Communication v. Confrontation

Since 12,000 publications in the U.S. are devoted to one or another aspect of education, the country's scholars would hardly seem to be in urgent need of more. George Bonham, a New York education consultant, believes, however, that the need is greater than ever just because of the flood of journals. Last week Bonham began the publication of Change, a bimonthly magazine that is pledged to be "an irreverent foe of all that is arcane, banal and irrelevant in higher education."

Change's first issue, which will go to 4,300 charter subscribers (Bonham needs 22,000 subscribers to break even), also makes it clear that the magazine means to deal in straight talk, avoiding the adulatory tone so often taken by education journals.

Involvement or Decline. In a section dealing with the confrontation between the university and the community at large, Kevin White, mayor of Boston, takes on those who oppose university involvement in urban problems. The cities must not be permitted to deteriorate, says White, because "the city and its academic institutions will either grow together or decline together."

Fred Hechinger, education editor of the New York Times, argues convincingly that students seeking to make their college education more relevant have chosen the wrong target. Faculties, not administrators, he says, are to blame for the neglect of undergraduate teaching, for overemphasis on science and for the indifference of some urban universities to their ghetto neighbors.

In an iconoclastic interview, Seymour Eskow, president of the Suffern, N.Y., Rockland Community College, lambastes four-year universities for condescending toward junior colleges. All too often, says Eskow, "haughty senior college departments" refuse transfer students credit for junior-college courses.

Love, Not Peace. Despite its concern with improving communication in the world of higher education, Change includes a striking open letter from one student leader that seems to rule out much hope for such improvement. Michael Rossman, who served on the steering committee of the 1964 Free Speech Movement at Berkeley, contemptuously denounces "the myth that better communication would solve everything," opts instead for the tactics of confrontation. There is "no campus where significant political advance or educational reform or movement work has taken place that is not also familiar with confrontation," he argues. "You've got to let yourself get angry--and maybe violent as well--before you can find out who you are." To Rossman, who signs his letter "Love, but not peace," no effort at communication can substitute for a good, rousing conflict.

This apocalyptic view typifies only too well what Sociologist Lewis Feuer, in an article, describes as "the student movement's abdication from reason." Now teaching in Toronto, Feuer observed the 1964 Berkeley rebellion as a member of the faculty there. Deploring "the student movement's attraction to violence, direct action and generational elitism," he is not a bit less shocked by the "moral surrender of the elder generation."

Change has succeeded well in delineating the gulf that separates a Michael Rossman from a Lewis Feuer. In so doing, it has also succeeded in demonstrating that the gulf may already be too wide to bridge by means of the sort of rational dialogue that the magazine hopes to promote.

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