Life & Wisdom Quote by June Jordan

Berkeley isn’t just a campus here; it’s a rehearsal space for the future. June Jordan frames her arrival not as a career move or an aesthetic preference, but as a political choice: she comes because she sees a public square alive with difference, argument, and accent. The word “ferociously” does the real work. Diversity isn’t presented as a brochure-friendly tableau of smiling faces; it’s loud, messy, and confrontational, the kind of pluralism that actually costs something. Jordan is drawn to that cost.

The subtext is a rebuke to two temptations: nostalgia and assimilation. “This is the 21st century” isn’t calendar talk; it’s a moral deadline. Jordan implies that institutions still clinging to monoculture are not merely behind-the-times but actively refusing reality. Berkeley becomes shorthand for a society where identity and ideas collide in the open, where authority is negotiable, and where speech isn’t sanitized into consensus. It’s also a subtle defense of the university as a civic engine, not a credential factory.

Context matters: Jordan came of age amid the civil rights movement, Vietnam-era protest, and the long fight for ethnic studies, feminist politics, and queer visibility. Her lifelong work insisted that language is power and that power should be redistributed. So her excitement reads as more than admiration; it’s recognition. She spots, in multilingual argument, the raw material of democracy - imperfect, uncontained, and finally modern enough to be worth joining.