Columbia in Turmoil-our Articles Days of Crisis
RUSTOW, DANKWART A.
Days of Crisis By Dankwart A. Rustow Since April 23, Columbia University has been experiencing a major convulsion reminiscent of the Great Revolution of 1789. Grayson Louis Kirk, by grace of the...
...A much more broadly based Strike Steering Committee was formed, though, composed about evenly of radicals and moderates...
...To those possessed by visions of becoming youthful "revolutionaries" and an ambition to tear down "establishments...
...But it is hoped that the writing of a new constitution will proceed over the summer and come to fruition in the coming academic year...
...Kirk's colleagues in Low Library (not to speak of faculty members or mere students) find him unapproachable...
...In the wake of the police "bust," a spontaneous surge of indignation had engulfed most of the students and many of the faculty—not so much because the policemen cleared the buildings, but because of the excessive violence and unnecessary cruelty that accompanied the action...
...In fact...
...What has seemed to others to be callousness, insensitivity, or arrogance of administrators is a simple case of chronic elephantiasis...
...It is futile to try to assign precise amounts and shades of blame...
...2. Strike Coordinating Committee—I...
...But following the attempt of the Majority Coalition to storm or blockade the West side of Low Library, where the protesters were ensconced in Kirk's and Truman's offices, the faculty members decided to form a patrol or human barrier along the ledge...
...Most students come from affluent middle-class homes where they are materially overfed yet often emotionally deprived of a firm set of standards...
...A fine of helmeted officers, led by a Negro Lieutenant with a Cheshire cat smile, marched toward Hamilton and inch by inch pushed through the crowd in front of the door...
...Thus proliferation in sheer number of administrators has been the bane of the university...
...As an administrator Truman has proven himself clearheaded, forthright, and at times blunt...
...Kirk publicly declared that he "fully" shared the resolution's "objectives," but expressed major reservations on each of the crucial details...
...Ruben Rabinovitz—the last two coopted as representatives of the junior faculty...
...The efforts of militants to radicalize the strike by holding forbidden indoor demonstrations failed to bring the police back into action...
...This group emerged on April 25 from the informal meetings...
...The sentiments he expresses on public occasions are unexceptional, and his style is far less banal than that of most ceremonial speakers...
...For one of the alarming features of the turmoil has been that the first week cut off all frank and informal communication between administrators and faculty...
...At the outset it included some 200 faculty members who had signed a proposal for halting gym construction and transferring disciplinary action arising from the crisis to a tripartite commission of students, faculty, and administrators...
...Independent Faculty Group...
...Special Committee of the Board of Trustees...
...Martin Luther King Jr., have long ago receded behind the more flamboyant and violent figures of Che Guevara, H. Rap Brown, and Mao Tse Tung...
...The next 12 hours in the precinct station and the Court House bull pen gave me a chance for much reflection, for intermittent catnaps on the floor, and for long conversations with students who had participated in the occupation of Avery, Fayer-weather...
...cessation of gymnasium construction...
...It is composed of 12 members: Professors Michael Sov-vern and Westin (co-chairmen), Bell, Dallin...
...The overriding concern of the original Ad Hoc Group was to resolve the crisis without violence—that is, without full-scale police intervention or any physical battles between students...
...Red balloons inscribed "Strike," and outdoor skits had to be employed to maintain morale...
...Appointed by resolution of the Joint Faculties on April 30 with a broad mandate to convene meetings of those faculties and '"to take other needed steps to return the university to its educational task at the earliest possible moment...
...Two such meetings were called by President Kirk, on April 28 and on April 30 (some 12 hours after the police raid...
...Professor Waller-stein serves as its executive secretary...
...And here, again, the Columbia picture has been one of steady and disastrous decline...
...What holds them...
...But we will fail, perhaps even more strikingly, if we allow ourselves to drift into a situation in which the university is little more than a confederation of virtually autonomous units held together by weakening fiscal ties...
...Tuesday, April 30...
