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MAX ASCOLI

660 MADISON AVENUE
NEW YORK, N.Y. 10021

(212) TE 2-8800

May 16, 1969

Dear Henry:

As soon as I came back to town, I started working on the little essay you had asked me to write. The research, part of which you will see here enclosed, was rather de-moralizing. On Friday the 9th, I read in The New York Times a story from Key Biscayne, entitled "Nixon to Give Details of Views on Campus Unrest," in which the two principal intellectuals-in-residence--Henry Kissinger and Pat Moynihan--were repeatedly mentioned. The following day, there was another piece, again from Key Biscayne, headed "Nixon to Address Ohio State's Graduating Seniors." The third and shortest report, from the same Key, was mostly about Mr. Ziegler, cautioning against concluding . . .

I reached a conclusion on my own: things have gone too far, and the situation is irretrievable. A few days ago, however, I felt quite strongly that a promise to Henry is one on which I cannot wesh. So here is the opus.

Needless to say, I would like you to read it, but considering how overburdened with work you are, I will in no way be offended if you send back the paper ungraded. Hell, our friendship is such that nothing can really hurt it.

If you think that my "Notes on the Campus Rebellions" and the brief collection of statements can usefully be read by the President, I shall be honored. If the President or, within limits you will understand, somebody in his entourage wants to discuss them with me, I will be happy to come to Washington. But, as I said before, I really think it is much too late, and possibly what I have written, duly revised, can be of greater use to the President himself if I give it to a national publication. In fact, this is what I shall do if I don't receive word from you by the end of next week.

NOTES ON THE CAMPUS REBELLIONS

Why could it happen, and why did it happen here? a number of eminent people, the President first of all, have asked. The key word is _it_: a succession of conflagrations and racial disruptions centered or converging on the campuses of a nation that only too recently had found itself playing the role of example to the world. There is little sense in comparing our four-year predicament from Berkeley on to the uprising at the Sorbonne.

Among the whys it could happen here, one is this nation's inexperience with revolution. The revolution to which the United States owes its birth is something else again, for it secured the centuries-old freedoms of the Mother Country that the Founding Fathers codified according to the needs of the newborn nation. France and England have repeatedly gone through chaos, and then emerged from it. In the Old World--Russia, Italy or Spain--they have had their troubles with anarchic uprisings. America had to deal with individual anarchists either of the native, Thoreau type or with alien practitioners of subversion.

The principle became ingrained here that vastity and complexity had immunized our country from the sweep of ideological revolution or totalitarian dictatorship. In the universities the social sciences and allied disciplines did their best to maintain this immunity by neglecting ideologies and practicing birth control of ideas. Only facts counted, as if they had all been born free and equal, and the dusty leftovers of happenings called facts were assiduously piled up by scholars.

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No wonder many college students were bored, and enterprising professors who had obtained tenure went after remunerative government or foundation assignments. No wonder also that in a large number of academic institutions there was a lack of contact between students and teachers. By and large, there was a superabundance of students and only infrequently could the leavening influence of teachers be effective. The substance of culture prepared for mass consumption in the multiversities and universities turned thinner and thinner, and ideas, or even their ersatz, were carefully pasteurized.

In 1964, on the largest campus of the largest multiversity, a substitute for ideas was accidentally discovered: *loquor ergo sum* (I talk, therefore I exist). It is strange that it had not happened before or on some other campuses. At Berkeley, there was a group of students who during the summer had trained themselves to take chances by going South. The new chance they took proved immensely rewarding. They practiced participatory democracy before re-discovering the old notion. The *loquor ergo sum* principle took the name of Free Speech Movement. The meaning was that the more one talks, the more of a man he is; the more people yell in unison without letting anyone utter a single antagonistic word, the more power they get. The Berkeley rebels celebrated in their own way their freedom from thinking, and gained worldwide notoriety in intellectual communities all over the world. Thinking is not easy, while anybody can talk and yell. From those 1964 days on, the exaltation of dissent started. Dissent from what? From anything you want, my boy, but dissent you must.

Mario Savio, the leader of the Berkeley movement, delivered at Sproul Hall an address that later was used in an article entitled, "An End to History."

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He did not appear to find much satisfaction in his success. "This free-speech fight points up a fascinating aspect of contemporary campus life. Students are permitted to talk all they want so long as their speech has no consequences."

This statement is echoed by Professor Herbert Marcuse, of the University of California at San Diego. In his Political Preface, 1966, to *Eros and Civilization*, he wrote: "In and against the deadly efficient organization of the affluent society, not only radical protest, but even the attempt to formulate, to articulate, to give word to protest, assume a childlike, ridiculous immaturity. Thus it is ridiculous and perhaps 'logical' that the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley terminated in the row caused by the appearance of a sign with the four-letter word."

