One of the special, intangible assets of Berkeley is that it is widely recognized as a political landmark and a state of mind. I love stumbling across references to “Berkeley” in that sense.
The latest comes from an excellent essay by Tim Garton Ash in The New York Review of Books on the epochal changes in central and eastern Europe in 1989:
During the first half of 1989, the new US administration of George H. W. Bush was extremely reticent in its response both to Gorbachev and to the changes being pushed forward by a combination of reform communists and dissidents in Poland and Hungary… Nor did Bush set much store by bearded dissidents who looked like something out of Berkeley in the 1960s… Much better to stick with a preppy reform communist.
Berkeley definitely favors the bearded dissidents over the preppy reformers.