...Fact Finding Commission on the Recent Columbia Disturbances...
...These were all temporary endeavors...
...5. Ad Hoc Committee...
...But as the appalling events of the last weeks have publicly demonstrated, one of Columbia's greatest liabilities is the personality of Grayson Kirk, who served four years as provost during Eisenhower's titular presidency and since 1953 has occupied the university's top office...
...At a final meeting in McMillin Theater the morning after the police raid, Westin as chairman introduced and then withdrew a resolution pledging "respect" for the wider student strike under way...
...Shortly before the bust a proposal known as the Fayerweather plan came to our attention...
...Its readers learn, for example, that the Barnard co-eds in Fayerweather had curtly told their friends from Columbia College that "liberated women do not cook"—but relented when the males offered to share in the chore...
...punishment...
...Faculty-student curriculum committees in departments, and other new ideas for academic reform were springing up on all sides...
...Clearly, the effort to apply these same rules to co-ed sleeping-in habits or indoor political demonstrations is bound to end in casuistry, futility, and possibly violence rather than in an increased respect for law...
...The two most authoritative recent surveys on the matter were done by Professor Hayward Keniston of the University of Pennsylvania in 1957, and by the American Council on Education in 1966—that is, in the fourth and 13th year of Grayson Kirk's presidency...
...In addition, the fervently loyal students of the university's adult education division occupied Lew-isohn Hall, seat of their School of General Studies...
...Several conservative faculty members crossed picket lines to lecture to sparsely attended classes...
...Many of the students arrested in the buildings had their clothing torn, and were kicked in the groin by police when they stumbled on the stairs...
...Everyone readily concedes, too, that such a constitution cannot be debated, written, and put into effect in the two weeks or so that remain of the spring term...
...the police van was filled with 22 students of architecture who had been arrested in Avery...
...In his commencement address of 1966, Kirk proclaimed: "In this new world that has come upon us so suddenly, the paramount problem within the university is that of cohesion...
...The group held its sessions in Philosophy Hall, usually chaired by Professor Alan F. Westin, and was subsequently joined by others on the teaching staff...
...As it turned out, one of the sparks that set off the tinder pile was provided by a small band of New Left "revolutionaries," among whom Mark Rudd is now best known...
...Only inside the door of administration headquarters at Low Library is there still a police guard...
...Their romantic fantasy world is populated by a large pantheon in which men like Thoreau and Gandhi, even the late Dr...
...We have also heard a Tennis Court Oath: rebellious students vowing to stand on their Six Demands and not to negotiate separately...
...Before dawn, some 700 persons were arrested and transported to police stations around Manhattan...
...Still, as a member of both the Ad Hoc Group and the Independent Faculty Group, my vantage point was a good one...
...Thrust into the impersonal atmosphere of a large college, they are expected to act overnight like responsible adults...
...Indeed, the real question now confronting the university is whether Utopian revolution can lead to radical institutional reform...
...The aims of the strike after April 30, moreover, were from the start far less specific than the original Six Demands...
...After a futile attempt to force the door of Fayerweather, the Coalition sought to blockade the passage of food or persons into the occupied parts of Low...
...Once or twice Rudd's legs twitched, but after some hesitation he kept them up...
...the rapid evolution of the civil rights movement from orderly protests for enforcing existing laws (e.g., on voting) to boycotts and sit-ins for forcing a change in the law, and beyond that to riot and arson...
...During the first phase of the crisis, these two societies were joined by two other groups...
...In accordance with Parkinson's Law, though, the number of administrators has increased no less than ninefold—without considering either the non-commissioned ranks or the clerical platoons...
...3. Ad Hoc Faculty Group—I...
...It consists of 17 members?7 faculty, 7 students, 3 administrators—and is chaired by Professor Quentin Anderson...
...Kirk's visible image, on the other hand, is that of the after-dinner speaker...
...At moments of crisis he hides behind subtle but to his mind inexorable points of legality...
...Moreover, the discipline regulations announced to them were designed chiefly to cope with cheating on exams or with fraternity pranks and panty raids...
