Students from New England to Berkeley Discover Their Own Universities, and Find

THIS WAS the year that students brought the war back home to the campus. In a swirling mass of identities, we became Vietcong and then blacks and then students again. And it happened all over--not just at Berkeley and Harvard, but at Ohio University and the University of Hawaii. Suddenly, students became activists. They did things. They took over buildings and held deans captive; they shut down universities and they bled.

The issue exploded from the war (which you could criticize from the sidelines) to the whole society (which you couldn't). Suddenly, the target became your home, the place that coddled and sheltered you and encouraged you. Suddenly, the target became the university.

The reasons that the university became the target are not too hard to see. There was a rational progression to it all. The Dow sit-ins of the fall protested first the corporation's manufacture of napalm, and then the university's sanction of it by allowing Dow to use university facilities to recruit future napalm-makers.

From there it was only a short hop to university "complicity" in the war: the university was contributing to the war effort by investing in armaments and by doing war research for the government.

Finally, the university was seen as a mirocosm of society, and there was Columbia. As SDS founder and Columbia Outside Agitator Tom Hayden wrote:

Columbia's problem is the American problem in miniature--the inability to provide answers to widespread social needs and the use of the military to' protect the authorities against the people.

I.

IT WAS a long road to travel in a year. But the thing called the Establishment has always had a death wish, and it helped out nicely. The big ugly war pervaded all American institutions, including the university. The "institutionalized hypocrisy" that Kenneth Keniston says American youth hates is right here, right in front of us.

Academic freedom, we found, is so much bunk, just as "outside" freedom is so much bunk. The university, with its enormous government and business connections, is part of the whole rotten mess.

The year after American students discovered America, they discovered their own universities. They looked at the university power structure and found out that it was undemocratic. They looked at the policy-making boards of the university and found them loaded with businessmen and corporation lawyers. They looked at their professors and found them doing research for the government. The war caused it, and the recognition was quite a shock.

Now, all of a sudden, right away, students want all this changed. What they are demanding is a new university. Hayden writes:

[Students at Columbia] did not even want to be included in the decision-making circles of the military-industrial complex that runs Columbia: they want to be included only if their inclusion is a step toward transforming the university. They want a new and independent university standing against the mainstream of society, or they want no university at all.

Richard T. Gill, Master of Leverett House, talked about Columbia last month on a WGBH-TV panel. His position is much the same as other academics. He argued that the university should not be the target of student attacks because the university is the American institution most capable of promoting social change.

To the activist, that is the very reason that it should be attacked. If in a time of crisis the university cannot forcefully demand social change, then who can? To the student activist, the university is a wishy-washy, impotent liberal--a despicable character.

Keniston talks in his new book, Young Radicals, about how most radicals have an image of their father that is split into two parts:

On the one hand, the father was portrayed as highly ethical, intellectually strong, principled, honest, politically involved, and idealistic. But on the other hand, this same father in other contexts was seen as unsuccessful, acquiescent, weak, or inadequate.

The university is seen in this split image also. In an interview I had early this spring with a top Harvard administration official, he talked about how healthy and constructive activism is. Yet, at the same time, he argued that students should not resist the draft because it is not worth it. "It will ruin the rest of their lives," he said. "This will pass. Harvard students have always been able to cope with outside pressures well. They can find ways out." (And they have too. They see their friendly local doctor or shrink.)

It is this kind of hypocrisy that disgusts students. The university tells them to be honest and moral, but, like the radical's father, it is too weak and inadequate to put its beliefs into action--it encourages students to do the same.

The university has also become the target of activist students because it is where the student lives. In part, the reaction is one of guilt, like the black student who finds it hard to justify being in college while his people are in bondage.

The white activist has a similar problem. There is the world, and you are here. What can you do? The first way out is to discover that the world is here too, right here in the university.

II.

THE DISCOVERY of the university opens up new worlds. There is a vast wealth of conspiracy to be uncovered, large numbers of liberal professors to humiliate, and it is not lonely at all. It is fun. It is great fun to manipulate the Establishment, to push it around, to outsmart it. It is what David Riesman calls "mischief" with a consciousness of the absurd always there.

Before, at a university, the pressures to conform meant a lack of commitment. What was cool was to be critical of things from the sidelines. Joining political organizations was not cool. It was better to talk and sneer. But now, in a new milieu, it is exciting to act. It is romantic and it is fun.

Commitment does not have to mean ideological rigidity. All commitment is doing. It is existential, as Simon James (a pseudonym for a Columbia demonstrator) shows in a feature that appeared last month in the CRIMSON and NEW YORK magazine. He writes down his thoughts as he sits-in at President Grayson Kirk's office:

I am not having good times here. I do not know many people who are here, and I have doubts about why they are here. Worse, I have doubts about why I am here. (Note the frequency of the word 'here.' The place I am is the salient characteristic of my situation.) It's possible that I'm here to be cool or to meet people or to meet girls (as distinct from people) or to get out of crew or to be arrested.

