A Nascent Counterculture at UC Davis
A Nascent Counterculture at UC Davis
Sasha Abramsky: A Nascent Counterculture at UC Davis
At night, on the quad in the center of the University of California at Davis campus, an eerie silence prevails these days. Silhouetted against the darkness, under the soaring pine trees, are dozens of tents, radiating out from the central circle where a small group of Occupy movement students were pepper sprayed three weeks ago. Just to the west of that circle is the frame of a large geodesic dome, in which faculty have been holding open-to-all, open-air teach-ins, from morning to night, on everything from the abolitionist movement to gay rights, from the global lessons of the Arab Spring to the counterculture of the 1960s. There?s a democratic nature to these conversations that is radically different from the large, formal, lecture-hall presentations that usually predominate in undergraduate education in the UC system.
The encampment has the beginnings of an infrastructure?a first aid tent, an information booth, coffee distribution points, chalk boards on which schedules and memos can be hastily written and as hastily erased and rewritten, a writing-assistance tent set up by some of my colleagues in the University Writing Program. From trees hang placards and sheets, adorned with political slogans, Old Glory, and Tibetan prayer flags. During the daylight hours, there?s an almost carnival-like quality to the scene. Crowds mill around, many of them students, but significant numbers from outside the campus; they talk politics, argue philosophies, drift in and out of teach-ins. Drum circles form and disband. Above everything is the episodic noise of the human ?mic checks.? Some of it is silly, some of it is inspiring; all of it is different, dramatically different, from what the campus looked like just three weeks ago.
At night, as I mentioned, it becomes wonderfully quiet, the lawns avoided by the normally raucous fraternity boys and sorority girls, the silence broken only by the occasional hacking cough. Some tents have cardboard message boards leaning against their exteriors, on which friends write messages to the occupants inside. There?s something pre-technological to the scene?despite the fact that it was catalyzed by social networking sites that spread the pepper-spray imagery around the world the week before Thanksgiving.
Somehow, without anyone explicitly saying so, the center of UC Davis has become a Free Space, self-policed, self-regulated. Not all of the tents are occupied. Many were donated in the aftermath of the pepper spraying incident, and remain empty?a sort of Potemkin Village of a nascent counterculture. Yet enough are lived in to present the semblance of a community. Mornings, one can see bleary-eyed students opening their tent flaps, and sitting in their doorways checking email on their laptops.
A SUBTLE, but unmistakable, transference of moral authority has taken place on the Davis campus, and, I suspect, on other campuses throughout the UC system. Since the students? nonviolent response to the police use of pepper spray and Chancellor Linda Katehi, who faced a long, silent line of staring students?an event dubbed the ?walk of shame??young people on the campus have begun claiming autonomy: a physical and moral space for themselves that operates in a parallel universe to the more formal university hierarchies. Perhaps as remarkably, many faculty and staff seem willing to cede that moral authority to the students. The institution is suddenly treating these young people as adults.
To my mind, this claiming of?and ceding of?moral weight is what makes the UC Davis students, and the broader Occupy movement, different from, say, the anarchic, and sometimes nihilistic and violent, anti-globalization protests of the past decades. Instead of simply articulating opposition to a set of institutions and policies, the Occupiers of 2011 are starting to create a set of counter-institutions and communal moral expectations.
In fits and starts, young people are starting to think differently not only from their parents, but from their older siblings, the so-called Obamaniacs of 2008. In small numbers, they?re starting to build alternative, and highly visible, communities. In other words, in fits and starts, a significant part of the upcoming generation is starting to think in countercultural terms. In that sense, the students of Davis in 2011 are, perhaps, where the students of Berkeley were in 1964: at the beginning of a period of tumult that has the potential to transform the lives and expectations of thousands of young men and women.
Most likely, the tent city on Davis?s quad will slim down or disappear as the winter winds and rains bear down; most likely numbers of campers will head home for the holidays at the end of the quarter and find it simply too unpleasant to return to their tents in the cold, dark days of January. But even if the city itself disappears, the change in the timbre of discussion on the campus will likely remain.
One can see new spaces, a new architecture of dissent, emerging. It is, almost certainly, a far cry from the outcome Lieutenant Pike envisioned when he took out his canisters of pepper spray and began his sadistic work those long three weeks ago.
