Berkeley and Freedom

DEAR SIR:
Having left Berkeley to be a visiting professor at Harvard in the summer of 1965, I cannot speak from personal experience concerning what went on during the past year. I do know, having watched at firsthand the successful efforts of Martin Meyerson, acting chancellor during the spring semester of 1965, to restore an academic atmosphere to a campus that had been tied up in a civil war, that the situation could not have been handled by doing what was “right,” by insisting that the rules and law and order be literally obeyed on each and every occasion. As any student of university behavior knows, administrators and the civic authorities the world over have traditionally refrained from enforcing the law and the rulebook on undergraduates. Fraternity men have gone free on many campuses after having destroyed considerable property, and even on some occasions killing pledges in initiation ceremonies. The norm that the police should not invade the campus even to seize law violators and revolutionists has been observed in many countries, including even Czarist Russia at various periods of its history. The idea that youth should be allowed to sow its wild oats, whether these be of a sexual, political, narcotic, or just plain hell-raising nature, has a long tradition in many places. Administrators, politicians, parents, the older generation generally, for good and bad reasons, allow youth and students a lot more leeway than they give to adults.
On December 8, I, together with about 250 others, voted for the amendment which Professor Feuer introduced that would have withheld endorsement of the right to use the campus for the organization and advocacy of immediate acts of force or violence. I think that subsequent events have sustained the position of this minority. In evaluating the behavior of the majority, however, I still recall that the Academic Senate meeting of that day occurred under conditions never before witnessed on an American campus. The campus had been tied up by a student strike, backed by a faculty minority. The debate at the meeting was piped outside to loudspeakers, and over 5000 students stood outside cheering or booing the speeches made by their professors inside. A thousand academics of all varieties and disciplines, most of whom had never been involved in politics, and who had had little contact with the dispute until the Sproul Hall sit-in, cannot be faulted morally for having sought desperate remedies to gain some peace. To use force, as was done by the public authorities, against the recommendation of President Kerr and the Regents, to get the students out of Sproul Hall on December 2, 1964, only exacerbated the situation. How much better did Chicago and Wisconsin handle similar situations this past spring, when they followed the course Kerr had advocated, allowing the students to sit until they sheepishly evacuated the administration buildings. An academic atmosphere exists in Madison and Chicago, although no one went to jail.
In evaluating this and subsequent episodes at Berkeley and other universities, it is important to recall that Steve Weissman, the head of the graduate student affiliate of the FSM, and after Savio the most important leader of the movement, openly boasted to a New Yorker interviewer that all during the latter part of November, the FSM leadership had been consciously searching for ways and means of creating a situation which would bring the police on campus, that they felt the best way to revive their then declining forces was through a confrontation with the police in which students were arrested. Weissman commented that if the university had not given them an excuse for the sit-in by bringing new charges against key FSM leaders, the FSM would have tried to show films which had been banned by the university. This strategy of creating confrontation situations in the hopes of forcing the university to commit “atrocities,” of course, was continued in the spring of 1965 after Martin Meyerson took over as acting chancellor.
The temperate pragmatic policies followed by Meyerson in the spring semester, which were based on a sophisticated understanding of what the campus extremists were up to, were designed to avoid giving them the continuing issues they were seeking and restored an uneasy peace to Berkeley. Their success was evidenced by the fact that the pro-FSM student party, Slate, which had swept the December, 1964, campus election, was defeated five months later in the May contests, The situation is not yet completely stable, not only because of factors on campus, some of which Professor Feuer discusses, but also because there is much more political extremism both on the left and on the right in California than anywhere else in the country. Ideological compatriots of Robert Scheer received almost identical percentages (45) in two other Bay area constituencies in the June primaries. Stanford elected a New Left president of its student body in spring, 1966.
The Berkeley story is much more complex than the student activists, or their faculty supporters, have ever been willing to recognize. It was never one of a reactionary administration seeking to protect the Establishment in the community from the civil rights movement, or other forms of protest. But conversely, it has also not been one of a weak administration, fearful of cracking down on the student and faculty left, opening the door to politicization. Ideologues of the left and the right were unhappy with Martin Meyerson and Clark Kerr, because they could not accept the fact that strict morality makes for bad politics, bad administration, and a divided university.
