On Misunderstanding Student Rebels

THE Young, it is becoming clear, are regarded with considerable hatred in our country. Resentment against them cannot be explained simply as a reaction to the style of a particular generation, for in recent years the young have been attacked on such divergent grounds that the grounds themselves take on the appearance of pretext. In the 1950s we denounced students for their inertia, their indifference to public questions, their absorption in the rituals of fraternities and football, their dutiful pursuit of “achievement.” In the 1960s we condemn them for the opposite qualities: for their passion, their absorption in public questions, their disgust with the trivia of college parties and athletics, their refusal to settle for mechanical processes of education.

Since the past two college generations have been denounced with equal vehemence for opposite inclinations, it seems plausible to conclude that it is not those inclinations but the very fact of their youth that makes them the target for so much murderous abuse. This conclusion may seem to contradict the fact that American society, above all others, is known for its adoration of youth. But that itself, paradoxically, is one cause of adult hostility: our youth-obsessed elders resent the eighteen-year-old’s easy possession of the good looks and high spirits they so desperately simulate.

Adult anger at the physical superiority of the young has usually been contained by the comforting assumption that eighteen-year-olds are at least the moral, intellectual, and emotional inferiors of their elders. College students have traditionally been viewed as apprentices, almost as supplicants. And until recently they accepted their role as dutiful petitioners for entry into the world of adult insight and skill.

As no one needs reminding, they no longer accept that role, though most of their elders continue the struggle to confine them to it. Today’s eighteen-totwenty-year-old considers himself an adult, by which he does not mean (as so many forty-year-olds unconsciously do) that he has ceased growing, but that he has grown up enough to make his own decisions. In every sense, even statistically, his case is a strong one.

Ihe weight of recent physiological and psychological evidence establishes the student claim that today’s eighteen-year-olds mature more rapidly than those of earlier generations. Physically, they are taller and heavier than their counterparts at the turn of the century. Boys reach puberty around age fourteen, and girls begin to menstruate at the average age of twelve years, nine months (in both cases almost two years earlier than in 1900).

Moreover, there is much evidence that this earlier physical maturity is matched by emotional and intellectual precocity. According to Dr. C. Keith Conners, director of the Child Development Laboratory at Massachusetts General Hospital, both emotional and intellectual growth are today largely completed by age eighteen. By this Dr. Conners means that the difficult trials of adolescence are over, the basic patterns of personality have become stabilized, and the ability to reason abstractly — to form hypotheses and make deductions — has been established. This does not mean, of course, that no further maturity is possible after age eighteen. Additional information and experience do (or at least should) provide material for continuing reassessments. But that, of course, is (or should be) true of all of us.

In terms of knowledge already possessed, moreover, the graduating high school senior of today, thanks both to the media and to the stepped-up pace of academic work, is well informed on any number of topics — the new math, say, or the physical properties of the atom — of which his elders are ignorant. And as for experience, I am not at all sure that the eighteen-year-old who has had his senses activated by early sexual relations, strobe lights, pot, soul, and rock, and his political instincts honed by Vietnam, the draft, and the civil rights movement, should not be considered more vitally alive, more instinctually sound, than the typical forty-year-old who has spent his additional twenty years glued to the tube, the routinized job, the baseball and stock statistics.

THE ACADEMIC MANDARINS

It is bad enough that we have refused to extend to students the rights and responsibilities which their maturity warrants. What is perhaps worse is that many of those who hold positions of power or prestige in our universities have learned so little from the upheavals which that refusal has produced. A recent spate of books and articles by such men demonstrates anew their uneducability; they make it clear, by their continuing patronization and belittlement, that students still have an uphill fight in their struggle to be taken seriously.

One case in point, though not the most egregious, is that of George F. Kennan. When Kennan’s article “Rebels Without a Program” (aptly characterized by Richard Poirier as “a new containment policy for youth”) appeared in the New York Times Sunday Magazine for January 21, 1968, it drew such an unprecedented reply from students and teachers (including a letter from me) that the Atlantic Monthly Press decided to issue the article, the replies, and a lengthy rebuttal by Kennan as a separate volume, Democracy and the Student Left. In that rebuttal, Kennan does acknowledge that the public questions agitating the country are indeed “so harrowing” and “harbor such apocalyptic implications that it is silly to suggest,” as he originally had, that college students should go about their studies as usual.

