Transformational geographies of academic advocacy: How the first ombuds in the University of California shaped an empowering university in Berkeley, 1968–1970

This article provides new insights into critical historical geographies of the university by examining how Berkeley's highly politicized campus environment of the 1960s both shaped and was reshaped by the institutionalization of academic advocacy. We center our analysis on the first ombudsperson of the University of California (UC) system to understand how their advocacy helped with safeguarding the rights, bodies, and spaces of students and fellow citizens at UC Berkeley (UCB) during the campus protests of 1968/69 and 1969/70. Based on a critical discourse analysis of archival records, media articles, and interviews with George Leitmann, an agnostic and cosmopolitan male Jewish UCB professor of engineering science with a refugee background, our article discusses how the ombuds role provided him with considerable authority, power, and opportunity to challenge perceived epistemic, social, and spatial injustices related to the People's Park riots and to create safer spaces for future protests to proceed more peacefully in a fairer democracy. We argue that Leitmann's academic advocacy developed distinctively spatial strategies to change protest spaces, the nature of an evolving empowering university, and wider US society in more just ways.