...severing of all relations with ida...
...A small number of Bamard undergraduates also joined the protesters, some entering the buildings and others remaining outside to buy food and help with sundry chores...
...David Truman, the eminent political scientist who last year was appointed Vice President and Provost, has been oast in the role of Jacques Necker: Admired in his own profession, an imaginative administrator in coping with financial stringency and political turmoil not of his making, he was called in too late to stave off disaster and for the moment his reputation hangs beneath a cloud...
...To begin with, students can be ejected by police from illegally occupied buildings, but not forced to attend classes...
...Composed of Archibald Cox, eminent Harvard jurist, and four other distinguished members, it held its first open hearings during the week of May 13...
...The group, however, developed no formal structure and soon dissolved...
...Thus as postwar enrollments have roughly doubled, the number of faculty members has increased by half, and the teacher-student ratio has somewhat deteriorated...
...The administration made a number of major concessions—on the gymnasium, on discipline—but these were marred by legalistic reservations...
...Official and unofficial discussions to this end already were going on all over campus last week...
...discipline to be handled by a bipartite committee of students and faculty...
...No wonder an endless amount of time is wasted on vain attempts at internal communication, on drafting, typing, reading, filing, or misplacing memoranda addressed by one bureaucrat to another...
...Faculty aristocrats have tried hard to play the role of a Mirabeau—to placate the unruly mob while upholding the tattered shreds of traditional authority...
...Columbia's hectic three weeks have had more than merely surface similarities to the three years from 1789-92...
...In the fall of 1967, the corresponding figures were 17.545 students...
...It appeared to be the first departure from the one student demand most offensive to the administration as well as to a majority of the faculty, namely the demand for amnesty...
...All-day meetings and all-night committee sessions served to heighten apprehensions in each camp and, ironically, minimized any effective interchange of information or sentiment between camps...
...One by one the buildings were cleared, the main force of the police moving through the tunnels that connect all campus buildings, other detachments pushing or beating those in front of the doors...
...There was a major tactical weakness in the Ad Hoc Group's position that should be noted: We were attempting simultaneously to mediate and to interpose ourselves physically between those bent on violent confrontation...
...He is chairman of the small Columbia chapter of the Students for a Democratic Society (sds), consisting of at most 3-4 per cent of the undergraduates...
...that the "Men" and "Women" signs had been removed from the rest rooms in Mathematics...
...If we are not responsive organizationally to changing needs we will fail, in both instruction and research, to meet our social obligations...
...At first we tried to lay down reasonable regulations which would combine humanitarianism with impartiality...
...I can testify that 1 have never encountered a better chairman in my field...
...He received us in a plush office in Ferris Booth, his two feet stretched out on the desk, and expounded his ideas on "democracy in the classroom...
...Here my account will have to become more personal, for it is impossible at this time—if indeed it ever will be—to sort out everything that has been taking place on the campus...
...Columbia pay scales have not kept pace with other universities, the teaching and examination load is far heavier than at any other major private university, and consequently Columbia has not held its own in a highly competitive academic market...
...the frequent reluctance of authorities to apply the law fully to those claiming the privilege to protest, even violently, from motives of conscience...
...That issue is the fundamental restructuring of the university...
...It was as if the same UN force was trying to negotiate an armistice at Rhodes and keep the peace on the Gaza Strip...
...This became the official name of the group previously envisaged as a tripartite commission...
...The students, embattled in their five buildings, had vowed not to negotiate separately...
...4. Majority Coalition...
...Our efforts were similarly obstructed from the other side...
...The idea of a "tripartite commission" to handle disciplinary matters and other proposals emerged from these meetings...
...Strike Coordinating Committee—II...
...The sit-in began on April 23 when a group led by sds and sas, after meetings at the sundial and at the gymnasium site, occupied Hamilton Hall...
...Although the protesters refer to both as "the strike," the first was in fact a sit-in and the second a boycott of classes...
