At last, Berkeley students have found an issue compelling enough to wake them from their torpor: sophomore David Cash, the moral reprobate who witnessed his friend threaten and commence to molest a seven-year-old girl, Sherrice Iverson, in the stall of a women’s restroom in Nevada. Cash simply walked away, tactfully giving his friend a little privacy. The perpetrator, Jeremy Strohmeyer, who was convicted of sexually assaulting Sherrice and then drowning her in the toilet, is now behind bars for life, while Cash is free to pursue his studies of—god help us, nuclear engineering—on the Berkeley campus.
Cash reportedly boasted last summer that his new-found notoriety as Strohmeyer’s pal had boosted his ability to score with women. But most Berkeley students, understandably enough, do not want to risk using the same dining hall utensils or handling the same reserve books that may have encountered David Cash’s noxious touch. They want him expelled, and since the administration refuses to do so on the grounds that Cash, technically speaking, has committed no crime, they want him shunned.
“Do not sit near him in the dining hall or in class. Refuse to be his roommate or his lab partner. If he talks to you do not hear him,” urges one first-year student in the Daily Cal. Fearing vigilante attacks, the administration has assigned a security guard to Cash, and students are complaining about this, too, as if the guard’s wages were already showing up on their tuition bills.
So what do you do: salute the sensitivities of today’s Berkeley students or bemoan the fact that their target is, in the scheme of things, so tiny?
Affirmative action, for example, which was banned by California’s Proposition 209 two years ago, rates only a fraction of the emotional intensity surrounding Cash. There were two days of pro-affirmative action protests in October, but they were organized by U.C. faculty members and generated only a lukewarm response from the now overwhelmingly white and Asian American student body.
It may be that, at some subconscious level, Cash is a coded way of taking up the race debate that Prop. 209 so rudely ended. He is white, as is Strohmeyer, while Sherrice Iverson was black as well as poor. What the state seems to be saying, through its university system, is that it will in no way bestir itself to educate black kids but doesn’t mind nurturing the kind of people who so lightheartedly assent to their murders.
Sherrice Iverson, if she had lived so long, might very likely have been rejected by U.C.-Berkeley, while Cash, who may bear some responsibility for the fact that she will never grow up to college age, studies on in what is called good standing. No one among the anti-Cash enrages, however, is arguing that the Sherrices of this world should be allowed to matriculate—just that they shouldn’t be flushed away at such an early age.
But there’s more to Cash-bashing than a displaced debate about affirmative action. What, after all, is his crime? He did not kill; he only turned away from the killing site, and this is something we almost all do every day, whether that site is Rwanda or Kosovo or the overworked gas chambers of our own nation. As Cash explained, “I do not know this little girl. I do not know starving children in Panama. I do not know people who are dying of disease in Egypt.” Moral responsibility, in other words, extends no further than a few close drinking friends.
Similarly, the students at Berkeley this semester have neglected to protest welfare reform, the severe mistreatment of environmental activists in Northern California, or Clinton’s compulsive waggings of the dog. A conference on incarceration, held on a September weekend and featuring Angela Davis and other luminaries of the California left, brought a temporary influx of black faces to the campus but barely roused any students from their dorm s, and those who were around walked by the outdoor guerrilla theater performances with the same studied coolness usually bestowed on ragged nutcases waving Bibles. If students find Cash hateful, it may in part be because he embodies what is most hateful in themselves.
It’s not entirely the students’ fault. The campus almost seems to be designed, geographically, to inculcate moral isolationism. Walk from Sproul Plaza, where antiwar protesters once massed before marches, out toward the burrito-and sprouts joints of Telegraph Avenue, and you run a gauntlet of outstretched hands and Styrofoam cups. The beggars are so numerous and, in some cases, so patently undeserving—skinheads and Goth kids demanding beer money—that after a few burrito runs the whole scene degenerates to the level of the picturesque.
And this may be something elite universities now feel that they need to teach: the ability to walk on by, keeping your mind fixed on the LSATs and GREs, no matter what examples of concentrated misery lie in your path. Hence, the locations of Yale, Columbia, Penn, and so many others on the edges of desperate ghettos. If the goal of an elite education is morally blinkered, self-centered careerism, David Cash is just a better student than most.
But it may be snotty, not to mention irrelevant, for an aged radical to content herself with telling the student body to get a (political) life. Cash may be a micro-issue, but at least the anger over his presence represents some pale reminder of how a working conscience functions. If he’s the issue of 1998-’99, how should the issue be resolved?
No one, on any side of the discussion, has suggested that Cash might still have some remote chance of evolving into an actual human. “Rehabilitation” seems to have faded from the American vocabulary along with such archaic notions as “hope” and “social spending.” The students who want him kicked out assume that what you are at age nineteen is pretty much what you’ll be at thirty-nine—which is not surprising, given that our criminal justice system is now prepared to try kids not much older than Sherrice as full-blown, grown-up perps. The throw-him-out faction argues that he doesn’t “deserve” the elite education he is getting, as if education were a commodity rather than a potentially challenging and life-changing process. No one, least of all the administration, has suggested that it might be part of the responsibility of a university, and especially a public one, to impart some moral insight to its students, even if such insight will not contribute to the students’ future earnings—in fact, even, if it might serve to lower them.
I’m not talking about “ethics” courses. (When certain medical schools instituted required ethics courses in the 1980s, they couldn’t keep the assigned texts from being ripped off from the reserve shelves— or so the story goes.) I’m talking about an all-out, campus-wide, grassroots mobilization for the moral reform of David Cash.
Suppose, instead of shunning him, his fellow students cornered him in the student union to discuss Kant and Jesus and Buber and whether he has a little sister himself.
Suppose every teaching assistant, librarian, and cafeteria worker he encountered buttonholed him tête-à-têtes about race and gender, community and responsibility.
Suppose, finally, that this kind of thing caught on and that students started confronting each other, dozens of times a day, with the question of what to do about capital punishment or Kosovo or the quadriplegic veteran who begs at Telegraph and Durant.
Nothing can redeem little Sherrice’s death, but the effort to make moral reflection a habit again would at least provide a fitting memorial