Scandal of Cal

The incendiary story of conquest, racism, warfare, and historical amnesia at one of the worlds most celebrated and ostensibly enlightened public universities.This is a land acknowledgment. Ruth Wilson Gilmore, author of Abolition Geography: Essays towards LiberationThe Scandal of Calis a template for scrutinizing other land-grant universities This is a beautifully written and heartbreaking narrative. Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, author ofAn Indigenous Peoples History of the United StatesThe University of California, Berkeleywidely known as Calis admired worldwide as a bastion of innovation and a hub for progressive thought. Far less known are the universitys 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 Berkeleys history. Platt looks unflinchingly at the universitys 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 schools 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 institutions decision-making up to the present day. This book, above all, illuminates Cals 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.