Where the News Ends
CHAMBERLIN, WILLIAM HENRY
WHERE the NEWS ENDS By William Henry Chamberlin The Old Guard And the New Guard TWO ITEMS recently brought back memories and comparisons in connection with the Philadelphia Main Line Quaker...
...One was a deplorable football showing—Haver-ford lost every game it played and over the season scored about one touchdown to every 10 for the opposition...
...Yet I think there is a logical explanation...
...This same element of assured reciprocity is also important in relation to bomb testing...
...A parallel phenomenon exists in England and in Germany, where traditional slogans of class war appeal more to the "old guard" of the British Labor party and the German Social Democrats...
...Occasional visits to Haverford during and since the war have given me some points of comparison between the college I knew as a student and the same college today...
...The poll, which was fairly exhaustive, showed that 85 per cent of the students favored disarmament, 72 per cent were in favor of recognizing Communist China, 71 per cent were opposed to defending Quemoy and Matsu at all costs...
...On the other hand, the rather cloistered and puritanical life of earlier times made for harder concentration on study, from Greek irregular verbs to the processes mysterious (at least to me) that go on in physics and chemistry laboratories...
...It is interesting, to digress for a moment, that the polls indicated students were mostly favorable to Nixon, while faculty members were more apt to favor Kennedy...
...At any rate, Haverford and similar liberal arts colleges supply values in intimate faculty-student contacts that are not so readily obtainable in huge state universities...
...Both 45 years ago and today it seems to me that the quality of the teaching is high and the students are generally hard-working and responsive...
...But it makes all the difference in the world whether someone who "favors" disarmament is thinking of universal disarmament under a system of absolutely foolproof controls (if such controls could really be established), or whether he is advocating unilateral disarmament in the face of a Soviet military power that is already, in some significant fields, ahead of the West's...
...For the sake of a closer close-up view of student sentiment it seems a pity that the questions were not spelled out in more detail...
...Faculty members are often of the generation that was strongly affected by the Great Depression that began in 1929 and lasted well into the '30s...
...Students are the children of the "affluent society...
...As to Cuba, 58 per cent favored economic sanctions, 31 per cent were for a "hands-off" policy and 11 per cent were for military intervention...
...Here it followed the lead of Harvard, where Kennedy partisans on the faculty were extremely vocal (Arthur Schles-inger Jr., John Kenneth Galbraith, Seymour Harris, Mark de Wolfe Howe, Archibald Cox, to mention a few), while the few avowed Nixon-ites seemed timid and apologetic by comparison...
...As an abstract proposition most people would certainly prefer disarmament to armament, just as there would be an overwhelming preference for peace rather than war...
...To return to Haverford...
...Haverford was one of the minority of universities and colleges where the student poll was in favor of Kennedy, by about a 3-2 margin...
...The present-day Haverfordian is a good deal more in touch with world affairs, partly because of a wise bequest from an affluent alumnus which provides a fund for bringing to the campus distinguished figures in politics and science, not only for lectures, but for brief periods of residence...
...This was the pattern at Princeton, Yale, Dartmouth and Amherst...
...The other was student psychology, as reflected in a poll of student views on the recent Presidential election and related issues in the world at large...
...and Nixon carried the student polls in all the big Midwestern state universities...
...Although Quakers, in my time and even more today, are a minority among the students, the Quaker influence and tradition make for a stronger pacifist sentiment at Haverford than one would probably find in other colleges of the same type...
...Election issues were rated as follows, in descending order of importance: disarmament, improvement of relations with the Soviet Union, cessation of A-bomb testing, improvement of relations with Cuba and Latin America, development of international law, strengthening United States economy and national growth, civil rights, establishment of relations with Communist China and aid to education...
...At first sight it may seem surprising that the younger group should generally be for the more conservative candidate...
...And, while "improvement of relations with the Soviet Union" and "development of international law" are appealing as slogans, both seem rather vague, from the practical standpoint, when one takes into account the implacable nature of Communist philosophy and the unlimited character of Communist ambitions...
...WHERE the NEWS ENDS By William Henry Chamberlin The Old Guard And the New Guard TWO ITEMS recently brought back memories and comparisons in connection with the Philadelphia Main Line Quaker college, Haver-ford, from which I graduated more than 40 years ago...
Vol. 43 • December 1960 • No. 47
