We can see the tensions on the Stanford left in a documentary about the 1968 SDS occupation of the university president’s office. The viewer watches activists debate whether to frame their confrontation in deliberative or aggressive terms. Bruce Franklin clutches his head in his hands, cigarette dangling between his fingers as he argues that talking with the administration wasn’t going to do any good, no matter how solid the research they brought to the table was, something he learned from the napalm campaign. “This whole idea: talking and talking and talking and all of a sudden people will see the light and they’ll pick up The Communist Manifesto and race into the streets and join with—it’s a bunch of shit! When does talking with people become relevant? Past a certain point.”62 An immanent critique of the university—calling on the school to live up to its ostensible principles regarding learning and debate—was misleading because it meant activists had to pretend not to have already come to a conclusion about Stanford’s role in the world. They had to take down the capitalist university, not reform it; agree to a conversation, and that’s all you could win. The viewer follows Franklin as he participates in the SF State strike, taking mental notes out loud about the Third World Liberation Front tactics and rhetoric. In an interview segment he laments that ruling-class Stanford students need more help than SF State students do to understand capitalism.63