But having acknowledged that “harrowing” problems face the country, Kennan proceeds, by a curious indirection, to minimize them. He lectures student activists on their “inability to see and enjoy the element of absurdity in human behavior” (adding, gratuitously, that he suspects their love lives, no less than their politics, are “tense, anxious, defiant and joyless”), on their “social science” rhetoric, and on their indifference to “nature as a possible compensating or sustaining factor in the face of social or political frustration.” Kennan fails, however, to make clear how the merit of the issues the students raise in any way depends on the “inadequate” manner in which they raise them. I, for one, cannot see how the Vietnam War or the plight of our ghetto-dwellers might become more attractive or tolerable if viewed with an awareness of “the element of absurdity in human behavior” or described in a rhetoric free of social science jargon or escaped from by periodic trips to the wilderness.

Kennan insists that the students’ obliviousness to nature, et al, is symptomatic of their “lack of interest in the creation of any real style and distinction of personal life generally.” By which he means, as he goes on to specify, their lack of “manners,” their untidiness, their disinterest in “personal hygiene,” their refusal to cultivate the “amenities.” It is debatable that this description is either accurate or significant, as applied to the nonpolitical, drug-oriented “hippies,” but it is certainly not a valid description of campus activists, the ostensible subjects of Kennan’s critique.

The main point, of course, is not that the new generation lacks “any real style,” but that Kennan is unable to perceive much of its distinctiveness. Kennan is a good eighteenth-century philosophe, distrustful of “enthusiasm,” and preoccupied with the rationalist credo of restraint and temperance in all things. Since “passion” is suspect, it follows (albeit unconsciously) that no injustice warrants fervent disapproval. What the new generation believes and Kennan apparently does not is that “moderation” can itself become a form of paralysis, even of immorality — like the moderate protest of Pope Pius XII against the extermination of Jews.

If Kennan’s condescension toward the different life-style of the young were peculiar to him, it could be more readily ignored. But in fact his attitude is the characteristic response of the older generation to the younger. Any number of other examples are possible, but I will mention only two of the more prominent: Sidney Hook and Jacques Barzun.

Hook has published two statements (that I know of) on the recent ferment at Columbia, a long article, “The Prospects of Academe,” in Encounter for August, 1968, and a brief note in the Psychiatry and Social Science Review. It is difficult to choose between them in deciding the high point to date for gray-bearded arrogance. In the shorter piece Hook flatly states that the Columbia rebels “had no grievances,” and that they were interested solely in “violence, obscenity and hysterical insult.” In the longer article Hook characterizes the protesters as “callow and immature adolescents” whose dominant mood, like that of all adolescents, is “irrationalism.” While denouncing students for their passion, this self-appointed defender of “reason” and of the university as the “citadel of reason” himself indulges in a rhetoric so inflamed (“Fanatics don’t lack sincerity. . . . They drip with sincerity — and when they have power, with blood — other people’s blood”) that by comparison the most apocalyptic students seem models of sobriety. Hook even declares that “there are some things one should not be moderate about” — which is exactly what the student activists (and Barry Goldwater) have said. The students, of course, mean it is acceptable to be passionately against war and racism. Hook (and Goldwater) mean it is acceptable to be passionately against those who passionately protest war and racism.

THE CASE OF JACQUES BARZUN

Hook’s themes — that college students are adolescents, that the best proof of their childishness is that they are “emotional” and that emotion (in others) is bad — are to be found in their most explicit form in Jacques Barzun’s new book. The American University. In a note in the book’s preface Barzun, who was dean of faculties and provost at Columbia from 1958 to 1967, explains that the manuscript was in the hands of the publisher six weeks before the student outbreak on April 23, 1968. But lest we be tempted on that account to excuse some of the positions he adopts in his book, Barzun further adds that despite the outbreak he has “found no reason to change or add to the substance of what I had written months earlier.” Among the views he has found no need to modify is his statement that Grayson Kirk has always shown himself “ready and eager for progressive changes.” Barzun does not pause to define “progressive,” but one can’t help thinking he uses the word in its original sense to describe the reforms that preceded World War I. Certainly nothing in his attitude toward students would place him beyond the year 1915.

Barzun begins his discussion of the college population by adopting the Olympian view: they are, after all, young men, and that means “turbulence is to be expected, heightened nowadays by the presence of girls. . . .” In other words, a certain amount of inherent anger adheres to the condition of being young (it is a “condition,” in Barzun’s view), and anger must find its outlet. The nature of the outlet is almost a matter of indifference: if “the people of the town” do not provide a convenient target, well then, it might just as well be politics.