...It may seem gratifying that the individual deans have proved better fund raisers than the university as a whole...
...Vice President Truman appeared before one session to report on developments and administration plans...
...A gradually formed steering committee ultimately consisted of 15 members: Professors Robert Belknap, Bell, Robert Cumming, Alexander Dallin, Robert Fogelson, Terence Hopkins, Seymour Melman, Walter Metzger, Sidney Morgenbesser, David Roth-man, Dankwart Rustow, James Shenton, Allen Silver, Immanuel Wallerstein, and Westin...
...Ad Hoc faculty members sounded out striking students or administration officials on various mediation proposals...
...After the police raid, the Coordinating Committee was expanded by the addition of about 60 members, each endorsed by 70 striking students...
...8. Meeting of the Joint Faculties on morningside heights...
...Members of the College faculty met on April 24 and 25 to explore the possibilities of peaceful evacuation at Hamilton and Low...
...After serving under him when he was a department chairman...
...Truman is a man of very different fiber from Kirk...
...Chaired by trustee Alan H. Temple, the Special Committee is composed of four trustees, with Petersen and Kirk members ex officiis...
...One was composed of the idealistic students from the School of Architecture, who for many years have combined fierce solidarity and loyalty to their school with deep-felt resentment against the physical and official Columbia scene...
...Meanwhile faculty disaffection—part of Columbia's tinder pile—has been fanned by additional problems...
...At the southwest entrance of Low on the night of April 25, faculty members set themselves up between police and the building, and when the Majority Coalition tried to storm Fayerweather members of the Ad Hoc Group physically barred and verbally dissuaded them...
...Other faculty members, like myself, emphatically maintained that their classes had never been captive and hence were in no need of liberation...
...The climax to the sit-in phase came at about 2:30 a.m...
...According to the two most recent surveys of the American Association of University Professors, Columbia's average professorial salaries have dropped it from fifth to 17th place among academic institutions...
...A Left-wing student group, calling itself the Liberation News Service, is circulating a packet of 30 multi-lithed sheets with its version of the heroic epos of life inside "Malcom X-Hamilton Hall" and the other "liberated buildings...
...Its disciplinary recommendations, released on May 9, were first rejected by Kirk but then accepted in response to trustee and faculty pressure...
...A vast majority of students, faculty, administration, and trustees now appear broadly agreed that out of its crisis Columbia must get itself a new constitution...
...Only under these circumstances can Columbia, in the words of the Independent Faculty Group, once again assume "a leading position of educational innovation and academic excellence...
...The list could be extended with many other items of indecision, poor public relations, and disingenuousness...
...Meetings marked by inflammatory speeches are drawing less and less of an audience...
...But the call for the final police action had already gone out...
...Food and medicine would be passed on if it got as far as the ledge, emissaries for purposes of negotiation would be let through the window, and anyone who wanted to leave the building for good could do so on surrendering his id card to a faculty member...
...Barbara Ward's appointment to a $100,000 chair by the intervention of the deans of two professional schools but over the emphatic objections of the Department of Economics...
...The drafting committee included Professors Belknap, Cum-ming, Hopkins, Morgenbesser, Rus-tow and Silver—who had served on the steering committee of the first Ad Hoc Group—and 10 others...
...The four groups combined constituted perhaps 10 per cent of Columbia's undergraduates, although in Columbia College itself the percentage was somewhat higher...
...Personally, I pray that the crisis will not have diminished Truman's usefulness as a force for reconstruction and reform at Columbia...
...Mark Rudd and his revolutionary colleagues have tried to create the impression that the strike begun on April 30 was a mass rallying behind their earlier sitdown strike in the five buildings...
...By Tuesday night, the vast majority of students had declared themselves on strike...
...The meeting ended in confusion when Westin and other steering committee members present left the theater...
...I first became aware of my fellow travelers when a young girl sitting on her boy friend's lap gently stroked my head and inquired whether I was alright...
