<p>Was chatting with a Cal grad about the college years. </p>
<p>We were talking about the bad aspects of Michigan and Cal and got into a debate of whether Michigan or Cal is more infamous for being leftist/hippie. What do you guys think?</p>
<p>San Francisco was the breeding ground of the hippie movement in the 60’s.</p>
<p>Go to Berkeley on 4/20 or just read about student activism in the 1960s. Michigan is a liberal school, but Berkeley was the epicenter of the hippy movement.</p>
<p>^Oh I just read about the student riots at berkeley in the 60s. Interesting.</p>
<p>I think Michigan feels more like UCLA than Cal.</p>
<p>Hippies were pretty apolitical and were centered in San Francisco. They believed you could change the world by turning on to drugs, embracing free love, and dropping out of mainstream society. In fact, they believed that was the only way you could defeat “the system.” </p>
<p>UC Berkeley students in the 60s were very politically active and heavily left-leaning. They weren’t hippies. These were very different, and in important ways rival movements. The political activists condemned the hippies’ passiveness and lack of political engagement. The hippies thought overt political activity of any kind was “square” and either a way of reforming and thereby propping up “the system” or a misguided attempt to replace one system with another system; they wanted no system. </p>
<p>Ann Arbor in the 60’s and early 70’s had some of each, but was more political than hippie, more like Berkeley than San Francisco. Ann Arbor was the birthplace of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), the most important radical student organization of the 1960s. It was as important as Berkeley as a center of leftist student political activism, though perhaps a bit tamer than Berkeley in the sense that student activism in Ann Arbor took the form of strikes, sit-ins, teach-ins, and demonstrations, but never the kind of full-scale rioting that occasionally erupted in Berkeley–though some of that may be due to a more measured police response. Very little of that radicalism remains today in either Ann Arbor or Berkeley; both are quiet, liberal college towns.</p>
<p>There’s a great movie called ‘Berkeley in the 60s’ that does a good job of showing the differences and tensions between San Francisco’s hippies and Berkeley’s radical political activists.</p>
<p>Depending on one’s political/cultural views, being leftist or hippie is not necessarily a bad thing. </p>
<p>Anyway, have you ever heard of “People’s Republic Of Berkeley”?</p>
<p>I know people who attended both Cal and Michigan back in the 1960s and 1970s. Back then, all of them agree that Michigan and Cal were both equally liberal and hippie-ish. But having visited again the recent years, they all seem to think that Michigan has moved on while Cal has not. So today, I would have to say that Cal is significantly more hippie-ish.</p>
<p>I know plenty of Cal alumni who graduated in the late 1960s, early 1970s. They claim, and current students agree, that it has toned down since the 1968 hey day. Much of that has to do with Cal’s changing student body as well as the general decreased radicalism among American students (odd because IMO we have far more to protest about today than in the 60s). However, from what I’ve read, the Berkeley of today seems far more radical than the Michigan of today.</p>
<p>Part of the reason for that is the continued reliance of the UCs on state support. Michigan’s enormous endowment allows it to be somewhat independent of the state whereas at the UCs, they are truly state supported so students experience the cuts more readily. It also relates to the structure of the UC system, where all 9 universities are relatively equally funded by the legislator. That means that when state support declines everyone in the system feels it which allows for easy coordination among campuses regarding protests. </p>
<p>Though there are plenty of other reasons, those two IMO are the largest.</p>
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<p>Just to be clear, as someone who lived through those times, the radical students of the 60s and early 70s at UC Berkeley and the University of Michigan weren’t ‘liberal.’ Most would have defined liberals as the enemy. They were radical leftists. Some later watered down their views and became liberal. Others renounced their earlier views and became conservative. But ‘liberal’ was pretty much a dirty word in the student politics of the era; anyone who self-identified as a liberal was scorned and attacked from both left and right, but on campuses like Michigan and UC Berkeley, mostly from the left.</p>
<p>Times have changed both in Berkeley and Ann Arbor. I’d say the town of Berkeley is now somewhat more left-leaning than the students at Cal. Ann Arbor and students at the University of Michigan are probably on the whole more moderate than Berkeley and Cal students, still with a definite liberal tilt but somewhat more mainstream. </p>
<p>As for “hippie-ish”? I guess I don’t know what that means. To be a hippie was to drop out of mainstream society. It’s a little like being pregnant; there’s no half-way. What did happen on campuses is that a lot of students affected a style based on the hippies–long hair, unshaven, lots of beads and bangles and unconventional dress, a lot of pot and sometimes psychedelic and/or hard drugs. But students who were still pursuing degrees (however tenuously) weren’t hippies, they were more like half-hearted hippie wannabes. I think that hippie-half-wannabe style has pretty much disappeared from both the Michigan and UC Berkeley campuses. There are still hippie and quasi-hippie remnants in both towns, probably more in Berkeley than in Ann Arbor, but more so in the towns than on the campuses.</p>
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while the City of Berkeley has not. Fixed that for you.</p>
<p>Asian students as a whole are much less politically active.
