Professor on Ice

By traditional standards, academe would not seem to be Eldridge Cleaver's bag. Yet he does have something to teach. Cleaver, who has spent nearly twelve years in California prisons for such crimes as assault with intent to kill, is the author of Soul on Ice, a brilliant polemic on the Negro experience in America. He is also the abrasively articulate "Minister of Information" for the Black Panther movement. Thus Cleaver seemed to be an imaginative choice to appear as an unpaid guest lecturer in Social Analysis 139X, an experimental course in race relations which is being conducted this semester at the University of California at Berkeley.

It is not as if Cleaver would have monopolized the course. He was to have been one of 12 speakers, including a psychiatrist, a Mexican-American writer, and Oakland Chief of Police Charles Gain, whom the Panthers scarcely view with academic detachment. For all that, Cleaver's appointment to speak produced an incendiary reaction. Among the first to explode was State Schools Superintendent Max Rafferty, a master of gothic prose and a Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate. Said he: "Cleaver is certainly as well qualified to lecture on urban unrest as Attila the Hun would be qualified to lecture on international mass murder."

Governor Ronald Reagan, an ex-officio member of the University of California board of regents who has had his quarrels with Berkeley in the past, compared the appointment to "asking that famous Bluebeard of Paris, the wife murderer, to be a marriage counselor."

Even Assembly Speaker Jesse Unruh, another regent and the state's liberal Democratic boss, agreed for once with the Governor. Said he: "I call upon the mature members of the faculty to review the appointment and to ask themselves whether his appointment serves the long-range best interests of the university."

After the assembly voted to censure university officials for the appointment, the board of regents settled on a compromise. Cleaver and the other guest speakers, said the board, will be limited to one lecture each. In the midst of the controversy, the University of Santa Clara invited the Panther professor to become a guest lecturer at its campus south of San Francisco.

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