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Student Politics and the University - Page 2
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Anger against the state
hat the liberal critics of student disruption in 1964 did not see was that a storm of violent antipathy to the United States—and indeed to any stable industrial society, which raises other questions—could be aroused in the youth and the intellectuals, and that it could be maintained and strengthened year after year until it became the underpinning of the dominant style, political and cultural, among the youth. The question I find harder to answer is whether we failed to see fundamental defects and faults both in the society and state and the associated universities which had inevitably to lead anyone committed to life and freedom to such a ferocious anger.
Vietnam, of course, could justify anything. And yet the same ferocity can be seen in countries such as Germany, Italy, and Japan, which are really scarcely involved, allies though they are in other respects, in our war in Vietnam, and in a country like France, which actively disapproves of our role. Undoubtedly Vietnam has enormously strengthened the movement of antipathy and anger, and not only because our powerful nation was engaged in the destruction—whatever the reasons for it—of a small and poor one. There were other reasons. Vietnam placed youth in a morally insupportable position. The poor and the black were disproportionately subjected to the draft. The well-favored, as long as they stayed in school, and even out of it, were freed from it. The fortunate middle-class youth, with strong emotional and ideological reasons to oppose violently our war in Vietnam, could escape as long as they stayed in college, just as prisoners could escape as long as they were in jail. They undoubtedly felt guilty because those with whom they wanted to be allied, whom they hoped to help, had to go and fight in Vietnam. In this ridiculous moral position, the university became to many a repulsive prison, and prison riots were almost inevitable—whatever else contributed to them.
And yet, where there was no Vietnam, students could create their own, as in France, or the real Vietnam could serve to make them just as angry at their own, in this case hardly guilty, government.
But the question remains: how do we evaluate the role of Vietnam in directly creating frustrations that led to anger at the university? Did Vietnam strive to teach or remind students, with the assistance of critics of capitalism, that they lived in a corrupt society? Or was it itself the major irritant? How was Vietnam related to the larger society? Was it an appropriate symbol or summary of its major trends or characteristics? Or was it itself an aberration, correctable without "major social change"? The dominant tone of student radicalism was increasingly to take the first position—it reflected the society, and could be used as an issue to mobilize people against it.
Those of us who took the position we did in 1964 have stuck with it, and are stuck with it. We took a position of the defense of institutions that we thought worked well enough, which could be changed, and which in the face of radical attack could and would crumble, to be replaced with something worse. I will not defend this position here—I have done so elsewhere (in "The New Left and Its Limits," Commentary, July, 1968). I will admit to some discomfort with it. We seem to find it impossible to modify our inhuman tactics in Vietnam (even though I understand we adopt them to save American lives), we seem to find it impossible to reduce the enormous military budget or to make effective steps in reducing the atomic arms race (though I am aware another side is involved too), we seem to find it difficult or impossible to move rapidly in the reform of certain inadequate institutions—for example, the system of punishment, the welfare system, the public schools, the universities, the police—without the spur of the disruption and violence I decry. But the disruption and violence, even if they produce reforms, will in the end, I believe, produce a society that we would find less human than the unreformed society. So I have stuck to this not fully adequate position, for I find it sounder, more adapted to reality, and more congenial than the alternative: the despairing view that we have solved no problems, that selfish and overwhelmingly powerful forces prevent us from solving any, that the society and its institutions respond only to disruption and violence.
Of course, this position has never been one that was uncritical of universities and colleges. Many who defend universities and the institutions of a democratic society against the radicals—for example, Daniel Bell and David Riesman—have been among the most forceful critics of colleges and universities. (I myself wrote, a year or two before Berkeley, an article critical of college and university education, and joined the small band of educational reformers when I came to Berkeley in 1963.) But rarely was the main force of these critics linked to a basic criticism of the society. Their criticism was directed at the structure of the university or college; it spoke of the university as an educational institution and faulted it for educational failure. What this criticism did not do was to subordinate the educational criticism to a devastating criticism of the society, its distribution of power, forms of socialization, its role in the world.
University reform
arly in the American student revolt it seemed reasonable that educational issues were at the heart of the matter. People spoke of the size of Berkeley, the anonymity of the student, the dominance of education by the disciplines, and the graduate departments and their needs. But there was a key difference between the critics of higher education and the student radicals: to the critics educational reform was, if not of major or exclusive concern, a matter of some significance in itself, worth taking seriously on its own terms; to the student radicals, it was immediately subordinated to the larger social criticism—educational reform was valuable if it meant the universities could be moved toward becoming a training ground for revolutionaries, or if it meant that revolutionaries would achieve greater power within it, or if it meant that the university could be used so as to produce "radicalizing confrontations" with "reactionary" forces.
