Challenge commonly held assumptions
As a former member of the People’s Park Community Advisory Board and current university staff, I write in response to Lynn Yu’s piece “Peoples Park Problems” and the general low opinion of these pages for Cal students who serve off-campus communities.
If the staff writers and editorial board respected their peers, who devote thousands of service hours annually, they would seek the opinion of at least one of the more than the 10,600 UC Berkeley undergraduate and graduate students who engage in public service each year when covering matters such as off-campus poverty, homelessness, education inequity, mass incarceration and other issues of oppression and exploitation.
Instead, we get pieces like that of Yu. She states the park is one of the “biggest headaches for the city” and that she has arrived at this conclusion not by speaking with people in the park but through speaking with students. She then blames the stagnant situation on loud “dissenters” who “cry back.” She proposes “relocating Cal Corps to a new facility there” because “the university continues to expand every year.” She ends by stating she would like a park — but one “that’s actually for the students.”
Several longtime Berkeley residents have made incisive comments on Yu’s opinion piece. Instead of adding to their critique, I would like to distance Cal Corps Public Service Center from her remarks, and share my disappointment in Yu’s and this paper’s general approach to reinforcing rather than challenging commonly held assumptions about those on the wrong side of power and privilege.
When we do get stories of poverty and homelessness among your pages, we find not one interview with a student who is actively confronting this issue in the community. Not one student who is tutoring local youth is cited as a source in stories of the achievement gap in the city of Berkeley. Essays on mass incarceration go without citing one formerly incarcerated Cal student.
These are uninformed opinions with no effort to cover a cocurricular activity that enriches learning and that just about one third of the entire student body participates in. They include minimal to zero interviews with student leaders engaged in public service — as compared with the level of coverage of Cal sports, in which around 1,000 students participate. The exception to this — a piece highlighting Minh Dang’s accomplishments — demonstrates the rule.
As Cal Corps’ assistant director, I encourage Cal students to provide direct material assistance to under-resourced communities. Students find many avenues for providing philanthropy or hands-on direct service. Yet simple volunteerism does nothing to change the system that produces such inequity and is as to social change as memorizing dates in high school is to original scholarship in college.
The Daily Cal’s fellow student leaders excel in their public service pursuits when they facilitate reflective dialogue with their peers — dialogue that questions and problematizes the status quo — in the process often speaking directly with community members to hear their stories. The personal transformations that your peers undergo through this process often leads them to center their social change efforts on the voices and leadership of those most impacted by the injustices cited above.
So why not speak with these students instead of floating (even as “fun” filler) the notion that People’s Park would be a suitable site for the public service center? Your decision to run Yu’s piece demonstrates how far removed you are from the topic about which she writes and is an insult to the UC Berkeley students who live the public service mission of the University of California.
Thousands of students commit large portions of their Cal days seeking to transform power and engage in authentic relationships across differences. These students challenge themselves and their assumptions and have genuine dialogue with the nontraditional, localized working class and working poor leadership of color.
Rather than acknowledge her assumptions about the people who inhabit the park, Yu jumps to a farcical conclusion and one that seeks to cut off at the knees any counter argument by painting those who engage in such arguments as unreasonable. Unfortunately, your writers routinely fail to interrogate their assumptions in the writing process, a failure that reflects poorly on your paper.
From my own practice of coaching students to confront material needs in the short term, while exploring the structural dimensions of their service, I have seen them develop a deeper understanding of the social, political and economic issues that surround us. What will it take for the Daily Cal to take even the first step: to care to pursue these same stories with weight and depth?
— Mike Bishop,
Cal Corps assistant director
A misunderstanding of a clear assertion
In his response to my recent article on the proposed Aquatics Center, Vice Chancellor Wilton alleges that I made “erroneous assertions” about financing for the project. Yet I never claimed (nor presumed) that the proposed Aquatics Center would be financed by the same model as the $153 million Student-Athlete High Performance Center. What I asserted, and continue to assert, is that administrators in Intercollegiate Athletics made false statements to the press and to the university about the level of private donations, with the result that UC Berkeley has had to take on significant debt for IA projects.
In claiming that the Aquatics Center is parallel “in concept” to the Student-Athlete High Performance Center, I referenced their being designed for the exclusive use of Intercollegiate Athletics. In none of the documents I have read has a reason been given that the Aquatics Center should be reserved exclusively for Intercollegiate Athletics.
Vice Chancellor Wilton claims that the project “will serve every member of the campus and neighboring community who use university pools.” He suggests that I am misinformed to think otherwise, but M. Kathryn Scott, the director of UC Berkeley’s physical education department, raises a similar objection: “The details of usage … do not show any benefit of increased or enriched water time to any program other than the Intercollegiate Athletics Water Polo and Swimming and Diving Teams.”
The projects the vice chancellor cites as evidence that capital projects can be and have been devoted to particular campus populations that all “support the academic interests of some of our students and faculty.” The problem here is that a significant piece of Berkeley’s precious real estate would be devoted exclusively to an “auxiliary enterprise” of the university — Intercollegiate Athletics — and therefore, the project does not conform to the principle stated in the 2020 Long Range Development Plan — namely, to “provide the space, technology and infrastructure we require to excel in education, research, and public service.” Nor does it conform to the Southside Plan, designed to meet another of the objectives articulated in the 2020 LRDP: to “provide the housing, access, and services we require to support a vital intellectual community and promote full engagement in campus life.” Indeed, as some have pointed out, by eliminating yet another parking lot, the proposed Aquatics Center makes “full engagement” with campus life more difficult for a great many.
I note the vice chancellor does not discuss at all the rejected possibility that the Aquatics Center be located at Strawberry Canyon, where swimming facilities (in need of upgrade and repair) already exist. The Environmental Impact Report acknowledges that this site “would be the environmentally preferred alternative.”
Vice Chancellor Wilton misunderstands my remarks about Berkeley’s crumbling bricks and mortar. These remarks were an attempt to alert the Berkeley community to the deleterious effects of declining state investment in public education. I do not dispute that the administration has worked hard — even heroically — to minimize these effects. What I wished to point out is that the decline in state support for public education makes it a target for venture capitalists. Just as impoverished neighborhoods become investment magnets for developers (without benefiting the residents, often displaced by gentrification), I am suggesting, the land granted by the state for the education of its citizens is increasingly vulnerable for exploitation. In this case, it seems to me that the will of private donors is sufficient to subvert the expressed will of UC Berkeley with regard to the development of available space.
— Celeste Langan,
UC Berkeley associate professor of English