The committee was severely critical of the whole university structure, saying: “The atmosphere of the campus now suggests too much an intricate system of compulsions, rewards and punishments; too much of our attention is given to score keeping.” Among other failures, the university was accused of ignoring “the moral revolution of the young.”

Talk like this strikes the radicals among “the young” as paternalistic jargon, but they appreciate the old folks' sympathy. To them, anyone who takes part in “the system” is a hypocrite. This is especially true among the Marxist, Mao-Castro element -- the hipsters of the Left.

One of these is Steve DeCanio, a 22-year-old Berkeley radical and Cal graduate in math, now facing a two-month jail term as a result of the Sproul Hall sit-ins. He is doing graduate work, and therefore immune to the Mulford law. “I became a radical after the 1962 auto row (civil rights) demonstrations in San Francisco,” he says. “That's when I saw the power structure and understood the hopelessness of trying to be a liberal. After I got arrested I dropped the pre-med course I'd started at San Francisco State. The worst of it, though, was being screwed time and again in the courts. I'm out on appeal now with four and a half months of jail hanging over me.”

DeCanio is an editor of Spider, a wild-eyed new magazine with a circulation of about 2,000 on and around the Berkeley campus. Once banned, it thrived on the publicity and is now officially ignored by the protest-weary administration. The eight-man editorial board is comprised of four students and four nonstudents. The magazine is dedicated, they say, to “sex, politics, international communism, drugs, extremism and rock'n'roll.” Hence, S-P-I-D-E-R.

DeCanio is about two-thirds political radical and one-third social. He is bright, small, with dark hair and glasses, cleanshaven, and casually but not sloppily dressed. He listens carefully to questions, uses his hands for emphasis when he talks, and quietly says things like: “What this country needs is a revolution; the society is so sick, so reactionary, that it just doesn't make sense to take part in it.”

He lives, with three other nonstudents and two students, in a comfortable house on College Avenue, a few blocks from campus. The $120-a-month rent is split six ways. There are three bedrooms, a kitchen and a big living room with a fireplace. Papers litter the floor, the phone rings continually, and people stop by to borrow things: a pretty blonde wants a Soviet army chorus record, a Tony Perkins type from the Oakland Du Bois Club wants a film projector; Art Goldberg -- the arch-activist who also lives here -- comes storming in, shouting for help on the “Vietnam Days” teach-in arrangements.

It is all very friendly and collegiate. People wear plaid shirts and khaki pants, white socks and moccasins. There are books on the shelves, cans of beer and Cokes in the refrigerator, and a manually operated light bulb in the bathroom. In the midst of all this it is weird to hear people talking about “bringing the ruling class to their knees,” or “finding acceptable synonyms for Marxist terms.”