...Consisting mostly of Left caucus members of the earlier group, it held several more public sessions in McMillin, at some of which I spoke at the group's invitation...
...Affluence and the World War II baby boom have further led to a phenomenal expansion of enrollments, with the result that the administrative structure, by-laws and disciplinary rules which worked tolerably well from the 19th century down to the 1940s have suddenly been revealed as inadequate or even positively harmful...
...How soon Columbia will witness its more humane equivalent of the Monarch's beheading—President Kirk's retirement or resignation—nobody knows for sure, but everybody expects it...
...But the true test of a university's quality is the rating of its various departments in the eyes of qualified colleagues throughout the country...
...A more moderate group, mostly of graduate students in the social sciences, occupied Fayerweather...
...Each of the major schools?Law, Business, International Affairs, etc.—has had its own fund raising program, so that for much of the budget fiscal ties have not only been weakened but cut...
...and Low...
...they have had the true characteristics of a revolution in the sense that established institutions collapsed, that effective power was assumed by bodies convoked by the king but not provided for in the existing laws of the realm...
...It is a relatively small band of dedicated teachers—no more than a handful in each department?who counteract the trend and do their best to maintain the students' spirit...
...Nevertheless, Columbia has one of the largest graduate enrollments of any institution in the country, and impressive numbers of Nobel and Pulitzer prize winners as well as other intellectuals of world-wide distinction...
...Yet some of the factors helping to keep up faculty morale turn into added disadvantages for the student...
...No wonder the problems of scholarship, of student life, of relations with non-Columbia residents in Morning-side Heights have little chance of penetrating Low Library's massive walls...
...One answer is that many scholars find the metropolitan setting extremely attractive...
...The strategic weakness of our position was that neither of the principals proved to be seriously interested in negotiation...
...A second spark was struck by a quieter, better organized, more tenacious group—the 75-odd black students at Columbia who make up the Students' Afro-American Society (sas...
...uniformed police in small numbers milled about quietly as a symbol of order...
...Precisely what his personal role has been in the present crisis, I find myself unable to judge...
...He cares more about quiet and incisive action at his desk than about well-rounded phrases on the platform...
...As for the immediate situation, one diagnosis was offered five days after the police raid by the Independent Faculty Group, whose moderate members are in touch with a wide spectrum of opinion from radical students to conservative professors...
...Only Columbia's French Department retained its previous excellence, appearing in second place in both surveys...
...Some of us also felt it important to test the good faith of the two sides...
...A professor who stays in New York because of consulting opportunities, because he likes to attend off-the-record sessions at the Council on Foreign Relations, or to mingle with the literary establishment, as a rule will spend less time with his students...
...For both, the revolution came in the 15th year of their reign...
...It should be emphasized that one of David Truman's most decisive and constructive new policies as Vice President was to re-establish fiscal cohesion by planning Columbia's current $200 million fund drive as a university campaign...
...At one point, together with a colleague, I was delegated by a faculty group to speak to Mark Rudd...
...Following the dissolution of the original group by this name, a rump meeting reconvened under the leadership of David Goodman and Professor Marvin Harris...
...The architecture students "liberated" Avery Hall by refusing to leave the premises when the university was declared closed...
...Early in the opening week of crisis, faculty members helped man the checkpoints at the Broadway and Amsterdam Avenue campus entrances to keep out non-university persons...
...The hypothetical dangers he so eloquently warned against amount to a succinct description of the actual failures of Kirk's 15-year administration...
...Kirk's weakness and Columbia's calamity is the glaring contrast between his professions as a speaker and his performance as an administrator...
...Each delegate to their steering committee was bound by instructions from his building, where all-day and often all-night sessions of participatory democracy resulted in profuse talk, much expression of Utopian idealism, but little {flexibility for negotiation...
...most but not all had been inside the various buildings...
...when the buildings were raided, neither Rudd nor most of his closer associates were inside...
...The signers promised that if students evacuated the buildings they would not hold classes until these proposals were accepted and pledged to "stand before the occupied buildings to prevent forcible entry by police or others...
