DISCUSSION- THE PLAYBOY PANEL: STUDENT REVOLT
campus dissidents-left and right-debate the issues of violence and reform
with university presidents and educators


PANELISTS
EWART BROWN, 23, is a sophomore medical student and two-letter man (track
and soccer) at Howard University in Washington D.C. During the 1967-1968
academic year, as student-body president he led a coalition of campus
political organizations in a successful five-day take-over of the school's
administration building as a protest against the disregard of their demands
for self-disciplining authority over student violations of college rules.
It was the first all-black seizure of a college administration building in
the country. Having participated in a student symposium at the Center for
the Study of Democratic Institutions in Santa Barbara, Brown now works
through student government and occasionally with Washington's Black United
Front and PRIDE, incorporated, to make Howard "a black institution
controlled by blacks to solve black problems."


HARRY EDWARDS, 26, is a Cornell graduate student in sociology and a
political activist who has lectured on the philosophy and tactics of social
change to black student unions on over 60 campuses throughout the nation.
When Cornell's blacks seized the student union last spring there were
rumors that armed white fraternity men were about to attack, and Edwards is
alleged to have advised the militants to take defensive measures by
smuggling in guns and ammunition. A onetime holder of the junior college
discus record and a former varsity basketball player he organized last
year's Olympics boycott and is now centrally concerned with the burgeoning
Federation of Black Athletes. Edwards' published work in this area includes
two books, Revolt of the Black Athlete and Up Toward Liberation, and
articles in magazines ranging from Sports Illustrated to Trans-action, the
sociological journal in which his piece "Confrontation at Cornell," written
with Professor William Friedland, appeared last June.


EDGAR FRIEDENBERG, 48, has a joint professorship in sociology and education
at the State University of New York at Buffalo. He received both his B.S.
(Centenary College) and M.S. (Stanford University) in chemistry by the age
of 18, and his Ph.D. in education at the University of Chicago An
anti-establishment educational theorist, Friedenberg was one of the first
sociologists to recognize youth as an oppressed group, and today is a
leading defender of student dissent. His humanistic interest in adolescents,
particularly in relation to our educational institutions, has been
expressed in several published works-_The Vanishing Adolescent_, _Coming Of
Age in America_, _The Dignity of Youth and Other Atavisms_ and _Self-
Perception in the University_, written with Julius Roth.


BUELL GALLAGHER, 65, was president of the City College of New York from
1952 to 1961 and, after one year as chancellor of California State Colleges,
returned to CCNY in 1962. Last spring, he resigned amid a furor surrounding
educational budget cuts and the college's disruptive student revolt. During
the massive protest, further complicated by open racial conflict, Gallagher
became increasingly disillusioned with the intransigence of black-militant
leadership and the patterned reactions of "old-line doctrinaire liberals."
Despite the crisis, Gallagher refused to bring police on campus and was
finally forced into the unpopular decision of closing the college in order
to facilitate student negotiations. He is also an ordained Congregationalist
minister, the recipient of 15 academic and honorary degrees, and a former
assistant commissioner of the U. S. Office of Education.


SAMUEL I. HAYAKAWA, 63, is the president of San Francisco State College,
succeeding Robert Smith, who resigned during the campus disorders last
November, which began as a massive black student-led strike to protest
State's "racist policies" and to press for a black-studies department and a
larger share in the college's decision-making processes. By resorting to
the extensive use of police on campus during the San Francisco State crisis,
Hayakawa was able to restore an uneasy order. Though these actions gained
him notoriety and popularity with many people, his reliance on police to
cool the conflict by force alienated many members of his own faculty and,
in the opinion of some, further polarized the academic community. Long one
of the nation's leading semanticists, Hayakawa has also written such highly
regarded books as _Language in Thought and Action_, _Symbol, Status, and
Personality_ and _Dimensions of Meaning_, written with William Dresser.
Before joining the San Francisco State faculty, Hayakawa spent five years as
a columnist for the _Defender_, Chicago's major black newspaper, was on the
board of directors of The Institute of Jazz Studies in New York and a
lecturer in English at the University of Chicago.  Hayakawa is also editor
of _ETC._, the journal of tile International Society for General Semantics.


