ACADEMIC LIBERTY: TWO REPORTS: Recruiter Bans & The New Ivory Tower

...DuBois Clubs recruiters could be cross-examined about the sources of their funds and whether they were members of the CPUSA...

...The demonstrators have not answered pressing and fundamental questions: whether their cavalier attitude toward maintaining an orderly and "open" campus might weaken the traditional means by which the academic community opposes outside pressures...

...Thus, opinions guaranteed access to public and private forums must meet unusual requirement for toleration in the groves of academe...

...73 ACADEMIC LIBERTY: TWO REPORTS During the forties the non-Communist Left had developed adequate and legitimate techniques to withstand infiltration...

...Although Rap Brown and other "black power" advocates have been willing to discuss the morality of riots and violence, rules like those suggested for Dow men could be invoked to "ban" them unless they answered specific questions about their personal and organizational involvement in ghetto "rebellions...

...Invoking the name 72 ACADEMIC LIBERTY: TWO REPORTS of Unamuno, a faculty demonstrator announced: "There are times when you have to break civil liberties...

...The Young Americans for Freedom, coached by William F. Buckley, Jr., might have a field day employing the new New Left concept of freedom of expression...

...Presumably Herbert Aptheker and other Communist speakers could be required by the audience to discuss Hungary instead of Spain, the jailing of Soviet writers instead of the writings of Marx...

...On the surface, this seems fitting when we consider our sense of outrage and total opposition to the war and the draft...

...However, Schwartz proposed that "any recruiter coming to campus be required to participate in an open forum to answer questions if students so request...

...Under the terms of the new theory, however, a recruiter's acceptability depends upon his moral probity as judged by his audiences...

...The burden of responsibility for determining the probity of those who used the campus was placed upon the university itself, which established student and faculty committees to determine standards in the case of every applicant...

...Today SDS and the New Left have discovered open means to expose CIA and military-industrial influence with devastating effectiveness...

...Indeed, the New Left's finest battles were against the Clark Kerrs who sought to exclude "outside recruiters" at Berkeley on the grounds that the university was a place for theoretical discussion rather than unbridled advocacy...

...Twenty years ago few voices were raised to warn against the implications of the "ban AYD" drive...

...The application of this principle to other campus visitors would look like the very "prior censorship" which SDS and student freespeech movements have protested...

...Last year SDS and other organizations at the Champaign and Chicago campuses mounted a protest against restrictions on free speech whereby the DuBois Club and Communist speakers were not allowed to use university facilities...

...Both the rationale of SDS and the position of the AAUP and NSA suggest new and aggressive versions of the "ivory tower" conception of the university, which they counterpose to pollution of the campus by the military-industrial complex...

...THE PROPOSED PRESCRIPTIONS may, however, prove fatal to the already impaired health of academic institutions: impose a ban on outside recruiters, who do not meet supposed "standards of an academic community," which will be defined and determined on an ad hoc basis...

...Liberal newspapers and university administrators have vociferously attacked the tactics and motivations of the demonstrators...

...How many employers could pass that test...

...President designate of the University of Michigan, Robben W. Fleming, has deplored "the tyranny of the minority" and "the high tensions and emotions that surrounded the Dow incidents [and] ignore the underlying principle of freedom . . ." The American Association of University Professors, which condemned General Hershey's directive to use the draft as a "punitive instrument" against protesters, has also differed with students and faculty who stop interviewers and hamper invited speakers by obstructionist tactics...

...The resort to dubious rules has been neither necessary nor honorable...

...In each instance, the proponents of some special ban on access to the campus fell back upon a double standard: that advocacy in a university setting should only be allowed to those who meet standards of academic and moral probity, and closed to deceivers and seducers...

...Here two issues were involved and one was more important than the other...

...That, said the New Left correctly enough, was a piece of McCarthyite repression aimed at the campus...

...Otherwise, say these leaders, demonstrators have a right to drive them from the campuses...

...Therefore, they conclude, students must take matters into their own hands...

...Now SDS leadership argues that the presence on campus of military and industrial representatives is the vanguard of a new wave of "repression" that "is coming," spawned by "the fascist phase of corporate liberalism...

...But the opinions of Prof...

...The charge against AYD was, in effect, similar to that now being made against Dow Chemical...

...Let them send a recruiter who will debate...

...In a similar manner, the advocates of "selective tolerance" have eschewed responsibility for the impact which their actions may have upon civil liberties...

...IF THE DEBATE-OR-BE-BANNED PRINCIPLE were adopted, it would have to be applied equally to all—in line with commonly accepted "standards of an academic community...

...One Dow demonstration leader told the press that the munitions makers must be driven from the campus, "like Jesus taking things into his own hands because they were doing something immoral...

...THE SPIRALS OF CONFRONTATION and force which marked recent campus demonstrations against Dow interviewers, military recruiters, and Johnson Administration spokesmen have raised serious issues regarding academic freedom...

...Unfortunately, the chain of circumstances which led to the passage of the Clabaugh Act provides a different parallel—and another lesson...