The protests over budget cuts have ceased since the state restored education funding to UC.</p>
<p>^^^^All of the hippies moved near the de facto medical school. :-)</p>
<p>^ Nope, most are still in Berkeley. </p>
<p>I only pull in the defacto medical school so as to compare apples to apples. ;-)</p>
<p>^ Probably true that there are now more old hippies in Berkeley than in San Francisco, due mostly to the real estate market. Some in parts of Oakland, too. Real estate is cheaper in the East Bay.</p>
<p>“Old hippies,” by the way, is now a redundant term. There are no “new hippies” or “young hippies.” I sometimes shop at a food co-op in south Minneapolis that was founded by, and is still frequented by, hippies. All geriatric cases now, but they’re there in force. Interesting from a sociological perspective. There are probably a number of enclaves like that around the country.</p>
<p>I’ve never even heard of Michigan being categorized as hippie. But Berkeley on the other hand…</p>
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<p>There definitely were hippies in Ann Arbor in the late 60s/early 70s. There are still traces. The Peoples Food Co-op on N. Fourth was founded by hippies and is still going strong. And of course there was the Rainbow Peoples Party (Google it) with Pun Plamondon, John & Leni Sinclair and friends, who took up residence on Hill Street and had a loyal band of countercultural followers and relatively large groups of hangers-on. They were more political than most hippies, but I’d count them as more hippie than political because their countercultural commitments always took precedence over political strategy and tactics. But these hippie elements were more based in the town than on the campus.</p>
<p>Same is more or less true in Berkeley. The town tolerated hippies, but the campus? Well, to be a “hippie student” was pretty much a contradiction, because to be a hippie was to renounce the sort of striving that it takes to be a successful student. Some people came to Berkeley to be students but dropped out and became hippies. The same thing happened in Ann Arbor but to a lesser degree. Berkeley had more hippies but both towns had some. As for campus radical politics, I think that was much closer between the two, but that’s very different from being a hippie, and I think both campuses have changed a lot since then.</p>
<p>Don’t forget Village Corner and hash bash(?)</p>
<p>Thanks for clarifying about the differences between hippies and students Bclintonk.</p>
<p>Well Berkeley has weed delivery services, but that’s more a function of California’s relatively relaxed marijuana laws. </p>
<p>Does Michigan have a co-op system or anything close to it? I stayed with my friend for a few days at Berkeley and she lives in one of the most commune esque co-ops at the school. Granted, they are a very small part of Berkeley life, but its existence still demonstrates that Berkeley hasn’t lost all of its anti-mainstream society outlook.</p>
<p>Also UCBChemE, I’m fully aware about the protests ceasing. But they were relatively recent, and their size demonstrates that Berkeley (and to a lesser extent other UCs) can mobilize to protest against something they deem unfair.</p>
<p>[People’s</a> Food Coop (Ann Arbor, MI)](<a href=“http://www.peoplesfood.coop/]People’s”>http://www.peoplesfood.coop/)</p>
<p>^ What about a student housing co-op?
[url=<a href=“http://www.bsc.coop/]Home[/url”>http://www.bsc.coop/]Home[/url</a>]</p>