Unbridled, massive loquacity having been authoritatively hailed as identical to freedom of speech, it could be turned against other targets. And so it was: in 1965, the Teach-Ins started. There on the campuses, antiwar students were joined and supported by many a youngster emeritus from the faculties. Even those who held qualified opinions against the Vietnam war had an exceedingly hard time trying to argue against the mobs who wanted the war stopped--right now. This unreflective quality is characteristic of the movements à la Berkeley.

Just as "free speech" came to mean four-letter speech, so the peace advocated at the Teach-Ins was not related to our times and to our opponent: it meant just peace at any price--now. Yet it is remarkable how many people, worthy of their high repute, for quite some time have not been able to mention the war in Vietnam without calling it immoral or criminal--a war that, for our own good, should end in our defeat.

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The exaltation of youth for its own sake, the disdain for anybody over thirty, is disconcerting for a man like this writer, who had to leave his native country at the time of "Giovinezza, Giovinezza." The Negroes, too, follow the same self-seeking trend: superior education has to be provided for all the blacks just because they are black, and of course their place in society must be conquered by black power. Every aim has to be reached for the hell of it.

In the universities the drives for student power, youth power, black power, meet and, as far as one can see, do not collide. Rather, they pretend to have separate but equal status, and occasionally they give a hand to each other--as, for instance, the SDS and the Negroes in favor of negritude.

American culture, like America itself, is part of the western world and, until now, a fantastically successful outgrowth of it. One of the characteristics of western culture has been the ease with which it has given cultural citizenship to men from every part of the world, while becoming enriched in the process. The universities in this country cannot become centers of cultural fragmentation on a racial basis without becoming responsible for the ultimate fragmentation of the country. They do not belong to the trustees or to the faculties or to the students, they belong to history--a history that this country has in largest part inherited--and are entrusted in various degrees to different groups of pro tem beneficiaries. Each one of the fragments of this historical heritage can be irretrievably wasted away.

The answer, it has been said, is academic self-government. Within

limits this is true, provided we are clear that academic self-government
does not mean sovereignty or, as Attorney General Mitchell put it, extra-
territoriality. The inner strength of a university and the position it
establishes for itself in the cultural community are a large-scale repro-
duction of man's destiny: a balance between inner and outer world reflect-
ing the role man plays in the various collective entities he comes to
belong to. Man can be free if he works at it, but he is not exempted from
death. The same is true for the universities. President Nixon said it:

"... violence or the threat of violence may never be permitted to influence
the actions or judgments of the university community. Once it does the
community, almost by definition, ceases to be a university."

Our government cannot force the universities to be free, but from the
universities has started the eradication of freedom in our country.
Academic self-government can rule the inner and outer life of an academic
community: in a microcosmic way each polis moves according to its own laws
finite
as part of a/system which is not exempt from exhaustion. The system and
each of its components have a margin of freedom but, as has happened in
a number of academic communities, when freedom is extinguished then the
resulting condition is one of national danger. "The Federal Government,"
the President said, "cannot, should not--must not--enforce" the principle
of intellectual freedom, which, in the preceding paragraph, he had stated
"is in danger in America. . . . Violence--physical violence, physical
intimidation--is seemingly on its way to becoming an accepted, or at all
events a normal and not to be avoided element in the clash of opinion
within university confines. . . . Anyone with the least understanding of

the history of freedom will know that this has invariably meant not only political disaster to those nations that have submitted to such forces of obfuscation and repression, but cultural calamity as well. It is not too strong a statement to declare that this is the way civilizations begin to die." When this happens, the Federal government, according to the President, can do nothing. Yet he knows that he is not the Federal government but only its Chief Executive.

Congress is not patient and is constantly exposed to the dangers of hasty or wrong legislation. For the right conduct of government, the President cannot disassociate himself from Congress. Indeed, one must hope that he is exerting a soothing, harmonizing influence on the many Senate or House committees engaged in preparing legislation on campus or racial disorders.

He or his office can also urge the local or state authorities to act. We all remember the picture of James A. Perkins, president of Cornell, beaming with the leaders of the SDS and the Afro-American Society, as if all were saying, "cheese, cheese." As far as one knows, the Harvard students who threw the deans out of University Hall are still at large. Can Cornell and Harvard be called free institutions? A competent man with a competent staff, like Attorney General Mitchell, should be able to find a way to put the universities into receivership. Let's not forget that, whether Governor Faubus liked it or not, Dwight Eisenhower sent detachments of the 101st Airborne Division to Little Rock.

