The strike’s momentum begins to wane on Monday, February 17, with numbers down to about seven hundred, but strikers continue to obstruct streets and disrupt classes. Some shout down Professor George Mosse as he attempts to lecture on European cultural history, but Mosse takes a historian’s view of the incident and is nonplussed. Late in the day, the Black People’s Alliance, WSA, and Third World Liberation Front issue a statement calling on students to return to class and engage their professors and classmates on the underlying issues.[i]
On Tuesday, BPA leader Willie Edwards tells a small rally of about 150 that the strike is officially suspended. Over the seven weekdays of the strike, attendance in classes on and around Bascom Hill has been off by about 10 percent, while the western campus generally had full attendance. That afternoon, about half the guardsmen are sent home, with the rest to follow on Thursday.[ii]
Students raise their fist in solidarity with the Third World Liberation Front 2016, the name of the four students on a hunger strike to defend the funding of the SF State College of Ethnic Studies, during an emergency press conference in the Quad Monday, May 9, 2016. (Photo: Melissa Minton/Creative Commons/Flikr)
In a struggle that is eerily similar to the battle for the Mexican American Studies program in Tucson a decade ago, teachers, students, and community activists in California are fighting to defend the content and pedagogy of ethnic studies. Their opposition? California politicians and right-wing lobbyists who are trying to turn transformative knowledge into a pale, ineffective shadow of itself.
Since its formation in 1970, UC Berkeley’s African American studies department has been at the forefront of African diaspora scholarship.
According to Leigh Raiford, associate professor of African American studies, the department was born from the work of the Third World Liberation Front, a student movement that called for minority representation in academia.
“The Third World Liberation strike here on campus sought to create, basically, an ethnic studies college for the study of underrepresented minority groups,” Raiford said. “Once the ethnic studies program was started, a couple of years later, African American studies broke off and created its own department.”
Fed up with what they describe as concessions to “right-wing interest groups” and “pro-Israel lobbyists,” the originators of California’s ethnic studies model curriculum for high schools are now demanding their names be stripped from the final draft.
The announcement Tuesday by Allyson Tintiangco-Cubales, one of the co-chairs of the advisory committee that oversaw the drafting of the controversial curriculum, indicates just how strongly the 18 committee members, made up of ethnic studies and social studies teachers and academics, oppose revisions made by the California Department of Education in the 18 months since the draft’s release in 2019.
During that time, the CDE has received a flood of complaints from Jewish groups opposing the curriculum’s anti-Israel content; others, including the editorial board of the Los Angeles Times, saw the first version as overly ideological, jargon-heavy, one-sided and ultimately inappropriate for high school students. Gov. Gavin News