Two statements illustrate the complexity of the universities’ problem:
McGeorge Bundy, president of the Ford Foundation, has expressed the view that, “While the university, like any other institution, needs government, it also should have about it as many as possible of the qualities of the utopia of the anarchist, because it is built on the notion of each man’s own responsibility for his own knowledge, utterance, work, behavior, and freedom—the maximum possible freedom. That’s got to be the flavor of the university.”
Joseph Copeland, president of the City College of New York, and a little closer to the fire bombs, told a Senate subcommittee that, “Much campus unrest and disorder have been planned by student groups whose purpose is to tear down and destroy, not to improve or reform.”
Such groups as the Students for a Democratic Society and the Progressive Labor Party were described by Copeland as “inherently treasonous, anti-American groups dedicated to the destruction of higher education, education in general, society at large, and the U. S. government . . . . With such revolutionary militants there can be no compromise and understanding.”
Stewart Alsop describes the academic year as the nastiest in American history. Yet, Harold Taylor, former president of Sarah Lawrence College, suggests that, “Because of what has happened at Harvard, Columbia, and lots of other places, the future of the liberal university has been enhanced.” In any event, most interested observers agree that whether campus violence increased hope or despair, it raised to serious consciousness the internal life of the university, and especially the private university, with the unique opportunities and problems within its ivy covered walls.
The protagonists are the same groups as in previous years: students, faculty, administrators, and trustees, who were supported or opposed by alumni, volunteer donors, and the forgotten nonvolunteer donor—the taxpayer.
However, to consider these groups simply as predictable power blocks could lead to oversimplification and misconceptions. An understanding of key sub-groups and emerging trends are necessary for a reasonably comprehensive understanding of the situation as it now exists, and how actions that may or may not be taken will determine whether the future of our private universities has been enhanced or seriously damaged.
The most visible members of the campus are the students—undergraduate and graduate. Their one common characteristic is that of being caught in the context of a waiting period of emergent adulthood—a holding pattern between puberty and the real life to come upon leaving the student life at the university, which spans the years of late adolescence to young adulthood.
This postponement of full adulthood, by not going to work but to college, creates a climate of waiting and indecision for many students which makes many of them vulnerable, at least temporarily, to the designs of a small group of radical faculty and student militants. Usually the most rebellious students include those studying the social sciences and humanities, since these are often students who do not quite know what they are preparing themselves for. A study completed in March of this year by Frank Endicott at Northwestern University, revealed that 62 per cent of students who were undecided regarding their future and had not decided on their vocational plans, were graduate students in the College of Arts and Sciences. Psychoanalysts who deal with neuroses have long recognized that the greatest mental strain comes from the need to make decisions—from the agony of choice—and apparently these graduate students are still agonizing.
The most highly publicized, but least understood individuals on the campus are included in the small group of leaders of the radical left, most of whom come from well-educated, very liberal families. Bruno Bettelheim, internationally known author and specialist in the treatment of emotionally disturbed children, described them in congressional testimony as being characterized by having had their intellectual abilities developed very highly at much too early an age, and at the expense of their emotional development. Although many are very bright, emotionally some of them remain fixated at the age of the temper tantrum. He suggests that it is this discrepancy between intellectual maturity and utter emotional immaturity that is so baffling to some non-radical members of the faculty who fail to look behind the obvious intelligence and see the inability to act rationally, and most of all, the inability to act responsibly. As persons committed to value intellectual abilities most highly, many professors are captivated by the intelligence of some of these students to the degree that they are ready to excuse their disruptiveness and violence, without realizing that it is the students’ emotional immaturity which motivates their call for immediate action and instant results.
This group, which produces many of the militant leaders according to Bettelheim, make common cause with another small group, who are outright paranoid individuals. He suggested, on the basis of many years of professional work with paranoids, that student revolts permit them to act out their paranoia to a degree that no position in a democratic society, other than as campus militants, would permit them. Their persuasiveness, in the Hitler or Stalin tradition, is now recognized as the consequence of their own paranoia and their unconscious appeal to the vague paranoid tendencies that can be found among the immature and the disgruntled. Both groups cry for action now and assume an attitude that truth is not to be sought, but “revealed” or “pronounced”—by them.
Extreme militants of both the right and the left are brothers under the skin. Followers of the extreme left can easily become those of the extreme right, as in Germany in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s where the National Socialists and the Communists worked together to eliminate the democratic Weimar government. Many former Nazis in East Germany easily became active in the later Communist government of East Germany.
These potential precursors of rebellion are likely to continue to gain admission to universities and form a small but explosive minority, especially in many of those private universities where high SAT scores and low drop-out rates have become a widely publicized status symbol. The bidding for top-standing high school scholars with confirming high SAT scores is intense among the “competitive” private universities. Other personal characteristics may be viewed by the admissions committee with the critical eye of a college football coach viewing a prospective 225-pound all-state halfback who clocks the hundred in 9.4.
