Back to School
ROCHE, JOHN P.
Thinking Aloud BACK TO SCHOOL BY JOHN P. ROCHE As another academic year begins, nervous administrators are busy strengthening campus security forces, moving rare books to fireproof sanctuaries,...
...By May 1970, it was fair to say that the disciplinary procedures of most American universities were a campus joke...
...Under the banner of "eliminating repression," a war will in fact be fought to eliminate intellectual standards...
...The day our faculty voted, in effect, an academic amnesty, the exodus began...
...The authority structure so long taken for granted proved a fiction...
...To say that students dislike final exams is not to insult them...
...still, there they are, and no one has ever discovered a satisfactory alternative technique of evaluating large numbers of students...
...And in the collegiate background there are ominous rumors of impending bankruptcy: University presidents these days make Wall Street "bears" sound positively rosy...
...Initially the impact was slight, but then came the shootings at Kent State and the demand for a nationwide "student strike...
...When President Nixon launched the Cambodian operation, the campus extremists leaped into action...
...the other, the vast majority who were also demanding that the university close down—while packing for Europe...
...Not only did the faculty capitulate, but it begged the militants for absolution...
...I hated finals, and my wife tells me that they gave her insomnia for a week...
...The revolutionaries were thus left isolated, but their activities over the past two years began to have a cumulative weight...
...Remember that all of this activity was occurrina on the margin of academic life...
...Trie overwhelming majority of the roughly 7 million college students were, if not overtly hostile, inert...
...They were unwilling to call the police, yet incapable of policing themselves...
...The remainder were not out marching—they were scattered on the beaches from here to St...
...A tiny handful of militants (many of them certifiable nuts) was vigorously chop-pine away at every symbol of authority in the academy...
...It is easy to blame the students for this disastrous trend, yet the real source of the problem is the behavior of their elders...
...Not toward revolution, however, but toward converting institutions of higher learning into a combination welfare program and progressive kindergarten...
...University presidents rushed to disassociate themselves from American society—and then wondered why the money wasn't coming in...
...I wish, for example, that I could grade my students on the basis of intimate personal knowledge of their work, but I had 160 students in American Government last semester, and intimacy cannot be mass-produced...
...But when the extremists came roaring in with their strike demand in May 1970, the "silent majority" brightened up considerably: What a perfectly beautiful opportunity to cancel final exams...
...Let me demonstrate my point by recalling briefly the sequence of events in May 1970...
...There has been an enormous amount of random violence (little of which makes the press), ranging from arson to larceny to property damage to simple old-fashioned assault and battery...
...The real payoff came from disruptive action—with a little help from tv cameras and some noisy, obscene interviews with journalists, one could emerge as a Student Leader, a Spokesman for a Generation...
...He drew on theological evidence in most learned fashion, and was well into his second hour when the old man gently inquired, "Come, come, my son—what is the girl's name...
...Term papers are due, reading must be completed, final exams are in the offing...
...The addiction of college faculties to the "youth culture" has created a paradoxical and tragic situation: When adults behave like children, whom can children emulate...
...Thinking Aloud BACK TO SCHOOL BY JOHN P. ROCHE As another academic year begins, nervous administrators are busy strengthening campus security forces, moving rare books to fireproof sanctuaries, and privately wondering why they didn't join the Green Berets and get combat pay...
...In short, one must catch up with the work one has not done over the semester or, in some cases, the year...
...The masses are in motion, as the Marxists would say...
...For the first time a significant mass of students supported the demands of a small extremist minority—rather than merely reacting to its treatment...
...The Chicago trial was the radicals' model—and the faculty has no power to punish for contempt of court...
...Events last May marked a qualitative change in the academic atmosphere, but for reasons quite different from those usually advanced...
...President Nixon and probably half a dozen educational organizations have commissions of inquiry on the prowl, trying to identify the sources of campus violence...
...The latter couldn't organize a milk route, much less a revolution, but the willingness of nonideological students to use radical political demands as a means of destroying academic standards is a frightening precedent...
...Nor was it too troubled by racism...
...At that time, they offered the proposition that the murders of Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, and the general student commitment to "relevance" (the McCarthy campaign), had made it impossible tor a serious student to concentrate on mere academic work...
...There were two worlds on campus in May: one, the usual tiny group of agitators demanding that the university close down so that students could meditate and work on the Revolution...
...One is reminded of the young priest who was explaining at great length to his bishop the doubts he had about the requirement of celibacy...
...Curiously, the revolt of the silent majority against exams was far more disturbing than the whooping and yowling of the militants...
...Faculties, in attempting to counter charges that American campuses (probably the freest enclaves in the world) are oppressive and reactionary, managed to undermine the very structure of authority...
...With rare exceptions, college and university faculties refused to agree and, more important, the radical view did not catch on with the mass of students...
...Thirteen out of 160 students took my final exam...
...5) 1970, K.F.S...
...They did not do so because they were "radicalized" (every poll indicates that on most important issues students divide roughly the way their parents do...
...The radical groups on campus moved in to capitalize on this state of jitters, dusting off a scenario they first tried out in 1968...
...about a third of our student body vanished in two days...
...Young people go to college in part to find adults who will provide them with models for their lives...
...Tropez...
...May, of course, is the cruelcst academic month of all, the time of reckoning...
...Instead, before their amazed eyes, deans and professors rushed to appease the extremists...
...When serious disciplinary efforts were made (and one professor of ray acquaintance spent over 200 hours on a judicial committee), the extremists would deliberately try to sabotage the hearings, and harass the members with uglv midnieht phone calls, nasty anonv-mous threats and plain character assassination...
...Administrations and faculties, bemused by the high theory of racism, repression, imperialism, etc., neglected to ask the girl's name...
...In the name of the democratic principle, a grading system will be labeled an "act of repression...
...Now the silent majority on campus was not really terribly concerned about Vietnam...
...Gradually the word spread throughout the student population: "The Emperor has no clothes...
...it is a clinical statement analogous to saying cats dislike water...
...They were puzzled, too: Accepting the mvth of authority, thev kept waiting for the disrupters to be put down, expelled, jailed...
...And from this point on, they will constantly be paying the price for their fixation with abstractions—a fixation which, by the way, provided a convenient excuse for running away from a fight...
...but confronted with the task of controlling and punishing it, most institutions folded...
...They urged that finals be canceled, or boycotted, and that a Pass/Fail grading system be instituted...
...Much of it has been sheer hooliganism cloaked in revolutionary theory...
...Lofty pretexts can always be found for closing a school if the mass of students are ready to act on their own selfish reasons...
...they acted as they did because they suddenly realized that "radicalism" was a lovely vehicle for beating the academic system...
...The psychological pressure on campus was now at its annual peak...
...This apprehensive mood is completely justified...
Vol. 53 • September 1970 • No. 17