Harry Truman kept a motto on his desk: THE BUCK STOPS HERE. Even the buck of a university headed by a weak man may end on that desk in the Oval Room.

The New York Times, the most authoritative organ of woolly thinking
in our country has adopted the position that, to appease the students,
we need to settle the war in Vietnam.

Yet the President can be sure that the domestic Viet Cong will never
make peace, even after Ho Chi Minh enters Saigon, and every single GI is
back from Vietnam. President Nixon should keep the example of Abraham
Lincoln constantly in mind. No one of Mr. Nixon's predecessors ever took
such liberties with the laws of the land as did Abe Lincoln, but he saved
the Union. President Nixon faces an even harder task, for he must save
the Union not from a civil but a guerrilla war.

SOME STATEMENTS ON THE CAMPUS SITUATION

I. Flattery of Students

1. Cox Commission Report: "The present generation of young people in our universities is the best informed, the most intelligent, and the most idealistic this country has ever known. This is the experience of teachers everywhere."

2. Muscatine Report: "The students arrested in Sproul Hall also included an unusual percentage of scholastically able young people. Their grades were significantly higher than those of the average student." "On the whole, support (for the FSM) was greater among those students with high scholastic records than among those with low records."

3. President Nixon (Chamber of Commerce, April 29): "... we do have a younger generation which is ... the best educated younger generation that we have ever had, more deeply motivated than any that we have ever had, one that deeply cares about America, about our system and about our educational system. We may not agree with them, but they do care."

4. Secretary Finch, before the Green subcommittee, April 18: "Nor can we assume, out of hand, that campus conflict is simply conflict for its own sake: in many instances, it is solidly based in legitimate grievance."

5. Rev. Theodore M. Hesburgh, letter to Vice President Agnew, Feb. 27: "The vast majority of university and college students today are a very promising and highly attractive group of persons: They are more informed, more widely read, better educated, more idealistic and more deeply sensitive to crucial moral issues in our times, more likely to dedicate themselves to good rather than selfish goals than any past generation of students I have known."

II. <u>Use of "politicize" by the President</u> in statement of March 22: "Increasingly it is clear that this violence is directed to a clearly perceived and altogether too conceivable objective: not only to politicize the student bodies of our educational institutions, but to politicize the institution as well."

The President should know what politics is, for he has been a life-long practitioner of that profession. The New Left has coined a new verb, which means the elimination of competitive politics, or the substitution of representative by participatory democracy. After all, the President does not belong to the New Left.

III. <u>Mention of Latin American universities</u>: President Nixon to Chamber of Commerce, April 28: "Look to the countries to the south of us, our closest neighbors, our closest friends -- very proud countries, many great and old universities. Those universities, most of them, went through a revolution similar to ours 100 years ago."

"The students won... And the result is that the educational system, as far as higher education is concerned, in Latin America generally, is one of the most inferior in the world. I say let us not let it happen here in the United States of America."

The student movement began in the twenties in the countries under dictatorship. Romulo Betancourt was one of the leaders in Venezuela. I went to Latin America for Nelson Rockefeller during the war and spent several weeks in Argentina and Chile, the two countries that had not yet broken relations with the Axis. It was not difficult for me to find and to make friends with the fairly large number of Italian and German professors that had found shelter, particularly in the Argentinian and Brazilian universities. In the departments of philosophy and humanities

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the university standards in Santiago, Chile, Sao Paulo, Brazil, and at
two universities in Buenos Aires and one in Cordoba were if anything
superior to those of the United States. The law schools could not be
compared to those here but were about as good as the best pre-Mussolini
law schools in Italy. This was, I repeat, in 1943, some years after 1869,
and at the Latin American universities I visited I found no evidence of
student rebellion or agitation for self-government. However, there was
something queer at the University of Havana in 1941, when Batista for the
first time was in command. Again, 1941 was later than 1869. Have they
any fact checkers at the White House?

IV. Praise of dissent, accompanied usually by the effort to separate constructive from destructive:

1. American Council on Education, April 17: "Recognizing the right of and even the necessity for constructive dissent--and allowing for inevitable arguments over what is in fact constructive--certain axioms must be accepted as basic to the operation of any university...." A first draft of this document was written at a secret meeting of 28 university presidents and foundation officials at a motel near Chicago's O'Hare Airport two weeks before, according to the New York Times of April 18. Among those present was Nathan Pusey. Disorders at Harvard started on April 9.