The bulk of the students who enter the universities, of course, are not the neurotics, paranoids or radicals who form the hard core of professional militants. They soon become aware, however, that the admissions policy, the selection of the faculty, the curriculum, classroom instruction, and the social organization of the university typically pay little attention to their needs and problems as students. They soon begin to suspect that so long as they don’t sully the public image of their university, the faculty and administration really do not care what happens to them. And it is this vague feeling of frustration and alienation that offers radical faculty and students opportunities to exploit them for their own political aims, using the tactics of confrontation, reaction, and escalation.
Most students, however, do not seem to realize that the source of most of their frustrations is the faculty.
This group, by far the most powerful of the university, in the Ph.D. tradition of extreme specialization, seems intent on following the pattern of learning more and more about their specialties which tend to have less and less breadth. For example, chemistry professors with different specialties do not even have a terminology that is common to all fields of chemistry. After making periodic ritual bows to culture with such faculty statements as, “The rise of campus art, drama, and musical groups gives hope that the future cultural life of this country will, more and more, not only distract from but give meaning to life,” many faculty members quickly return to their own departmental islands.
Departments have become worlds unto themselves. Their faculty members may have a closer working relationship with faculty members in the same discipline at other universities than with the faculty members from other departments at their own university. Their loyalty often does not belong to their university but to their discipline. And with rare exceptions the department faculty members select, by vote, new faculty additions to the department. Approval of nominations voted by the faculty of a department is required by the dean of the college, the chancellor of the university, and the board of trustees. But, essentially, in private universities, approval is automatic, as disapproval could generate complications and possible inclusion on their “censured administrations” by the American Association of University Professors at a time of explosive growth in the demand for professors. This universal practice in private institutions, which was designed to ensure scholarly excellence in the choice of faculty, can also be used to ensure political compatibility of incoming faculty with the voting majority in a department. Thus, the stage is set for political discrimination in ostensibly the least likely of all places, the “liberal” university.
Politics appear to have surfaced in another area of faculty power. The admissions committee, representing the faculty of one of the undergraduate colleges of an eastern university, rejected applicants who held Navy Rare scholarships, even when their qualifications were superior to the average admitted candidates.
In addition to substantially determining who will and will not teach at the university and which students will be admitted, the faculty makes other decisions vital to the students. They determine the type and content of each course to be taught, the general curriculum requirements, and which students are to receive degrees. A determination more familiar to students, of course, is the assignment of individual grades.
Situations peculiar to the current national and international situation helped shape the ranks of the young faculty members who joined the faculties of the colleges of Arts and Sciences in most private universities in recent years. According to one distinguished educator, many young Ph.Ds joined college faculties because their radical beliefs, appearance, and attitude made them unacceptable in much of the world away from the more permissive campuses. A second influence on both these and other young faculty members has been the war in Vietnam. Their problem is simple but severe. Since they were exempt from military service when others were not, they can live in peace with themselves only if they are convinced that this is a vile war. Their desperate need for reassurance makes it easy for them to find common cause with hard-core faculty agitators when they select “issues” such as ROTC in an attempt to mobilize moderates.
Those faculty members who dedicate themselves to the disruption of their own universities have a tactical advantage rarely if ever found outside academe. They agitate, manipulate, and even lead student extremists in their attacks on their university, and then take their place in the emergency faculty meeting and help frame the faculty’s position and actions with regard to the “student” rebellion. Good intelligence alone has usually proven sufficient to gain victory in most wars, but this built-in Trojan horse produces odds that would make a Las Vegas blackjack dealer turn green with envy.
The effect of all this on the administrators who have the responsibility—but relatively little authority for maintaining a balance between campus freedom and order—is reflected in a headline of the July 28 issue of U. S. News and World Report: “NEEDED IMMEDIATELY: 200 COLLEGE PRESIDENTS.” The job is truly a “meat grinder.”
Logan Wilson, president of the American Council on Education suggests fewer outstanding men and women will be willing to subject themselves to the “increased rigors and decreased rewards that may be in prospect.” Our news media regularly remind us that campus radicals tend to zero in on a college president as the symbol of the educational establishment. “It is scant reassurance to note that as yet only a few of them have had their offices pillaged and burned, or their homes invaded,” according to Doctor Wilson.