Whatever the facts concerning the following year, 1965-1966, this still remains true, and Professor Feuer would have done all of us a better service if he had written more in sorrow; if he recognized with Aristotle that the essence of tragedy is that the human flaw is inherent in every man, that victor and vanquished are equally victims.
SEYMOUR MARTIN LIPSET Professor of Government and Social Relations
Harvard University

Professor Lewis Feuer seems to have a fantasy view of what the University of California at Berkeley ought to be. His article implies a university in which the extreme behavior of the new radical left, and presumably also of the radical right, would vanish. The beat and bohemian culture attracted to the neighborhoods of metropolitan universities would move away. Nature would be bountiful and would endow professors with so much more wisdom than other mortals that resolutions passed by many hundreds of votes would be both subtle and unambiguous. At this benign version of the University of Utopia, all persons would act democratically and decorously. Unfortunately, such fantasies do not help solve problems.
Professor Feuer exaggerates Berkeley’s difficulties and denigrates the accomplishments of Chancellor Heyns and his staff. A few stupid, imprudent, and outrageous acts do take place at Berkeley. It would be unrealistic to think that all these acts could be eliminated in a population of over 35,000 students, faculty, and staff. Some faculty are leaving, but not many; their motives for doing so are diverse in this period of general job mobility for professors.
Ever since the discord in the fall of 1964, many students, faculty, and administrators at Berkeley have been trying to solve problems plaguing other universities as well as Berkeley. The problems are complex, and many have not been faced before. Students used to get into trouble mostly through sex, beer, and cheating. Town and gown cooperated; culprits turned over to university officials were subject to an arbitrary discipline which was generally accepted on campus and off. Now some students engage in political confrontations with civil authorities, and their stands on civil rights, the war in Vietnam, or other issues cannot be judged solely against earlier standards of accepted student behavior but must also be judged by our constitutional concepts of freedom of speech.
The questions raised ate difficult and unanswered. Are the open spaces at a university an extension of the classroom or of the street? (In each case, the expectations of appropriate behavior differ.) How do we assure, as Professor Feuer so rightly wishes, that freedoms for those who dissent do not impede freedoms for everyone else? What does the current phrase “academic due process” signify? These kinds of issues face us at a time when faculty and students have many doubts about the nature and caliber of the undergraduate and graduate education offered at universities, and especially at large state universities.
The world is imperfect, and solutions to its and to university problems are not simple, as Professor Feuer should know. If he has superior alternative strategies to suggest for Berkeley or other universities or for the problems of youth today, those of us who admire his abilities would be grateful.
MARTIN MEYERSON President, State University of New York at Buffalo
Former Berkeley Dean

Lewis Feuer’s article is a masterpiece of obfuscation, deceit, misrepresentation, and perversion of truth. It is at best a superficial and consciously dishonest analysis, and at worst a malicious and premeditated attack on the students and faculty of the Berkeley campus. Feuer discards all standards of scholarship.
There are two central themes in the Feuer thesis. The first is that the shortsightedness of the Berkeley faculty in passing the unequivocal December 8 Resolution, “That the content of speech or advocacy shall not be regulated by the university,” laid the basis for the disruption and corruption of education at Cal. Feuer is arguing that the faculty resolution made possible the advocating and organizing on the campus of immediate acts of force and violence. The second theme is that the student New Left is essentially a fascist movement — a fascism of the left, if you will. Feuer defines the New Left movement as violent, aggressive, immoral, dominated by non-students engaged in “guerrilla warfare” against society, and as a movement which denies freedom of speech to its adversaries. This definition, which Feuer throughout the article seeks to illustrate, is the basis for his “left-fascist” theme.
