Classroom combat

...No doubt,Catholic schools have been able to forestall violence by operating within a firm and explicit moral framework...

...people, counted myself among them) he was simply forcing Fordham to compete academically with comparable secular universities rather than rest on a pre-Vatican II religious complacency .To his critics he had "sold out" Fordham's Jesuit heritage-taken the crucifixes off the classroom walls-to qualify for state aid . To those who most resented the "payany-price-break-any-mold" innovations of his leadershipthe radical Ben Salem College experiment, the expensive Marshall McLuhan professorship, the broadening of the transfer of Jesuit controlling power to laymen and women, "freedom" in the dorms etc...

...The next night, as I returned to my room after saying a midnight Mass, the thick, gray air throbbed red...

...But it also survived because there had always been a band of friends at its core-Jesuits, lay faculty, and students-who:answered calls for help or invitations for a beer in the middle of the night ;weren't afraid to sign a "controversial" petition that would cost them a few ounces of their "moderate" image ; did all the work on those experiemental, interdisciplinary, "values" programs that were one of the few signs in the 1970s, when Fordham and the country as a whole were getting duller, that the school's collective imagination had not withered . I sometimes think it is this kind of heart-when enough of the participants have been touched by the teachings like "Thou sha t not steal...

...But it was a terrible wound of physical and emotional exhaustion-especially for those faculty and administrators who somehow felt obliged to be presdiscovered that`A comparison of standard test scores reveals that children in Catholic inner-city schools generally score higher on these tests than do children in public schools in the same neighborhoods...

...THROUGHOUT THE PROLONGEDcrisis, however, Fordham had never come to the equivalent of what, inThe China Syndromegeneration, we have learned to call a "meltdown...

...but we spoke, we thought, from within the mainstream ARE CATHOLIC SCHOOLS NE T? E RECENT Tvdocumentary, "Combat in the Classroom," presented some chilling statistics.Across the country one out of every ten schools has a serious problem with violence . Approximately 280,000 students are assaulted-every month . Over 110,000 teachers ate injured at schools in assaults every year...

...In addition to teaching students the traditional academic subjects, Catholic schools have been able to be utterly straightforward in instilling in their students distinctions between right and wrong, and elementary 26 September1980: 527ent at the edge of nearly every meeting, protest, late-night rap session, march, and bonfire-partly because we wanted to listen and understand, partly because it was exhilarating to see young people interact politically, partly because we didn't want to wake up the next morning to hear that while we slept someone had been killed...

...The film examined schools in New ork, Ohio, Maryland, and California- all of which it should be noted were Commonweal: 526of American liberal Catholic thought, and in the summer of '55 we dutifully flew off to Fort Bliss or to Germany for two years on the "trip-wire," guarding Rhine River bridges from the Soviet jets and tanks our commanders assured us would come roaring our way that winter...

...When I returned to Fordham as a Jesuit priest in 1969 to teach both journalism and history and to finish my George Washington University Ph .D...

...The 1960s died not because the issues that enflamed them were resolved, but because the sixties burned out . The 196970 academic year gave a number of us what Shakespeare's Henry V said the soldiers who fought with him at Agincourt would share in their old age-a wound we might someday show our children with pride...

...In May, the "days of rage" that surrounded the invasion of Cambodia and the killings at Kent State were even uglier .I will always remember looking out my A-House Martyrs' Court dorm window just in time to see a bunch of "Rippies" (too "wild" to call themselves Hippies) tear down the American flag and too late to do anything about it . One of them stood up later at a meeting and said:"The only way we can get them to pay attention around here is to burn down a building...

...Although I could have seen closing the school as a moral protest against the Cambodian invasion and Kent State, I didn't like closing shop out of fear .I didn't argue that publicly then and I suppose I should have, whether it would have been well received or not...

...Because we never stopped talking, community grew out ofconflict . I think Fordham survived the transition from the late 1960s to the 1970s partly because of its presidents-Mike Walsh, S .J.,the healer of the wound, looking tired, but sweet and tough, the Godfather (in the best sense of that word) of Jesuit higher education;James Finlay, S .J.,modest, faithful, making both brave and prudent decisions that will shape Fordham's new urban image that must somehow transcend, without detaching itself from, the galloping, pathetic squalor of the Bronx, the garbage and graffiti of Fordham Road...

...his sudden removal for financial mismanagement, his voluntary exile in a Southern black college, his decision, in his sixties, to leave the Jesuits and marry were further proof that Fordham's and the church's worst mistake had been to neglect the dikes constructed long ago to keep out the flood of change...