Still in the Olympian vein, Barzun further suggests — it is as close as he ever comes to implicating society — that “perhaps our lack of proper ceremonies for initiation into the tribe leaves the young to devise their own proof of manhood,” Barzun loves dismissing the young with this kind of casual irony. Its elegant offhandedness is a useful device for keeping a proper distance between the generations. It is also useful — though of this Barzun seems unaware — for expressing the savagery which he likes to think is confined to the student population. Barzun claims the undergraduates would themselves welcome rites of initiation, for what they really want, he insists, is more, not less, discipline. When they speak of the impersonality of the university, they mean, it seems, “the looseness of its grip upon them.” Kennan makes the same point in almost the same words: students are currently objecting to parietal rules, he asserts, because “the rules have relaxed too much rather than that they have been relaxed too little.” According to both men, students are starved for structure, are desperate to be introduced to the rigors of logic. In Barzun’s phrasing, they are looking for “order,” for “intellectual habits”; they sense that this is the balance they need, for like all youngsters they are in a “fever and frenzy,” “their mind is monopolized by their inner life.”

To meet this “rage for order,” Barzun and Kennan posit a properly antiseptic university, a place of “respite and meditation” whose “proper work,” in Barzun’s phrase, is “in the catacombs under the strife-torn crossroads.” He fills this subterranean cemetery with properly lifeless figures; they are “somewhat hushed,” they give pause, as at Chartres, to the “spiritual grandeur of their surroundings.” Yet just as one begins to feel, in the rush of Christian imagery, that Barzun has spent so many years surrounded by campus Gothic as to have lost all sense of distinction between the university and the church, he stoutly declares that his catacombs will not be peopled by early Christians. He dislikes that breed; it was marked by the same distasteful qualities he associates with today’s young radicals: “indifference to clothes and cleanliness, a distrust and neglect of reasoning . . . a freedom in sexuality, which is really a lowering of its intensity and value . , . and — mosL symptomatic — a free field given to the growth of hair.'’

Barzun also shares with Kennan and Hook the proposition that “emotion” has no place on campus, and that since student rebels tend to be emotional, it can be safely assumed they are also unreliable. All three men equate (and thereby confuse) “emotion” with “irrationality,” and all employ a vocabulary of neat opposites — “reason” versus “emotion” — that separates what our experience combines. They see education as “the cultivation and tempering of the mind” but fail to see that “enthusiasm” is one path by which that tempering proceeds. (For an understanding of the role emotion might and should play in learning, they would do well to read a remarkable new book by George B. Leonard, Education and Ecstasy. Though Leonard’s discussion is chiefly centered on the lower grades, almost everything he says has applicability to higher education as well, especially his remark that schools as presently structured tame the “unnamed powers” of their students — their chief effect is to “limit possibilities, narrow perceptions and bring the individual’s career as a learner (changer) to an end.” Leonard foresees schools where the children will not emerge as mere knowledge machines but as beings who have also learned about their bodies, emotions, and senses. His is as authentically the voice of the future as Barzun’s is that of the past.)

Barzun is also huffy at other “nonsense” currently being peddled about teaching, especially the idea that teacher and student should explore together, each learning from the other. This view, he asserts, has done “immense harm to both parties. The teacher has relaxed his efforts while the student has unleashed his conceit.” And of what does that “conceit” consist? Barzun is quick to tell us: the conviction that they (the students) have something to contribute. “Only rarely,” he declares, with a hauteur appropriate to the century from which most of his ideas spring, does a teacher “hear from a student a fact he does not know or a thought that is original and true . . . to make believe that their knowledge and his are equal is an abdication and a lie.”

And so we are back, as always in Barzun’s schema, to the confinement of his starting assumption: students are children and, usually, fools. His contempt for undergraduates is pervasive. They are, very simply, not to be trusted; “student reliability is at a low ebb,” he warns, and especially in that of radical students, who have but one purpose: to destroy. The evidence Barzun marshals to justify his contempt is so exasperatingly trivial (as well as suspect in its accuracy) that it demeans its compiler far more than the students. The undergraduates, he asserts, cheat a lot on exams and papers; they obtain pocket money by stealing books from the college bookstore; they keep library books out as long as they like and let fines go unpaid; they deny their roommates “the slightest considerateness”; students of both sexes live “pig-style” in their dormitories; their conversations “usually cannot follow a logical pattern,” and so on.