2. Secretary Finch, April 18: "The line between legitimate dissent and intolerable disruption is hard to draw--sometimes, indeed, even within the life-cycle of a particular campus outbreak."

3. President Nixon to Chamber of Commerce, April 29: "First, with regard to that great problem of dissent on the college and university campuses, let us recognize that this is a very healthy force when we consider it at its best."

V. <u>Student Participation, right to:</u>

1. Attorney General *Mitchell*, May 1: "...students, faculty and administration officials should all participate, in some measure, in the decision-making process. What this means, at a minimum, is that university administrators must offer a serious forum for responsible student criticism, and--more than that--it must be clear to the students that their grievances will be honestly considered and will not be lightly dismissed under the procedural ruse of an artificial dialogue."

2. President *Nixon* was considerably more moderate on this point on April 29: "As far as our colleges and universities are concerned, I think that young people, students, are correct in asking that they have a voice-- a voice in determining what the courses should be, a voice in determining what the rules should be. But then I say that while they should have a voice, under no circumstances should they be given control of the colleges and universities."

3. Dr. James E. Allen, Jr., May 11, said students should have a larger voice in policy-making and urged the institutions to become "involved more in the concerns that affect the students outside of the university..." However, he said he did not think students should serve on the boards of trustees. "They should be consulted, not merely consulted in a passive sense but brought into the deliberations from time to time, but the final say must be in the hands of the administration."

4. Dr. *Lincoln Gordon*, president of Johns Hopkins University, said (May 8) that students should not have a direct voice in academic policy making.

VI. HEW on Antioch: The Department of Health, Education and Welfare has notified Antioch College (May 2) that it may operate its all-Negro black studies institute as long as non-blacks are not excluded solely because of race,

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# The University Crisis

## Stephen R. Graubard

The American university is gravely threatened. Events move swiftly; a system of higher education that was the envy of the world less than a decade ago may well become the institutional casualty of our time. What is endangered is not simply the loss of a vital national resource, which would be serious enough, but the destruction of one of the last props to legitimate political authority. We are confronted on the national scene with a situation whose incendiary potentialities we ought not to underestimate. The next few years are critical. Any analysis that does not take into account what the situation will be when the Vietnam war is over is short-sighted and misguided; one must start with the assumption that peace in Vietnam is imminent.

If this be the case, what ought the nation's preoccupations to be? First, with the growing evidences of a widespread, massive, and continuing loss of public confidence in American universities and in their student bodies; second, with the signs of disorientation among white youth in the United States to the point where it is possible to speak of a "cultural revolution" taking place in this country; third, with the marked militancy of black youth, increasingly separatist and increasingly hostile to (and uncomprehending of) existing institutions; finally, with the antics of the so-called "radicals," white youth to whom attention is still paid out of all proportion to their real importance.

The universities have suffered a catastrophic fall in public esteem. Everyone knows why this has occurred but few have reflected on what it may portend, and fewer still on what remedies might be appropriate. Superficially, the problem appears simple. Universities were admired so long as they were productive and tranquil; the restoration of order on the campus is clearly the pre-condition for any renewal

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of public confidence. Unwittingly, we fall into the habits learned in war; we plan our "pacification programs"; this time, our own citizens and not hostile Vietnamese will be our subjects. This is a serious misconception of the nature of the problem. Our purpose ought to be the restoration of order, obviously, but, more imperatively, we need to consider the state of American public opinion, and how that opinion has contributed to the decay of order. Joel Barlow, in 1791, suggested that what really separated the free from the oppressed of the world was simply their "habit of thinking." It is time that we gave very serious consideration to the "habit of thinking" that prevails in our society.

The mass media, so zealous in their pursuit of truth, have carried us to all the battlefronts of the world without once considering what the perpetual sight of violence would do to our beliefs and our confidence. Watts, Detroit, Newark, Saigon, Hue, Chicago, Cornell, Harvard, City College -- these are indelibly imprinted events in our minds. They have contributed to the creation of new kinds of uncertainty and disbelief; they have been transforming experiences for American men and women, young and old.

The destruction of public confidence in American higher education is not a matter to be lightly set aside, nor is it likely to be remedied when students again become obedient, responding to the imaginative leadership of presidents and deans and deliberate policies of faculties. These groups are becoming more experienced in the control of certain kinds of disorder, but it would be foolhardy to expect them to achieve total command in the foreseeable future. Public demand for new legislative controls is almost certain to continue.

Any plan to reestablish law and order on university campuses, particularly when it involves outside authority, must take into account how those within the universities will react to such an assertion of authority. Any effort to coerce the universities -- to do what students, professors, presidents and deans think to be coercion -- is to invite