Press Releases

You know the answer to the riddle: Where does a 900-pound gorilla sit? Anywhere he wants. Forty-one years ago, during the Free Speech Movement (FSM), we learned that there is indeed a gorilla in town, but camouflaged in Blue and Gold and crying out “Go Bears!” Questions about nuclear weapons labs, the treatment of UC workers and teachers’ assistants, or deals with the City of Berkeley are finessed by the administration ultimately down—or up—to the Regents, the university’s own college of cardinals.  

UC’s administration is not averse to hiding bureaucratic power plays behind parading Nobel laureates and a top-of- the-line student body—whose tuition has also gone top-of-the-line. Yet Clark Kerr, chancellor during the FSM, made no bones about what he called the multiversity: Run it like a corporation, hook up with other corporations and the government. These are already part of the military-industrial complex in general, and (quietly) the nuclear labs at Livermore and Los Alamos in particular. 

The Blue and Gold gorilla has recently done double duty, sitting first on the citizens of Berkeley, and then onto everyone in the country opposed to continued work on the nuclear arsenal. The local issue was covered by the Daily Planet, giving a history that characterized the City of Berkeley’s stance toward the UC administration as: “Speak loudly and carry a rubber banana.”  

I don’t mean to get Freudian here, I don’t know that the city attorney’s office got anything from the gorilla for offering backroom legal advice about how to keep backroom decisions secret. While this was in remarkable concordance with the presumed other side UC attorneys’ position, it may be as simple as an instinct to not irritate gorillas, or to bond with fellow bureaucrats at UC, rather than the messy citizens of Berkeley.  

While pondering this disheartening news, an even bigger UC story appeared. Because of “oversight” failures, UC administration had to bid publicly to keep running Los Alamos. And who would be a better partner than Bechtel, a genteel San Francisco-style war-profiteering corporation, not of the obvious and crude Halliburton stripe? And Bechtel has a distinguished pedigree, epitomized by Reagan’s now-beatified secretary of war, Caspar Weinberger.  

In case you’ve (hopefully) forgotten, he was called Cap for his friendly manner, though those of us not captivated by his charm called him Doctor Death—or Strangelove. He showed unremitting zeal in the build-up of weaponry that ranged from nukes to cluster bombs, making possible the “shock and awe” sideshow that the DOD put on in Iraq. Reagan’s secretary of state, George Schultz, was another Bechtel principal. 

With due modesty Bechtel could claim, without appearing right-wing themselves, to be principals in the right-wing driven military buildup of the last 25 years. This has culminated not only in the war on Iraq, but in a virtually unlimited free lunch for the MIC at the public treasury. This spending straps all peacetime purposes, including universities. As a result, the university needs to—it says—pursue military contracts. And since the competing bid is coming from Texas, let’s show California loyalty. UC and Bechtel executives eat raw carrots and don’t quote Jesus, at least out loud. 

UC administration claims that, besides patriotism and national security—rationales now proclaimed by several generations of regents—the “basic” research done at the labs is best done by academics rather than some heartless soulless corporation (I’m joking, the administration would never refer to a corporation that way). This reasoning has been picked apart in the old days when there was a faculty peace movement that used to protest the UC administration’s making money while giving an educational fig leaf to the “campuses” at Livermore and Los Alamos.  

Now it’s underreported student activists who carry on the long-term fight to expose UC’s bedding down with the military-corporate—and academic—complex. They protested at the last UC regents meeting, questioning Blue and Gold pride over UC employees grooming the world’s biggest nuclear weapons (see the Coalition to Demilitarize the University of California, or TriValleyCares.org). 

So it’s probably small potatoes for the UC administration to finesse the city of Berkeley out of a few million in a 20-year backroom deal. Maybe it’s just keeping in shape for the Big Game—not Stanford, but that key to the public treasury. 

Neal Blumenfeld is a psychiatrist and FSM veteran.