157 - Tony Platt, The Scandal of Cal: Land Grabs, White Supremacy, and Miseducation at UC Berkeley

Tony Platt is the author of thirteen books and 150 essays and articles on race, inequality, and social justice in American history, among them Beyond These Walls: Rethinking Crime and Punishment in the United States; Bloodlines: Recovering Hitler’s Nuremberg Laws, from Patton’s Trophy to Public Memorial; and The Child Savers: The Invention of Delinquency. His work has been translated into German, Spanish, Italian, and Japanese. In addition to scholarly books and publications, Platt has written for the Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Truthdig, History News Network, Z Magazine, Nation, Salon, Monthly Review, and the Guardian, and his commentaries have aired on National Public Radio. Now a Distinguished Affiliated Scholar at Berkeley’s Center for the Study of Law and Society, Platt taught at the University of Chicago, the University of California, Berkeley, and California State University where he received awards for teaching and scholarship. The focus of our conversation is Tony's new book The Scandal of Cal: Land Grabs, White Supremacy, and Miseducation at UC Berkeley.  Here's a description of the book:  The University of California, Berkeley—widely known as “Cal”—is admired worldwide as a bastion of innovation and a hub for progressive thought. Far less known are the university’s roots in plunder, warfare, and the promotion of white supremacy. As Tony Platt shows in The Scandal of Cal, these original sins sit at the center of UC Berkeley’s history. Platt looks unflinchingly at the university’s desecration of graves and large-scale hoarding of Indigenous remains. He tracks its role in developing the racist pseudoscience of eugenics in the early twentieth century. He sheds light on the school’s complicity with the military-industrial complex and its incubation of unprecedented violence through the Manhattan Project. And he underscores its deliberate and continued evasions about its own wrongdoings, which echo in the institution’s decision-making up to the present day. This book, above all, illuminates Cal’s culpability in some of the cruelest chapters of US history and sounds a clarion call for the university to undertake a thorough and earnest reckoning with its past. It is required reading for Cal alumni, students, faculty, and staff, and for anyone concerned with the impact of higher education in the United States and beyond.