The Dialectic of Demonstration

DAY after day the campus spectacle repeats itself: professors and deans evicted or held hostage, windows shattered, students struggling with police, offices rifled, even rifles carried by grim militants. The protesters talk, preach or scream about the university's Government connections, the percentage of black students, faculty selection, admission policies. These are surely significant questions, but all too often they are forgotten in the dialectic of demonstration. What starts in many instances as the "politics of conscience" bypasses the political process and anesthetizes conscience.

Familiar Trap. At Cornell last week, protesters armed themselves for "self-protection" and caused a grave crisis (see following story). Arsonists of unknown affiliation harassed New York University and Columbia. Harvard was still uneasy. There was a "mill-in" at one building, and neo-Luddite members of the Students for a Democratic Society destroyed an architect's model of projected university buildings because they oppose Harvard's expansion plans.

At the predominantly Negro Atlanta University Center, 100 students held 22 trustees prisoner for 29 hours until the trustees agreed, among other things, to amnesty for their captors. President Buell Gallagher of New York's City College found himself in the familiar dilemma between repression and submission when a couple of hundred students locked the gates. He chose to close the school to its 20,000 students while negotiating with the rebels. Other schools under varying degrees of siege last week included Princeton, Fordham, Tulane, Dartmouth, Howard and Hampton Institute in Virginia.

Conflict is seeping downward in the educational system. In Norfolk, Va., 300 students of the predominantly Negro Booker T. Washington High School walked out in protest over the dismissal of a football coach and next fall's football schedule, which does not include any conference games against white schools. New Rochelle High School, near New York City, was forced to close after a disruption over the stationing of a policeman at the school because of previous trouble. Vandalism, violence and vituperative dissent on a broad variety of issues shut down four New York City high schools last week and caused upheavals in others. Will kindergarten be the last bastion of adult authority?

Psychology Professor Kenneth Clark of New York's City College, a Negro and no stranger to protest movements, is sympathetic to some of the rebels' views. "Our major educational institutions," he said last week, "have not delivered the services to humanity that could be reasonably expected of them." Yet Clark, like Harvard President Nathan Pusey, argued that the extreme forms of dissent now in vogue "have as their goal destruction of institutions." Said he: "All forms of tyranny are introduced under the guise of moral indignation and are justified by some higher moral ends."

Poet Archibald MacLeish admits that there are incidents of "student hooliganism, student Hitlerism" in the campus insurrections. But in a philosophic inquiry last week, he raised the crucial question of why today's undergraduates are so much more tolerant of the radical, activist minority among them than previous student generations were. MacLeish suggests that students generally are in revolt against "the world of the diminished man," that they are humanists disgusted with a society which they view as having failed the individual in far too many ways.

Riddled with Danger. That analysis is essentially a hopeful one. It foresees a maturing generation with a deep commitment to idealism and reform. But for now, disruption and dissent are riddled with danger. As the protest movements become more and more irrational, they can only stimulate a latent streak of antipathy toward things academic that has been largely quiescent in the U.S. since Joe McCarthy's heyday in the 1950s. Punitive statutes have already been enacted by some state legislatures, and several bills to penalize campus militants are before Congress. State-supported schools face the threat of a taxpayer backlash that might stringently reduce funds and curb academic freedom. Riot-ridden private institutions are in danger of losing the support of alumni. If the public becomes seriously angered at the universities, the nation at large will be in more serious trouble than ever.

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