Early last month, professor Norman Jacobson of the political science department passed away. The Clog recently found a online transcript of an interview from 1999 he did with the Regional Oral History Office at the Bancroft Library. We normally wouldn’t remark on something like this, except that the guy was unimaginably kick-ass.

You see, he’s been at Berkeley since the prehistorical mists of 1951. Saw the Free Speech Movement firsthand. Knew Mario Savio. Taught Greil Marcus and Jann Wenner, the founders of Rolling Stone. Almost seceded from the political science department.

On President Sproul:

bq. In 1951 when I came to Berkeley, there was no chancellor at the university, there was a president—President Sproul—who, though a laughing-stock among the faculty because he was not an
academic and therefore he was not our equal at all—. He had started in the administration, I believe, as an office boy and worked his way up and became president. He was a presence. He was on the campus all the time.

On anti-Communist firings on campus:

bq. I should point out that the fifties on the campus were
dominated by the Cold War, the McCarthy business. On one occasion one of my 6 colleagues who was on a yearly contract didn’t have his contract renewed by the Regents because of charges that were made against him by HUAC, and the next time I saw him he was at Ed Hunolt’s bookstore selling books.

On the expansion of other campuses:

bq. I remember one of my colleagues down at UCLA referring to Berkeley as the Vatican (…) Riverside, which had been a citrus fruit station, now became a campus. Davis became a full campus. It had been the agriculture school. Later in the late sixties,
Santa Cruz was established (…) Santa Barbara. Of course then Irvine was added. What had been Scripps Institute became the basis for San Diego and so on.

On the Free Speech Movement:

bq. If you look at the student complaints at the time, they don’t talk about what’s happened bureaucratically to the university, but they do in the substance of what they’re saying: that they’re products of this big machine, that they’re turned out by a factory. Faculty now are so engrossed in research and research units that teaching gets the least attention and so forth. They remind me of the anti-Federalists arguing against the Constitution on the grounds of the destruction of classical Republicanism, of participation, of face-to-face relations, of primary relations with people. They’re now part of the big machine and they’re going to be swallowed up and so on.

On Rolling Stone:

bq. Griel Marcus was a TA for me in my large political theory course. Well, as a matter of fact, [laughs] there was Griel Marcus, an undergraduate in the course—a kid named Winner. Jann Wenner. He was there, too. As a matter of fact, the whole Rolling Stone crowd was in that class. And Jann Wenner’s mother, Sim—her name was Simon—was a very wealthy woman, who had established the first diaper service. And she had been a graduate student of mine for a term, and she gave Wenner the money to establish Rolling Stone.

On Mario Savio:

bq. The first time I had a conversation with Mario Savio was when he called me and asked whether he could be a teaching assistant for my course. He was a philosophy student and no, he couldn’t meet the requirements and so forth, but we did talk (…)
I observed him and he was somebody I recognized, also a New Yorker. And when I first became acquainted with him, following that conversation, he told me where he was from in New York, where he’d gone to high school. He told me about his father
who was a shoemaker, and so you know, (I had) these pictures in my own mind. I also understood later why he had to grin and bear rock and roll when he preferred listening to opera. He had grown up in his father’s shop listening to opera.

Links:

Norman Jacobson Oral History

Daily Cal Obituary

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