The Scandal of Cal

September 18, 2023
UC Berkeley law professor Platt (Beyond These Walls) presents an incendiary and deeply researched history of his employer’s wrongdoings. Deriding how the university, established in 1868, came into existence, Platt highlights how land-grant universities were part of a system that transferred land from Native Americans to white settlers and reveals that Native American graves were disrespectfully exhumed on campus “on a regular basis” in the university’s first decades. He also spotlights a wide range of other institutional acts that he argues were racist and imperialist, including the teaching of eugenics-related white supremacy theories, the “militarism” of requiring all male students to have military training during WWI, the expulsion of 500 Japanese students during WWII, and participation in the Manhattan Project. Platt’s criticism of Cal anthropologist Alfred Kroeber (1876–1960) is especially strong; he accuses Kroeber of “moral cowardice” for not speaking out about the mid-19th-century genocide of California’s Native Americans while he made his career preserving their language and culture and his department unscrupulously collected Native American corpses and artifacts. The varied list of accusations somewhat dilutes the overall argument. Still, it makes for a profound alternate institutional history, one that sees the long arm of institutional racism implicated everywhere.