Lessons in Mind Blowing

The six-year-old U.S. Student Press Association is composed of some 400 college newspapers that exchange campus news and maintain a four-man Washington bureau. When the association held its annual conference in Washington this month, its members had every reason to suppose they would discuss the state of the world in a rational fashion. The conference organizers, however, had something else in mind. "In the past," said onetime University of Toronto Student David Lloyd-Jones, 24, "the conferences have followed the conventional authoritarian pattern. This year we were resolved to change it."

What resulted was sheer anarchy. For the first general session of the four-day conference at the Sheraton-Park Hotel, the editors found 500 chairs arranged in a circle, with 17 microphones placed at intervals. The idea was that anyone could speak whenever he felt like it. Those who felt most like it were hippie citizens of "Drop City," Colo., decked out in dungarees, headbands and feathers. "If I heard someone say once he was 'doing his thing,' I heard it a hundred times," reports Charles DeCarlo, director of automation research for IBM. Along with Buckminster Fuller and Economist Robert Theobald, DeCarlo had been invited to address the assembly. "It was the easiest speech I ever gave," he says. In fact, he could not get a word in edgewise.

Projecting Violence. After a couple of ear-piercing, sight-and-sound sessions, the participants were about to settle down to an actual discussion of newspaper editing--only to have the lights go out. Then, on screens on three walls, flashed gory Viet Nam scenes from Communist propaganda movies, accompanied by a booming sound track. "The purpose," explains Co-Organizer David Peterson, 23, a University of Denver graduate, "was to make people aware that violence is going to be a great part of American civilization unless people start doing something about it." The film was meant to blow the minds of the viewers, but they blew their cool instead. Some raced around trying to pull the plugs of the projectors; others tried to get their hands on the organizers. "We were very close to physical violence," recalls Lloyd-Jones. "Instead of getting angry at the war, they got mad at us. We didn't expect they would be so up-tight," said Peterson.

That was a tough act to follow, but USSPA managed it. As Democratic Senator Eugene McCarthy was addressing the group on the final night of the conference, three New Lefters arrived on the stage and started to heckle him. When he ended, six others came trooping down the aisle bearing a coffin. They overturned it, and out poured hundreds of the Senator's campaign buttons, intended, as one perpetrator explained, to be a "witness to McCarthy's impotence." Peterson, who claimed no responsibility for the mock funeral, was filled with admiration: "McCarthy kept his cool very well."

No Time for Craft. At the end of the conference, the bewildered editors agreed they had not learned very much about newspapers, though they certainly had not been bored. DeCarlo, for one, had had his fill. "These kids don't appreciate the fact that it takes time to develop craft," he says. "They want all the answers right away. I went prepared to be angry or sympathetic toward them. I came away rather sad." The conference had been supported in part by the Washington Post and Newsweek, which together had contributed $15,000. Whether the USSPA will find it easy to get sponsors for next year's gathering is problematical. After a considerably tamer conference in 1966, both the Overseas Press Club and the Reader's Digest withdrew their support.

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