Resistance Across the Nation

Never before has an academic year opened with college administrators so self-conscious about their own actions, or so concerned about the actions of their students. Determined to prevent rebellion, many are wooing undergraduate affection with offers of participation in a wide area of policy making. But if these opportunities are rejected, many college presidents are prepared to swing new weapons of repression against attempts to disrupt the campuses.

This fall, students at many colleges and universities have gained representation on curriculum committees, advise the president on educational goals or operate nonacademic campus services. At Berkeley, students now sit on 23 committees, including one in the Academic Senate. It is becoming common for students to gain the decisive voice in regulations affecting their social activities and living conditions. Discipline is often handled by student courts.

Ombudsmen on Campuses. Relatively young deans and vice presidents are being appointed to devote full-time attention to student affairs. Some campuses have even created campus ''ombudsmen" to carry student grievances to top administrators, The University of Chicago has appointed a student to such a post, gives him an office with a fireplace, plus a small budget and a full-time secretary. The Stony Brook campus of the State University of New York intends to dismiss classes for three days this month so that students and faculty can talk out the school's pains and aims.

But if such ameliorative measures fail, administrators on several campuses are armed with tight new rules governing the limits of student protest. Some have been handed down by impatient regents. In Ohio, the state legislature required all twelve state universities to draw up such regulations. A student at Ohio State may now be expelled if he merely remains on university property when told by a school official to leave.

Many presidents have issued clear warnings. Yale President Kingman Brewster Jr, said that the university will listen to "anyone who is himself willing to listen," but that "coercion must be rejected as a substitute for persuasion." A student's views on campus matters, he said, "should be primarily motivated by what is best for Yale, not what will help him attain some other personal, political or ideological objective." At his installation as the new president of Brandeis, Morris Abram declared that "the right of students, faculty or anyone else to disrupt the learning process is no right at all. It is wrong. I reject the modern paeans to violence."

Into the Stream. Violence--and university intransigence--were rejected by the special commission, under former U.S. Solicitor General Archibald Cox, that was appointed to investigate last spring's student rebellion at Columbia. Implicitly advising other school administrations on how to avoid such troubles, the Cox report contends that Columbia administrators had too often "conveyed an attitude of authoritarianism and invited distrust" of students and that the roots of unrest lay in a "deepseated dissatisfaction with Columbia life" among nonradical students and faculty. Cox concluded that "the survival of Columbia as a leading university depends upon finding ways of drawing this constructive segment of the student body back into the stream of university life."

Whether they want it or not, university leaders were this month handed a powerful new club against unruly protest by Congress. It passed an amendment to the Higher Education Act that would cut off all forms of federal aid to any student who has "contributed to substantial disruption" of a college. The threat hangs over the head of any student who has a federal loan, educational opportunity grant, loan insurance, fellowship or subsidized part-time job. Nearly one-fifth of all college students fall into one or another of those categories.

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