University of California Berkeley - Blue and Gold Yearbook (Berkeley, CA)

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McKenzie and Stampp on Academic Participation John McKenzie Vice President for Academic Affairs By their greater numbers and by their worsening conditions, students have come more than ever before in this country ' s his- tory to constitute a class. The university has become in many ways analogous to a factory and the students the raw material to keep it running smoothly. Worse than these oppressive conditions is the role students are required to play within the university, that is as trained workers for both a dehumanized and dehu- manizing technology admidst the meaning- less life of suburbia. Instead of the univer- sity being used to fight the root causes of the alienation and anomoly that are Amer- ica, the university is used to sustain them. Those of us in the ASUC concerned with the academic fate of the university in a sense with the battle for its soul, have worked to devise forms and create oppor- tunities for student participation as well as to move to reorient the university to a cur- ricular policy that enables learning to re- place training and motivation to replace submission. Numerous obstacles remain: the guild psychology that sees students as passive agents, a view that more often than not dominates faculty policy councils. Another perhaps more obstructive U.C. Board of Regents, more appropriate to General Mo- tors than a university. None the less we have gotten somewhere: in 1969-70 during the first year of the ex- istence of the post of a Vice-President for Academic Affairs, eleven Academic Senate Committees agreed to student participation; two, the B.E.D. and the Committee on Teaching, on an official basis. The ASUC developed a campus-wide Search and Se- lection Committee (SSC) to advise the AAVP on his appointments. We informa- tionally assisted student departmental or- ganizing at Berkeley and the AAVP ' s office was fortunate in having the advice and as- sistance of John Sugiyama, Coordinator for the SSC, Mark St. Angelo, Floyd Huen, Keith Takata, Don Schag, Alan Fong, and Steve Bloek. There still is effectively no academic com- munity within the University and the Uni- versity itself has lost its coherency. Whether or not it successfully deals with these cen- tral weaknesses is a question that bears directly on its ultimate survival. Kenneth Stampp Professor of History This year, as students moved more closely towards achieving the nebulous goal of student participation in campus decision- making, debate on the topic shifted ground. Once the question was whether students should have a role in the tradi- tionally faculty and administrative areas. Now the question is how student opinion can most effectively be used. Taking time off from his studies of the evolution of Southern thought and identity in American history, Professor Kenneth Stampp joined in the debate saying he strongly believes that the only practical way for students to actively participate in such areas as the development of academic policy, the protection of academic freedom and the fixing of admissions policy is through the ASUC. He admitted that while he shares serious reservations about the ASUC with many of his faculty colleagues, he still believes the AS UC should be the organizing force. Stampp suggested that students could best participate in such traditionally faculty matters as academic freedom, educational policy and experimental education through ASUC-established student committees par- alleling existing Academic Senate commit- tees—not, as has been widely recom- mended, through a single joint faculty-stu- dent committee or some small student rep- resentation on an existing faculty group. He explained that on any committee with both student and faculty membership, the faculty members would want, and would go ahead, to meet alone when they felt it necessary. So, Stampp said, Why have a committee system which would breed sus- picion? If students were to set up parallel committees, then the corresponding faculty group could meet with it to get student ideas. This way we would have a regu- larized system to feed student ideas into the operations of the faculty Academic Senate here. Kenneth Stampp John McKenzie Pim JicKelizie 23