On December 8, 1964, during the faculty debate, Feuer had offered an amendment to the resolutions before the Academic Senate. His amendment was “to affirm . . . that freedom of speech . . . did not extend to advocating and organizing immediate acts of force and violence.” Had the faculty accepted this amendment, the December 8 resolution would have been rendered meaningless. The relevant and decisive questions are: Who would determine that the advocacy was illegal? Who would determine that the advocacy led to immediate acts of force and violence? The Regents? Does the professor seriously contemplate the establishment of a board of censors on a university campus to determine arbitrarily what students and faculty may or may not advocate? The FSM and the Academic Senate preferred to leave such determinations of constitutional law to the courts. Feuer is in actuality suggesting that constitutional guarantees be compromised. The faculty on December 8 courageously chose not to compromise the constitutional principles incorporated in the First and Fourteenth Amendments.
Feuer spends the better part of his article giving examples of students resorting to force and violence; of non-student domination; of student desire for confrontation and conflict. One such example was Feuer’s insistence that the visit of Arthur Goldberg in March, 1966, led the New Student Left into a frenzied desire for confrontations and violence. When U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Arthur Goldberg was invited by the university to receive an honorary degree at Charter Day ceremonies, students and faculty jointly protested. Very few non-students were involved in the protest. The Peace/Rights Organizing Committee, one of several sponsors of the protest, had two non-students on an eleven-man executive committee.
We were not objecting to Goldberg’s appearance on the campus as a speaker. We were protesting the audacity of the university administration in granting one of the leading defenders of American policy in Vietnam an honorary degree in our name. Honoring Goldberg was offering university approval of the war in Vietnam. But a very large segment of the university community opposes that war. Feuer fails to mention that at no time did we interfere with Goldberg’s speeches. He also fails to mention that the debate in Harmon Gymnasium between Professor Schurmann and Goldberg was sponsored by the Faculty Peace Committee. Finally, Feuer fails to mention that at the conclusion of the debate, over 7500 students silently stood to express their opposition to the war.
Feuer cites the report of the county grand jury which charged that the university administration had condoned “deliberate violations of criminal laws” on the campus. What Feuer conveniently avoids telling the reader is that when the Berkeley administration challenged the district attorney, J. Frank Coakley, to make an arrest (after all, the purpose of a grand jury is to offer opinion that evidence warrants arrest), the district attorney declined the challenge. One must conclude that there was no evidence with which to make a case in court. I assume that Feuer still believes in the creed of “innocent until proven guilty.”
This writer cannot help but conclude with some mention of her election to the campus Rules Committee. Feuer explains this unfortunate event by insinuating that John Searle, administrative assistant to the chancellor, plotted to make the elections unduly complicated, and that this, combined with student apathy, made possible the election of a Communist. The election for the Rules Committee was conducted on the basis of a simple majority. There were five student seats open on the committee. The five students with the highest vote won the election. About 6000 students voted, several hundred more than had voted at the height of the FSM in December, 1964.
BETTINA APTHEKER
Berkeley student leader

Professor Feuer’s latest broadside against Berkeley is so tendentiously reasoned and contains so many errors of fact that one cannot begin to put matters straight in a brief commentary. He has neglected to observe, among other things, that the Berkeley disturbances of 1964 have been paralleled by student unrest on dozens of other campuses across the land, and that we are witnessing not a “Berkeley problem” but the symptoms of significant changes in American society and education, the nature and meaning of which we have scarcely begun to understand.
Professor Feuer would have you believe that the Berkeley campus remains in unceasing turmoil, and that the villain of the piece is the Faculty Resolution of December 8, exempting the content of student speech from the university regulation. The restrictions on free speech favored by Professor Feuer were, in the opinion of most faculty members who expressed themselves, not only unconstitutional, but repugnant to the ideals of a university, impossible to enforce, and likely to provoke even greater excesses of student agitation than those he now deplores. Students at Berkeley, as befits Americans, are free to associate, assemble, publish, distribute literature, and engage in political advocacy. Not all of them know how to exercise these rights responsibly and for deserving causes. Civilized men have long recognized that this is a price a democratic society must pay for the freedom it enjoys. Surely a university, a center of reason, enlightenment, and learning, can do no less.
