Self-Criticism at Cal

When things get sticky, the impulse of a board of governors is to "get a report." After last fall's student disorders at the University of California, the regents commissioned not one but two reports. The first, made last month by Regent Theodore Meyer and urging tightened student discipline, was a bit of a bomb; nobody objected violently or approved heartily. The second, released last week by investigators under Regent William Forbes, was a bit of a bombshell; it laid the university's troubles mostly on the regents and the administration and let the students off with a light knuckle-rapping.

The report was directed by Jerome C. Byrne, 39, a labor-law specialist and honors graduate of Harvard Law School, whose partnership in the respected Los Angeles law firm of Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher made him seem a sensible choice to investigate the eight months of unrest at Cal. But when Regent Chairman Edward Carter saw the report, he angrily called Byrne a "young, inexperienced guy, unaware of the pitfalls in a university administration." President Clark Kerr buttoned his lip, but was reported to be upset.

Mario Savio, the student chiefly responsible for the dustup, said: "It sounds like a great report." And Byrne won other support. Regent Buff Chandler called it "a good piece of research, well written, with many salient points." Her family newspaper, the Los Angeles Times, published all 85 pages. Governor Pat Brown called it "very thoughtful, very provocative, a good report." U.C.L.A.'s Chancellor Franklin Murphy agreed with its major points.

Bogged Down in Trivia. The report's basic assumption is that California's great university system has attracted "a substantial portion of the most highly trained, intelligent, curious and creative individuals in America." They are the main value of a university, in its role as a "continuing critic" of society. Many such individuals are bound to "pursue paths that the great majority of people regard as silly, dangerous or both." But "there is hardly a single example, either in America or elsewhere, of a distinguished university which has been directly responsible to popular opinion." Quite properly, the 16-year staggered terms of Cal's regents permit them to "remain comparatively aloof to the headlines, telephone calls and opinion polls."

Nevertheless, Byrne and his eight-man staff argue that the regents have failed to confine themselves to broad policymaking functions and have got bogged down in administrative trivia: "In a typical month of 1964, the President sent the regents 400 pages of complex material, running to several hundred thousand words." Moreover, the system has no clear delegation of authority or systematic code of laws: officials "constantly refer to university regulations which are difficult or impossible to find."

As for Cal's students, they feel isolated from the faculty, partly because "some faculty members take comparatively little interest in the quality of their performance in the classroom" since the teachers know that the administration judges them solely on their published work. Students "come to depend on one another for both intellectual stimulation and moral guidance." At the same time, "this generation of students acts from a dissatisfaction with the rate of change in American society." For some, "the opportunity to act in behalf of change is the essence of life itself." Although a few of the Free Speech Movement leaders "had close ties with the American Commu nist Party," there is "no evidence that F.S.M. was organized by the Communist Party, the Progressive Labor Movement or any other outside group." An elemental tragedy of the events of the fall was "the clear revelation of the deep mistrust of the young for their elders and the implicit denial of hope in one for the other."

Legislative Rumbles. The report recommended a sweeping reorganization of the university. Each of the university's nine branches would become autonomous, while regents would outline broad policies and let each chancellor operate his own campus within those guidelines. On each campus, both students and faculty would have full freedom to organize and to announce positions on any issues they considered important. The university president would confine himself to statewide university concerns--and be made chairman of the board of regents.

Regent Carter predicts that the Byrne report, for which the regents paid $75,000, "will have very little effect." Byrne says: "I'm not exactly sure how I'm going to fight for it, but I am going to." To add to all of the confusion, State Representative Jesse Unruh, speaker of the house, rumbles that the legislature might have to investigate Cal too.

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