The first thing to be said about these accusations is that Barzun has seized upon the occasional practices of a few undergraduates in order to damn a whole generation. The second is that even if these qualities did characterize a whole generation, they hardly seem heinous when compared with the sins of the fathers — when compared, that is, with racism at home and imperialism abroad.

The distressing consequence of this obsession with the peccadillos of the young is an avoidance of those genuinely important problems to which the young are calling attention. Mandarins like Barzun, Kennan, and Hook are so preoccupied with manners that they forget matter. They are so certain of the rightness of their own patterns of thought and action and so eager to denounce all deviations by the young from those patterns that they blind themselves (and others) to the serious questions this new generation has raised — questions about the nature of education, the proper functions of a university, the very quality of American life.

WHAT ACTIVISTS ARE REALLY LIKE

A dozen or so studies have been made of student activists at a variety of universities, and the findings have been conveniently summarized in a recent essay by Stanford’s Nevitt Sanford. The group portrait that emerges (confirmed by Kenneth Keniston’s new book, Young Radicals) is strikingly different from the slanderous one being peddled by Messrs. Barzun and Hook.

The activists, first of all, constitute only a a small minority, though a growing one, of all college students; at Berkeley, for example, their number is put at about 15 percent. Second, there are important differences, in almost all measurable categories, between activists on the campus and other students. The activists score consistently higher on a wide variety of personality tests, including theoretical skills, aesthetic sensitivity, degree of psychological autonomy, and social maturity. They are also the better students, with significantly higher grade-point averages than the nonactivists. In trying to account for the recent emergence of student activism, Sanford points to various changes since the 1930s in family life and child training. But he feels that student activism is primarily a response to social conditions both within the university and in the world at large. Since the latter are the more widely known determinants of student rebelliousness, I will confine my remarks to conditions in the university.

One set of grievances on the campus centers on what does — or does not — go on in the classroom. As David Riesman has written, “Colleges on the whole have been very backward as compared with industry or the Army in their curiosity about their own inner processes.” Until recently they have accepted lectures, grading, and examinations as part of the Natural Order of Things and have seen no reason to question the long-standing assumptions that Teacher is the possessor and arbiter of Truth, that his function is to transmit knowledge (narrowly defined as accumulated information) to students, and that their function is to memorize it.

Any challenge to this conventional wisdom is still viewed with scorn by the vast majority of faculty and administrators — and of the student population as well. Barzun, for example, gives short shrift to any protest against grades and tests; “no person by way of being educated.” he announces, “resents examinations; they are so instructive.” Should a student activist or one of his allies among the younger faculty reply that exams and grades chiefly instruct students in how to please their professors, in how to compete with one another, in how to settle for orthodox questions and answers, and in how to suppress their own originality, Barzun’s answer would be — hogwash. He sees the activists demand for autonomy and for the freedom to pursue their own lines of inquiry as cant, as another example of their “mental confusion.” By way of proof, Barzun triumphantly recounts a recent episode in a large Midwestern university: when students in a philosophy of education class of 300 complained that they had little say in their own education, the professor asked how many did in fact want to take responsibility for their work, and only ten hands went up. The moral, as Barzun draws it, is that students calling tor selfregulation merely “ape the advertiser’s soapy mind.” But that is not the moral at all. Our educational system has been so successful in turning out automatons that the vast majority of its products are terrified at the thought of takingover responsibility for their own lives. The fact that only ten hands went up is itself a severe indictment of our educational practices. Instead of proving that “all is well.” it proves that we are in desperate trouble — that maybe only 3.3 percent of our citizens are willing to make their own decisions.

Barzun similarly misses the point the undergraduate dissenters are making about the lecture system. That point has been well put in a recent issue of the Yale Alumni Magazine by Alan Weiner, a graduating senior. The present system, he wrote, encourages “debilitating dependence”; each student, taking dutiful notes at lecture, produces by the end of the semester (and for exams) a “paraphrased copy” of the lecturer’s text, “one copy differing from the other less in content than in penmanship.” Weiner recognizes that lectures, at their best, can be useful — a good lecture can provide a lucid introduction to some particularly difficult area of study so that the student “is spared the initial paralysis of venturing alone into terra incognita”; it can offer a fundamental reinterpretation not yet published or widely accepted; and it can “show a brilliant man in the process of putting ideas together.” But such moments in the lecture room are rare, so rare that they do not justify the maintenance of a system which far more typically inculcates sloppiness. omniscience, plagiarism, and theatricality in the lecturer, and passivity, boredom, resentment, and cynicism in the student.

