# Healy v. James/Separate Douglas

* Court Documents
* Case Syllabus
* Opinion of the Court
* Concurring Opinions Burger Rehnquist
* Separate Opinion Douglas
[p196] MR. JUSTICE DOUGLAS.
While I join the opinion of the Court, I add a few words.
As Dr. Birenbaum says, the status quo of the college or university is the governing body (trustees or overseers), administrative officers, who include caretakers, and the police, and the faculty. Those groups have well-defined or vaguely inferred values to perpetuate. The customary technique has been to conceive of the minds of students as receptacles for the information which the faculty have garnered over the years. Education is commonly thought of as the process of filling the receptacles with what the faculty in its wisdom deems fit and proper.
Many, inside and out of faculty circles, realize that one of the main problems of faculty members is their own re-education or re-orientation. Some have narrow specialties that are hardly relevant to modern times. History has passed others by, leaving them interesting relics of a bygone day. More often than not they represent those who withered under the pressures of McCarthyism or other forces of conformity and represent [p197] but a timid replica of those who once brought distinction to the ideal of academic freedom.
The confrontation between them and the oncoming students has often been upsetting. The problem is not one of choosing sides. Students—who, by reason of the Twenty-sixth Amendment, become eligible to vote when 18 years of age—are adults who are members of the college or university community. Their interests and concerns are often quite different from those of the faculty. They often have values, views, and ideologies that are at war with the ones which the college has traditionally espoused or indoctrinated. When they ask for change, they, the students, speak in the tradition of Jefferson and Madison and the First Amendment.
The First Amendment does not authorize violence. But it does authorize advocacy, group activities, and espousal of change.
The present case is minuscule in the events of the 60's and 70's. But the fact that it has to come here for ultimate resolution indicates the sickness of our academic world, measured by First Amendment standards. Students as well as faculty are entitled to credentials in their search for truth. If we are to become an integrated, adult society, rather than a stubborn status quo opposed to change, students and faculties should have communal interests in which each age learns from the other. Without ferment of one kind or another, a college or university (like a federal agency or other human institution) becomes a useless appendage to a society which traditionally has reflected the spirit of rebellion.

## Appendix to Opinion of Douglas, J.

"A compulsory ghetto fails as a community because its inhabitants lack the power to develop common goals and to pursue them effectively together. It fails too [p198] because of a fatal disconnection between the possession and use of power and the cognition that knowledge, as a form of power, carries with it political responsibility. In these respects the campus is now like the compulsory ghetto.
"Those who deplore a view of the university in terms of its powerful political role in American society must account for the institution's use of political power in its own terms, for its own purposes. I have come to feel lately—partly, I guess, because of the legal reasoning styles to which I have been exposed—that those playing around with the structure of their universities these days are playing with tinker toys. New committees, new senates and new student-participation formulae do not necessarily mean that anything has changed. Indeed, if Berkeley, Columbia, Harvard and Chicago are valid example, restructuring turns out to be one of the brilliant new inventions for sustaining the status quo. The vested interests and essential privileges involved in current efforts to restructure the university have yet completely to surface. A substantial part of our melting iceberg is still below the waterline.
"That part of the student critique of the university which most deserves our attention bears upon what we teach, how we teach it, and the terms on which it is taught. One of the interesting things their critique points out is that our building programs, corporate investments, relationships to the immediate community and to the society, and our views of citizenship inside the university, all turn out to be projections and applications of what we call or have called education. Their critique suggests the perfectly absurd conclusion that there is a relationship between their long hair and our long war, between being a nurse and being a Negro, between the freshman political-science course and the pollution of fresh air, between education for freedom and [p199] being free. Obviously, the contemporary American student activist is crazy.
"We have probably made a mistake by revealing to our students that there really is too much to know, and only one way to learn it—our way. They have come to accept this as gospel, and it has encouraged them to view curriculum development as essentially a sophisticated art of selection, interpretation and emphasis in which they have a vested interest. Understanding this, naturally they have begun to ask the key political questions bearing upon our vested interests and privileges: What experience and talent should be empowered to select? Who should be empowered to employ those who will interpret, and to deploy the wealth required to support the enterprise?
"Obviously the control over who will be kept out and over punishment-and-reward systems inside is extremely important. While our students still generally concede that the older adults who teach them may know something they don't, they are also asserting the uniqueness of their own experience, claiming that they may know something which those now in charge don't. They have returned to the kindergarten level to rediscover a principle long revered in American education—that the student plays a positive and active role, that he has something definite and essential to contribute to his own education.
"The young—suspended precariously in a society obsessed by Vietnam violence, race violence, crime violence and culture violence—are restating the eternal questions about education: What is important to learn, and how may people best learn together? Regarding these enduring questions, they are also asking the eternal question of a society which officially encourages its young to grow up free (even while keeping them in bondage), namely: Who shall judge? Regarding the problems [p200] these questions suggest, academic tradition responds through an uptight delineation of jurisdictions and powers within the university.
"Today's campus disruptions were born in the years 1776 to 1787. Although the mind of Thomas Jefferson was anchored in the traditions of Heidelberg, Oxford, Paris, Bologna, Rome, Greece, the religions of the early Christians and the ancient Hebrews, minds like his transformed the old into something quite new, as in the case of his proposal for a university in Virginia. What was created then was not, of course, the latest thing, nor was it necessarily the Truth. But it was an adventure, a genuine new departure, unlike most of the institutions of learning we have created in this country since the Morrill Act—that is, most of our higher-education establishment.
"The traditions of the university in the West are anti- if not counter-revolutionary. Operating within these traditions, the university has produced revolutionary knowledge, but institutionally the uses of the knowledge have been directed mainly toward the confirmation of the status quo, particularly the political and cultural status quo. The themes of peace, integration, equality, freedom and the humane uses of knowledge are ones which traditionally fall behind the purview of the university.
"But in principle the main themes of our society run counter to this deployment of knowledge. In spite of Vietnam, poverty, racism and the overbearing logic of our technology—in spite of Bedford-Stuyvesant—the main themes of our country, in principle, were and still are revolutionary. They are reflected in such questions as these: Can the revolutionary knowledge developed in the universities be used humanely, to conform with what Jefferson and his colleagues apparently meant? What [p201] does quality mean, and whatever it meant or means, can we still achieve a version of it consistent with this adventure? Are reason and democracy really consistent? Is war in behalf of peace, given what we know now, realistic? Can Negroes who were once property suddenly become people? Are some genocides more decent than others, some cesspools more fragrant than others?
"In any event, I know that Bedford-Stuyvesant is crammed full of red-white-and-blue Americans. They really believe that we ought to practice what we preach, and that's the problem. We've oversold America to ourselves, and so many of my very good friends—looking at the street violence and the circuses in the courts and on the campuses—who believe we confront a deeply un-American phenomenon, who think we face a serious threat to American values, completely misread what is going on there. We face a vibrant, far-reading reassertion of what this country claims, what it has always claimed it is."
W. Birenbaum, Something For Everybody Is Not Enough 67-69, 248-249.

## Notes

* ↑ See the Appendix to this opinion.