Columbia in Turmoil-our Articles Challenge to Liberalism

...Yet the same students flock to research-oriented universities, and research produces much of what is taught to graduate students...

...Students will graduate and become leading members of society...

...To deal with these establishments is, by definition, to become embroiled in the parliamentary and legalistic entanglements the elites have created for their own protection, and therefore to be ineffective...

...Student radicals see few differences, though, and have shown a strong predilection for strikes...

...Considered in isolation, the gym is a limited affair: Only a small part of the park is to be used for its construction, and the site is rocky and very steep...

...But some significant sharing of power is considerably over-due...

...Several distinguished professors at Columbia announced that they would resign if anyone tried to tell them what they should teach...

...Some of them called for a strike when Martin Luther King Jr...

...For it is the students of a university who pay (a rather hefty fee at Columbia), and it is the faculty that is paid—in other words, the professors are the workers...

...These actions were responses to demands initiated by New Left students that gained wide support among liberal students and faculty...

...Very typically, when the students barricaded five Columbia buildings, several faculty groups and various levels of the university administration sought frantically to "negotiate" with them...

...The New Left, which has initiated and spearheaded the confrontations, holds, quite correctly, that the university, like other corporate bodies, is a political microcosm akin to the society at large...

...The administrators also have quite a different view of the university and its place in the community than the younger generation of faculty and active students, the latter being much more anti-establishment and more concerned with social justice...

...Or is it a way of laying the groundwork for effective liberal give-and-take politics between the rebelling students and those in power...

...Frequent presentations of grievances and constructive suggestions by a large faculty group, several student groups, the city, and several Harlem groups had no visible effect...

...Their present lack of maturity is in part the effect, not the cause, of their being excluded from the responsibility for decisions...

...For a long time the radical approach was ineffective, partly because the student body and faculty of Columbia University are less readily given to political mobilization than those, say, of Berkeley or Wisconsin...

...Students cannot learn the real constraints on university administrators and faculty unless they share in campus problems...

...Another difficult matter is the balancing of academic freedom with the need for a collectively guided and integrated curriculum...

...But the gym is a fair symbol of Columbia's unilateral actions in the community and its expansionist tendencies...

...Last but not least, due process, even in the loose sense of established channels for expression and participation, is not institutionalized at Columbia or at most other universities...

...Thus they prefer to act as if due process were exhausted so that they can mobilize liberal support, while they really hold no briefs for liberal politics in the first place...

...In addition, adding power groups to the give-and-take increases the labor of decision-makers...

...As I see it, there can be enough social action after school hours to exhaust the lessons activism has to offer...

...In part, they are inherent in liberal politics: Many groups have to be consulted, broad consensus must be achieved, a large variety of interests has to be taken into account...

...Despite the experiences at Berkeley, Wisconsin and elsewhere, liberal university administrations and faculties have failed to develop an approach, not to mention a capacity, for handling New Left confrontations...

...Indeed, they often seemed to be preparing the ground for their "Berkeley" instead of trying to work within the institutional framework, or trying to make the framework viable when they encountered one of its numerous inefficiencies...

...Following demands to forbid Dow Chemical and cia recruiters on campus, the matter was put to a vote of the student body, and the majority favored continuing "open" recruitment policies...

...At this point the "philosophy" becomes fuzzy: Does the confrontation continue until the "masses" are ready for a revolutionary takeover of the seats of power...

...Another major issue on which the administration's response was almost imperceptible concerned the right of students (and faculty) to share in shaping Columbia's structure...

...Civil disobedience and other modes of confrontation, of course, are not employed exclusively by radicals...

...Students have to struggle for avenues of participation as they attempt to advance specific issues...

...It should further be noted that a degree of frustration has been generated by the typical bureaucratic device of managing information: sds repeatedly argued that students and faculty could not take part in Columbia decision-making because they were systematically misled (for instance, by flat denials that secret research was conducted at the university and by the "classification" of committee reports, including a recent one on student life...

...Following student demands, the administration did stop releasing student grades to the draft boards...

...The majority of students "vote with their feet" against liberation classes and for regular instruction whenever they are free to choose...

...It is much more productive, according to the New Left at Columbia and elsewhere, to confront the power structure through the creation of heacUine-making crises, usually involving the use of civil disobedience if not outright force...

...None of the above is meant to imply, however, that the crisis at Columbia University, and on other campuses, is solely the fault of short-tempered or radical students...

...The issues involved are often extremely complex...

...voting...

...In part, they are bureaucratic and conservative: Accustomed to dealing with largely apathetic faculty and students, the administration has tended to heed mainly itself, the trustees and the alumni...