A more important factor in resignations, according to some educators, is the feeling of presidents and other administrators that they do not get enough support from faculty members, according to a recent article in U. S. News and World Report. In many, if not most cases, it would be a more accurate assessment to say that the president was driven out by students who were controlled by faculty members whom the president supplied with monthly salary checks until his departure. Usually this is made possible because many of the younger professors have joined or succumbed to those attacking the president (and the university), while some of the more senior professors have been neutralized because of their fears of jeopardizing their position in what has been described by HEW Secretary Robert Finch as the most “privileged” group in our American society. They are aware of the long struggle by the American Association of University Professors which was necessary to place many of them in a position of making $25,000 for nine months[’] work, while collecting consulting fees and royalties. They receive a higher salary than the majority of our state governors—for only nine months’ work. And, unlike the governors, their job is permanent until age 68, without regard to the quality or effectiveness of their teaching. They hesitate to risk this privileged position by reforming the rules which also protect faculty members who are attempting to wreck their university, since changes might weaken their own unique privileged position, which, incidentally, is not shared by the university president and deans.
It is ironical that these exceptional privileges, which were fought for and gained in the name of academic freedom and free speech, now serve as a protective mantle for those professors who agree with Professor Herbert Marcuse that civil liberties are the opposite from what they seem, and show cynical contempt for the individual freedom of others. The parallel between their current tactics of suppression, coercion, and violence and those which Marcuse—born in Berlin in the 1890s—observed in the pre-Hitler German faculties are remarkably similar.
In addition to students and professors who insist on being part of the problem rather than helping to solve the university’s problems, the president of a private university has to cope with other demands. One continuing problem is to maintain and improve the academic prestige of his university. This means a continual struggle to upgrade the academic quality of the faculty. Also, if the admission standards are not kept high, the reputation of the university soon declines and its best professors leave.
University departments in the humanities, social sciences, physical sciences, and engineering are compared periodically by the American Council on Education, and the leading departments are listed in the order of their rated quality of graduate faculty (which usually teaches undergraduates also). Some public universities’ faculties have become quite competitive with our best private university faculties despite their dependence on and control by taxpayers. Presidents of private universities now are receiving strong competition from public universities in the competition for distinguished faculty members.
Many presidents also have to contend with revolts other than the usual student/faculty types. These come from volunteer donors of gifts, both alumni and non-alumni. Reductions in gifts have become a serious problem for many private universities who have suffered violence on their campuses. Columbia University experienced a deficit of eleven million dollars in its operating budget for the past year, according to Newsweek magazine.
The rumblings of another possible revolt affecting private universities have also reached the ears of their presidents. This revolt could be by that non-volunteer donor to “private” universities—the taxpayer.
The tenth edition of American Universities and Colleges, edited by Otis A. Singletary, gives an indication of how serious a determined effort by taxpayers to eliminate the use of public funds by private universities could be for their faculties, students, and administrators. Of Harvard University’s total operating budget of $151,000,000 for academic year 1967-1968, $55,000,000 was furnished by taxpayers from across the nation. With an endowment of over $1,000,000,000 Harvard is not likely to close its doors if it had to resort to operating with private funds only. Still, faculty salaries, personnel administrator’s salaries, and tuition rates could be affected. For other less heavily endowed private universities, the attitude of the awakening taxpayer could be more significant.
The signs for university presidents of this awakening are numerous. After hearing the state superintendent of public instruction tell them that, “College presidents with courage are needed to deal firmly with violence on college campuses,” the Illinois American Legion passed a resolution. It called for a withdrawal of federal financial support from colleges and universities that have eliminated their ROTC programs or reduced them to an extra-curricular activity. Yet the need for taxpayer assistance to private universities is growing.
Only a month earlier, the dean of Northwestern University testified before the Illinois State Board of Higher Education that Northwestern supports a $500 per student award by the state to the private universities that they attend. He said, “Northwestern is faced with costs rising more rapidly than income.”
This followed, by a few weeks, a statement by the president of Illinois Institute of Technology. He stated, “The only feasible source of the major revenue which private higher education must have to survive is the federal government. Tuition at independent colleges has been increasing at a rate of 9 per cent per year for the last ten. At the same time, resistance to rising tuition is growing, and many students are seeking lower-cost institutions, which usually means public ones.”
One description of a successful university president suggests that, “he must have the wisdom of Solomon, the patience of Job, the strength of Hercules, the constitution of an ox, the energy of a beaver, the leadership of Moses, and the charisma of Christ—besides a distinguished military and administrative record.”
All these he will need because his strategy must be to take those actions necessary to articulate the university’s values, define its goals, and marshal its will. As Logan Wilson stressed, “there is no substitute for capable and responsible leadership.”
The tactics that each president must use to marshal the university will, of course, be affected by the situation at his university, the amount of actual authority that he holds, and the power groups and sub-groups inside and outside his university. Tactics that might be effective on one campus might be decidely [sic] ineffective on another campus. However, some requirements may be common to all, even though there is no quick, simple, single solution to the private university’s problems. But, by defining each university’s goals and adhering to them, many potential student and faculty applicants can be alerted to the requirement to seek their personal goals elsewhere, if they are at variance with those of a particular university.
