The Crowded Left

"It's pretty easy to see what this congress is," said one delegate at last week's annual meeting of the National Student Association held at the University of Illinois. "It's a meeting between the left left-wingers and the right left-wingers." Such was certainly the impression that many of the 425 delegates, representing 250 college student governments, tried hard to get across.

The newly elected president of the N.S.A., Rhodes Scholar and University of Chicago Graduate Gene Groves, proclaimed that he is a "leftwing Democrat." The newly elected national-affairs vice president, former New York University Graduate Student Ed Schwartz, positioned himself to the left of Groves. Bearded David Harris, attending the meeting as Stanford's student president, said: "It's hard to find someone farther to the left than I am."

Raw Power. Such dogged radicalism, plus what Brandeis Graduate Student Bill Berquist called "the raw political power" of students nowadays, inevitably conditioned the resolutions finally adopted by the congress.

The N.S.A. demanded an end to the bombing of North and South Viet Nam, and the setting up of a coalition government in the south to include the Viet Cong. The congress proposed abolishing the peacetime draft and asserted that "no government should be allowed the power to compel its citizens to kill." Even wartime drafts, the resolution contended, should give conscriptees a choice of military service or work in hospitals, conservation, the Peace Corps or "a learning corps," and should exempt "philosophical and political as well as religious" objectors. The convention opposed as "undemocratic" the draft's 2-S classification, which defers students. Another resolution urged the repeal of laws banning the sale of marijuana and LSD.

Split Personality. Notre Dame Student President Jim Fish, who calls himself a "moderate," believes that the N.S.A. itself is suffering from a split personality--implying that it is simply trying to compensate for its tepid past with noisy radicalism. N.S.A. used to be a confederation of student governments that were understood to be little more than exercises in democracy, and had almost no power in molding university policies. Part of the leftward lurch is the result of the 1960 break away of the conservative Young Americans for Freedom, after the N.S.A. took a strong stand for civil rights.

But mostly the change is an attempt to overcome widespread campus apathy toward student governments, whose limited power made them seem impotent compared with the campus New Left, particularly after the 1964 student revolt at Berkeley. Lenore Sheridan, a member of the Students for a Demo cratic Society at Illinois, charges that the N.S.A. "doesn't really mean much," because it is made up of "middleclass white Americans" who may talk about revolution but are unwilling to bring about a "fundamental" change in American society. So N.S.A.'s politicians judge that the route to relevance and influence is emulation of the New Left.

Anti-Intellectual ism. In the current issue of Worldview magazine, Tom Kahn, executive director of the League for Industrial Democracy, Inc., suggests that many of the self-proclaimed student radicals are immature adolescents out of touch with reality. Civil rights marches and sit-ins, which aroused students from their indifference toward social causes, have led "to an almost mystical devotion to activism and a distrust of theory and analysis that borders on outright anti-intellectualism."

Martin Meyerson. acting chancellor at Berkeley for a time and now president of the State University of New York at Buffalo, thinks that student radicalism results from a basic trans formation in U.S. higher education. From being the privilege of a small elite half a century ago, college has become the birthright of the middle-class horde. Writing in the current issue of Daedalus, Meyerson holds that then and now 98% of the students are "silent" and the rest articulate activists. What has changed is that with the current enrollment of 5,500,000 in colleges and universities, the remaining 2% add up to more than 100,000, a force quite sufficient to make itself heard.

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