TOM HAYDEN, 29, a graduate of the University of Michigan, has led and allied
himself with radical forces on every major revolutionary issue since the
free-speech movement in 1964, and with liberal reform since the civil rights
movement of the early Sixties. He registered black voters for SNCC in the
South, established community organizations in the Northern ghettos and was
one of the principal founders of the Students for a Democratic Society. In
1965, Hayden traveled to Hanoi with Communist dialectician-historian Herbert
Aptheker and New Left theorist Staughton Lynd, and later to Czechoslovakia
for a conference of American anti-war activists and leaders of Vietnam's
National Liberation Front. He has also met with American and Vietnamese
negotiators in Paris to work for the release of American prisoners of war.
As one of the demonstration leaders during last year's Democratic Convention
in Chicago, Hayden has been indicted under the anti-riot section of the 1968
Civil Rights Act and faces a possible ten-year sentence if convicted at the
trial, which is scheduled for this month. His published works include _The
Other Side_, written with Staughton Lynd, _Rebellion in Newark_; most
recently, _Repression and Rebellion_.


CHRISTOPHER JENCKS, 32, is codirector of The Cambridge Institute and an
associate professor of education at Harvard University, where he earned both
his bachelor's degree in English literature and his master's in education.
His provocative writings in the latter field have appeared in such
publications as _The Saturday Evening Post_, _The New Republic_, _Harper's_
and _The Atlantic_. In collaboration with sociologist David Kiesman, he has
also written _The Academic Revolution_, an analysis of the current crisis in
American education. A self-described maverick, Jencks supported the Harvard
student strike last April but not the occupation of University Hall that
preceded it.


PHILLIP ABBOTT LUCE, 30, who once led trips to Cuba as a member of the
leftist Progressive Labor Party, now serves as Director of College Services
of the conservative Young Americans for Freedom, while completing work on
his Ph.D. in political science. Hoping to mobilize a conservative
counteroffensive to the activities of the student left, With which he
became disenchanted in 19G5, he has lectured at numerous universities and
debated such New Left spokesmen as Jerry Rubin, panelist Tom Hayden and
_Ramparts'_ Robert Scheer. In addition to articles in _The Saturday Evening
Post_, _National Review_, _Reader's Digest_ and the ultraconservative _Human
Events_, Luce has written three books- _The New Left_, _Road to Revolution_
and _The Intelligent Student's Guide to Survival_.


LINDA MORSE, 25, began her political involvement as a member of the
free-speech movement while attending college in New England in 1964. She
dropped out after two years to join the civil rights struggle as a volunteer
worker in Philadelphia's Fellowship House, a center for black cultural
education and community organization. From 1965 to 1968, she worked for New
York's Fifth Avenue Peace Parade Committee, helping to stage a series of
massive peace demonstrations, and was executive secretary of the Student
Mobilization Committee until last year. Now living in Berkeley, she is
active in a variety of radical groups, including the Women's Liberation
Front.


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PLAYBOY: Increasingly, in the past several years, the campuses of America
have been transformed into ideological-and often literal-battlegrounds as
the demands of militant students for sweeping educational and social reforms
clashed with the intransigence of university administrations and state and
local authorities. The student protest movement, which began as an
apparently limited dispute over free speech on the Berkeley campus of the
University of California five years ago, has now become a major
international issue, arousing as much passion and political polarization as
the racial crisis or the war in Vietnam, with both of which it has been
linked. The escalation of demonstration and counterdemonstration, disruption
and suppression has divided the nation so profoundly that the National
Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence, established by
President Johnson after Senator Robert F. Kennedy's assassination, issued in
June a 3600-word statement on student disorder that concluded:
"The problem of campus unrest is more than a campus problem. Its roots lie
deep in the larger society. There is no single cause, no single solution. We
urge all Americans to reject hasty and simplistic answers.... Students are
unwilling to accept the gaps between professed ideals and actual
performance. They see afresh the injustices that remain unremedied. ... 
Today's intelligent, idealistic students see a nation which has achieved
the physical ability to provide food, shelter and education for all, but has
not yet devised social institutions that do so. They see a society, built on
the principle that all men are created equal, that has not yet assured equal
opportunity in life. They see a world of nation-states with the technical
brilliance to harness the ultimate energy, but without the common sense to
agree on methods of preventing mutual destruction." 
The report was prefaced with the statement:
"So threatening is the situation, so essential is the need for understanding
and calm appraisal, that this commission feels compelled to speak now rather
than to remain silent until publication of its final report next fall." In
an effort  to confront this explosive subject in the calm and understanding
spirit recommended by the commission, we have asked nine leading spokesmen
on both sides of the dispute--college presidents, radical students
representing both black and white campus protest groups, professors and
educational theorists- to participate in an unprecedented discussion on the
student revolt and the far-reaching issues it has raised. To begin with,
let's try to establish the relative strength of the opposing forces. Critics
of campus unrest contend that the majority of students are either apathetic
or actively hostile to the protesters. Are the rebels really only a small
minority of the student population?