...The final item of tinder has been the university's public image: the fiasco surrounding an abortive program for developing a cigarette filter of great financial promise and dubious quality...
...The only practical way to prevent a riot was not to allow passage of any thing or any person in so far as possible...
...One trusts it will be a regime under which neither strikes, police, nor periodic confrontations between strikers and policemen will need to occur...
...The Ad Hoc Group remained determined to pursue a course of peaceful mediation to the end...
...emissaries from the Mayor, the Borough President, and the Police Commissioner explored negotiation possibilities...
...Ed Robinson was the chairman...
...He has a fatal penchant for agreeing with his last interlocutor and avoiding unpleasant decisions...
...Within the overall group of 70, a moderate caucus of approximately 25 members was set up in early May...
...On April 28 the group adopted a six-point resolution for settlement of the crisis, and the following day it launched a massive publicity campaign to stimulate support on campus...
...No wonder there has long been an undercurrent of sullen hostility among faculty and students toward all parts of the university bureaucracy...
...One group of faculty and students was chased by mounted police across Broadway, where several found refuge by climbing a construction crane...
...What precise shape the nouveau regime will take it is too early to attempt to guess...
...The leading figures were Vice Dean of the College Thomas Colahan and Professors Daniel Bell and Eugene Galan-ter...
...They did, however, hope to politicize the student body, radicalize the faculty, and discredit the establishment by systematically provoking a "bust...
...The tinder has consisted, to begin with, of some conditions affecting all of American society in the 1960s, or certainly all Americans in their late teens and early 20s: the dismay and despair over Vietnam that turns into grim outrage in the minds of many young people...
...For teachers of law and business there are vast opportunities of spare-time consulting...
...6. Joint Committee on Disciplinary Affairs...
...After hours of ominous expectancy, plainclothesmen started wrestling with students taunting the police...
...One faculty member who had joined our ledge patrol countermanded several instructions I gave in an effort to prevent a riot, and a number of our meetings in Philosophy were disrupted by alarmist rumors...
...The ifg held that the problem posed by the second phase of the strike differed from the sit-in issues in several ways...
...the university's withdrawal from membership in the Institute for Defense Analyses, with Grayson Kirk remaining on the Institute's board in some ill-defined "personal" capacity to provide "continuity...
...Elsewhere there were reports of police using excessive force...
...the trouble is they imagine themselves the best judges of how to spend the money they have raised...
...Kirk's and Truman's offices in Low Library were held by sds members and other New Left sympathizers...
...Headpatches, black eyes, and arm-slings became a common sight on campus, but I noticed no visible battle wounds among those taken to the precincts and Court House...
...The Commission, appointed by the Executive Committee, is inquiring into "the chronology of events leading up to the recent disturbances on the campus, and the underlying causes of those disturbances...
...There was much frantic scurrying between the various buildings...
...From the beginning our efforts were directed at exploring the possibilities of negotiation...
...the university," and suggested immediate steps for settling or obviating the post-police raid strike...
...Few persons on campus managed to snatch more than two or three hours of sleep per night...
...Above all, the social life of Columbia faculty, unlike that of small-town or rural campuses, is not a busman's holiday: No one has to see his colleagues off the campus if he doesn't genuinely like them...
...Made up of representatives from the various occupied buildings, it took its stand on the Six Demands: amnesty...
...This multiplicity of regulations soon proved impossible to apply as tension mounted and crowds around Low increased...
...When the strike sympathizers took to throwing food through the open window of Low, I became fully aware that the issue was not food, that their target was to destroy the credibility of the Ad Hoc Group as mediators...
...Hamilton Hall became the headquarters of the black students...
...To many of them, the pursuit of regular studies is only a means of training for political and revolutionary activity...
...And just as the National Assembly of 1789 transformed itself into a constituent assembly, so many of those dedicated to the dream of a better Columbia are pinning their hopes on some assemblee con-stituante, perhaps including trustees, administrators, faculty, and students, to fill the institutional vacuum with new and more rational laws...
