Signs of Moderation?

In scenes reminiscent of labor wars in the 1930s, the nation's campuses erupted in more violence last week. At Roosevelt University in Chicago, rebels invaded the president's office and ripped out telephones in a demonstration seeking amnesty for fellow rebels. Deputy sheriffs prevented seizure of the ad ministration building at Eastern Michigan University by 200 students, cut chains off the doors and arrested twelve demonstrators. At Berkeley, 100 police men clashed with thousands of demonstrators supporting a month-long strike for Third World Liberation Front demands. Pelted with rocks, bottles and fire bombs, the cops fought back with Chemical Mace, clubbed four strikers and arrested 24. While the University of California's regents met at the ex plosive Berkeley campus, Governor Ron ald Reagan alerted National Guard units to stand by in nearby Alameda.

How long can the violence continue?

According to the Educational Testing Service, a mere 2% of all students are wreckers who aim to "radicalize" the campuses even if some universities are destroyed in the process. Harvard's Dean Franklin Ford describes the varying degrees of militancy as a series of concentric circles; most students are mainly onlookers (see chart). Unfortunately, the torrent of spring-term disorders has clearly put dozens of campuses in dou ble jeopardy. Repressive state legislators are on the war path; so are vigilante-minded conservative students. Unless moderates intervene, campus freedom and evolutionary reform may well be sacrificed to left and right extremists.

Patience and Restraint. Fortunately, amid all the highly publicized violence, signs of moderation are appearing. Last week the dangerous eleven-day strike at the University of Wisconsin, which pitted bayonet-wielding National Guard troops against students, was called off while faculty members considered various reforms. Toward the end, as few as 300 students continued the strike, compared with 7,000 strikers during the Guard's initial invasion. At Howard University in Washington, black law students quietly heeded a federal judge's order to end their lock-in, called to obtain more voice in administrative decisions. The student lawyers planned to go on boycotting classes, but not to flout the law they study.

Elsewhere, student bodies have already taken a second look at good-faith faculty efforts to make archaic universities more democratic, relevant and effective. On some campuses, skilled administrators have warded off outside interference by firmly dealing with radicals while simultaneously "co-opting" their saner demands.

On other campuses, students in the middle have simply wearied of disruptions that constantly interrupt their costly education. Items:

>Brandeis University's President Morris B. Abram applied patience and restraint during the eleven days that 65 black students occupied the school's communications center in January. Abram waited out the occupiers, meeting with them when they requested but refusing to yield on a crucial demand that they control selection of the black studies department chairman. Because Abram shunned force, moderate students were never radicalized by police action and a strike supporting sympathy for the blacks," said Student Council President Eric Yoffie, "but there was also a commitment to maintain the university, not destroy it by physical force." -- >University of Chicago President Edward Levi, in office only five months, adopted a similar policy of passive resistance when radical students occupied the administration building, protesting the school's refusal to rehire a sociology teacher because she was unproductive. Like Abram, Levi eschewed police help, simply continued university business outside the occupied building. As a result, less than a thousand of Chicago's 9,000 students supported the protest; after 16 days, the sit-in died. The administration then quietly suspended 80 students, summoned 50 more to appear before the university's disciplinary committee. Jeffrey Blum, a sit-in leader, freely admitted that Levi had won the day. "We lost because there just wasn't enough faculty and student support for us," he said. "Perhaps our movement was too radical for the campus at this time."

>Wilberforce University in Ohio pioneered a new approach to student demands by hiring an outside arbitrator to cope with a nine-day class boycott. After 13 days of negotiating with university and student representatives, Cornell Labor Law Professor Frederic Freilicher hammered out an agreement on 40 points. Freilicher noted that the students' "crisis of confidence" dissipated as administration positions were patiently explained at the table. As he sees it, the Wilberforce way of professional mediation and arbitration "could set a precedent for settling similar situations in schools across the country." >Columbia University, scene of wild disorders last spring, will vote next month on an overdue plan to democratize the administration by joining students and long-aloof professors in running the campus. The plan, designed by a faculty committee chaired by Law Professor Michael I. Severn, would place 20 elected students in a 100-mem-ber senate that would govern the university. Implicitly aimed at mobilizing moderates, the plan will bar any senate member if less than 40% of his constituents voted in the election. "Unless the students participate," warns Sovern, "their role will atrophy." If the plan is approved, representative government--not violence--will become the legitimate way to influence Columbia.

Notre Dame's president, the Rev. Theodore Hesburgh, took a slightly different tack last week, stressing the need for responsible behavior, and decreeing immediate suspension and possible expulsion for recalcitrant rebels. Without stiff rules, he said, "the university is a sit--ting duck for any small group from the outside or inside that wishes to destroy it, to incapacitate it, to terrorize it at whim." No one wants the police on campus, Hesburgh added, "but if some necessitate it, as a last and dismal alternative to anarchy and mob tyranny, let them shoulder the blame instead of receiving the sympathy of a community they would hold at bay."

Rational Revolt. Harsh words--but they obviously appeal to those who yearn for what Philosopher Sidney Hook calls "militant moderation." Hook himself is touring the country, organizing faculty cells for "a revolt of the rationally committed." Toward that end, some moderate students have acquired a hero in S. I. Hayakawa, the doughty acting president of tumultuous San Francisco State College. At the University of North Carolina, Student Grainger R. Barrett has, in fact, started a group called the Hayakawa Society. Says he: "We think change on this campus should be brought about through established and legitimate processes."

The danger in all this antiradicalism, of course, is the boost it may give to a militant right. Zealous conservatives at Queens College in New York City, for instance, recently sacked the office of a newspaper that has consistently supported the position of disruptive Negro and Puerto Rican students. Similar mindless violence seems imminent elsewhere. Worse, at least twelve states are now considering laws cutting off state aid to campus demonstrators who cause physical or property damage. The result might well threaten free speech, to say nothing of penalizing the poor without touching the rich, who may be equally guilty.

Such laws can only stimulate more radicalism followed by more reaction. Instead, the best solution is a lively coalition of liberals who shun revolution and conservatives who shun repression to provide firm leadership, promote sound reforms and purge the campus wreckers. Though it may take time, the odds are that just such a coalition will ultimately emerge.

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