Of course the possibility exists that I am here to precipitate some change at the university. I am willing to accept the latter as true, or rather, I am willing, even anxious, not to think about it any more. If you think too much on the second tier (think about why you are thinking what you think) you can be paralyzed. . . .

Certainly it isn't conscionable, to hold [Dean Henry] Coleman captive. But attention is being gotten. Steps will be taken in one direction or another. The polls will fluctuate and the market will quiver. Or being here is the cause of an effect. We're trying to make it Good; I don't know what else to say or do. That is, I have no further statement to make at this time, gentlemen.

There is something that makes us want the market to quiver and the polls to fluctuate. That is why we do things. All Simon James knows is that he wants to make it Good. That is a good thing to know. Don't ask him how he would remake the university. He is honest and he is doing and he wants it Good and he recognizes that things are rotten and that is enough.

Simon James is not really so new. The report of the Muscatine Committee at Berkeley two years ago describes him fairly well, even though the committee's understanding of the depth of his feeling is hopelessly inadequate:

There is much youthful impatience in the search for instantaneous remedies to public and private ills. The unconventional student is inordinately sure that his own picture of the world is the correct one. He lacks the perspective necessary for self-criticism and for an appreciation of his opponent's position. Of course, there are also some who enjoy the notoriety and power offered by leadership of protest movements.

Here we are with all this youthful impatience. The faculty and administration, says the Muscatine Report, "are more willing to tolerate the evils of the world, believing they can be reduced but never entirely eliminated." And so we do not understand each other, and there is conflict.

The difference between Berkeley and Columbia is quantity not quality. The feelings are the same, but this year more people have them, and they are deeper. The reason for this is the self-destructive bent of Establishment liberalism. Throughout the year, the government and the universities have managed to "radicalize" large numbers of students, to turn cool liberals into hot radicals.

III.

RADICALIZING people has been one of the major tasks of SDS and other activist organizations for a long time. But SDS has never been able to radicalize people by what it does. Instead, its task has been to produce confrontations, then let the authorities do the work.

A radicalizing experience is often something like getting your head bashed in by cops, or watching your friends get their heads bashed in by cops. Or else it can be watching something fail, as Harvard's Student-Faculty Advisory Council has failed.

Keniston explained radicalization in terms of coming face-to-face with the evils of society:

Even more than most young middle-class Americans, these young men and women [radicals], while they had "done the reading," were not psychologically prepared for a personal and concrete confrontation with injustice, social repression and discrimination.

Coupled with the "shock of confrontation"--disproportionately strong for these students from privileged families--is the vision of failure these students see in the political system. The social injustice, the reaction in rioting that they see around them makes them reject the customary liberal belief that institutions already exist that can relieve the inequities. They have been around too long. Keniston writes:

What is most impressive is not their secret motivation to have the System fail, but naive hope that it would succeed, and the extent of their depression and disillusion when their early reformist hopes were frustrated.

As more students are radicalized by these confrontations, the polarization gets greater. The liberals, who say that things are bad but can be corrected, become lumped together with the racists and militarists who are actively making things bad. This year, more than anything else, we have seen a crisis for the liberals--the dispassionate sideliners who have been sneering and talking but not doing. I wrote in a Crimson article last October:

For those who were listening, listening to the war get worse and to the repression of demonstrations get more brutal, the time for the choice was zooming in very fast. Sitting on the sidelines, being cool-liberal and dispassionate was becoming irrelevant. The theme that the Washington demonstrators harped on was: if you're not with us, you're against us.

And how frustrating it is to try to convince them that you are with them! Words, apparently, are not good enough any more.

That was October. Since then, the pressures of the war have gotten worse (drafting graduate students), and the repression of demonstrations has gotten more brutal (the bloody raid on Columbia). More people have gotten radicalized.

IV.

The best way to look at this phenomenon of radicalization is to look at the history of student activism on university campuses this year. The focus will be on the events of October, 1967, and April, 1968, when outside events--the work of the self-destructive Establishment--managed to turn hordes of cool liberals into hot radicals and managed to build a movement.

The war dominated everything. And the October action began with massive protests against the war--draft-card turn-ins that were supposed to symbolize a new direction for the anti-war movement, "from dissent to resistence."

On October 16, turn-ins were organized across the country to begin an anti-war, anti-draft week that would culminate in a march on the Pentagon "to confront the warmakers." In Boston, 237 men, including 23 Harvard students, burned or turned in their cards. In New York, Baton Rogue, and San Francisco the scene was the same. In Oakland, California, all through the week, anti-war demonstrators trying to march on the induction center there battled police, and the New York Times showed you the blood on the front page.

These Octobrists were the conscience of the movement that would develop during the year. On Friday, October 20, they presented their 984 cards to the Justice Department. Since then, a Selective Service memorandum has called for them to be treated as delinquents, and many are facing five-year jail terms.

