The Political University

Little by little, U.S. campus protest comes closer to resembling the compulsive mania of the recent Chinese "Cultural Revolution." Last week the spectacle seemed uglier than ever.

At Dartmouth College, state troopers cleared the administration building of students protesting ROTC; 45 students were later fined $100 each and sentenced to 30 days in jail. At Johns Hopkins, students demonstrated against military research and recruiting on campus. In Indiana, state troopers used Chemical Mace on Purdue demonstrators. At Washington's Howard University, federal marshals fired tear-gas rockets to flush 100 protesters from six buildings they had seized as part of a drive to make the predominantly Negro school more "relevant" to the capital's black community. The worst incidents occurred at Manhattan's City College, which became a battleground of racial violence (see story below).

Grave Misgivings. The deluge of disorders made it harder and harder for most Americans to keep the events in perspective. Bewildered citizens understandably forget that most of the nation's 6,700,000 collegians are still quietly studying for final exams. The U.S. has 2,500 colleges and universities; this year, scarcely two dozen have been seriously disrupted. The fact that each incident has a particular context is also frequently overlooked. Because universities differ so greatly, condemnation of all "protest" is not very helpful without an analysis of specifics at each campus.

Nonetheless, an underlying pattern has emerged: the American university has suddenly become a political arena --the prime forum for a generation that has lost faith in the ability of regular political institutions to solve such national problems as war, race and poverty. As a result, the university is losing whatever neutrality it professes. In pushing it toward social action, students are helping to create a new U.S. institution: the political university. It is a dangerous role for universities. In Latin America, where universities have long been "politicized," most higher education has suffered badly. Moreover, extremism on the left has historically led to a counterextremism from the right, as it did in Germany in the early 1930s.

U.S. campus disorders have incited many state legislatures to consider repressive measures, some well intentioned, some reminiscent of the know-nothingism of Senator Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s. Clearly, the political university must be viewed with grave misgivings. Writing in The Public Interest, Robert A. Nisbet, a sociologist at the University of California, states the problem: "The university is the institution that is, by its delicate balance of function, authority and liberty, and its normal absence of power, the least able of all institutions to withstand the fury of revolutionary force and violence."

To student activists, though, such words lack credibility because the modern university is already, in their view, a de facto political institution. Politics, they argue, is concerned with how and by whom a society's resources shall be directed. As they see it, universities have become political not only by training people for social roles but by performing Government research and supporting official policies. Thus, universities now share the blame for causing the nation's ills. The activists believe that they are merely redirecting the American university, yoking it to needed reforms and to the drive for a better society.

Even so, the growing hooliganism of many protesters threatens to wreck universities in the process. This danger now worries even some New Leftists, not to mention the vast majority of moderate sympathizers, who are more and more weary of having their expensive education constantly disrupted. The fundamental solution, of course, lies far beyond the campus. As Yale's President Kingman Brewster Jr. put it at a press conference last week: "Campus violence will grow worse unless an intense effort is made to end the war in Viet Nam, remove the inequities in the draft, solve problems of the cities and improve race relations."

Faculty Reaction. Meantime, the universities are trying to save themselves by seeking the key to orderly political processes, procedural safeguards that can turn campus protests away from naked force and toward rational debate. Above all, the obvious need is for long-aloof faculties to lead in reforming their universities. Here and there, professors are finally awakening. Items:

> At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, several hundred faculty members stopped work for a day last March to dramatize their mounting concern over the institution's heavy involvement in scientific research for the "militaryindustrial complex." Subsequently, M.I.T. decided to decline new contracts for classified war research until a 22-man committee can re-examine the school's ties to the military and report back to President Howard Johnson next fall.

> At the University of Wisconsin, 35 senior professors have anonymously formed a group that was instrumental in gathering overwhelming faculty support for the administration's stand against Negro demands for a separate, autonomous black studies department; it is now leading a battle to restore proposed legislative cuts in the school's budget. "We're divided as to the changes we think should be made in the university," says one of the leaders, "but we're united in not wanting to see it closed down."

> At Pomona College last winter, Swimming Coach Charles Platt sensed that "the campus was like a teapot about to blow its lid," because plans for a black studies center were getting nowhere. Platt united 15 professors and students from all six colleges of the Claremont group in an organization called F.A.S.T. (Faculty and Students Together), which goaded the rest of the faculty into approving plans for the center; F.A.S.T. also worked on individual trustees, who last week voted their approval of the center as well. Now members of Platt's group are thinking of broadening their organization and renaming it F.A.A.S.T. --Faculty, Alumni, Administration, Students, Trustees.

Such examples of professorial activism are increasing, but they are still exceptional. Many self-centered scholars still insist that they are hired to teach, not to run universities. Equally self-centered are some professors who do get involved, supporting whatever students demand as a way of enhancing their own popularity. Sometimes professors are even too passive to protect their own interests. Last week, for example, the academic senate at Berkeley met to vote on a resolution branding as "unnecessary, illegitimate and dangerous" a move by the University of California regents to review all tenure appointments. The resolution was approved unanimously--by the 75 faculty members out of 1,000 who bothered to show up.

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