The Berkeley Effect

Spring usually generates a mild lunacy in the American college student; this year it is bringing a radical testing of law and the university, all with candid disregard for consequences. To students across the country -- or at least to that bright, neurotic tenth of them who make themselves visible -- the effect of six months of tumult at Berkeley has been to show, as Yale Student Bruce Payne expresses it, that "students have become somebody in being able to act together."

Coed Sleep-Out. On the normally casual campus of the University of Kansas in Lawrence, 113 students were arrested last week when they refused to leave a hallway outside Chancellor W. Clarke Wescoe's office, protesting segregation in K.U. fraternities and sororities. At the University of Washington in Seattle, students were loudly objecting to forced membership in the student association. At the University of Chicago, 200 students shivered in wind-driven snow on the main quadrangle to sing freedom songs, while coeds threatened a "sleep-out" to protest curfew hours.

At New York City's St. John's University, biggest Roman Catholic school in the U.S., students broke a tradition of obedience by joining in support of some 200 faculty members who had walked out of a faculty meeting to demand salary increases and greater academic freedom. Rejecting the "reactionary paternalism at St. John's," students claimed that the administration had kept them from hearing such speakers as Socialist Norman Thomas, Senators Kenneth Keating and Robert Kennedy, Malcolm X and Madame Nhu. They composed a protest song, which began:

Here at St. John's the avant-garde

Is something like weeds you dig out of your yard.

A couple of hundred Yale students sorrowfully demonstrated to mourn the loss of popular Philosophy Associate Professor Richard Bernstein (TIME, March 12) after the philosophy department reversed itself and voted 5-2 against recommending tenure for him. "We watched a number of good teachers getting the ax," explained Yale Daily News Chairman Howard Moffett. "After a while you feel that you have to say something." Yale President Kingman Brewster Jr. effectively closed the Bernstein case when he returned from a Bahamas vacation and announced that he would not overrule the tenure committee's adverse decision. But he also praised the students for their "zeal, good will and responsibility," promised to try to improve the techniques for "judging a man's work, especially as a teacher."

"A Holy Discontent." The new student mood takes many forms, but the great common lever back of it is civil rights; by combining idealism, emotional appeal, techniques, and proof that students can act effectively, this cause has lifted students out of their silent-generation apathy of the late '50s. Students from Yale, Harvard and Princeton were well represented at Selma last week; Mario Savio, the original free-speech leader at Berkeley, showed up too. And a healthy thing it is, insists St. John's Sociology Professor William Osborne: "This generation of students has what other generations have lacked--a holy discontent, courage, and the willingness to sacrifice."

Now, in its advanced forms, student thinking is going beyond civil rights and beyond the simple idealism that led many into tutoring slum kids or into the Peace Corps. The new goal is equality of all sorts--not only between races but on such campus issues as the relationships between students and faculty, faculty and administration, students and administration. "We are seeing a great and potentially constructive awakening on the part of the students to their own stake in education," says Yale's Brewster. "There are some who think this is a question of almost having the students take over the management of educational enterprises, which is absurd. But it is just as absurd to say the students should be ignored."

Taking Ideals Seriously. Notes of despair and hysteria can be heard through the pervasive restlessness. "Students are drifters; that's what worries them," says University of Chicago Senior Kathy Bailey. Graduate Student Fred Kuretski, at the University of Washington, believes that "religion no longer works properly for the student in trying to confront the chaos of his own existence; his father's politics don't work for him any more; he begins to resist the old forms--the money morality, inequality of races, brutality of foreign policy, the mechanization of university life."

Berkeley Sociologist Seymour M. Lipset notes that "youths generally take the ideals of their society very seriously --they don't take the imperfections in that society for granted the way adults do." This is obviously healthy, but Lipset also views students as "marginal individuals--insecure about their future, their sex relations, their identity," largely without responsibilities and prone to abuse legitimate techniques. "The tactic of civil disobedience used justly in civil rights demonstrations is now being used unjustly for other purposes and could result in a breakdown of respect for law," he warns.

The vice chancellor at Berkeley, Alex Sherriffs, is similarly concerned about the student trends but feels it is more a case of most students' remaining silent while extremists take control. "Society is in trouble only when the middle section is quiet--and it's in trouble," says Sherriffs, citing the filthy-speechers at Berkeley to support the point. The conduct of ten male students at Pennsylvania's Washington and Jefferson College last week supported him. They paraded through a Washington, Pa., hotel lobby early one morning clad only in short T shirts. They were arrested for disorderly conduct.

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