...and a book on the Brooklyn Eagle, I found it a healthier intellectual community than ever, and that valuable but sometimes elusive force, "the Jesuit presence," was, in my judgment at least, as free as ever to have its influence felt . But the big difference was the impact of the Vietnam War...

...The ROTC class of '55 had marched toready ourselves for Korea .Now hundreds and, on the night of the great Moratorium, thousands of Fordham students marched with the judgment that the country's policy was wrong, even-to use the word once used most commonly in ethics class to denote illicit sexual activity- "immoral ." My first course was on the history of American domestic violence, centering initially on the nineteenth-century Haymarket bombing and the Pullman strike and later touching on race riots and George F . Kennan's essay on student unrest...

...In Los Angeles one out of,, every four security agents isinjured, and in New ork City 7.5million is spent annually on school security . If these figures seem staggering, they are nevertheless true, and they are even more ominous because they show no signs of decreasing...

...8 revolvers . As a Catholic school teacher,sometimes wonder why-and how much longer this happy condition wlast At present Catholic schools operate:at approximately one quarter of the cost of public schools,and they often operate in conditions that are far from idealand with facilities that way comparable.Despite these handicaps the offer a quality education . n fact that per capitaparochialschoos andardized tests than public school the forty-seven inner-cityCatholic my-eight percent of whosestuinority groups, RobertHoytare i continue It is a well-kno students...

...To those who either shared his vision or loved him in spite of his mistakes, his paradoxical career personified one ambivalent theme of the 1960s which men and women long buttressed by the church's structure did not deal with easily : each of us really is both free and responsible-free to reassess and shift certain commitments, and responsible for the failure to grow as well as for the failure to obey...

...THE THIRD MOSTimportant change to affect our generation was the forced redefinition of what it meant to be a good American . In 195 , 101 of us had published a letter that tried to say-after some friendly editing by the administration-that Catholicism and McCarthyism should not be identified in the public mind . As a result, we called down upon our heads months of abuse from the then right-wing Catholic Brooklyn Tablet...

...They have given their time, donatedtheir money, and helped in ways too numerous to mention...

...Now the parental role seems more important than ever .In my years of teaching I have noticed a pronounced change in both my students and in their attitude toward life . The toward material values and away from the spiritual realm is the most noticeable.The constantly escalating violence in public schools has not yet contaminated, to any degree, the Catholic system, but it may be only a matterof time...

...I guess I was too worn out...

...The Campus Center was in flames . Disoriented by bomb threats, the faculty postponed or canceled some final exams...

...The administration withdrew into the north wing and the protesters seized the south wing . They held their wing for a day until, after they had injured a security guard, the police scared them out...

...Certainly public school teachers also try to insist) on basic morality, butone of thefew discernible differences betweenpublic and parochial education-especially significant in an ultra-sophisticated society that often treats moral principles as relative-is the Catholic schools' ability to be authoritative about this morality, and to assume it as a common code, shared by church, school, and parents . "The key is parental involvement," says Niemack, Certainly parents have long been the backbone of Catholic education...

...It is untrue that Catholic schools achieve these results, as s, sometimes charged, by "creaming," accepting only the best of students and rejecting those from disadvantaged backgrounds . On the other hand, the perpetrators of violence in the public schools are a small minority, whose acts victimize not only individuals but, by creating a climate of fear and absorbing adult energies, damage whole schools . Catholic schools can-and frequently do-expel the few truly violent students . Comparisons with public schools, therefore, should not justify smugness . There is more to the story than the power of expulsion, however...

...Peer contact, peer pressure will eventually take their tollwill they...

...do better o studeeyt schools' ine' dent population c eatMore Catholic High SchoolonStaten egy session in Keating Hall, crossed Edwards' Parade and crashed into the Administration Building, right into President Michael Walsh's office while Walsh was there...

...Thus far Catholic schools have remained free from security agentsarmed with handcuffs, batons,aloaded...

...It attracted an odd mixture of student government leaders and the Progressive Labor party faction of the SDS . Although the radicals and I didn't see eye-to-eye on some fundamental issues, like the heavy work load in my course and the value of non-violence, we had some rapport . At least we could share a Friday night beer with the throngs that packed the El Dorado bar, a run-down old speak-easy with ceiling fans that became, for a few years, a satellite center of Fordham's intellectual life . Then one day in October 1969 things got ugly . To protest ROTC the SDS and their followers, swept down from a stratpublic schools.-Acordingto Robert Niemack,-o authors andproducers of "Combat in the Classroom, research indicated, "There isnot a greatdeal of violence: in the private, religious schools...