Protest and the Law

In the spasm that routinely greets the arrival of military recruiters on college campuses, protesters occupied the offices of Columbia University's student placement agency for all of five minutes last week--time enough for them to perform a few customary acts of vandalism. Then the quiet of the midyear exam period returned..

Or so it seemed. But in the aftermath of the brief excitement, Columbia's acting president Andrew W. Cordier faced up to a nagging legal issue. He announced that a faculty committee will study the university's relationships with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Under specific scrutiny by the committee is Public Law 90-373. That recent, obscure piece of legislation withholds new NASA research grants from schools that bar military recruiters. More significantly, it also forbids universities to dispense NASA funds to any individual who has ever been convicted in any U.S. court of "organizing, promoting, encouraging, or participating in a riot or civil disorder"--provided that the offense was a felony carrying a penalty of more than one year in jail. To politically active professors and students throughout the U.S.--many of whom depend on federal research funds--Public Law 90-373 now has ominous significance. As they see it, the law is one more disturbing piece of evidence that the Government is trying to legislate standards of behavior on campus.

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