Students and faculty advisers are trying to create the Sixties all over again at Berkeley in response to tuition rises in the University of California system, according to a report in the New Yorker (abstract here). But administrators and state leaders have seen the light of reality. Mark Yudof, at whom the protests have largely been directed, replies: “You can protest. You can put up signs — at Berkeley they like to occupy trees and run nude — but the answer is I still don’t have any money.”
Yudoff keeps a photograph of Winston Churchill on his desk and remarked last year that “being president of the University of California is like being manager of a cemetery: There are many people under you, but no one is listening.”
Other realists include Diane Feinstein’s husband, Richard Blum, who wonders: “If you tell me some union janitor doesn’t understand it, okay, but I don’t understand why the Berkeley faculty doesn’t understand that the problem is Sacramento.”