In
the ’70s, some new student project, destined to change
the world, got fired up almost every week. A peer crisis center
opened in the Muir apartments (Crisis K2) and a student-run coffeehouse
was launched in the Muir Commons (the Muir Five-and-Dime) where
cheap movies and hot cider were also on offer. We started a Student
Print Co-op with cast-off equipment gladly provided by the Campus
Reprographics Department (to keep pesky students off their backs).
Two of those projects, however, have miraculously endured to this
day—Groundwork Books and the Course and Professor Evaluations
(CAPE).
Groundwork Books began as a radical community bookstore in Solana
Beach but quickly split into two political factions. The portion
composed primarily of college students decided that the UCSD
campus was a reasonable place to set up shop.
From the beginning, we students saw the selling of books as merely
a means to an end. Our true goal was to transform society, one
bit at a time, through self-criticism and study.
And self-criticize
we did, endlessly, rigorously and long into the night. No bourgeois
tendency was left untouched, no liberal value unexamined. We
strove to behave as new socialist men and women. It may sound
pretty strange
now, but at the time it was a baptism by fire that made us
examine ourselves in new ways. In between these ethical exercises we actually managed to run
a bookstore. At first, we dragged books across campus on a
wheeled
metal rack. Then we got a student center space and were able
to offer students an environment where they could buy textbooks
as
well as browse other related texts.
Classroom orders became our bread-and-butter, so much so that
the official bookstore tried unsuccessfully to close us down.
We broadened
our selection, published a newsletter of recent arrivals, sponsored
study groups, and hosted May Day celebrations. It was always
challenging to keep the collective spirit alive with the steady
turnover characteristic
of student groups, but Groundwork is still going strong 31 years
later. The Student Educational Change and Development Center (SECDC) was
also seeded at that time and embarked on an ambitious program to
transform UCSD’s pedagogical foundation. I was the first
director of CAPE and we saw it as a tool to gain more control over
our academic lives, by providing data for selecting electives and
by offering structured feedback to faculty about their teaching.
We endured numerous technical challenges, including burning out
a good many electric pencil sharpeners and spilling a box of punched
cards used to run our program on the Burroughs B-6700 mainframe.
We outraged faculty and baffled students. But eventually the idea
began to take hold, after students started to see—and use—our
published reports.
Remarkably, the administration supported our
efforts, and by 1974 CAPE was the most heavily funded student
organization, with a $16,800 budget coming from a special systemwide
grant supporting
undergraduate teaching evaluation.
The fact that these two institutions survive today is a testament
to the spirit of students who actively seek control over their
own environment. I can think of no more rewarding a legacy than
their endurance. 
Lincoln Cushing is a librarian at UC Berkeley’s
Bancroft Library. |
