The New Yorker:

Among the protesters on college campuses—and among the students who oppose them, too—there is a deepening disillusionment with American institutions. 

By Jay Caspian Kang

The student-protest encampment at the University of California, Berkeley, sits on the steps of Sproul Hall. Sixty years ago on the same site, Mario Savio, a leader of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement, gave a famous address in which he told his fellow-students that sometimes “the operation of the machine becomes so odious” that “you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop.” At the time, students were forbidden from on-campus demonstrations about noncampus matters—the “machine” was the state-university system, which eventually gave into the Free Speech Movement’s demands. But Savio’s words have since assumed a broader resonance for dissent and civil disobedience of any stripe. Like many other élite institutions of higher learning in America, Berkeley presents itself as a place where historic change took place thanks to the bravery of its former students; in 1997, the university installed a small plaque at the base of the steps and named them after Savio.

Encampments are not an uncommon sight in Berkeley, but on my visits to Sproul Hall I was struck, nonetheless, by the tents, and what they seemed to evoke. In the Bay Area, tents sit on sidewalks, under nearly every highway overpass, and, until recently, in People’s Park, another famous site of Berkeley resistance, which was once a homeless encampment. The university has since blockaded the park with a fortress of shipping containers, stacked like Lincoln Logs. The university’s administration wants to build a dormitory on the site, and its early attempts to start construction were disrupted by a coalition of young students and old Berkeley radicals—a reminder that protest in America is always nostalgic and referential, shot through with the desire for a past radicalism, one with specifics that, like Savio’s speech, have been diluted over time.

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