In other words, university reform was a tactic. I make the distinction too sharply, of course, because to many of the student radicals, university reform was not a tactic; it was a goal of value in itself. Among the student radicals were, and are, to be found many serious students and critics of university education, with strong commitment to change and experiment. And yet again and again the tactical use of educational change became dominant.
Thus, consider the case of the course in which Eldridge Cleaver was to lecture at Berkeley, a course organized under the liberalized procedures that permitted students to initiate courses of interest to them. The Regents moved, against this course, that lecturers not members of the regular faculty could give only one guest lecture a quarter in a given course. If the students wanted to hear Eldridge Cleaver give his planned nine lectures, they would have to take the course without credit.
This led to the occupation of the building housing the offices of the College of Letters and Science and the philosophy department by unreconciled radicals (including the ubiquitous Tom Hayden, who can add to his honors his presence in Moses Hall at Berkeley as well as in the mathematics building at Columbia), and to considerable damage. The "revolutionary" slogan, the demands for which the radicals fought, were summed up on a button, "For credit, on campus, as planned!" It would be hard to argue that the radical students were moved by the opportunity to hear Eldridge Cleaver on campus, an opportunity that was available to them every day, if Cleaver had enough time or energy, and it seems quite clear that this educational innovation was now becoming a tactic, a counter in the revolutionary struggle that would (hopefully) activate the students to strike, to occupy buildings, and to disrupt the university.
If we go across the country, we can find a similar development in the enormously successful course that radical students conduct under the auspices of the social relations department of Harvard University, for credit. Some members of the department preferred to move the course elsewhere, into social sciences. The faculty member under whose formal authority the course was given denounced this as an effort to destroy the course, and he and those conducting sections in the course organized to fight the move, insisting it was political, and issued threats as to what would happen if the social relations department tried to disengage itself from this albatross. Thus, it was suggested, other social relations courses would be disrupted in protest.
Everything can be explained, if we are so inclined, as the effort of students devoted to education to save an experimental and rewarding course from destruction, and this certainly was part of the motivation. Reading the statements, I cannot escape the cynical conclusion that the course was being used as a club to threaten a "conservative" department, and the threat was being used to organize and radicalize students. There is enough to suggest that this objective loomed far larger in the minds of the organizers of the course than any concern with education as such.
Of course the organizers would argue, as student radicals argue everywhere, that there is no difference between radicalization and education. Everything else is "miseducation.'' To understand properly the nature of social relations, or power relations, of the structure of the society, the political system, and the economy is to become radical, and become imbued with the passion to destroy the status quo. Thus, they argue, any so-called "objective" or "scientific" education is really a fraud—if it's not educating people to overthrow the status quo, then it must be educating people to support it, for even inaction (when one could be active against) is a form of support. Thus, the outraged defenders of Social Relations 149 argued that all the other courses were conservative (clearly, or they weren't formally "radical"), and therefore their own radical course was a necessary and valuable effort to redress the balance.
The argument is not new. It is in effect the argument that was fought out in Russia over the question of whether all education and all science must reflect "dialectical materialism," and whether any scholarship that did not was by that fact alone "counterrevolutionary" and "bourgeois." Or the battle that was fought out in Nazi Germany over "Aryan" science and "non-Aryan" (and therefore "Jewish" science). It is understandable why we sputter, "I know the answers, but I've forgotten them." For these positions became so outrageous and untenable in the eyes of Western intellectuals that to have to defend again the possibility and reality of objective science and scholarship means to call into play parts of our minds that have long lain quiescent and unused. But called into play they must be, because the possibility of pursuing and disseminating knowledge freely is now quite seriously threatened.