...fortunately these were soon taken over by university guards, reinforced by police...
...He is presentable, affable, and well-mannered...
...Yet this decision evolved only after systematic testing and abuse of each of our previous regulations by strike sympathizers outside, and in some cases by the opposing Majority Coalition as well...
...At about 3:20 a.m...
...In every other field there has been a marked downward movement in relation to other universities, as the following sampling indicates: Economics down from 4 to 14, English 5 to 10, Geology 1 to 6, History 2 to 9, Mathematics 7 to 15, Philosophy 4 to 11, Physics 3 to 12, Political Science 4 to 9, Zoology 3 to 18...
...They made it clear that this was not part of the sit-in but rather an effort to prevent "liberation" attempts from the neighboring Mathematics building...
...Of course we have had our Bastille, the storming of five university buildings...
...Columbia must have seemed extremely inviting and vulnerable...
...Released on my own recognizance, I learned that I had been the only senior faculty member arrested...
...a large university-controlled gymnasium to be built in a city park, with a segregated entrance to its basement space as a generous service to the Harlem community...
...lifting the ban on indoor demonstrations...
...Some teachers and students started to hold "liberation classes" on subjects outside the normal curriculum, including homosexuality and guerrilla tactics...
...For the political scientist there is the Council on Foreign Relations...
...The strongest basis for this hope is the fact that the inadequacies of the ancien regime are now amply clear to almost everyone...
...The other was a diffuse assemblage of radicals, many of them graduate students in the social sciences who, without approving sds' sometimes erratic tactics, share its thirst for direct political action and its profound distrust of established institutions...
...He and Mark Rudd act as joint spokesmen, and there are seven others on the group's steering committee...
...Tempers cooled gradually as the university authorities adopted permissive policies concerning class meetings and grading, as police were withdrawn from the campus, as the strikers tried to redefine a set of demands, and as thoughts turned to the problems of reconstructing a better university...
...The more seriously injured, though, were those who had assembled to block police, or to quietly watch the proceedings from plazas and lawns...
...A particular consequence of this baronial structure has been that the professional schools, with their affluent constituencies of lawyers, engineers, or corporation executives, have thrived and the more strictly academic divisions—the College, Graduate Faculties, General Studies —have languished...
...By the end of the initial week of the crisis, neither Kirk nor Truman would take a public stand without first securing the backing of some formal or informal faculty group...
...Rumors were rife...
...A look at some Columbia statistics provides a significant clue to the mounting sense of malaise pervading all parts of the university during the last few decades...
...At Hamilton Hall, where Human Rights Commissioner William Booth was watching the proceedings with evident approval, both the police and the black students accomplished the arrest without violence...
...In the academic year 1946-47, Columbia University (excluding Barnard and Teachers College) had 8,211 undergraduate and graduate students, 2,331 officers of instruction, and 78 officers of administration (not counting faculty members in administrative posts...
...The total picture has been one not DAVID TRUMAN of confederation, but of quarrelling feudal baronies...
...Columbia has barely been a confederation of autonomous units...
...In all, a total of four buildings and part of a fifth were occupied...
...Kirk, Truman, and other administrators operating from the lower floor of Low Library may have felt it would be preferable to have the inevitable police action sooner rather than later...
...Elizabeth Beaujour, and Mr...
...By mid-May that question was still unresolved, but there were grounds for optimism...
...Where press and television cameras were present, there was comparable police restraint...
...The young rebels in the buildings apparently did not yearn to become martyrs...
...Essentially, the upheaval at Columbia breaks down into two phases...
...Pickets have become less menacing and diminished in number...
...A broad middle range of students and faculty met at regular class hours, but on lawns, in apartments, or in neighborhood coffeehouses...
...For all there is a wide choice of museums, concerts, European films...
...Students and faculty members in sympathy with the strikers or in antipathy to the police began congregating before the buildings...
...Then there are the psychological and social roots of today's youthful rebelliousness...
