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EXCERPT FROM THE PROLOGUE, "CONNECTIONS"
As a neophyte grad student fresh off the plane from medieval Oxford in 1963, I felt liberated in cutting-edge Cal Berkeley, where the foundations of the old white boys’ club that had run elite universities forever began to shake. I quickly felt at home on a campus where students linked the struggle for civil rights in the South with the right of students to exercise free speech. In the School of Criminology, where I did my doctorate, I was fortunate to be part of a group that tried to break criminology’s incestuous ties with government and criminal justice agencies.
It was here that I learned my first lesson about how quickly benign Berkeley could turn ruthlessly punitive.
After completing a doctorate, I did my postdoc in Chicago from 1966 to 1968, where I witnessed rampant police violence and was jolted into action by the antiracism movement. My return to Cal Berkeley as an assistant professor in 1968, the year of worldwide popular revolts, coincided with new ideas and practices storming through academia. My first academic job was in a lively, pluralistic criminology program that included old-school police officials and criminalists, liberal policy advocates inspired by the War on Poverty, and a small radical wing that advocated what is known today as abolitionism and defunding the police. While I joined anti-war activists on the streets, the school gladly took $140,000 (about $900,000 in today’s value) from President Nixon’s right-wing Justice Department to train police in how to control urban disorders. My leftist colleagues included a survivor of Manzanar “relocation camp,” a Marxist activist, and a Freedom Rider veteran of the voting rights campaign in Mississippi.
I joined organizations that advocated community-based governance of police, massive decarceration of prisons and jails, making crimes of violence against women a public matter, and holding corporations and government officials responsible for crimesagainst humanity. For an extraordinary few years, I was, in the words of Alice Walker, “called to life” by the movement. I experienced a seamless connection between ideas and practice, a sense of purposeful commitment in the classroom and in the community, teaching what I believed and believing what I taught. We were far too hopeful, as it turned out, but we did not know or care.
Years later, benefiting from information available through the Freedom of Information Act, I would discover that informants in my classes were taking highly selective and sometimes hilarious notes for the FBI and CIA, and recommending my deportation. “Platt has continually and consistently displayed anti-American ideas,” reported an FBI agent in 1969–1970. “He has expressed anti-police opinions in the past and has led discussions which had an anti–law enforcement tone. He was one of the first individuals to wear extremely long hair. . . . He is a dangerous individual.”
Berkeley figured prominently in the paranoid imagination of the federal executive branch. Richard Nixon’s national security adviser was “shell-shocked” by the anti-war movement, and Admiral Thomas Moorer, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, claimed in 1970 that a radical “command post” in Berkeley was plotting a military attack on the White House.
Not surprisingly, I was not a criminology professor much longer. Berkeley Chancellor Albert Bowker regarded my first book, The Child Savers (still in print more than fifty years later), as “sharply biased” and evocative of “Orthodox Marxism of the 1930s.” In a confidential memo, he berated my “agitating” against the police. “I do believe some of his colleagues would be somewhat relieved if he weren’t around.”
By the mid-1970s, social movements were in retreat and radical ideas marginalized in academia. Despite campus protests, including a rally attended by thousands to hear Black Panther Party leader Bobby Seale defend the School of Criminology, in 1976 the university administration and Governor Reagan–led Board of Regents closed down the oldest such program in the United States and placed vetted senior faculty under the ideological guardianship of the law school.
This experience at Berkeley taught me a great deal about how academia functions not just as a servant of power but as a powerful institution in its own right. But as was the case with many fellow activists in the 1970s, I didn’t understand if the university’s hard-nosed exercise of power against its own was extraordinary or precedented.
While working at Berkeley, I had another opportunity to make connections that I failed to take.
Berkeley’s role in creating the Manhattan Project’s first atom bomb during the Second World War was well known in 1972 when I cotaught a class that included an unedited, unembellished video made by the air force, but suppressed until 1967, on the impact and aftermath of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. My co-professors and I asked the stunned students: Was this a war crime?
My generation of New Left activists was steeped in the significance of Hiroshima-Nagasaki, but I didn’t understand the details and context of how and why Berkeley got involved in the bomb-making business. Was this an aberration, an exception, or business as usual? I didn’t know, for example, that the university governed the Los Alamos lab’s day-to-day operations; or that it was deeply involved in the application of scientific knowledge, such as planning in which Japanese cities “the blast wave would create effective damage”; or that it administered the Bradbury Science Museum as a public relations department of the American military.
In 2010, I traveled around New Mexico for the first time, my eyes opened wide by colors, clouds, and light—a spectacular experience until I went through the security check into the Los Alamos compound, where some ten thousand employees worked on “The World’s Greatest Science Protecting America.” I also spent time in local museums, hoping—and failing—to learn how such an extraordinarily sensual terrain became home to the world record for mass killing in seventy-two hours.
Even after my visit to New Mexico, I was oblivious that the university and federal government unilaterally appropriated land for Los Alamos that included Pueblo burial grounds, exploited the labor of local tribes, and enabled the families of lab employees to treat Indigenous cultures as a source of entertainment and collectibles.
About the same time as my visit to Los Alamos, I published a book about the traffic in the human remains and ceremonial artifacts of Indigenous peoples. The University of California, especially its Berkeley campus, figured prominently in this trade—as excavators, authorities, dealers, and collectors—and amassed one of the largest collections in the world. Grave Matters documented with compelling evidence how the university had pillaged hundreds of Native burial sites through either their own expeditions or local surrogates, and had subjected ancestors’ remains to eugenic postmortems in the anthropological laboratory.