The attacks on freedom
e have to learn the answers to the arguments that are now used to defend attacks on freedom—they are widely used, and in the present cultural atmosphere are repeated in the same form on a hundred campuses. Thus, if ROTC is prevented from operating, and the argument is that students should be free to take it if they wish, the answer is, "But the South Vietnamese are not allowed their freedom—why should students be allowed the freedom to join ROTC and the armed forces, which deny the South Vietnamese their freedom?" If a faculty member is not allowed to give the course he has scheduled, and faculty members criticize the black students who have prevented him from teaching, the answer is, "But this has been a racist institution for a long time, and 'academic freedom' is only a ploy to defend racism and the status quo." If some students engage in violence against others, the argument is, "But the violence of the police at Chicago is far greater, and what about the silent violence of starvation in the South, not to mention the violence of ghetto merchants who overcharge, and of social investigators who ask degrading questions?" We must remember what we have forgotten—for example, the old joke about the man who is being shown the wonderful new Moscow subway, and after a while asks, "But where are the trains?" The Russian answers, "But what about lynching in the South?" It's no joke any longer.
In other words, when I think of the student rebellion today, and of the disasters threatening and in some measure already actual on the campuses today—the massed battles between students and police, the destruction of card catalogues and lecture halls (and the threat to major research libraries), the destruction of computer tapes and research notes, the arming of many black students and the terrorization in many cases of other black and white students—I do not think initially in terms of the major reforms that are required on the university campus, but I think of the politics, and even the tactics, that would defend the university. For I have made some commitments: that an orderly democracy is better than government by the expressive and violent outbursts of the most committed; that the university embodies values that transcend the given characteristics of a society or the specific disasters of an administration; that the faults of our society, grave as they are, do not require—indeed, would in no way be advanced by— the destruction of those fragile institutions which have been developed over centuries to transmit and expand knowledge. These are strongly held commitments, so strongly that my first reaction to student disruption—and it is not only an emotional one—is to consider how the disrupters can be isolated and weakened, how their influence, which is now enormous among students, can be reduced, how dissension among them can be encouraged, and how they can be finally removed from a community they wish to destroy.
I know the faults of the universities as well as any of its critics do, and have worked and continue to work to correct them. But I take this position because I do not believe the character of the university as an institution—its teaching, its research, its government—is really the fundamental issue raised by student radicalism on the campus, or that changes in the government and education and research of the university, important as they are on many grounds, will do much to mitigate or deflect the radical onslaught. Again and again we have seen political uprisings on the campus—political acts based on a certain interpretation of American society to which one can either adhere or not, as one wishes, in the university—and in response to these political acts, we have seen an effort to shape a response in the educational or administrative area. This, I suggest, is a completely inappropriate and ineffective response.
Thus, if students attack Columbia for its ties to IDA and its building of a gymnasium in a park adjacent to Harlem, we end up by "restructuring" Columbia, with endless committees, with elected student representatives, with student participation being argued over in every setting, and all the rest—the university turned into committees and tribunals. Now, the fact is that the cause of the uprising was not dissatisfaction with the government of Columbia. The cause was the ceaseless search of the SDS to find means of attacking the basic character and mode of operation of a society and government they wished to transform, "by any means possible," to use the prevailing rhetoric. IDA and the gymnasium we have been told by SDS activists—and we must take this seriously—were tactical.
The cause of the uprising at Columbia was not the system of government, for any system of government for that university might in the fifties and sixties have involved ties with IDA and might have undertaken the building of a gymnasium in the park. (Who, after all, objected to these things when they were begun?) And indeed, even Columbia's system of government, archaic as it was, was quite capable of responding to changed attitudes, and was engaged in the process of cutting the ties to IDA, before the student uprising. As to the gymnasium, the fact was that aside from the protests of defenders of New York parkland and design (I am among them), who objected violently to the gymnasium, there was little other protest. Even the Harlem community was either indifferent to or actually supported the project.
With IDA and the gymnasium alone, as we all now know, the SDS at Columbia would have gotten nowhere. But then there comes the illegal seizure, the successful confrontation, the battle with the police, and new issues arise. The radicals are now joined by the liberals. The latter are concerned with due process, with government, with participation, with education. The liberals are much less concerned with the revolutionary change in the society that the radicals insist is necessary. The liberals demand amnesty for the protesters, due process before punishment, a new role for students and faculty, a change in "governance."
The script was played out before Columbia, at Berkeley in 1964 and 1966, and it is now being played out at Harvard. In 1966 at Berkeley, radical students blocked military recruiters. Police were called onto the campus to eject and arrest them. What was the faculty's response? To set up a commission on governance.
Copyright © 1969 by Nathan Glazer. All rights reserved.
The Atlantic Monthly; July 1969; The Campus Crucible: 1. Student Politics and the University - 69.07; Volume 224, No. 1; page 43-53.