Far from having abdicated responsibility for the regulation of student conduct (as Feuer charges), the faculty in the December 8 resolution expressly called for the university to regulate the “time, place, and manner” by which student rights are to be exercised. A set of rules governing student conduct has been drafted and put into effect. Despite abuses and the sometimes unreasonable demands by the small minority of student militants who place their immediate agitational goals above the educational functions of the institution, the campus has been restored to good order; the intellectual pursuits to which a university is primarily and properly dedicated are flourishing with, if anything, renewed vigor. The new chancellor has shown precisely those qualities of intelligence, fairmindedness, and balanced judgment that the situation requires. He has appointed to his staff a brilliant group of politically sophisticated men, whose high-minded devotion to the integrity of the university is questioned only by the few recalcitrants among the faculty and student militants who, for opposite reasons, have refused to accept the “settlement” of December 8. The small number of students who have openly transgressed against the rules have been firmly and fairly disciplined. Student demands, when warranted, have been honored; and when unwarranted, have been denied.
It is curious that Professor Feuer, who dwells so cheerfully on the alleged charges and countercharges of “paranoia,” has himself represented the campus as in a state of siege, controlled by student activists who have intimidated the administration, shamed the Faculty, and bullied their fellow students into silence or collaboration. That the small minority of student activists are often noisy, strident, bad-mannered, and undeservedly visible to the press and public, there can be no doubt. I am, however, inclined to believe that the university has less to fear from their outrages than from the persistent, sensationalized, and irresponsible assaults by men like Feuer, who possess the badges though not the attributes of scholarly objectivity.
HERBERT MCCLOSKY
Berkeley Professor of Political Science

Lewis Feuer condemns the New Left for having created “the first political university in the United States.” Unfortunately, the American university lost its political virginity long before the “Great Student Uprising” at Berkeley. So commonplace are the present intimacies between academia and the institutions and ideologies of the status quo that even liberals will scarcely raise an eyebrow. Only the nation’s loosely defined radical community — the “Movement” — preserves the capacity to be shocked. And with all its mistakes at Berkeley and elsewhere, only the “Movement” represents the ideal of a “free university,” which to me means not only the destruction of built-in intimacies with government and business, but also the end of administration control, a sharing of power even in the classroom between teacher and student, and the creation of an atmosphere of autonomy in which individuals and communities with the university can engage in their own politics—be they right, left, or even pornopolitical.
Ramparts magazine recently exposed Michigan State’s involvement with the CIA in Vietnam. Less covert—but no less political — is the intrusion of the Pentagon into the University of California. According to an unrefuted graduate student study, U.C. assembles 90 percent of America’s nuclear warheads, the Livermore Radiation Lab has become a stepping-stone into the Pentagon’s weapons development section (and the Atomic Energy Commission), and one Berkeley professor has invented a guerrilla detector. The Institute for International Studies — formerly headed by Seymour Martin Lipset, whose departure from Berkeley is one of the “Movement’s” major contributions to intellectual integrity — conducts interdisciplinary seminars on counterinsurgency, while Lipset himself has jeopardized the reputation of other Berkeley scholars by researching Latin-American student movements for the Air Force.
Equally political is the increasing status quo orientation of the trend toward “science” in the social sciences. More and more, young economists accept free enterprise (the “mixed economy”) and 3 to 4 percent unemployment as given; political scientists and sociologists measure behavior shaped by existing institutions rather than examining whether the institutions should be changed; psychologists study adjustment to and deviance from the norm rather than the norm itself; and philosophers explore the meaning of words without questioning the meaning of life. Such “specialization,” moreover, brings with it the dominant “end of ideology” attitude: “It’s all right, Jack. We have no real differences, conflict is outmoded, society’s major problems have been solved, and administrative manipulation can handle the remaining breakdowns in communications.”
