Challenging the UC’s “Mantle of Legitimacy”

One of the first documented critical critiques of the UC’s involvement with the labs came in the form of the Zinner Report, commissioned by the UC Academic Senate in the late-‘60s. The report was requested during the height of the anti-Vietnam War movement, which was prominent at every UC campus with the exception of UC San Francisco.

Headed by UC Davis political science professor Paul Zinner, the report was published in May 1970. It found that “administrative interaction between the laboratories and the University is barely discernible” and that the lack of meaningful oversight on the part of UC officials makes the UC akin to a “benevolent absentee landlord” with respect to the labs. In fact, the report concluded, “The laboratories enjoy a delightful autonomy within the protective shelter of the University, so delightful as to border on the licentious.”

The report stopped short of calling for severance of UC lab management, instead ruling that "continuation of UC management would be appropriate only with substantial modifications." These modifications were to include greater administrative control, increased policy formulation powers, and expanded research/educational collaboration with the universities.(14)

While the Regents did carry out a few of the Zinner Committee’s recommendations, they largely ignored the more substantive recommendations. The UC continued in its role of largely rubber-stamping all weapons programs at the labs, yet shielding the labs from scrutiny by providing the illusion that oversight was taking place.(15)

Following the end of the Vietnam War in 1975, peace activism in the United States – and, by extension, peace activism at many universities – turned toward the gathering arms race.(16) It was at this point that the first large, multi-campus campaign to address the UC’s management of the weapons labs took shape, using the Zinner Committee report as a basis for many of its political positions.

In October 1976, the UC Nuclear Weapons Labs Conversion Project was founded, a joint project of Berkeley Students for Peace, the Bay Area office of the War Resisters’ League, and the Ecumenical Peace Institute. Affiliated student groups were located at various other UC campuses, including UC Santa Cruz, UC Santa Barbara, and UC Davis. The initial goals of the Project were to force greater disclosure and discussion of work in progress at the labs, stress public health dangers from plutonium leakage, and to persuade the Regents to make a shift to non-military research a part of the terms for renewal of their contract with the Department of Energy in 1977. These goals did not at first include severance; instead, the Project’s focus was “conversion” of the labs from nuclear weapons science to science for peace. The Project’s initial mission statement read:

"The UC Nuclear Weapons Lab Conversion Project is part of a growing movement committed to reversing the momentum of an insane arms race that threatens, increasingly, to lead to nuclear holocaust.

We strive for an end to all nuclear weapons related work at both the Lawrence Livermore Lab and the Los Alamos Scientific Lab, where all nuclear weapons are designed and developed."(17)

The Project’s tactics and strategies evolved incrementally during its first few years. At first, the organization focused primarily on consciousness-raising activities – then, as now, surprisingly few students knew about the UC’s function as lab manager, nor understood the history and implications of its management. In the words of a 1978 information sheet put out by the Conversion Project, the group succeeded by “[reawakening] local public concern about the nuclear arms race.”(18)

Through petitions, meetings with officials, demonstrations, “die-ins,” teach-ins, testimony to legislators, and considerable media attention throughout California, the organization built a gathering awareness of the UC’s central role in the arms race heading into the Sept. 1977 Regents meeting. The Regents largely ignored the group’s efforts, voting 14-4 to retain the UC’s management affiliation despite the presence of over 100 Conversion Project members.(19)

The group’s frustration with this outcome was palpable. In 1978, Project members issued a statement reversing its position on lab conversion (though it retained its original name).

"For more than two years, the Labs Project pressured the University to take an active stand in favor of converting the labs… We resisted for that time calling for severance. Now we believe it is quite clear that the University will not exert even the most minimal amount of control or influence over the labs needed to make them accountable. Rather, the University appears interested only in maintaining the status quo at the labs under the guise of exercising some control.

