The Old College Try

Since last April when they toppled former President Syngman Rhee in a series of bloody riots (TIME, April 25 et. seq.), South Korea's students have shown less and less desire to return to their books, more and more have acted as if they alone are competent to run the country. Twice in six weeks gangs of students have stormed the National Assembly in an attempt to force passage of laws inflicting retroactive punishment on ex-officials of the Rhee government. When not careening through the streets of Seoul in commandeered Jeeps, giving orders by loudspeaker to the legislature, the students have held massive rallies urging unification with Communist North Korea in a single, neutral state.

Privately, gentle Premier John M. Chang, himself a longtime Rhee foe, deplored the students' troublemaking. But publicly he temporized, offered to consult with them regularly to get their ideas of what course South Korea should take.

Sourly. Seoul's daily Minkook Ilbo editorialized that the government might as well appoint students as "permanent advisers."

Last week the students finally went too far. Angry because Seoul's Yonsei University had fired three professors and expelled leaders of a student strike, a thousand screaming collegians marched on the homes of the university's acting president and board chairman--both Americans-and reduced their possessions to kindling. At that, for the first time since the revolt against Rhee, Seoul's police were issued tear gas and guns with blank cartridges, and told to use them. Wading in, the cops hauled 200 ringleaders off to jail. Later, when younger students at Kangmoon High School, infected with the same fever of violence, locked their principal in his office until he signed a resignation statement, police showed the same resolution, jailed 65 young ruffians.

Between mob politics and petty parliamentary factionalism--a dissident wing of Chang's own Democratic Party recently broke off to form a new party--South Korea was still a long way from re-establishing stable government. But along with Chang's new toughness, there was another hopeful straw in the wind. During the April riots against Rhee, thousands of cheering Seoul adults egged the students on. Last week, with rare exceptions, their elders watched the rampaging students in disapproving silence.

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