Why did the 1968 SF State Strike succeed, grabbing the attention of the entire nation (and that is no exaggeration) and yet City College of San Francisco in 2014 still barely elicits local attention, much more any notable victories that have prevented the taking over of our Commons by the privateers of profit over the priorities of basic human values. For to this date after almost two years of struggle, there exists a Net Loss in terms of the original mission statement of CCSF to serve the interest of All the residents of San Francisco.
The corporate marauders of Our College through their bought and paid for traitorous apparatchiks have eviscerated, if no other thing else mattered, the enrollment population of CCSF and thus crippled, blew off the legs of and mutilated the life of what was once the exemplary mother ship of city colleges throughout California. What’s left is just guerrilla warfare as they will return and slice away with their profit seeking, blood soaked blades whatever is left for their taking.
But one thing I learned as a recently discharged Marine infantryman who found himself on the campus of SF State in 1968, where my political education was to have begun, was that a third world army of dedicated men and women fighting for their existence were capable of defeating the most horrendously and monstrously created dominant military force ever unleashed upon a diminutive nation of people. January 30, 1968, the Vietnamese Army shocked the US military and its allies with the Tet Offensive, a massive surprise attack that was the beginning of the end for this nation’s incursion upon a land that was not ours, upon a people who lost almost three million lives in the “American War”. To this day, I cannot understand how they could ever have forgiven us for such brutal annihilation of their land and families for what? For what?
And to find out in 2005 through the Freedom of Information Act that the “American War” was started under false pretenses. American ships in the Gulf of Tonkin were never fired upon by torpedoes. An inexperienced navy tech misread the sonic waves on his screen, no officers doubled check, and President Johnson, itching for a fight ran with unverified intelligence. And 58,000 of my fellow Americans died for a lie. Almost forty years later another president would take us to war, this time in Afghanistan and Iraq based again on a pack of lies.
But SF State became the battlefield for another war, a domestic war, one in which the demands were for full participation of all the members of American society in having to begin with, a Black Studies Department set up by the college. From that was gained Gender Studies, Latino-American Studies, Asian-American Studies, Labor Studies, etc.
City College of San Francisco also began its war against the privatization of its Commons as we were engaged in war once again, only in this case, this nation was engaged in at least five to seven wars_Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, Libya…………
Why was the intensity of 1968 absent from the equation at City College, in the Fall of 2012? Why had the Students arriving on Opening Day at City College been met by only members of the Occupy movement, Codepink, the Grey Panthers, and a very small contingent at the time of Student Activists bannering and passing out flyers explaining what was coming down for their college? It took three months for the Faculty to get in gear and start a Coalition to fight back. Two teachers, a chemistry teacher, Bob Price, and a political science teacher, Rick Baum, called their colleagues forth to confront what was happening.
And from my perspective, the Teachers’ Union chose, for at least a year, to work in relative eerie silence, rather than using that valuable time to motivate and mobilize their constituencies. The Coalition to Fight Back and the Students with comrades like Shannel, Mihael, Eric, and others were being characterized as unruly radicals by those within the “establishment” of faculty members who tossed pebbles at them from their pristine academic alabaster pedestals. Many of these, later when a vote was to take place to decrease their salaries by 4%, didn’t even show up at the polls. What vacuum of unconsciousness did these “educators” secrete themselves from?
For in 1968 at SF State, I witnessed bloody battles of baton slamming by cops on students’ heads and police horses mowing down demonstrators. Yes, there was blood and there were photographs of bloody scenes in all of our newspapers at the time. What transpired at Conlan Hall a couple of weeks back was a daily experience at SF State and a much more violent one. And a certain sense of what college teachers gained out of that war in terms of democratic participation in the carrying out of their professions came from that battlefield and others throughout the nation at the time.
So why have they been so removed consciously and physically from this battle on their campus from the Reality of the Stealing of their Academic Futures, and the Futures of their Students, and in fact been so complicit in enabling the ongoing process of diluting the Public aspect of Public Education by not lifting a finger of resistance but instead voting for a decrease in their salaries while administrators thereafter were given 19.25% increases in theirs?
Where’s the f___ing fight? A third world nation could defeat a dominant first world military force decisively, Students and some Faculty could force the hands of then President S.I. Hayakawa and his administration to accede to their demands, but the majority of faculty at CCSF,
whose privileged positions came at the expense of the blood of students in 1968, could not temporarily emerge from their “comfort cocoons” and engage on the campus grounds the forces that once again sought to destroy democratic process in our educational institutions?
Well maybe therein lies the answer to my question at the beginning of this investigation. No leadership or respect for past history among the indentured servants of mediocrity.
__Bob of Occupy
PS Be sure to silence the voice of free speech and smother the final call for democracy because some might be offended. For the killing of the messenger is a sick and gleeful dance of revelry endlessly repeated by the conviction-less and those whose souls are shocked by mirrors thrown up in front of their own faces.
And if the majority rise up in condemnation at their own public exposing, let not a single voice speak against them to silence this messenger, for this is the new American form of democracy and political correctness. MAKE NO WAVES.