If there was one day, a single day that can be described as a turning point in the move toward resistence, it was Saturday. The place (Simon James's "salient characteristic") was the Pentagon.

"For the first time in my life, I was standing on one side and my government was standing on the other," said one participant. "We finally found out what it was like to be Vietcong," said another. Soldiers were coming at you with gas masks on and sheathed bayonets drawn. Tear gas canisters exploded, and people were being dragged off for "transgressing a police line," like Norman Mailer did.

At the Pentagon, hundreds of U.S. Marshals and thousands of troops faced 40,000 demonstrators. That was all it was--a raw, bitter confrontation. Two lines facing each other, looking at each other. There were sudden rushes into the line of troops drawn around the building--almost a giant game of capture the flag. In the end 600 were arrested.

And there was blood, too. The repression came, and for the first time in their lives, middle-class college students were clubbed and gassed by police and soldiers. It was Keniston's "confrontation with evil," the thing that radicalizes you. That night, a few thousand sat on the steps of the Pentagon with troops smashing them with rifle butts, but no one reported it.

In the morning, they came home to school to tell their friends about it. At a rally in the Yard, once one-time cool-liberals were talking in hot-radical tones about what had happened, and the word brought a reaction.

The first place it happened was Princeton, an unlikely place. Amory Blaine would have been shocked to see 31 students arrested for blocking the entrance to a government-sponsored military research center on the university's campus--the Institute for Defense Analyses (IDA). IDA would later become a major university complicity issue at the University of Chicago and at Columbia.

The people who go to Princeton today are quite different from those who went there five years ago. And this situation is the same at other "pace-setting" schools. A few years ago, a new dean of admissions at Princeton changed the school's public-to-private school graduate ratio from 40-60 to 60-40. The new radicals there call themselves "Dunham's Children" after the admissions dean. Upperclassmen were calling them "lunchmeat"--a favorite Princeton expression. But the "lunchies" dominate Princeton now. And a tiny but active SDS chapter has been organizing sit-ins all year.

Princeton's effect on other campuses was strong. Just as Midwestern types had once adopted the button-down shirt and the rep tie from the Ivy League, they now began to adopt the sit-in as life style.

At Harvard the reaction to the Pentagon was the Dow sit-in. Three hundred students held a Dow recruiter named Frederick Leavitt inside Malinckrodt M-102 for seven hours, then let him go. As a result, 74 students were placed on probation and the Student-Faculty Advisory Council, a committee of the Faculty, was set up to look into recruiting and other things.

The October demonstrations opened things up. Students began to look into what their universities were doing. They began to complain and criticize. Something was building.

In Cambridge, a "failure of the system" sort of radicalizing event happened when a referendum on the war was soundly defeated. To quite a few hard-working students, including many that Keniston had interviewed months before, it was a stunning blow. The "channels" that liberals had talked about were turning out to be ineffective channels.

V.

Then, on February 16, lightning struck. In perhaps the single most important event of the year to the movement, the Selective Service decided to draft seniors and first-year graduate students in June. The symbolic confrontation at the Pentagon was now a real one. It was a shock that everyone knew was coming.

Someone had thrown up a wall against the future, and suddenly 1968 was snatched away. Suddenly it became June, and there you were with the war that you told everyone you hated. And a government you never knew had decided your future for you. That was lousy and undemocratic, and back in your mind you remembered that the same thing had happened to people in Vietnam and in America and all over the world. And maybe it was an irrational reaction, but you hated your country for what it did and you didn't want to be a part of it.

There were plans then for a summer in Chicago and all over. Tom Wicker was saying that hundreds of thousands would resist. Then General Hershey would not be able to get enough men, and maybe the war would end in that kind of glory. The thousands of college seniors and grad students would be the raw material for a massive movement for social change in this country.

Then came a hiatus, an interruption--Eugene McCarthy. When we were all sure that it would be Johnson and Nixon in November with no one really caring, McCarthy showed up. In March he nearly won New Hampshire. And then, on the night before April Fool's Day, Johnson told us that he wouldn't run, that he would try for peace. And suddenly, things fell to pieces.

Peace, even a phony peace that will mean war for two more years and no real change in the policies that lead to war, peace is a beautiful thing. And this country embraces it as a beautiful thing. Students, like everyone else in America see war and peace as separate times and separate places. There is nothing in between. For a long time, it looked like this country was at peace.

Then April came, and the next shock hit. Martin Luther King was assassinated, and nothing was different after all. Black students brought America back to the university, just as white radicals had brought the war to the university.

There was a connection there, we all realized at once. The war is America, and America is the university. And suddenly the university became the battleground, in a comfortable, fun university-way. From being students we had gone to become Vietcong at the Pentagon, then to become blacks15Ronald H. JanisWashington, D.C., October -- Soldiers defending Pentagon watching demonstrators begin to stick flowers down their rifle barrels.