A Reporter Looks Back on Days of Campus Rebellion : ‘60s Addendum at CSUN

I can’t believe it was 20 years ago this week that I walked out of a classroom building at Cal State Northridge and saw Mike Lee, armed with a bullhorn, standing on a second-floor overhang, carrying on an argument with the crowds milling below around the administration building.

It seems like yesterday: Mike, thin of build, sharp of voice, vibrantly proclaiming that the Students for a Democratic Society were in solidarity with the two dozen Black Student Union members who had suddenly occupied the building and were holding administrators against their will.

The scene floored me. Still does. I’ll treasure it forever.

Politically, it was the equivalent of Godzilla walking over the Sepulveda Pass. It was a crazed day of florid rhetoric and deeds that shattered forever the somnambulistic reputation of a college then known as San Fernando Valley State. It was the day that produced the first felony charges ever brought against American campus radicals. It was a day that would ultimately lead, months later, to the creation of two of the nation’s most ambitious ethnic studies programs.

It was a day on which, as a thousand of us confused students stood outside the administration building, arguing ourselves hoarse, everybody forgot that either Richard M. Nixon or Hubert H. Humphrey was going to be elected president the next day. That became cosmic. Everywhere, in knots of 10 or 20, people jawed furiously about violence and nonviolence, about the righteousness or temerity of the BSU, which was protesting racism in the athletic department. This was surreal. This could not happen at this sleepy, impersonal commuter school.

Neither could what followed. Valley State was swept by 2 months of passionate demonstrations and counterdemonstrations, marches and arrests, concluding with the mass arrest of 300 students who, having assembled in the college’s Open Forum to demand creation of ethnic studies programs, refused college President Delmar Oviatt’s notorious order to leave a peaceful rally.

I watched all this unfold as the managing editor of the campus newspaper, and when I tell people about it, it always occurs to me that maybe you had to be there.

Wednesday, you almost were.

Mike Lee and a half-dozen other students who were involved in the Nov. 4, 1968, occupation came back to address a rally orchestrated by a handful of CSUN students who consider themselves activists, don’t fear George Bush’s L-word and feel a spiritual kinship with the bygone rumblings of radicalism.

A couple of hundred students congregated during the lunch hour on a huge, grassy area in front of the library named after Oviatt. Around the corner, twice that many gathered to watch fraternity touch football games.

Lee, now a deputy county public defender and always a man to take himself less seriously than his causes, stepped onto a wooden platform and took the microphone.

“I’d like to welcome you on behalf of the graduating class of the Los Angeles County Jail, 1968,” he deadpanned.

Old Days

And he began to talk about the days of old, when the administration told SDS it could not set up tables to pass out anti-draft literature, and of the demonstration that followed. And of his disgust that the Reagan Administration “has stripped you of your own history, to convince you that you can’t do anything these days.”

Cliff Fried came back too. A short, bearded, quick-witted firebrand as a student, he returned as a clean-shaven, balding firebrand, his remaining hair pulled into a ponytail, suspenders holding up his jeans. Cliff was as angry and articulate as ever. In a furious 2-minute address (“This isn’t like the old days,” he joked later, “where we gave 2-hour speeches.”) he zoomed from South Africa to Central America to racism to “classism” to sexism. Now a union official at UCLA, where he works as a laboratory researcher, Fried demanded that everyone within the sound of his voice work for Michael Dukakis in the last week of the election campaign.

“Activism is the same as it was 20 years ago!” he shouted. “You get out and kick ‘ a ,’ ‘ s ‘ . . . “ He paused and smiled. “I won’t say that last letter. I don’t want to get arrested again.”

Speaking Out Again

In the end, Lee again took the microphone.

“Did you like what happened here today?” he shouted.

“Yes,” the students roared back.

“This is what free speech is about!” he said, and he began to rage at how the university administration had torn down the Open Forum several years ago, leaving students without a convenient place to air public issues. And how, paralleling the anti-war-tables controversy of his time, the administration had recently removed from a well-traveled breezeway the benches that activists were using to distribute literature protesting President Reagan’s Central America policy. In my day, Lee said, we would have taken those benches back.

“Bring back the benches!” a number of students began to chant, and a few minutes later, as the rally ended, a few dozen of them marched off, continuing the chant. They headed for another part of the campus, found the benches, brought them back to the breezeway and proclaimed themselves victorious.

Lee was with them every step of the way, enjoying the moment. This was what he was after. He had come to take his best, most strident shot, to wake up some people on a campus he has always considered politically retarded, to annoy, to pester, to proselytize, to make a little more sense out of a crazy world. Hell, that’s what 1968 was all about.