The university’s relationship to the status quo is so taken for granted that the Berkeley administration felt no qualms about permitting the (nonstudent) Marine Corps to recruit on campus during the same week that non-student representatives of the Delano grape strikers were barred from the political tables in Sproul Plaza. Nor do the administrators or Dr. Feuer find anything “political" about granting an honorary degree to UN Ambassador Arthur Goldberg. Feuer chooses rather to concentrate his fire upon “the most extreme activists,” who saw the demonstration against the degreegranting as a chance to “lead the way for the student movement to stand publicly with the Viet Cong.” Surely Feuer, with his experience in the Old Left, recognizes that a vast majority of “the most extreme activists” are “third-campers” — that is, they oppose both capitalism and presentday Communism. But more important, in which camp would Feuer place a university that “stands publicly” with the chief international defender of American intervention in Vietnam?
Feuer tries to make of the demonstration against Goldberg a denial of free speech. That is absurd. Not only does the government swamp the mass media with its viewpoint, but that viewpoint has been publicly defended on campus innumerable times during the last year. Moreover, even “the most extreme activists” time and again made clear that their opposition was not to Goldberg’s speaking on campus but to the university’s honoring him. Perhaps students would have hissed and booed at a regular speech by Goldberg; what difference? Hisses interrupt no more than applause, and the British, whose commitment to free speech is at least as strong as ours, manage quite well at their political meetings in permitting vigorous demonstrations of opposition as well as of support.
Feuer also attempts to crucify me personally by quoting out of context a remark about storm troopers which I offered in a March, 1966, debate with John Searle. Many people, including FSM lawyers, have defended the FSM Sproul Hall sit-in as a final form of petition for ends (free speech) which everyone accepted. I oppose that view, for petitions grant the legitimacy of pre-existing authority, imply a harmonious reintegration into “the system” after redress of grievance, and suggest an ongoing consensus about ends, if not about means. Petitions won’t resolve them, nor will votes which the administrators can ignore or committees which they enmesh in their administrative frame of reference. Perhaps the conflicts will remain unresolved, or go against the ideals of the activists. Still, the Great Sit-in was a strong-arm, uncivil, disruptive act, justified by the end of unrestricted advocacy and by the need to struggle for a free university. Moreover, force will continue to be necessary and justified as long as the American university deprives students of their voice in decisions that affect them, supports the politics of a repressive status quo, and subordinates intellectual activity to security clearances and the national interest.
STEPHAN WEISSMAN
Berkeley non-student leader

Professor Feuer’s vision revealed itself in the second paragraph of his article, when he said: “The faculty was promulgating a charter which could be used to safeguard the advocacy and planning of immediate acts of violence, illegal demonstrations, terrorist operations, interference with troop trains, and obscene speech and action [italics mine].” He utterly refuses to conceive of an alternative, which does not do credit to him as a social science analyst. The whole is a mishmash, and is unworthy of serious consideration.
I will only present two minor pieces of evidence to support my contention; one concerns the professor’s moral perspective, and the other his inaccuracy as an observer of the scene. He reports, in a carefully constructed context, the bombing of the headquarters of the V.D.C. near the university. He even went so far as to say that it was shattered beyond recognition. But then, true to form, he adds the following: “To be sure, the V.D.C. itself included many who advocated or justified the rise of terrorism.” Professor Feuer is telling us that the V.D.C. people got precisely what they deserved. And here lies the moral question: Professor Feuer fails completely to appreciate the nonviolent aspect of the great mass of people and actions taken by the V.D.C., the FSM, and other groups.
The second point, which concerns his inaccuracy of observation, relates to Bob Scheer, who is both a personal friend and an associate at Ramparts magazine. Mr. Scheer at no time has had a shaggy Castro-like beard, as reported by Professor Feuer. True, his beard changes from time to time, one month being somewhat fulsome and at other times rather brief. But I can assure you that Mr. Scheer’s beard has always been neat. Mr. Scheer did not trim his beard for political purposes, and as long as I have known him, he has always worn a “bourgeois jacket” whenever the occasion warranted, such as working in the office and speaking at teach-ins.