We therefore are calling for the university to sever its connection with both labs! Such action will remove the benign, liberal image that the university lends to the horrors of the arms race. It will bring to public awareness the actual Strangelovian character of the labs. It will end the illusion that the scientific work and political lobbying of the labs is supervised by a publicly responsible and knowledgeable body of independent citizens. And it exposes, once again, the complicity of the university in the war machine…”(20)

The call for severance occurred in tandem with a radicalization of the group’s tactics. Anti-nuclear direct actions, including student takeovers of campus administration buildings, proliferated across the UC system. During the spring of 1979, 1,500 students and local community members protested at Berkeley’s Sproul Plaza. The protestors marched to the campus’ Camanile and held a “die-in” (a guerrilla theater tactic -- pretending to die in an explosion as a way to dramatize the effects of nuclear war), while a few people handcuffed themselves to the top of the building, later to be forcibly removed and arrested by police.(21)

A raucous student protest greeted the Regents at their February 1979 meeting at UC Los Angeles, the largest student anti-nuclear demonstration at a Regents meeting up to that point. Over 300 people attended. UCSC Chancellor Robert Sinsheimer, emboldened by the intense level of anti-nuclear activism taking place at his campus, took the opportunity to make known his opposition to the UC weapons ties, saying UC lab management “stands in inherent contradiction to the high and lofty principles” of the university.(22)

The movement had earlier scored a victory in the form of new Academic Senate report on the UC-lab management situation, ordered by UC President David Saxon under pressure from the Conversion Project and its new ally, CA Governor Jerry Brown.(23) Chaired by UC political scientist Dr. William Gerberding, the report was based on a series of visits to the weapons labs, meetings with lab and university officials, and public hearings featuring faculty members, nuclear weapons scientists, and outside experts as speakers.(24)

At one of these hearings, in late-1977, famed government whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg (author of the Pentagon Papers) summed up the UC’s role as weapons labs manager by pointing out that the UC’s objective function with respect to the labs was to bestow them a “mantle of legitimacy.”(25)

The Gerberding Report was released in 1978. Like the Zinner Report, it strongly recommended that the UC become involved in the day-to-day activities at the labs, rather than a veritable front organization for the Department of Energy. The UC was not in an adequate position to generate, direct, or object to lab research projects, the report concluded; most of these projects were being directed by program managers in Washington, D.C.(26)

UC President Saxon at first showed some willingness to carry out the Gerberding proposals, appointing UC Vice President William Fretter to try to put some of them into practice. As a consequence, the ugly nature of UC-government collaboration became apparent: The Department of Energy pressured Saxon into backing down from even the most moderate of these proposals, such as the creation of a committee of faculty members and administrators to monitor work at the labs. A letter to Saxon from Duane Sewell, DOE Assistant Secretary for Defense Programs, summed up the UC’s subservience in this way: “It is essential that DOE’s contractor for the weapons laboratories accept the contractual responsibilities to execute them, not to subject them to the crucible of public debate.”(27)

Meanwhile, establishment politicians were starting to take notice of the UC severance movement. Governor Brown stepped up his support of the Nuclear Weapons Lab Conversion Project agenda following the release of the Gerberding Report. Prompted also by the growing disarmament movement on an international level, as well as the Conversion Project’s organizing and advocacy work within his own state, Brown issued the following statement to the press in 1979:

“UC is profoundly compromising itself by becoming the intellectual home of nuclear weapons and participating in a runaway arms race. The Board of Regents… act as a cover, giving the labs protection from the DOE bureaucracy. In the confusion of that management gap, the lab is free to act. If you believe we need more nuclear weapons, then this gap is creative. I intend to do everything in my power to separate the University of California from the nuclear weapons business.”(28)

Brown forced a historic resolution onto the ballot of the September 1979 Regents meeting which, if passed, would have forced the Regents to attempt to convert Lawrence Livemore into a non-weapons facility. Students and faculty members organized heavily in advance of the meeting. By the time the Regents meeting rolled around, over 800 UC faculty members had signed a petition supporting the Brown resolution.

As per their custom, the Regents ignored the call. They voted down the proposal, 15-7.(29)


Navigation

Introduction
Part 1 - Los Alamos: "Born at the Crosshairs"
Part 2 - The First Disarmament Movement Wave and the ‘60s
Part 3 - Challenging the UC's “Mantle of Legitimacy”
Part 4 - The Early-‘80s: A Series of Radical and Creative Actions
Part 5 - The Rise of Faculty Activism
Part 6 - A New Generation Emerges
Part 7 - Moving Forward
Works Cited