The Men in the Middle

RUNNING a university today is so burdensome a task that many campus presidencies go unfilled for months. The excruciating problem is to maintain order and academic freedom while still heeding legitimate demands for reform. How to be tough without playing into the hands of would-be martyrs, how to loosen the university structure without relinquishing necessary authority--these are dilemmas that require uncommon gifts of diplomacy, imagination and luck. Four moderate campus heads have done uncommonly well:

ROGER W. HEYNS, UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA AT BERKELEY. Heyns, 51, came to Berkeley from the University of Michigan, where he had been a highly esteemed vice president for academic affairs, soon after the Free Speech Movement tumult of 1964-65. Holder of a doctorate in psychology, he combined the lessons of that discipline with the tactics of a skilled administrator, stressed communication and anticipation in dealing with crises.

Although he is an unflappable, pipe-smoking type, Heyns has a steely determination to keep his campus functioning, first proved this to students when he called police to quell disorders over military recruiting on campus in 1966. Only because he had demonstrated his interest in reform, won the trust of the students and repeatedly emphasized his desire to discuss the issues was he able to use police without exacerbating the conflicts. The chancellor takes abundant time from his jammed schedule to see students. Heyns' willingness to listen has kept him well up on student thinking.

His major test this year came when minority students picketed and disrupted the campus to reinforce their demands for a black-studies program. Heyns won faculty approval for an ethnic-studies department but rejected the demand for student autonomy. "I tried," he says, "to maintain open communications with the regents and the faculty and the students, to maintain an open position, to avoid getting in an adversary relationship with one group or another." Heyns' hope now is that the high pitch of student activism will decline as students see that violent disruptions keep the university from doing the things that they want done. If this happens, he will turn to the reforms that really concern him, such as student participation in governance, improvement of teaching, and development of small colleges.

MARTIN MEYERSON, STATE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK AT BUFFALO. Among the youngest of university presidents, Meyerson, 46, is a veteran of U.S. campus insurgency. As acting chancellor at Berkeley in the wake of the Free Speech Movement of 1964, he picked up the smoldering pieces with uncommon skill, winning the admiration of faculty and students.

In three years at Buffalo, Meyerson has not only resisted political pressure from outside the university and forestalled disruptive efforts from within, but has also pushed ahead with major reforms. To relieve academic parochialism, Buffalo created seven faculties, each headed by a provost and incorporating related academic departments and professional schools. Nonacademic research has been shunted into separate research institutes, and Meyerson has called on all faculty members, including himself, to teach. So that students "may experience neighborhood within the metropolis that is the university," Meyerson (whose academic background is in urban affairs and environmental design) is establishing a series of small colleges.

When students presented nine demands for radical changes in university governance and policy last month, Meyerson responded by calling a convocation of students and faculty, reading a set of counterdemands. The result: a week-long campus-wide teach-in on university reform that has elicited 120 specific proposals from departments, ad hoc groups and individuals. When 175 radical-led students seized the university administration building recently, Meyerson sat and talked with the occupiers for two hours. Persuasion unavailing, he got a court order directing each student to show cause why he should occupy the administrative offices. The occupiers filed quietly out.

A complex, subtle intellectual, Meyerson is a passionate advocate of university "reformation." Says he: "The American university in the 20th century has adapted itself to change less than any institution in our society. It is true that the scale of universities has changed, but change of scale without change of style may be suicidal."

EDWARD H. LEVI, UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO. Levi, 57, met his first challenge from dissident students just two months after he became president. In January, radical students occupied the university's administration building to protest a decision not to rehire an assistant professor of sociology. They also demanded an equal voice in faculty hiring and firing. Levi, who had been law dean and provost at Chicago, was concerned above all with preserving the institution that he loves and whose reason for being, he says, is simply "to be one of the great universities."

The new president coolly weighed the alternatives: seize the building and risk destroying the university, or let the students keep it and wear them down. He took the gentle course, conducted business from his house while the university continued to function almost normally. He refused, however, to negotiate "with a gun at his head," as one fac ulty member put it. After 16 days, the occupiers, denied broad support because there had been no violence to galvanize apathetic students, gave up. Not one of their "nonnegotiable" demands was granted.

Perhaps Chicago's example cannot be applied universally. The school has a long tradition of intellectual discussion that made the vast majority of students unwilling to join the sit-in. Most of its students are in graduate and professional courses, are less subject to undergraduate enthusiasms. Levi has relegated increasing responsibility for the university's conduct to the faculty, by so doing has engaged the support of most professors. And Levi has earned ample respect by years of brilliant scholarship, educational reform and urban involvement. But his example could well be studied by other college administrators. In one demonstration after another across the country, it has been the sudden application of brutal force that changed a mere protest into a bloody battle.

THE REV. THEODORE M. HESBURGH, UNIVERSITY OF NOTRE DAME. Father Hesburgh brought a new approach to campus violence in February when he issued a carefully thought-out set of rules for handling demonstrators. His eight| page letter put students on notice that persons disrupting the campus would be warned, "given 15 minutes of meditation," then suspended if they did not desist. Hesburgh's initiative, which he took only after sounding out faculty, alumni and student groups, brought him quantities of favorable mail, including a letter from President Nixon that warmly endorsed his "forthright stand."

Notre Dame, whose comparatively docile students bear little resemblance to the activists at Berkeley or Columbia, has suffered only modest demonstrations. The one that aroused Father Hesburgh occurred last November, when students held a lie-in in front of the administration building to prevent students from attending interviews with a CIA recruiter. Hesburgh denounced the lie-in as "clearly tyranny," said in his letter that Notre Dame could not tolerate "anyone or any group that substitutes force for rational persuasion," warned that angry reaction to campus violence from legislators might suppress the liberty of universities and "may well lead to a rebirth of fascism."

Hesburgh resisted calls for state and federal action, insisted that "the ultimate solution must come from within the universities." Student protest, he said, is a "resonance of the world's troubles on the part of young people at the university. You cannot ask young people to get involved and not put it to work on the world in which they are living. I think there are many legitimate reasons for protesting today, but the university has to do this according to its proper style, which is rationality and stability, not force and violence."

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