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Citation: The Progressive Dec 1998, 11(1)
Author: Ehrenreich, Barbara
Title: Conscience on Campus.(criticism of Berkeley student
David Cash) by Barbara Ehrenreich
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COPYRIGHT 1998 Progressive Inc.
At last, Berkeley students have found an issue compelling enough to wake
them from their torpor: sophomore David Cash, the moral reprobate who
witnessed his friend threaten and commence to molest a seven-year-old girl,
Sherrice Iverson, in the stall of a women's restroom in Nevada. Cash simply
walked away, tactfully giving his friend a little privacy. The perpetrator,
Jeremy Strohmeyer, who was convicted of sexually assaulting Sherrice and then
drowning her in the toilet, is now behind bars for life, while Cash is free to
pursue his studies of--god help us, nuclear engineering--on the Berkeley
campus.
Cash reportedly boasted last summer that his new-found notoriety as
Strohmeyer's pal had boosted his ability to score with women. But most
Berkeley students, understandably enough, do not want to risk using the same
dining hall utensils or handling the same reserve books that may have
encountered David Cash's noxious touch. They want him expelled, and since the
administration refuses to do so on the grounds that Cash, technically
speaking, has committed no crime, they want him shunned.
"Do not sit near him in the dining hall or in class. Refuse to be his
roommate or his lab partner. If he talks to you do not hear him," urges one
first-year student in the Daily Cal. Fearing vigilante attacks, the
administration has assigned a security guard to Cash, and students are
complaining about this, too, as if the guard's wages were already showing up
on their tuition bills.
So what do you do: salute the sensitivities of today's Berkeley students or
bemoan the fact that their target is, in the scheme of things, so tiny?
Affirmative action, for example, which was banned by California's
Proposition 209 two years ago, rates only a fraction of the emotional
intensity surrounding Cash. There were two days of pro-affirmative action
protests in October, but they were organized by U.C. faculty members and
generated only a lukewarm response from the now overwhelmingly white and Asian
American student body.
It may be that, at some subconscious level, Cash is a coded way of taking up
the race debate that Prop. 209 so rudely ended. He is white, as is Strohmeyer,
while Sherrice Iverson was black as well as poor. What the state seems to be
saying, through its university system, is that it will in no way bestir itself
to educate black kids but doesn't mind nurturing the kind of people who so
lightheartedly assent to their murders.
Sherrice Iverson, if she had lived so long, might very likely have been
rejected by U.C.-Berkeley, while Cash, who may bear some responsibility for
the fact that she will never grow up to college age, studies on in what is
called good standing. No one among the anti-Cash enrages, however, is arguing
that the Sherrices of this world should be allowed to matriculate--just that
they shouldn't be flushed away at such an early age.
But there's more to Cash-bashing than a displaced debate about affirmative
action. What, after all, is his crime? He did not kill; he only turned away
from the killing site, and this is something we almost all do every day,
whether that site is Rwanda or Kosovo or the overworked gas chambers of our
own nation. As Cash explained, "I do not know this little girl. I do not know
starving children in Panama. I do not know people who are dying of disease in
Egypt." Moral responsibility, in other words, extends no further than a few
close drinking friends.
Similarly, the students at Berkeley this semester have neglected to protest
welfare reform, the severe mistreatment of environmental activists in Northern
California, or Clinton's compulsive waggings of the dog. A conference on
incarceration, held on a September weekend and featuring Angela Davis and
other luminaries of the California left, brought a temporary influx of black
faces to the campus but barely roused any students from their dorms, and those
who were around walked by the outdoor guerrilla theater performances with the
same studied coolness usually bestowed on ragged nutcases waving Bibles. If
students find Cash hateful, it may in part be because he embodies what is most
hateful in themselves.
It's not entirely the students' fault. The campus almost seems to be
designed, geographically, to inculcate moral isolationism. Walk from Sproul
Plaza, where antiwar protesters once massed before marches, out toward the
burrito-and-sprouts joints of Telegraph Avenue, and you run a gauntlet of
outstretched hands and Styrofoam cups, The beggars are so numerous and, in
some cases, so patently undeserving--skinheads and Goth kids demanding beer
money--that after a few burrito runs the whole scene degenerates to the level
of the picturesque.
And this may be something elite universities now feel that they need to
teach: the ability to walk on by, keeping your mind fixed on the LSATs and
GREs, no matter what examples of concentrated misery lie in your path. Hence,
the locations of Yale, Columbia, Penn, and so many others on the edges of
desperate ghettos. If the goal of an elite education is morally blinkered,
self-centered careerism, David Cash is just a better student than most.
But it may be snotty, not to mention irrelevant, for an aged radical to
content herself with telling the student body to get a (political) life. Cash
may be a micro-issue, but at least the anger over his presence represents some
pale reminder of how a working conscience functions. If he's the issue of
1998-'99, how should the issue be resolved?
No one, on any side of the discussion, has suggested that Cash might still
have some remote chance of evolving into an actual human. "Rehabilitation"
seems to have faded from the American vocabulary along with such archaic
notions as "hope" and "social spending." The students who want him kicked out:
assume that what you are at age nineteen is pretty much what you'll be at
thirty-nine--which is not surprising, given that our criminal justice system
is now prepared to try kids not much older than Sherrice as full-blown,
grown-up perps. The throw-him-out faction argues that he doesn't "deserve" the
elite education he is getting, as if education were a commodity rather than a
potentially challenging and life-changing process. No one, least of all the
administration, has suggested that it might be part of the responsibility of a
university, and especially a public one, to impart some moral insight to its
students, even if such insight will not contribute to the students' future
earnings--in fact, even, if it might serve to lower them.
I'm not talking about "ethics" courses. (When certain medical schools
instituted required ethics courses in the 1980s, they couldn't keep the
assigned texts from being ripped off from the reserve shelves--or so the story
goes.) I'm talking about an all-out, campus-wide, grassroots mobilization for
the moral reform of David Cash.
Suppose, instead of shunning him, his fellow students cornered him in the
student union to discuss Kant and Jesus and Buber and whether he has a little
sister himself.
Suppose every teaching assistant, librarian, and cafeteria worker he
encountered buttonholed him for tete-a-tetes about race and gender, community
and responsibility.
Suppose, finally, that this kind of thing caught on and that students
started confronting each other, dozens of times a day, with the question of
what to do about capital punishment or Kosovo or the quadriplegic veteran who
begs at Telegraph and Durant.
Nothing can redeem little Sherrice's death, but the effort to make moral
reflection a habit again would at least provide a fitting memorial.
Barbara Ehrenreich, author of "Blood Rites" and "The Snarling Citizen,"
writes monthly for The Progressive.
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