But I didn’t make any connections between the university’s acquisition of Indigenous homelands in New Mexico and in California; or between Berkeley’s military history and the Manhattan Project; or between the university’s plundering of Native grave sites and Los Alamos residents’ fascination with collecting Native artifacts. Los Alamos does not appear in the index of Grave Matters.
There is no excuse for my ignorance, but it’s not surprising. The Berkeley campus’s commemorative landmarks honor the victors in the Indian Wars, not those who died and resisted. Also, there are no visual reminders or solemn events on the Berkeley campus to trouble our consciences about one of the most consequential events in university and world history. Unlike the US ambassador to Japan, the University of California does not formally participate in ceremonies of remembrance to commemorate Hiroshima Day on August 6.
Minimally, I hoped that Grave Matters would reinforce the efforts of tribes to repatriate their ancestors’ remains and cultural and ceremonial artifacts, as demanded by the federal Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) of 1990 and the 2007 United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People. But the university treated my research the same way that it treated Native claimants: ignoring, evading, and delaying through “glacially slow” procedures and “interminable consultation,” as a gathering of California tribes concluded in 2017.
In 2020, I took another opportunity to make connections that, in retrospect, were hiding in plain view. With a small group of faculty and staff I co-founded Berkeley’s Truth and Justice Project. Our purpose was to investigate the history of the university’s accumulation of Native ancestral remains and artifacts. What could we learn from the past that might explain the university’s reluctance to comply not only with its legal obligations under NAGPRA and ethical guidelines suggested by the UN Declaration, but also with its reputation as the country’s “top public university” and an incubator of social justice committed to “improving the world”?
This book emerged from my praxis with the Truth and Justice Project. It took me a long time to make connections between Los Alamos and Berkeley, to understand how they both share a callous disregard for the human cost of knowledge. Now, I can’t stop these associations from scurrying around my brain, as intricate and interconnected as a spider’s web.14 The Scandal of Cal is not the or even a definitive history of Berkeley-the-University. It’s not a celebration of Nobel laureates, Pulitzer prize winners, MacArthur Fellows, scientific breakthroughs in genomics, or entrepreneurial innovators. It’s a story less often told that encourages us to think in new ways about what we too often take for granted, to consider history not as an indisputable set of facts, but as “an argument about the past, as well as the record of it, and its terms are forever changing.”
To know the place I call home requires recuperating multiple erased histories and unpeeling institutional memories that tenaciously stick to History. The book’s first section, Origins Stories, contrasts vibrant Ohlone communities, which preceded the founding of the University of California for thousands of years, with archaeological records and public histories that are embedded in the state’s foundational stories and continue to reduce peoples to specimens, as well as minimize the horrors of conquest and genocide. Sometimes, as Saidiya Hartman warned us, “to read the archive is to enter a mortuary.”
To know the past requires recognition of how Cal Berkeley—where I was schooled in anti-war activism in the 1960s and 1970s—flourished in war and celebrated colonial violence as a harbinger of Civilization. The book’s second section, Conquest, argues that California’s “Golden Age” was birthed in unspeakable bloodshed, and that colonialism, imperialism, and militarism shaped the university’s governance and academic priorities from the Indian Wars to Hiroshima, and beyond.
To know how Berkeley achieved such a rapid rise to prominence requires understanding the importance of its anthropological collecting practices. The longtime slogan fiat lux distilled the university’s aspiration to bring light to a make-believe wilderness. The book’s third section, Accumulation, investigates how Berkeley in the late nineteenth century followed the example of European colonial powers in pillaging Indigenous grave sites from Egypt to California, and hoarding a glut of artifacts and human remains. It was only through persistent tribal resistance and organizing that universities, museums, and other institutions finally and reluctantly in the late twentieth century put a halt to excavating and displaying the spoils of their plunder.
To know how the state validated conquest and genocide as the price of Progress requires an investigation into the role of academia in the production of knowledge or, in W. E. B. Du Bois’s blunt phrase, “lies agreed upon.” The book’s fourth section, Miseducation, examines Berkeley’s contributions to popular narratives about California’s fanciful history and to eugenic explanations of inequality; and explores how the university’s “beautiful white buildings embowered in greenery” and its memorial landscape express a cultural self-identity as an outpost of European civilization.
The book’s epilogue, Reckoning, calls upon Berkeley to live up to its progressive reputation and grapple with how the past bleeds into the here and now. Such a challenge should not be delegated to subcommittees and task forces. It demands a system-wide investigation with tribal and Native community leaders occupying principal seats at the table. Their land, blood, ancestors, cultural heritage, and traditional knowledge are inseparably tied to the university’s origins. It will require the kind of paradigm shift that occurs when longstanding truisms—so rooted in everyday common sense that they are regarded as indisputable facts—are upended, when consensus becomes dissonance, when orientation is disoriented. From its origins story to its wishful historical narrative, the institution’s persona needs a makeover. Facing the weight of the past means tackling hard issues—such as reparations—and a willingness to tarnish the university’s well-polished brand as a catalyst of social justice.
It’s time, in the words of Michael Yellow Bird, for “truth-telling and the revision of settler history.”