...In response to the College faculty resolution of April 24, proposing a tripartite commission on discipline, Kirk the next day appointed a committee consisting of professors Galanter, Carl Hovde and Lionel Trilling to nominate the personnel and devise the procedures for such a commission...
...By Monday April 29 a large number of faculty, with myself in charge, were wedged between hostile forces...
...Luckily, I was not alone...
...The week of the sit-in saw the campus divide into three hostile camps—striking students, the administration, and an Ad Hoc Faculty Group that actively sought to mediate and even to force a setdement...
...In short, faculty members are free to devote time to their students, to their writing, to their moonlighting or their leisure activities—on condition that they leave power to an anonymous and remote bureaucracy of university administrators...
...9. Executive Committee of May 20, 1968 9 the Faculty...
...on April 30, in a series of rapid events that would have seemed comical under less tense circumstances, I found myself being thrust into a paddy wagon by two plainclothesmen and two uniformed policemen...
...3,466 teachers, and 723 administrators...
...But the traumatic experience of the police bust of April 30 has placed on the general agenda of campus meetings small or large an issue far more fundamental and significant than Grayson Kirk's disastrous malapropisms, than the Six Strike Demands, or even questions of amnesty vs...
...7. Ad Hoc Faculty Group?II...
...Yet it is these divisions, more than any others, that must be strengthened if Columbia's old reputation in the academic world is to be restored...
...Like the French Revolution, too, the Columbia upheaval has had its tinder and its spark...
...Eli Ginzburg, Poly-karp Kusch, William Leuchtenburg, Metzger, Ernest Nagel, and Trilling, Mrs...
...Let me list briefly, in rough chronological order, the most prominent faculty and student groups that have sprung up on the campus since April 23: 1. Informal meetings...
...Even at the height of the current difficulties, while noticeably shaken and aged, he presided over two emergency meetings of the Joint Faculties with calm and poise, gallantly yielding the chair to one of his deans when the discussion turned critical of his personal role...
...A group of students opposed to the strikers, led by a College senior, Paul Vilardi, it claimed to have collected 1,700 signatures on a petition condemning the sit-in, but active membership hardly exceeded 200...
...In a statement on the long-range reconstructing of the university published May 5, this group urged "effective student and teaching staff participation in decisionmaking within...
...and that inside the "Liberated John" there had been several "community toothbrushes" and a "community box of Tampax...
...The university faculties, somnolent and separate under the ancient by-laws, have met in emergency joint session much as did the Three Estates merged in the National Assembly...
...In the Mathematics building an even more radical group formed a "commune," hoisted red flags on the roof and displayed a huge picture of Karl Marx in the window...
...The ifg has therefore proposed "a restructuring of the university to ensure effective student and teaching staff participation in decision making" at all levels...
...At my apartment a telegram awaited me announcing another emergency meeting of the Joint Faculties...
...plainclothesmen tried to gather information by various means...
...Back on campus, I found that the hopes and apprehensions that I had entertained in my 12 hours of detention were widely shared...
...Just 10 days after the police raid, there even was a public academic discussion by nationally renowned scholars from inside and outside Columbia which centered on the question, "What Is a University...
...Columbia's upheaval, like any political revolution, has resulted in a complete disarray if not collapse of traditional legal institutions...
...Grayson Louis Kirk, by grace of the Board of Trustees absolute monarch of Morningside Heights, has continually displayed no less incompetence and indifference than did Louis XVI...
...Appointed on May 1 by William E. Petersen, chairman of the Board, and given a mandate "to study and recommend changes in the basic structure of the university...
...It now seems possible that the strike, without being officially negotiated or settled, will gradually peter out—especially as vacation time draws students and faculty alike to Europe, to the beaches, or to the mountains...
...dropping charges against those arrested at the gymnasium site...
...strikers from the occupied buildings convened for Strike Coordinating Committee meetings in the student lounges of Ferris Booth Hall...
Vol. 51 • May 1968 • No. 11