And what is the answer of men like Barzun to the growing resentment of the lecture system? That the protesters do not understand the true nature of their dissatisfaction. The real trouble, Barzun declares, is that the university has “let lapse the formality of lecturing — its form — which was its principal merit.” What is wanted by way of change, in other words, is not to dismantle the lecture system but to return it to its pristine shape, to reintroduce “formal presentation” and even “staginess and rhetorical effects,” since these impart something Barzun labels “didactic energy.” Given this gross misreading of student discontent, it might be well to remember in speaking hereafter of the “generation gap” that incomprehension is not confined to one side.

WHERE THE SYSTEM FAILS

Discontent with teaching practices in our universities embraces more than the lecture system. Even where small seminars or discussion groups prevail (an expensive device few universities can afford ), the needs of the students are not given anything like equal consideration with the needs of teachers. As two students in the Tale Daily .Yews recently put it, the present system fails to help undergraduates appropriate facts and skills “in the interest of making lives, not just living.” In assuming that the university’s main, almost exclusive, function is to produce and transmit information, we have given top priority to promoting those faculty members most likely to assist in the manufacture of knowledge. This means, of course, that the university has come to be staffed chiefly by those concerned with research and writing rather than those concerned with educating the young — that is, with helping them to discover what their interests and talents are, in helping them to change. As Alfred North Whitehead said long ago, “So far as the mere imparting of information is concerned, no university has had any justification for existence since the popularisation of printing in the fifteenth century.” Yet most professors do look on the imparting of information as the sum and substance of their responsibility. They make little or no effort to show, either in their subject or in their person, how knowledge can influence conduct and inform action (which, as William Arrowsmith has pointed out, is not really surprising, since they are themselves products of the same noneducation).

Most professors are interested only in students who are themselves potential scholars; they are concerned with training future colleagues, not with helping the individual young person grow in his own directions. The lack of interest taken by most professors in most students, their refusal to reveal or engage more than a small share of their own selves, have made many of the best students cynical about knowledge and about those who purvey it. They hoped to find in their professors models on whom they might pattern their lives; instead they find narrow specialists busy with careers, with government contracts, with the augmentation of status and income. They hoped to find a curriculum which would help them to uncover and pursue their interests; instead they find one primarily tailored to the needs of the faculty specialists. They hoped to discover a mode of living which would help them to integrate their intellectual curiosity with the demands of their senses and emotions; instead they find, in Erich Fromm’s words, an education “more and more cerebral . . . [where] people are taught concepts, but are not taught or confronted with the experience which corresponds to these concepts.” They hoped to find some acknowledgment of their worth and some encouragement toward its further development; instead they find disinterest, patronization, overt dislike. They find, in short, what Nietzsche called “the advancement of learning at the expense of man.”

With considerable justice, therefore, the students, particularly the more talented and sensitive ones, reject the university and its faculty as self-serving, self-justifying, self-enclosed. They learn to seek their education — the expanding of insight and option — outside the formal academic curriculum, to seek it in talk and games with friends, in films, clothes, and cars, in Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, in the lyrics of Bob Dylan, in the Doors, in pot and acid. And if some of these sources prove as phony or as dangerous as the mechanical exercises of the campus, surely much of the responsibility lies with an academic community that has encouraged, almost forced, its students to look for life-enhancement where it can.

IS THE UNIVERSITY A DEMOCRACY?

Most of the powers within the academic community will not even acknowledge the right of students to complain, let alone the cogency of those complaints. To the request that they be allowed a voice in planning the curriculum, a Jacques Barzun replies that they have done nothing to “earn” a voice. To the lament that their studies seem outmoded or irrelevant, Barzun retorts that “relevance is a relationship in the mind and not a property of things” — which apparently means that although students might want to study urban affairs, if they will instead study cockle shells in the right way, they will discover all there is to know about life in the ghettos. And to the students’ suggestion that they have some formal power in such matters as choosing faculty, passing on applications for admission, or helping to decide on the expansion of the physical plant, Barzun responds with hoots of derision and George Kennan with cold anger.