EDWARD M. Keating
Publisher, RAMPARTS

It is no surprise to us that Professor Feuer shares with many of the students involved in the FSM last year a bitter sense of disappointment that December 8 did not bring the millennium. We had hoped that, despite the efforts of many conservatives (including Feuer in a series of articles in the New Leader) to write us off as a bunch of confused children acting out oedipal drives, there would emerge from the year of tumult an atmosphere in which constructive dialogue and genuine change would take place. When we called the university “a factory” and pointed to the need for 2000 more teaching positions, and then were told by the faculty “Yes — you’re right, we’ll have to study this,” we thought we had made some moves toward academic reform. When we pointed out the undemocratic nature of the Regents and were greeted by choruses of agreement from local newspapers, we thought we had made some moves toward university reform. And when we set up teach-ins deliberately designed to give both sides a chance to present their case, we thought we had made some important start toward making the university a center for political dialogue, rather than simply the service station to society that Clark Kerr saw it as. And though Feuer continually attacked us then, he kept warm personal relationships with many of us, and we sensed that deep down the memories of his own radical days of the thirties made him want us to succeed just as much as, on the other side of his personality, his disillusionment with his own past forced him to see everything we were doing as low-minded and base and Communist-inspired.
We thought we had opened Sproul Steps to highlevel dialogue and that professors would come to join us in our political discussions, not realizing that the Faculty Resolution of December 8 was largely the expression of a bunch of men who would do anything simply to be left to their research because they had never changed their assumption that students have nothing to say.
We have run into the totalitarian center, the great and powerful liberal Establishment that is as doctrinaire as any leftor right-wing extremist ever was. We were a bunch of starry-eyed idealists who thought it was enough to be right — we overestimated our power and underestimated the ability of “the system” to make minor adjustments to incorporate us into the total and still remain the same. Just as Johnson adopted the language of a crusader for peace, so the university has cleverly adopted the language of internal reform and free speech, while everything remains the same. But now that this is dawning upon us, it really is too late, for 1966 is not the year for university reform.
MICHAEL B. LERNER
Berkeley graduate student

Lewis Feuer stands unique among commentators of Berkeley in that he doesn’t like anybody. Faculty, students (“studentry”), and administration alike come under his stern disapproval. His procedure is to pick a scattering of incidents or quotations of student and non-student extremists and then, ignoring what is not grist to his mill, to make sweeping generalizations concerning such things as an alleged decline of freedom at Berkeley. Unfortunately, he did not even get his facts right. In my own case, for example, he quotes at length an anonymous leaflet containing statements I am supposed to have made. The leaflet was in fact a mixture of fantasy and distortion, but according to Feuer, who cites it as truth, it went unchallenged. Yet he also inadvertently cites two incidents where it was challenged and refuted at some length, once by Reginald Zelnik and once by myself in a symposium with Stephan Weissman. University enrollment, he says, is declining, whereas, in fact, had he checked the latest data, he would have discovered that enrollment applications are well above last year’s. As of midJuly, there were 5395 confirmed new undergraduates compared with 4467 one year before. Of this year’s figure, 5126 picked Berkeley as their first choice, more than the overall total of new enrollments for last year. Furthermore, the obsolete figures he does cite, dating from February 7, are skewed by the fact that in 1964—1965 the freshman enrollment procedures were altered, with an earlier closing date set, and this produced a large number of very early applications to Berkeley in 1965. All his figures prove is that the trend toward very early freshman enrollment did not continue.
But such shoddy reporting is less important than the selective presentation of material and its consequent distortion. What really happened in Berkeley last year? In the 1964-1965 year something very like a revolution took place on this campus. Now, successful revolutions, even little ones, tend to produce two forces for instability. First, they create a class of people who wish, often in quite unrealistic and even dangerous ways, to extend the revolution into many new areas, and second, they create a class of people who feel themselves to have been defeated by the revolution and who wish to overthrow it. The student and nonstudent extremists whose activities he describes belong to the first class. Feuer is an embittered exemplar of the second. Neither group, of course, is in any sense typical or representative of the Berkeley campus. The problem of a new administration coming into office in such a situation is, as Chancellor Heyns has repeatedly stated, to recreate a sense of community. This involves dealing with the first group patiently and dealing with the second sympathetically. Each must in the end come to feel a loyalty to the institution and a stake in its success. Even more important, it involves inspiring a sense of confidence and trust in the mass of students and faculty who do not fit into either of the extremist groups. And this can only be done by making it clear that the university is administered according to certain principles and goals. And what are they?
