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Campus officials and luminaries addressed about 12,000 students and faculty at UC Berkeley’s Memorial Glade Monday, in a solemn tribute to the victims of last week’s attacks in New York and Washington. 

Classes were suspended from noon to 2 p.m. as students and faculty packed the bowl-shaped lawn, the north terraces of the main library, and the top-floor balconies of Evans Hall for songs and brief speeches. 

The central campus, normally noisy and ebullient with a fraction as many people on the lawn, was eerily silent but for the occasional tinkle of a cell phone. The expressions on the multitudes’ faces were both sad and angry. 

“We are a different people than we were a week ago,” said Chancellor Robert M. Berdahl. He called on the university to respond by recommitting itself to openness and honest inquiry. “We have been scarred by this tragedy and we have been changed, but let us resolve here today not to change too much. We are a community of learners committed to unchanging principles. We are here because we believe that education is the basis for both freedom and civilization.” 

Berdahl borrowed H.G. Wells’ maxim that history is “a race between education and catastrophe.” 

“History,” said Staff Ombudsperson Anita Madrid, “summons our generation not only to reject barbarism but to overcome it.” She called upon those gathered “to stand up for the innocent and vulnerable in our communities who may be targets of misdirected rage.” Author Maxine Hong Kingston and former U.S. poet laureate Robert Hass, both English department professors, also made urgent appeals for peace among the widely diverse peoples of the world, and of America. 

“Terrorism does not have national characteristics,” Hass said, and portrayed the heroism of the rescue workers in New York and Washington, the small acts of coming together in times of crisis, as a universal phenomenon. “We see images of Palestinians doing the same when struck on the West Bank, images of Israelis doing the same when struck in Jerusalem,” he said. “Human beings are sometimes able to turn to one another with courage.” 

“What makes this so terrible is that these were each individual lives,” he went on. He recounted the story of a businessman who survived the Twin Towers attack only because he had delayed his arrival at a business meeting to go downstairs and fortify himself with a salmon bun. 

“If somehow the mystery of the value of each individual life is not at the center of our teaching and learning, then we have failed,” Hass said. 

Academic Senate Chair David Dowall told the story of a former urban planning student at the university who he said was among the missing at the World Trade Center. (The Daily Planet could not confirm her name by press time). At his enthusiastic recommendation, Dowall said, she had taken a job there last year with the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, after working on the design for a new airport in Berlin. 

Wally Adeyemo, president of the Associated Students of the University of California, remarked that the victims had “no choice of the hour of their deaths” and encouraged the contemplative crowd not to let days or even moments slip away. Unlike the victims, he said, “You have a choice... what you’ll do, what you’ll build.” 

Several small groups in the crowd clearly intended to build a campus movement against the Bush Administration’s call for open-ended war. One group, the Berkeley Stop The War Coalition, which has announced a peace rally at Sproul Plaza on Thursday at noon, handed out lapel ribbons cut from green cloth – a color signifying peace in Islam. Lindsay LaSalle, a social welfare sophomore, and Candy Tischer, a senior in French, solicited Red Cross donations in a paper Uncle Sam hat. 

Most students, however, looked on somberly or chewed sandwiches contemplatively. A young woman wiped away tears when Joanne Liu, an ASUC senator, sang “Imagine” by John Lennon. 

After the ceremony ended, the Campanile carillon bells began pealing elegiacally and conversations resumed, mundane as what to do for lunch and weighty as whether there are things worth fighting for. 

Students had passed out scores of purple irises at the ceremony’s beginning, and attendees lay them one by one along the edges of the Reflecting Pool, which is dedicated to Cal alumni who died in World War II. (Memorial Glade is dedicated to all those who served). A campus police officer strode up slowly and made a formal salute. 

“It’s so amazing to see everybody all together,” said Mike Wilson, a public health graduate student. “I can’t remember the last time this happened.” 

Wilson said he had previously served 13 years as a fireman and paramedic, spending 56 hours a week cheek-by-jowl with his colleagues, and knew of the special mourning now being endured by so many emergency workers. 

A university staff member who asked to remain anonymous commented that Hong Kingston, the author and professor, “said ‘breathe in anger and breathe out loving happiness – kind love, peaceful love or something – and it wasn’t working for me. I was breathing in peace and breathing out anger.” 

Kingston later told a reporter that her actual words were: “Breathe in the world’s pain, and breathe out the world’s love.”