The crowd was enthusiastic, but there was zero of that old time tension. (Crowd tension is a good sign to me.) There seemed to be no cops at all, at least in sight. There were very few old people around. I saw maybe a dozen or so in my age-grade. All this means is that overwhelming majority were current students. It was nice to see a very mixed crowd with asian and latino students mostly with some white students. There are almost no black students here. (I'll try to get into that in another post. Prop 209 in 1998 ended affirmative action, thanks Ward Connelly.)
The most energetic responses came from the most engergetic speakers of course, and they were running down the list of the usual suspects, corporatization, overpriced top heavy administrators, bad tax structure, and so on. All the stuff you read here on LBO. I couldn't see the speakers. One was a young white woman and the other a latino man. I have to assume the woman represented the students, the man represented the faculty and or staff. Much of the crowd was asian decent. There were a lot of cheers for stopping the registration fee hikes.
Some other observations. Most of the thin stream of people picking their way around the rally were the youngest looking, freshmen, sophmore types. That's a pretty good sign, because it means that they are just young, probably too worried about their grades, etc. There are tremendous academic pressures in the first two years here. It's an unbelievable grind just to get through it. Then the pressure relaxes a little. It then starts up all over again for the first year or two of grad school, then it again slacks off until the big show down at the very end.
Most of the UC system re-installed the quarter system, which completely sucks. Berkeley didn't. When UCB changed back to semesters, they shortened the semester to something like 16wks(?), from what used to be 20wks. This was not the first day of class. That was back in August.
As for class attendence, that's hard to know. You have to actually go to class and see. I was starved to death and didn't bother with the hike up to Dwinelle and Wheeler, two of the main classroom buildings. I left early as the crowd was thinning out near 12:45p. So forty-five minutes. That's about average as it was in the past. I hiked down to Blondie's pizza then a lazy meander back home.
Some criticism. You always need good speakers. The real reason is that if the rally gets any press at all, texts of the speechs have to get handed to the press corp with the hope that some of that gets into print. The press is lazy, so give them the words so they can cut and paste and write your story. The man was okay but did little of that `teaching' effect I wrote about for Ann Ginger.
So the rally is also about the economy, the lack of action from Washington. I would have tried to get Lee or somebody from her office to get up there at talk about the whole public education system. The battles in Congress every year over funding education, etc. Then somebody from the unions associated with public education, etc. And somebody like Delums--although he is looking mighty frail--the point to talk about declining city budgets, mean declining futures, etc.
See I am not sure the students see they are a small part of a very much larger scene. That that this is a capitalist system---get it? The fat cats take it all, you get nothing, so shut up and drop dead.
CG