implications of how, as a hopeful academic and educator, I can support the twinned struggles for social justice and knowledge creation. It’s allowed me to discover the intersection of these goals and to locate ways of engaging simultaneously with them. I’ve since spent evenings participating in teach-in protests – those most American forms of collegiate dissent – in support of People’s Park, a local greenspace whose history is inseparable from my work. I’ve attended both Shut Up and Write sessions and Food Not Bombs general meetings at Berkeley’s anarcho-social space, The Long Haul. I’ve quietly audited the meetings of a veritable alphabet soup of campus political organisations, not only observing but participating in the types of movements that sparked my academic interests in the first place.

And it is that dialectical process, more than anything, which I hope to bring back to Belfast. To rediscover that first sense of awesome appreciation I felt when walking into Linen Hall Library. To feel not simply an academic satisfaction, but a personal one, when reflecting on Free Derry’s emulative connection to Free Berkeley. To bring home not just reams of notes or garbled interview recordings, but a reinvigorated commitment and determination towards pursuing the type of professional life that betters more than just myself. Because, as Mario Savio so elegantly put it, having a place in our disciplines, our universities, or our wider societies isn’t worth much, if we fail to create a society worth inhabiting.

 

Darren Colbourne

Darren is a doctoral candidate in history at Queen’s University Belfast. His dissertation focuses on the political identificational development of Northern Ireland's People's Democracy, comparing their evolution to other mobilisations of the global New Left. His work uses cases not only from Northern Ireland's 'Long Sixties', but also similar movements in the Untied States.