...whether these new 71 ACADEMIC LIBERTY: TWO REPORTS "resistance techniques" do not themselves detract from the New Left's power of exposure, which in the past year effectively crippled covert CIA subsidies and biological and chemical warfare projects...

...The result has been that the university has been forced to ban groups like the DuBois Clubs and SWP affiliates...

...However, this does not dispense with the question of the right of free speech and access to the campus or the proper relation between the universities and the "military-industrial complex...

...But we could argue that both cases demonstrate the futility of "ivory tower" militancy...

...Those who use Herbert Marcuse's notions of "repressive tolerance" to exorcise "hang-ups about bourgeois civil liberties and middle-class law and order" do an injustice to the other element of the Marcusean dialectic: "the closing of the universe of discourse...

...These speculations would be academic were there not historical parallels between present problems and the banning of "front" groups from campuses during the late forties...

...The Free Speech movements offered decisive arguments against arbitrary bans and made the Bill of Rights the only set of applicable "standards of an academic community...

...It would be a tragedy if the New Left, which reopened discourse within the university, should now lend intellectual justification to another era of exclusion in the name of opposition to tyranny and war...

...Perhaps a perfect example is the University of Illinois, the scene of many unresolved controversies over academic freedom...

...But now SDS leaders there and elsewhere have proposed preconditions that would, in effect, require a "Committee On Visiting Recruiters...

...What the Defense Department does with our work is its business," Willis E. Groves, head of Project Michigan, told the Collegiate Press Service, "We just go ahead and develop more technology...

...Today, the New Left should ponder whether the consequences of the fight to exclude outside recruiters will not legitimate administrative and legislative equivalents of the Clabaugh Act...

...Eventually AYD violated a university regulation governing outside speakers and the direct result was that right-wing legislators passed the Clabaugh Act with the tacit approval of the "ban AYD" movement on the campus...

...Supporting the AAUP statement, National Student Association President Ed Schwartz asked, "In what way does the left's attempt to rid the university of recruiters whom they oppose differ from the right's frequent attempts to ban Communists from campus...

...Unquestionably, the students were right about the suspect affiliations of AYD, and they are right about the insidious implications of military-industrial influence on the campus...

...SDS and its allies have announced an abrupt turn "from 'mere protest' to 'resistance.' " SDS National Secretary Mike Spiegel has declared: "We think the issue of civil liberties tends to obfuscate the real issues...

...Freedom of speech signifies that, right or wrong, a person has the right to choose whether he wishes to debate, and his decisions to refuse to debate with anyone is no adequate ground for an attempt to deprive him of the right to speak...

...Speakers' bans and the use of napalm are both by-products of a "one-dimensional mentality...

...Once directed against a specific "enemy within," such precedents have an inherent tendency to be used against all dissent...

...According to the rationale proffered by leaders of the demonstrators, the university should have no right to participate in the military efforts of the country, and Dow Chemical representatives and other recruiters must, when they come to the campus, discuss their involvement in the war machine...

...This year some of the same groups have rationalized their part in obstructing Dow interviews with a faulty historical analogy between "McCarthyism" and corporate "repression...

...Before the Act was passed, various "liberal" groups of students at Illinois, led by the student newspaper, initiated a move to ban American Youth for Democracy, the Communistled youth front, on the grounds that its "sham" activity was inconsistent with the purposes of the university...

...Mulford Sibley and the Socialist Study Club at Illinois, no newcomers to anti-Stalinism and anti-militarism, were and remain instructive: "The Socialist Study Club . . . in the interest of maintaining freedom [is ready] to defend an organization whose policy we oppose...

...Moreover, the napalm debate proposals reverse the conception of "freedom of expression...

...When a "visiting speaker's form" was required of Staughton Lynd, the University of Illinois SDS chapter was "appalled by the Student Senate's compliance with the University of Illinois regulations . . . In a society in which individuals are supposedly guaranteed freedom of speech, there is no place for the Committee On Visiting Speakers...

...The traditional American conception holds that persons and organizations ought to have the right to decide whether to participate in debate or submit to questions...

...As the revelations of CIA subsidies and chemical warfare research proved, there is a grave danger to the integrity of the academy posed by Pentagon and security agency contracts and influences...

...THE CLABAUGH ACT of 1947, the state law which was opposed last year, banned "the use of any facilities of the university for the purpose of carrying on, or advertising or publicizing the activities" of "any subversive, seditious, and un-American organization...

...And they add that the university is guilty of complicity because it has not taken a stand against the Vietnam War, as formerly it did not oppose the Clabaugh Act...

...SUCH THEORIES OF "SELECTIVE TOLERANCE" find their obverse in the defenses of those who rationalize the uses to which their "pure" scientific researches are put...

...After a Dow representative declined to comment on certain questions during an "open forum" at NYU, protest leader Brendon Sexton called his performance unsatisfactory and grounds for further harassment: "If he will not debate the issue of burning civilians with napalm in Vietnam, then he cannot be a recruiter...