The single most preposterous charge in Feuer’s article is that the administration has been ambiguous in its statement of objectives. Probably no university has ever issued so many statements and answered so many questions concerning its objectives, or worked so hard to make them clear. In the student affairs area, which is the main bone of contention, the chancellor made clear with the first issuance of the student conduct rules on September 16, 1965, that the assumptions behind the rules were, first, that they should protect the primary educational and research functions of the university, second, that they should not “regulate the content of expression or advocacy or otherwise limit constitutional rights,” and third, that they should as far as possible reflect the consensus of the campus community. It soon became clear that the chancellor meant to stick to these principles and that he meant to enforce these rules. The fact that they have been enforced, that those who violated them were disciplined, and that there was overwhelming faculty and student support for enforcement Feuer nowhere mentions. The principles stem from the December 8 resolution. Why does Feuer hate that resolution so tenaciously? The real political meaning of the resolution is that students would have the same constitutional rights on the campus as they do off the campus, and it is this to which Feuer objects strenuously, for it means that one can on the campus advocate such things as sit-ins, marches, and picketing. His bitterness over the alleged ambiguity of the administration’s stand really seems to stem from the fact that we have defended the constitutional rights of our students and yet have insisted that they observe campus rules in the exercise of these rights.
And his omissions demonstrate a quite genuine resentment over the successes of this policy. He fails to note that every attempt to attack the university in 1965-1966 was completely unsuccessful. The attempts to mount a classroom walkout over the Vietnam issue, to disrupt Charter Day, to obstruct the disciplining of rule violators, as well as the attempt to pass an insincere student government constitution all failed. At major universities all across the country this spring large sit-ins were held to protest the draft exams; no such sit-in occurred in Berkeley, and the exams were held without incident.
Berkeley still has serious problems. It is not completely clear that the voters of California really want a great and free university. And many of the institutional arrangements, ranging from dorms to the lecture system, that Berkeley and other major universities have are clearly quite outmoded for coping with today’s students. Furthermore, Berkeley is part of a large urban area and is now beginning to face the problems, such as rising crime rate, that have plagued such other urban universities as Chicago, Columbia, and Harvard. But Feuer’s article makes no contribution whatever to the solution of such genuine problems.
I recall meeting Lewis Feuer during the FSM crisis. “Louie,” I said, “you’ve been doing a lot of bad things.” He replied instantly: “You haven’t seen anything yet.” I am sorry his parting shot at the university should be the fulfillment of his promise.
JOHN R. SEARLE
Special Assistant to the Chancellor
Associate Professor of Philosophy

At the University of Madrid not many months ago, students quarreling over politics staged a pitched battle that injured many, endangered the lives of foreigners, and stopped the university from functioning. At the University of Rome student rioters, in order to indicate their disapproval, broke up a funeral procession, tore up wreaths, and generally rioted. At the University of Mexico last April, students drove the rector out of his office, and in July, barricaded the office of the dean of the law faculty so that he could not occupy his post. In fact, the University of Mexico was for a time in a state of siege.
In the United States, protesting students at the University of Chicago swarmed into the administrative offices and held them for a long time in an effort to force their notion of right policy upon that institution. At City College in New York the same performance was repeated. On a score of other American campuses like events have occurred, within the twelvemonth, in the name of “freedom,” or “peace,” or “rights.” We have but to go further along the line of action begun at Berkeley in 1964 to reduce more and more American colleges and universities to the farcical institutions that pass for universities in many other countries and that have become political sounding boards.
We need a rigorous definition not merely of student rights but of student responsibilities. We need a clearer apprehension of the truth that though the university should not close its doors to public discussion, it cannot be flooded by public passions. We need universities. We are not going to get them by following the Berkeley pattern described by Professor Feuer.
HOWARD MUMFORD JONES