YOUTH: THE JEREMIADS OF JUNE

UNDER the late spring sun, a patina of calm overlays the American campus. Nearly all the rhetoric is coming from duly invited commencement speakers rather than protest leaders. The marching feet belong not to demonstrators but to the 925,000 youths receiving college and graduate degrees this month. Some of the most violent students have been expelled, suspended, imprisoned or pacified. Here and there last week, a few recalcitrants cried defiance, but with little tangible effect. It looks like peace. In reality, the prevailing condition is a most fragile truce.

By every index, students' dissent and frustration over the status quo are more widespread than ever. A poll in the current FORTUNE concludes that 12.8% hold political views that classify them as either "revolutionary" or "radically dissident." The survey also indicates that increasing numbers of other youngsters agree with some of the rebels' ideological positions.

Republican Congressman William Steiger returned from a tour of universities to report last week: "Vast numbers of bright, dedicated, sincere students are just as deeply disturbed as the so-called revolutionaries. The difference is that they have not yet rejected completely the view that they should not resort to violence."

After interviewing students, faculty members and administrators across the country, TIME correspondents support Steiger's conclusions. Said Columbia Law Professor Michael Severn: "The mood is sullen. Students are not happy. They have had a taste of influence and power and they have not accomplished much." Like other campus elders, Severn fears that next year could be worse--and that new violence could invite a "real crackdown." Father Edwin Quain, acting president of Georgetown University in Washington, notes that "the freshmen are much more radical than the seniors, and I'm told that the high school students coming up are even more so."

Parenthood Renounced. Students themselves are for the most part unimpressed with internal changes at many universities. Even where adroit maneuvering avoided tough police action against dissidents, as at the University of Chicago, there is bitterness. Roger Black, editor of the Chicago undergraduate paper Maroon, said last week that the "tightlipped, moralistic and adamant" attitude of administrators and senior professors has "planted very deep seeds of demoralization." Looking beyond the campus, many students are even more distressed. Apparent progress in negotiations over Viet Nam has been too slight to eliminate the war issue. Military spending, poverty, the skein of racial problems--and frequently the basic values of U.S. society--draw more and more criticism. Stephanie Mills, 20, of Mills College in Oakland, Calif., concludes that the only "humane" thing she could do was to avoid bearing children. Miss Mills is no dropped-out radical; she is her class valedictorian, and renounced parenthood in a commencement speech entitled "The Future Is a Cruel Hoax."

How can adult society respond? Richard Nixon attempted an answer last week at General Beadle State College* in Madison, S. Dak., a tranquil campus that presented little risk of embarrassing disruption, though a few student protesters did in fact stage a peaceful mini-demonstration. The President praised youth's quest for honesty in public and private life. He defended the right to peaceful dissent. But he came down hard on radicals who prefer coercion to persuasion and on faculty sympathizers who "should know better." Said Nixon: "It should be self-evident that this sort of self-righteous moral arrogance has no place in a free community. It denies the most fundamental of all the values we hold: respect for the rights of others." Arguing against the rationale of violence, he observed: "Avenues of peaceful change do exist. Those who can make a persuasive case for changes they want can achieve them."

Civics Lesson. In large part, Nixon's speech was a reasoned defense against those who profess to see something unwholesome in the American system. "The structure of our laws has rested from the beginning on a foundation of moral purpose," he told the new moralists. The President also taught a fundamental civics lesson: "The right to participate in public decisions carries with it the duty to abide by those decisions when reached, recognizing that no one can have his own way all the time." What he failed to emphasize was that the realities of economic and political power sometimes dilute these principles. He did not really confront the challenge of those who have shown specifically where the system fails.

Although he said things that needed saying--and the majority of Americans doubtless found his arguments unexceptionable--Nixon probably won few converts from the ranks of the disaffected. Hard-core radicals, such as the Marxist-oriented Students for a Democratic Society (estimated nationwide membership: 6,000), for example, reject all such rational formulations. Negroes know that agitation in the '50s and '60s has prompted more progress than did reasoned argument. Test cases frequently come from broken laws. At many universities in the past two years, it was clear that authorities agreed to reforms after, rather than before, upheavals. Thus it should not be surprising that the alienated young occasionally carry this approach to irrational extremes, ignoring that point on the violence scale where protest evokes reaction and repression, not reform.

Bite Them. The crucial question is whether most students can be kept from following the extremists. Bob Powell, president of the National Student Association, is pessimistic: "Attempts at persuading the university administrations to change over the years have, by and large, failed. The sentiment now is growing very rapidly that the only way to elicit a response is direct action."

There is no longer any doubt that a large percentage of the nation's students will remain restless and questing for an indefinite period. Many will follow the advice of Barbara Ward, the English economic journalist, who exhorted University of Pennsylvania students: "Please stay angry. I implore you to determine that you are going to give them [public officials] no peace. I say, go out, bite them!"

If the biting is going to be primarily intellectual and political rather than physical and destructive, there must be some reasonable prospect that valid demands will be met. Yet it seems more and more doubtful that the country is in any mood for further concessions. Besides, a number of university faculties and student bodies are internally divided to the point of polarization. The failure of many universities to cope with unrest has served as an invitation to political intervention.

First in the statehouses, and now in Congress, legislators have been tumbling over each other to declaim, investigate and write bills (see EDUCATION). Some measures, such as those banning firearms from campuses, are unexceptionable. Others, seeking to regulate behavior, are questionable. In Congress, a House Internal Security subcommittee is investigating campus disorders, and the Senate Permanent Investigations Subcommittee begins its hearings this week. Their main consideration is subversive influences. A House Education and Labor subcommittee last week sought to write a bill that would pressure universities to enact strict standards of behavior.

In terms of police power, outright rebellion on campuses can doubtless be controlled. As Nixon said last week, "Force can be contained. We have the power to strike back if need be, and to prevail." That reassurance is not very comforting. More pertinent, perhaps, is the issue raised last week by Class Speaker Hillary Rodham at Wellesley. "For too long," she said, "those who lead us have viewed politics as the art of the possible. The challenge that faces them--and us--now is to practice politics as the art of making possible what appears impossible."

* After turning down a number of other campus invitations, Nixon announced the Beadle visit a month ago. He had intended to speak at Ohio State four days later but had to cancel the date because of his trip to Midway. Beadle, with 1,342 students, is named for William Henry Harrison Beadle, a lawyer and engineer who served as a Civil War brigadier and later became the college's president.

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