The University of California has played an important role in sparking social change on its campuses and beyond, UC Merced history professor Sean Malloy said Wednesday afternoon.
And that change didn't always come from administrators, he said.
"Most of that social change has come from bottom up," he said. "It has come from grassroots organizing efforts by students, faculty and staff."
Malloy was among several speakers who took part in the UC Merced Occupy Wall Street Movement teach-in session Wednesday afternoon. Daniel Crosswhite, a UC Merced senior, talked about his visit to New York to interview Occupy Wall Street participants.
The event was to help the campus community understand issues raised as part of the movement by providing various perspectives from students, faculty and staff on economic, political and social factors that led to the movement.
In the wake of incidents of police brutality on nonviolent Occupy protesters at UC Davis and UC Berkeley, UC President Mark Yudof declared that free speech is part of the university's DNA, and that nonviolent protesters have long been central to the university's history, Malloy said. "That is a beautiful sentence, but it's also a little misleading," he said.
At least, that wasn't the case in the first century of the university's existence, he said.
As late as 1964, students at UC Berkeley were prohibited from advocating, fundraising or recruiting for any political causes or social movements on campus property, Malloy said.
When a group of students at UC Berkeley tried to challenge the university's restrictions on freedom of speech, the police were called, Malloy said. But thousands of UC students surrounded police cars for more than 24 hours to prevent police from arresting anybody.
The students didn't leave until the university administration agreed to drop the charges, he said. "That event was what started the free speech movement at the UC Berkeley campus," he said.
At that time, the university administration and police's reaction was not the same as today, he said. "They didn't sponsor a teach-in," he said. "Instead, nonviolent protesters were forcibly dragged out of university buildings. They were jailed, they were threaten with expulsion — all because they advocated free speech on their campus."
A few years later, in 1968, students at UC Berkeley and San Francisco State University organized the Third World Student Strike to protest institutionalized racism on campus and to insist on the establishment of ethnic studies programs, Malloy said. However, once again, those students' efforts were met by police violent force.
Today, the UC system, the California State University system and the community college system, are more open, tolerant and diverse places, he said. "That was made possible by the students and activists who came before," he said.
Daniel Martinez, a senior at UC Merced, said Wednesday's event was great, but this kind of conversation also needs to take place in the community. "It's not enough just to have it on campus," he said.
It's important to get people together to talk about issues around today's movement, he said. "Economic inequality speaks for itself — it's a fact, and it's a problem too," he said. "Economic and social inequalities translate into inequalities of political representation."
Charles Nies, associate vice chancellor for Student Affairs at UC Merced, said he hopes the event gave students the opportunity to see the Occupy movement from multiple lenses.
Reporter Yesenia Amaro can be reached at (209) 385-2482 or yamaro@mercedsunstar.com.
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