Friday, Dec. 13, 1968
scription of the school's condition. Bands of pickets roamed the campus, seeking to prevent nonmilitant students from entering classrooms. Although his predecessors had been reluctant to use police to restore order, Hayakawa--backed strongly by a majority of the trustees of California's state colleges and by Governor Ronald Reagan--had no such compunction. On Tuesday, police arrested 32 protesters, ten of whom were injured in a melee; two days later, 23 more were carted off to jail. The maintenance of order was helped by a Committee for an Academic Environment, organized by proadministration students. Wearing blue armbands, committee supporters confronted strikers in shouting matches--countering "Shut it down!" with "Keep it open!"--and denounced the militants as "Gestapo pigs" for abridging the rights of students who wanted to attend classes.
Despite the strike and the sporadic battles between police and militants, Hayakawa claimed that 80% of the college's students were able to attend classes without interruption. Having proved that he could keep the campus open, Hayakawa at week's end then tried to accommodate the most reasonable of the dissidents' demands. An announcement read over campus loudspeakers declared that the college would take immediate steps to set up a new black-studies department, and that 128 additional places would be made available to minority-group students. As a further gesture, a faculty spokesman said that the college would restore due process in any disciplinary procedures against the strikers. The militants' first reaction was that the moves were inadequate and that the strike would go on. Still, the trustees and a majority of the students at San Francisco State were hoping that the acts of its word-expert president would prevail.
This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.