Protest in Reverse

The students are restless at Kentucky's Pikeville College, a small (enrollment: 1,200) Presbyterian-supported school in the heart of Appalachia. But not for the usual reasons. Oddly enough, the dissidents are protesting long-haired professors, women teachers in miniskirts, and a liberal president who wants to give students more freedom and make their education more relevant.

The main thrust of what one Pikeville senior proudly calls "the only right-wing student protest movement in the country" is against the progressive policies of Thomas Johns, 37, a former Little All-America football tackle (Hanover College, 1953) who became president 19 months ago. Johns hired 30 new teachers, put a new curriculum emphasis on sociology and psychology, secured federal grants so that students can work in local antipoverty projects, and instituted compulsory courses on contemporary issues. He has appointed students to faculty and trustee committees, urged them to get involved in such local issues as water pollution, strip mining and illiteracy. He insists that "true education means addressing ourselves to the 20th century--and it must be self-directed, not imposed on people."

None of this has gone over very well in a community so conservative that its newsstands refused to sell copies of LIFE and Look when they carried features on the 50th anniversary of the Russian Revolution last fall. Some students confronted Johns at a convocation last spring, charged that he and many of the new teachers were promoting Marxist philosophy and inciting opposition to the Viet Nam war. One undergraduate group began a drive to impeach him.

"This liberal involvement thing asks students who aren't educated to solve problems that educated people can't," complained one student leader. A sophomore argued that Johns keeps asking students to do their own thing, "but we don't know what our thing is, and even if we did, we wouldn't know how to do it." Complaining that faculty-student relations had become too informal, one coed protested: "I don't want my professor to be a pal."

The trustees of the college have studied the complaints against Johns, who holds a divinity degree and a Ph.D. from Indiana University, and repeatedly voted their confidence in him. Despite the student complaints, he feels that the controversy on campus is educational in itself. "Peaches and cream doesn't bring dialogue," he says, "but confrontation does. Polarization of ideas is what education is all about--it makes people aware of their own thinking."

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