Semantics in San Francisco

After two weeks of churning disorder, as black militants campaigned for changes in curriculum and admission policy, San Francisco State College President Robert R. Smith reluctantly closed his campus down (TIME, Nov. 22). Last week, convinced that he was not the man to reopen the college, Smith resigned. Named to replace him as acting president was Professor Samuel I. Hayakawa, 62, an internationally recognized expert not in administration but in general semantics, the study of the interrelationship of language, thought and behavior.

Hayakawa, who is the third new president in 27 months, will need a profound understanding of behavior in particular if he is to deal effectively with the convulsed San Francisco campus. Students have been beaten, buildings occupied, fires started, and stink bombs thrown; plainclothes and uniformed police were everywhere. Even the faculty seemed hopelessly divided.

Martyrs Without Martyrdom. Born in Vancouver, British Columbia, of Japanese-American parents, Hayakawa has studied in Canada and the U.S. The most famous of his books, Language in Action, which he published in 1941, not only became a bestseller but is still a standard college text. A man of many and varied talents, Hayakawa for five years wrote a column in Chicago's Negro newspaper, Defender, served as director of the Institute of Jazz Studies in New York, and taught English at the University of Chicago before he joined S.F. State's English department in 1955. He has taken outspoken stands on such diverse issues as all-digit telephone dialing (against), advertising ("venal poetry") and the 1964 Free Speech Movement at Berkeley (against). In a comment that clearly foretold his attitude toward dissenters at S.F. State, Hayakawa castigated Berkeley's promoters of Free Speech. They defy authority, he complained, "yet when punitive action is threatened they holler for amnesty. They want to be martyrs without martyrdom."

Last month Hayakawa angrily reported to a faculty meeting that "black students are again disrupting the campus." And he attacked teachers who condoned or defended the disruption. "There are many whites who do not apply to blacks the same standard of morality and behavior they apply to whites," he said. "This is an attitude of moral conde scension that every self-respecting Negro has a right to resent--and does resent." As a semanticist, Hayakawa said, he wished to comment on "the intellectually slovenly habit, now popular among whites as well as blacks, of denouncing as racist those who oppose or are critical of any Negro tactic or demand.

We have a standing obligation to the 17,500 or more students--white, black, yellow, red and brown--who are not on strike and have every right to expect continuation of their education."

Neither Black nor White. Hayakawa, who has spoken repeatedly and vigorously on the need for more effective civil rights initiatives, professes some hope that his own color will help him work out a compromise between black militants and whites at S.F. State. "In a very profound sense," he said, "I stand in the middle. I am neither white nor black." Thus he would like to be come "a channel to bring blacks and whites together."

Despite the new president's unusual advantage, the prognosis is gloomy. For one thing, many faculty members resent the fact that Hayakawa was named without the approval of the "president-selection committee"--of which Hayakawa himself was a member. Dr. Nathan Hare, the Negro coordinator of the college's black-studies program, promptly predicted: "Hayakawa will go out faster than Smith. He takes the hard line. We'll be ready for him." Militant students promised picketing and demonstrations if the campus is reopened; they even threatened to call strikes on some of the other campuses in the 18-college state system.

"The problems," Hayakawa admitted, "are almost beyond solution, but I will give it a trial." At week's end he declared war on the S.F. dissenters by announcing that classes would resume immediately. "The relation between teacher and student," he said, "the freedom to think and study and discuss, will be protected by all means necessary. The people who cannot live with such a system will simply have to move on."

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