Features

Heaven forfend! UC Berkeley beaten by the California Community Colleges? And for activism, no less! 

Mother Jones Magazine, that bastion of Leftist print, ranked the University of California in ninth place in its annual listing of the most activist college campuses, seven places behind the California Community Colleges. 

First place honors went to the University of Tehran, honored by the magazine for “unflinching dissent in a nation where speaking out can lead to imprisonment or worse.” 

The Iranian students staged massive protests after a popular history professor was sentenced to death for challenging the exclusive right of sanctioned clerics to interpret Islamic scripture—forcing the state to commute the sentence to 74 lashes and an eight-year prison term. 

California community colleges were honored for marching 10,000-strong on Sacramento and 4,000-strong on Los Angeles last March following massive budget cuts and tuition hikes. 

While Berkeley ranked next-to-last in the top ten—honored for the protest of 1,500 students after the outbreak of the war on Iraq—it was the school’s fourth appearance on the list, topped only by the University of Michigan, whose fifth-place ranking (for pro-Affirmative Action protests and demonstrations against Attorney General John Ashcroft’s war on online bong sales) heralded the school’s fifth appearance on the MoJo honor roll. 

The full list appears in the magazine’s September/October issue and online at: http://motherjones.com/news/outfront/2003/36/ma_508_01.html