Founded in Berkeley, California, The Daily Californian is an independent, student-run newspaper that publishes content covering both the city of Berkeley as well as UC Berkeley and its campus. Starting in 1965, the newspaper’s office was originally located on UC Berkeley’s campus on the sixth floor of Eshleman Hall on Bancroft Way, but in 2012, it relocated to 2483 Hearst Avenue on Northside¹.

This office relocation resulted in not only physical distance between the paper and the university, but also served as a clear representation of the paper’s continued resistance against institutional authority and repression.

The Daily Californian has covered local activism as well as published controversial editorials related to politics, and its newsroom office in Eshleman Hall has even literally been the site of student protest. In November 1996, The Daily Californian ran an editorial endorsing Proposition 209, prompting student protesters to charge down to The Daily Californian’s Eshleman Hall office, grab thousands of the paper’s print copies, rip them up, and throw them over the building’s fifth-floor balcony².

This protest indicates how prevalent and influential The Daily Californian’s editorials can be, and more importantly, the invasion of the office’s physical space points to how activism often involves exerting control over space, as well as how press can affect activism or widespread messages.

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¹ Baxter, Adelyn. “Daily Cal bids farewell to Eshleman, moves to new office on Northside.” Daily Californian (Berkeley, CA), Aug. 31, 2012.

² Reimold, Daniel. “Sexual, Revolutionary. The First U.S. College Newspaper Sex Column, 1996-97.” June 10, 2019. https://doi.org/10.1080/00947679.2007.12062733

Berkeley is known for its political activism, and the 1960s was an especially tumultuous time of rebellion and active change — the Civil Rights Movement, Anti-Apartheid Divestment Movement, the Disability Rights Movement, the Free Speech Movement, and other consequential movements all became spotlighted around this time and especially in Berkeley.

Focusing on the Free Speech Movement, cultural geography professor Don Mitchell emphasized that while the movement protested Berkeley's political activity limitations, it also served as a rebellion against the “increasingly restrictive policies of an administration that viewed itself as a center of liberal (capitalist) intellectualism”³. This indicates the irony that UC Berkeley is widely regarded as a radical, forward-thinking campus, yet the institution that many students are rebelling against is, in fact, the university itself (or its policies).

Narrowing focus, the property known as People’s Park stands today as one of the most significant landmarks of UC Berkeley’s activism history. In 1952, UC began a development plan designated much of Berkeley’s southside area as spaces for potential university expansion, and four years later, the UC Regents authorized a land-acquisition program that included the three-area that would later become People’s Park⁴.

In the mid-1960s, local merchant and activist Michael Delacour popularized the idea of a community-controlled park, and later in the decade, the vacant lot eventually transformed into a park with “swings, slides, and sandboxes; flowers, grass, and three apple trees; abstract metal sculptures, benches, and brick walkways”⁵. In May 1969, Chancellor Roger Heyns declared that UC would fence People’s Park as to start construction of a sports field, and later, thousands protested in defense of the park, clashing with police on a day known as “Bloody Thursday” in which a bystander was killed, another bystander was blinded, and dozens of protesters and bystanders were hospitalized⁶.

Signaling a direct relationship between controlling space and power, his ongoing locational conflict exemplifies how the university's attempt to exert control over physical space has put the institution at odds with the community it was intended to serve.

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³ Mitchell, Don. “Iconography and locational conflict from the underside: Free speech, People’s Park, and the politics of homelessness in Berkeley, California.” Political Geography, Volume 11, Issue 2, March 1992, p. 157.

⁴ Cash, Jon D. “People’s Park: Birth and Survival.” California History, Vol. 88, No. 1, Votes for Women, pp. 8-29, 53-55, University of California Press, 2010.

⁵ Cash, Jon D. “People’s Park: Birth and Survival.” California History, Vol. 88, No. 1, Votes for Women, pp. 8-29, 53-55, University of California Press, 2010.

⁶ Cash, Jon D. “People’s Park: Birth and Survival.” California History, Vol. 88, No. 1, Votes for Women, pp. 8-29, 53-55, University of California Press, 2010.

Mitchell states that contemporary locational conflict serves as a “fundamental conflict over the meaning and definitions of basic rights within our society”¹⁰. The conflict over People’s Park and its eventual prompting of The Daily Californian’s independence, as well as its link to the newspaper’s office’s relocation, elicits questions of who governs press and physical space.

“The Daily Cal is a fixture of Berkeley — a part of the city’s fabric — and the office is the same,” Sundeen said¹¹. “It’s the center of local journalism in Berkeley and both an educational and community serving space.”

In this way, The Daily Californian office symbolizes what it means to make room for freedom and free press. The paper's major shift away from the university, both in regard to independence and location, demonstrates student resistance and arguably even presents itself as a form of activism.

The story of The Daily Californian and its connections to student activism aid scholars' wider understanding of UC Berkeley through an emphasis on the university’s relations to press and physical space. Importantly, the paper’s departure from the university’s affiliations as well as the paper’s office relocation both serve as a wider representation of defying powerful institutions. More broadly in regard to American culture, this study reminds scholars of the importance of not only examining institutions, but questioning them and their power.

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¹⁰ Mitchell, Don. “Iconography and locational conflict from the underside: Free speech, People’s Park, and the politics of homelessness in Berkeley, California.” Political Geography, Volume 11, Issue 2, March 1992, p. 152.

¹¹ Sundeen, Jasper K., interview by Taila Lee, May 12, 2022, https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Uu9RBMdrgq2_SweENczhoX7GC3ZFk_Tm0siAZsBwKq0/edit?usp=sharing

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