One essential requirement for any university president is to identify and eliminate or neutralize as rapidly as possible the small but determined minority of students and faculty in his university seeking not reform but destruction of the university itself, through nihilism, violent disruption or sabotage. This minority group includes those who, according to the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence, act as ‘the agent that converts constructive student concern into mindless mob hysteria.” And, until neutralized, they pose a threat to all members of the university which is far out of proportion to their numbers. Bettelheim described their tactics.
They gain their success by arousing a sizable number of students through the tactics of confrontations, and by the university’s fear of such confrontations. Confrontations have one important aim—to use the reaction of those they provoke to generate a feeling of new unity among the demonstrators. This has been used in its most direct form by militants, who stand in front of policemen and denounce them as pigs and wait until the man in uniform hits out. The art of demonstrating then lies in seeing that the blows are directed against the less committed demonstrators and, if possible, against completely uninvolved persons. This then provides the mass following they need for their success. A whole system of provocations has been worked out for this purpose.
It would appear to be an absolute requirement that university administrators work out, in great detail, advance contingency plans, for meeting disorders. This should include continuous advance planning, and coordination with outside agencies, since most universities are not equipped to cope with disruptive violence. And the use of outside help, when necessary, creates additional complications and possible escalation which must be anticipated.
The best time, of course, to avoid disruptive violence is before it starts. Lewis Powell, President of the Virginia State Board of Education, expressed his views as follows:
The demand for student participation in decision making ranges all the way from membership on boards of trustees to selection of presidents and faculty and determination of curriculum. If the full sweep of this demand were met, the present structure of higher education would be dismantled and replaced by the type of student power found in many South American universities . . . .
And yet, student views are entitled to be voiced and seriously considered. Appropriate channels must be devised to accomplish this, along with a far greater effort to make these channels meaningful. The wise administrator will work these out, with faculty and student participation, in advance of campus trouble. All of this must have substance, and reflect a genuine desire to reach accommodation with responsible student views.
But there must be more, even after the president, if he does, has given away the key to that last bastion of a coed’s virtue—her bedroom.
An assistant dean of students at Northwestern recently remarked, students must have concerned adults to talk to about their problems and needs. “It is a 'cop out’ to tell undergraduates that they are adults and then use this as an excuse to forget about them. If students have gripes that are not explained to them, the gripes will remain and build up. Students need someone to talk to besides the radical faculty members who are trying to use them.” Even after increased budgets permit an adequate number of professional counselors in the university administration, faculty members must continue to be induced to fill this traditional role.
Problems with disgruntled alumni and voluntary contributors should disappear as the noise level on campus is brought under control. But the problems with those involuntary contributors, the taxpayers, may grow, especially if faculties in addition to Brown, Columbia, Dartmouth, and Harvard, for obviously political reasons, suddenly deny their students the academic freedom to take ROTC courses. In June, President Nathan Pusey of Harvard, addressing that university’s 1969 ROTC graduates stated that the attack there on the ROTC, “was one of the shameful episodes in the history of this university.” This highly publicized episode could help raise serious doubts concerning the use of tax money for Harvard and other private universities, since much of the public considers “academic freedom” to be the main argument for their support. And to most of the public, for decades, “academic freedom” has included the student right to take ROTC subjects, not just the faculty’s right to pursue its own idea of knowledge, irrespective of any pressures from society.
The increasingly common problem of imposing discipline or prosecuting students and faculty accused of breaking university regulations following periods of campus violence, may well prove more complicated than anticipated for some presidents of formerly peaceful universities. Among university rules and codes of behavior it is interesting to note a wide variation in length and detail. Those for private universities vary from a polite suggestion to be ladies and gentlemen to the elaborate and detailed “Revised Interim Rules Relating to Rallies, Picketing and Other Mass Demonstrations” published by the Columbia University Committee on Rules of Conduct—after the mob riots.
Section I of Article II provides definitions for such words as university, dean, day student, and publish. In an age when affluent student violators are supported by a battery of lawyers, it appears to be prudent to include members of the law school faculty on committees which should prepare detailed and complete student rules of conduct. Precise steps for their enforcement should be included in contingency plans.
In all of these, as in most university problems or “opportunities,” the “rights” of more than one group are involved, therefore the president of the university is responsible. But does he alone have the usable authority to effect a solution in a private university? Usually not. In fact, in many private universities most of the power gained to date by students, including bedroom access, has come from the authority formerly reserved to the administration. The faculty has given up little of its tremendous power. Yet, it is in the areas of traditional faculty power, involving tenure, curriculum, quality of teaching, and the major responsibility for a true “community of scholars,” that the major opportunities for constructive university reform lies. Their presidents’ abilities to ally themselves with each other, their universities’ responsible students and their boards of trustees, to marshal the faculties’ will to resist the role of politician and concentrate on badly needed scholarly reform, will determine whether violence on campus is the harbinger of chaos or of opportunity for our private universities.