Both gentlemen remind the undergraduates that the university is not, and was never meant to be, a democracy. Barzun does believe that students should have the right of self-government in their own dormitories, for he acknowledges that they are “socially mature enough not to need domestic proctoring” (a curious and seemingly arbitrary departure from his usual premise that undergraduates are children). But Kennan will not go even this far in extending power to undergraduates. The university, by virtue of its position as owner of the dormitories, has no choice in Kerman’s view but “to lay down certain minimal norms for the manner in which that use can proceed. This would be true,” he insists, “even if the inhabitants were older people.” But it is not true, for Kennan’s (and my own) university, Princeton, owns a great deal of faculty housing, and in none of it are the tenants subjected to the demeaning regulations in regard to visitors, and so on. which are imposed upon the students.

With the exception of this disagreement over parietal rules, Barzun and Kennan are firmly united in their contention that the university cannot and should not be a democracy. Kennan, in this instance, is the more peremptory of the two. “Even if university trustees and administrators had a right to shift a portion of their responsibilities for university affairs to the student, which they do not,” he writes, the student would in any case “be unqualified to receive it.” The very suggestion, he warns, is part of the current tendency of American society “to press upon the child a premature external adulthood.”

Barzun rests most of his case on the grounds of impracticality. The university cannot function as a democracy, he argues, because it is “extremely difficult to get from student bodies either a significant vote, or a council or committee that is representative. . . . Add that student newspapers have long ceased to purvey anything approaching a public opinion, and it is clear that democracy is that last name a political scientist would apply to the government by outcry which has lately gained favor as an extracurricular activity.” The absurdity of this argument (and its loaded terminology) is best seen when placed in another context. Is it easy to get a “significant” or “representative” vote from the United States Congress? Do our commercial newspapers “purvey anything approaching a public opinion”? Shall we, on those accounts, abandon both the Congress and the public press as unworkable institutions? In trying to make a case against democracy in the university, in other words, Barzun has forced himself— I assume, inadvertently — into making a case against democracy in general. The “insurmountable obstacles” which he finds to democratic institutions on the campus are likewise in the path of democracy within the larger society. Indeed, they loom less large on campus; given the limited size of a university, the opinions of its constituency could be canvassed and tabulated far more easily than in the society as a whole — that is, if the will to do so existed.

The other argument most often heard for denying students any say in university affairs is that they are “mere transients.” True, but so are many professors, and so (to change the context) are members of the House of Representatives, who are elected for only two years. Besides, the interests of the student population do not shift as often as the population itself; Clark Kerr, in fact, detects signs that students are beginning to look upon themselves as a “class.” But even if the interests of the undergraduates did continually change (and they probably should), life does, after all, belong to the living, or, in the case of the universities, a campus to its present constituents.

THE UNIVERSITY AS LANDLORD

In addition to student grievances over what happens in the classroom and on the campus, there is another major source of disaffection: the university’s relationship to the world around it — its role as landlord of neighboring property, and, on the broader canvas, its role as the recipient of government largesse and provider of government expertise. The upheavals of last spring at Columbia brought to focus the problem of the university’s relationship to the society at large. One of two key issues during that upheaval was Columbia’s pending construction of a gym in a public park used by Harlem residents. This issue by itself might be thought of minor importance (if, that is, one is not a resident of Harlem), but in fact it was the latest of a long series of encroachments by Columbia into the surrounding ghetto, an encroachment which usually involved evicting tenants with little concern for their wishes and welfare. (Even now Columbia continues its encroachment; as James Ridgeway reports in his new book, The Closed Corporation: American Universities in Crisis, Columbia is still secretly extending its real estate holdings in Harlem, and its “relocation office” is still forcing families out of buildings it wants to tear down.)

Various groups, including students, faculty, Harlem residents, and the city, had appealed to the Columbia administration to review its policies on the gym construction — all to no avail. It is simply false to say, as Sidney Hook has, that “instead of seeking peacefully to resolve them [grievances] through existing channels of consultation and deliberation, the SDS seeks to inflame them.” Not only did student groups, including SDS, attempt to get a peaceful hearing, but they had to make those attempts against formidable obstacles, for as Amitai Etzioni, professor of sociology at Columbia, has written, “due process, even in the loose sense of established channels for expression and participation, is not institutionalized at Columbia or at most other universities.”

