the power of silence

I was walking by Sproul during noon, an arc of students stopped around Sather Gate. I thought it might have been a performance or maybe a religious preacher. Instead I found 60 or so African American students wearing all black, linked arm and arm, their faces masked by black cloth. Some of their shirts read, "represent."

Police watched on from afar checking out the latest protest. A crowd stopped respectfully several feet away to view them as a whole. They left the sides of the gate free for people to still pass. Several campus staff members were on hand to observe as is the rule for protesting to have third party observers just in case. Tourists snapped videos and pictures. Some stayed and stopped. Others walked past, just anothe day on Sproul.

Other students in the crowd talked about how they were to be here for 2 hours. Though, not summer, the sun shone brightly. Another said she had wanted to join but 2 hours was too long and she had classwork to attend to because she said, if she didn't do her work there would be one less Black person at Berkeley.

No one spoke. Sather Gate which is usually bustling with students going to and fro and folks handing out flyers about Christian bible study, to Cal sports, to some other event or another, was eerily silent, a void on the usually rumbling cobbled walk.

Protestors on each end held up a piece of paper explaining themselves. It detailed how despite increasing the number of Black applicants (an increase of 11%), despite attending numerous meetings and "think" sessions with the university about diversity and recruitment, the Black population at Cal has been on decline. They have been, as they stated, "IGNORED and SILENCED."

It's been over 10 years since Filipinos were taken off of Affirmative Action at Berkeley. We too worried about declining numbers. When before, 200+ Filipinos enrolled on campus, a scant 50-60 now were. We told the administration that this is a problem. They replied that the problem is that "not enough Filipinos are applying to Cal." Fine, we said. So, we went out there and told everyone we knew they should apply to Cal. The number of applicants of declared Filipino descent went from a few hundred to over a thousand, yet it did nothing to change the population's numbers.

We went back to the administration and showed them the numbers and they said, well, we can't do any more, this is a UC problem go to the Office of the President. When we went to the Office of the President, they told us, it's not a UC wide problem, it's a Berkeley problem because all the other campuses had stable if not growing populations.

On and on the circle went with students tacking on dozens upon dozens of administration meetings and working the university bureaucrazy on top of full course loads.

I can understand where they are coming from. I'm sure they got told the same things. And despite doing what they were told, they found the answer empty. From the student point of view, it looks like the administration is hardly trying. In the end though, I don't think anyone knows what the answer. It's ironic really. Though the campus cannot use quotas to determine diversity and use race as a qualifying factor, once a closely watched ethnic population goes up, someone almost always accuses the university for "rigging" it on race. This is the real problem, how anti-affirmative action folks say that "race shouldn't be a factor," yet in the end they are the first to scream while watching the race numbers, because these closely watched ethnic minorities can't possibly improve that much. But isn't this the real discrimination? To presume that these numbers are more correct. No one complains when the Asian population increases.

I stood there on Sproul in their silence. On a campus where the Free Speech Movement began, and most days are spent with students trying to out shout each other, there was a palpable saddness in their silence. A true sense of the void that is being created as populations of ethnic groups decline on campus. I wondered where this population and all the declining ethnic groups, would be in 5 years, would there be enough to span the gate?

This is the Master Plan of education for California. Perhaps not written, but it is the way it is heading.