...These are complicated questions that need to be carefully answered...

...By the sixth day, Vice President David Truman has explained, the administration saw no alternatives to either accepting all of the student demands or calling in the police...

...At most, token concessions may be achieved slowly...

...The first concessions were made by the administration very quickly to "show good will," resolve the crisis, and "be conciliatory...

...This was quite evident at Columbia...

...Most important, to the extent that university education has grown irrelevant, demands for educational reforms should be made of the faculty and the administration, but these are conspicuously missing from the Columbia strikers' list...

...Both in its immediate tactics and its administrative procedures, the university has not responded creatively to the challenge posed by the student groups...

...The administration has not responded to repeated requests from many sides to review and revise its policy, a policy that amounts to driving out minorities and turning Morningside Heights into a lily-white, purely middle class neighborhood...

...What form should their participation take (consultative...

...But the tactics and underlying political positions of the students are very similar at almost all the universities currently experiencing difficulties...

...In short, if for the liberal civil disobedience is a court of last resort, for the confronting students it is a short-cut, and for the radical it is an attempt to destroy institutionalized channels not merely because they do not work but to insure that they will not work...

...There were and are other outstanding issues on which the administration has not taken action, despite repeated appeals by some faculty and students...

...Liberals, too, participate in sit-ins and have few qualms about resorting to such tactics when all other means of redressing grievances have been exhausted—that is, when the repeated presentation of legitimate demands evokes no response...

...If Columbia students had meaningful representation, Columbia administrators would have reviewed and revised their short-sighted university-community relations policy long ago...

...All three arguments have been heard at Morningside Heights during the last few weeks, providing some interesting insights into both the premises and results of confrontation politics...

...The point here is not what might have been done, but that no one in a position of power seems to know...

...Columbia administrators expected the buildings to be cleared without violence...

...For example, should a graduate school cease to train specialists in biology, Spanish, and medieval history...

...If GRAYSON KIRK Columbia is barricaded again tomorrow, or if some other university has similar difficulties, is there another alternative besides calling in the police or allowing a minority of students to dictate university policy...

...Similarly, the great imbalance between the attention devoted to research and that given to teaching would have been reduced...

...And most of the liberation classes conducted by students are an educational farce, consisting of unqualified teachers espousing vulgar versions of Marx, Freud and Reich, or anarchic discussions leading nowhere...

...The task of campaigning for reforms peacefully does not appeal to students who believe in anarchy and radical transformation...

...Circling the Pentagon, a segregated lunch counter, and a school are not one and the same thing...

...to probably a larger number whose temperaments do not find slow progress congenial and who are attracted by the drama and excitement of confrontations, it seems too difficult...

...As the chairman of a departmental committee interested in getting students involved in planning and decision-making on academic and related matters, I found many students complaining that committee meetings kept them from doing their studying and research, "which is, after all, what we are here for...

...The roots of these delays are many...

...They should have known better after the experiences in Oakland, Madison and Berlin...

...They would be much less likely to demand a tutor for every two students, for example, if they had to share in the decision not to admit any new students and to send home half of the old ones, which probably would be necessary if this policy were to be implemented...

...Where the Columbia administration did respond, often initiating the reforms required much prodding and met with numerous delays...

...Nor did the students choose to barricade ida's buildings or to limit their seizure to administrative buildings...

...What areas of decision-making should students share in...

...Most of the faculty members were horrified, and a number of them came out in support of the strike...

...The effect of the police action on the morning of the eighth day, with its shocking brutality and abuses, was equally predictable: Many liberal students swung behind the strike, increasing its active supporters from several hundred students to at least 4,000...

...In numerous other small ways, too, teaching has benefitted from the new student power...

...The striking students, arguing that social action is the best classroom and that formal education is irrelevant, set up "liberation" counter-classes...

...It is a sad fact that the current New Left confrontations may have been the only means of bringing about the reforms necessary for liberal processes to work effectively at many of our major universities...

...Strike a School...

...One concerns what the purpose of a university ought to be...

...If the students are not organized and given access to the centers of university decision-making, this becomes one reason that some of their legitimate needs and demands are not heeded...

...Finally, policies—indeed, the university's very structure—are in part shaped by power relations...

...In addition, the administration set up a faculty committee to review all other ties to external research organizations under the chairmanship of Professor Louis Henkin...

...Even after the present crisis began, President Kirk suggested that his appointment of a director for student activities constituted an adequate response to the student demand for a role in decision-making...

...The administration tends to subscribe to the position that the students are immature and transient members of the university community, and that they have "no right" to share in its decision-making...