Even after the upheavals of last spring, the suggestion that precise channels be established for student participation continues to infuriate men like Barzun. One would think that anyone who so deplores student “immaturity” would at least recognize the standard argument of psychologists that immaturity is prolonged, even heightened, by an exclusion from responsibility. But apparently, despite his rhetoric in defense of “orderly process,” Barzun prefers occasional barricades to regularized communication.

He even goes so far as to deny the reality of issues like the gym construction. Universities must expand, he argues, and expansion inevitably brings conflict with the university’s immediate neighbors. But shall the needs of several hundred citizens, he rhetorically asks, “prevail over the needs of . . . a national university?” Besides, the area around a university is usually a “deteriorating” one (as regards Columbia, Barzun has elsewhere referred to its surrounding neighborhood as “uninviting, abnormal, sinister, dangerous”), so it is a matter of simple “self-protection” for the university to take “steps.” The “steps,” as Barzun defines them, include “bringing in the police against crime and vice, hiring special patrols, and buying real estate as fast as funds and the market permit.” This might look, Barzun concedes, like “waging war on the inhabitants,”but what they forget is that with the university’s expansion goes “increased employment and trade.” The residents of Harlem apparently do not see it that way, and they and their student allies have decided that all else failing, it becomes necessary to invoke the doctrine of “self-protection” for themselves as well. (In his long book, Barzun has almost no discussion of Columbia’s relations with Harlem; when I came to a chapter entitled “Poverty in the Midst of Plenty.” I thought I had finally come to a detailed review of those relations, but the chapter turned out instead to be about the financial problems of the university.)

WHY INNOVATION IS CRUCIAL

The second major issue in the Columbia dispute last spring concerned the university’s affiliation with the Institute for Defense Analyses (IDA), an affiliation which in turn symbolized the university’s dependence on government grants and involvement with government research. Barzun and others like to defend the university as a “center of research.” and they contrast that “proper” function with the “misguided” one of the university becoming a center of “experience.” But it is one thing to defend the university theoretically as a research center, and quite another to ask specifically “research in what and for what?”

The multiple and tangled relationships that have developed between our leading universities and the large corporations and the federal government raise doubts about the proper boundaries of “research.” This is especially true of what James Ridgeway calls the university’s “war machinery” — its complicity in everything from antisubmarine-warfare research at Columbia to counterinsurgency planning at the University of Michigan. Today more than two thirds of university research funds come from agencies of the federal government closely connected with defense matters, and about one quarter of the 200 largest industrial corporations in the country have university officials on their board of directors. It is certainly an open question these days whether the university is engaged in research in order to pursue “truth” or to acquire status, power, and profit. Columbia’s own farcical involvement with the Strickman cigarette filter is but one of many examples of the university’s placing greed ahead of integrity.

There are, I should stress, no simple formulas for establishing the “right&$8221; relationship universities should form with public corporations and governments. It is because there are no easy answers that the matter should be subjected to open debate, with all interested parties bringing to bear their insights and perspectives. And by “all,” I include students. They are rightly disturbed over the university’s entanglement with war and private profit, and they ask that their concern be registered and their views considered. They are entitled to nothing less, for until students began to protest such matters as IDA affiliation, the universities were doing business as usual, blind to the implications of their own actions. The same is true of the university’s record regarding innovation in education and the procedures of campus government — I mean real innovation, not the substitution of blue tape for red. Before student activists began forcing a variety of campus and classroom issues into the open, the university’s concern was minimal.

What we are witnessing, then, is not a sporadic and superficial, but a sustained and far-reaching, attack on the university’s smug and antique bearing. The student activists are not rebelling against their parents’ values, but applying those values to the institutions with which they find themselves involved. They are not confused children, uncertain of their motives or aims, but determined adults who have found their education and their society seriously wanting.

I doubt if we have ever had a generation or at least a minority of one — that has engaged itself so earnestly on the side of principled action, that valued people so dearly and possessions so little, that cared enough about our country to jeopardize their own careers within it, that wanted so desperately to lead open, honest lives and to have institutions and a society which would make such lives possible. It is a generation for which we should be immensely grateful and of which we should be immensely proud. Instead, we tell them that they are frenzied children; that we will try to be patient with them but that they should not push us too far; that they too in time will grow to understand the real ways of the world. To say that this condescension or blindness on the part of the older generation is a “pity” does not fit the dimensions of the case. It is a crime.