...The question of whether to campaign or to confront must be answered not only in the light of how much campaigning has already been tried to no avail, but also with regard to what is being confronted...

...The specific demands differ greatly from one situation to another...

...one more group must be informed, consulted, persuaded, even paid off—a prospect few administrators cherish...

...Hence, a student strike at a university is similar to a strike by patients at a hospital: They must continue paying their fees, but do not receive the services they are entitled to and badly need...

...they blocked classrooms, leaving outside many faculty members and students (probably a clear majority) who wished to study (although not every athlete who shouted "I want my education" has shown such enthusiasm during periods of normal university routine...

...In the last two years, the same groups and leaders who precipitated the present crisis advanced several causes peacefully, yet even then they showed a marked preference for demonstrations, picketing and petitions, over voting, presenting documented support for their charges against the administration to faculty committees, etc...

...it also cancelled paramilitary parades and the ROTC reviews that had been part of commencement exercises...

...And it is phasing out a cia project and siphoning off a major complex of laboratories that conduct classified, militarily revelant research...

...Educational reforms have been called for by striking students at other universities, but they have shown little taste for the patient, painstaking thought this requires...

...They continued to adhere to their demands...

...Perhaps more important is the fact that the Columbia administration did frequently respond to legitimate demands, although the response was often too little too late...

...He answered, "You should never get that drunk...

...Kant was once asked if a person who was very drunk was morally responsible for his actions...

...was slain...

...The danger of excessive student power, illustrated by many Latin American universities, cannot be ignored...

...Student Power...

...A third problem is the relation of research to teaching...

...Many students believe research deflects faculty energy from teaching, and to some extent that is true...

...The gymnasium or, more generally, university-community relations is an example, and a major one...

...Once the university is confronted by a sizable body of students, it may well be too late for a sensible solution, and probably there are only very unpalatable options left...

...The faculty is already less inclined to let assistants teach classes than was the case before the recent crises...

...Radical students like to see themselves as part of the working class and depict the university as a factory...

...If it is to train such specialists, can courses that the striking students consider useless or boring be eliminated...

...It also holds, quite wrongly in my judgment, that the liberal politics of give-and-take and concensus-building does not work at Columbia, at universities generally, or anywhere in the nation—because the existing establishments have monopolized the political (and other) forms of power...

...Lectures (or pep-talks) about these constraints do not achieve the same educational effect...

...But if it had responded earlier and more actively to the students' legitimate demands, and provided for authentic student and faculty participation in several key decision-making sectors, most of the present difficulties could have been prevented and both student and community support for them would have been much smaller...

...The university was disaffiliated from ida, but President Grayson Kirk retained his position as a member of its board and executive committee...

...Merely adding a course on the history of civil disobedience, or endowing a chair on Marx, does not constitute educational reform...

...The moderate student government joined hands with sds and other radical groups...

...at Columbia, disaffiliation from the Institute for Defense Analyses (ida) and ceasing the construction of a gymnasium in a public park used by Harlem residents were presumably the key demands...

...But the arguments favoring student participation in some key areas of university decision-making are overwhelming, even if this were not the only likely method of keeping the university free from the kind of crisis Columbia now faces...

...This is how protest is directed toward institutional lines in other sectors of social life...

...Exhausting Due Process...

...It took about six days for the faculty and quite a few administrators to realize that the students were not really negotiating at all...

...But radicals would rather dispense with the normal approaches, because any effective operation of the system undercuts the radical premise: that the system is in need of a fundamental transformation...

...Challenge to Liberalism By Amitai Etzioni As in the case of other institutions of higher education here and abroad, more has been at stake during the confrontations between students and the administration at Columbia University than merely a set of specific demands for institutional reforms or changes in university-community relations...

...Shortly before that, another group demanded the cancellation of regular classes until the war in Vietnam is terminated...

...All this has placed a heavy burden on those seeking reforms through institutional channels...

...Liberal Response to New Left Confrontation...

...Is it an "educational" prelude for later revolutionary action (a "radicalization...

...Student protest leaders maintain this is inadequate and, many of the disaffected students are totally unaware of the disaffiliation...

...At one point Mark Rudd, the 20-year-old sds leader, addressing 200 professors after having listened to the suggestions for mediation they had developed in the course of 56 sleepless hours, summarized his group's reaction in a single word: "bullshit...

...any opportunity for them to participate responsibly in democratic decision-making should be considered a significant part of their education...

...The large university is often almost as impersonal as a middle-sized factory, yet this is about as far as the analogy holds...

...Consequently, not sharing power with the students (and curbing the faculty's power) is a way of preserving the university in its original form (Columbia's charter is dated 1810), and of continuing policies dear to the trustees...