HAYDEN: That's the same bullshit they've been handing out for years about
how 90 percent of the Vietnamese are either pro-government or indifferent
neutrals. The fact is that the Viet Cong could never have carried on a
revolutionary war for 25 years against two great military powers without the
sympathy and active assistance of the people, any more than the student
revolution in this country could exist without widespread campus support.
The old Chinese revolutionary axiom about the people being the water and the
rebels the fish holds just as true on American campuses as it does in Asian
jungles. I think the overwhelming majority of students are sympathetic to
the basic goals of the movement: withdrawal of U.S. troops from Vietnam,
elimination of institutionalized racism, raising the living standards of the
poor and, in general, placing greater decision-making power in the hands of
the people.
Not everybody who's sympathetic, of course, is willing to actively
participate in the movement, and there are also inevitable differences of
opinion over how to realize these goals. Some students still feel that it's
possible to reform the system from within. But a good-sized minority of
students disagrees and feels that to accomplish such goals, you've got to
change the whole system from top to bottom and replace it with something
new and healthy. Though some students believe this can be done peacefully,
or relatively peacefully, a small yet significant number are committed to
true revolutionary action in order to change the system by any and all means
necessary. That's where I stand, of course, and our numbers are growing
every day.
HAYAKAWA: I think Mr. Hayden is deluding either himself or his followers-
or both-if he thinks that his kind of revolutionary methods have the support
of anything more than an infinitesimal fraction of the student population of
this country. The vast majority of students may, indeed, be in favor of some
of the specific goals he's just enumerated -after all, who isn't opposed to
war and poverty and racism?-but it's a far cry from that to supporting
tactics of mindless violence and intimidation. The great bulk of American
students are primarily concerned with finishing their educations and earning
their degrees, not with burning administration buildings. So far, they
haven't actively opposed the minority of violent demonstrators-although I'm
certain you'll see a significant increase in such opposition soon-but that
in no way means they're sympathetic to them. If anything, they're like
bystanders at a mugging. I believe it's the purpose and duty of a university
administration to represent this silent majority of moderate students, and
that's what I've tried to do at San Francisco State, where at least 15,000
out of our 18,000 students want to go to school and pursue their studies
without disrupting the university on behalf of a few peripatetic
revolutionary demagogs like Mr. Hayden.
EDWARDS: I don't dig all this crap about the moderate majority, There isn't
any middle of the road left in this country. You're either with the movement
or against it, because if you're not willing to take the measures that are
necessary to correct the problem-and they have to be radical measures today
-then you automatically become part of the problem. It's the same thing with
the so-called Negro moderates; they're either chumps who don't know what's
going on or they're conscious traitors to their race. As for moderate
whites, they're as much responsible for the racial problem as George
Wallace. If you won't act to cure the sickness and rottenness of this
system, then you're responsible for it. And that makes you the enemy.
LUCE: That kind of extremist attitude is precisely what's driving more and
more students away from the New Left. Mr. Edwards is way off base when he
says that you automatically become a tool of the establishment or an ally of
George Wallace the moment you oppose these left-wing lunatics with a fetish
for violence. Individuals like myself on the New Right and organizations
like tile Young Americans for Freedom, who are opposing these left-wing
crazies, aren't doing it because we love Johnson or Nixon or the whole
stultifying bureaucracy of the Federal Government, or because we don't want
the things that are wrong with this society reformed. We're fighting them
because we oppose violence and collectivism and totalitarianism and the Nazi
storm-trooper tactics they use against anybody who opposes them. We'd be
glad to sir down and debate ideological and social goals with the SDS all
night, and we might even find ourselves in agreement on some points-but we
refuse to be strong-armed by those who employ violence in the name of peace,
and intimidation in the name of dissent.
MORSE: Right-wingers like Mr. Luce use this whole business of opposing our
tactics as a smoke screen to conceal their opposition to our goals. Whatever
they say, they are tools of the system, and they're dedicated to
perpetuating everything that's wrong with it. They're failing, however,
because just as Tom Hayden said, the movement is steadily growing stronger,
despite all attempts to suppress it. Fortune magazine, which is hardly a
New Left journal, recently did a breakdown of student support for the
movement; it estimated that 40 percent are with us while the other 60
percent are mostly interested in getting through college. Many of these,
however, sympathize with us on specific issues. Now, when you consider how
relatively new the movement is and all the opposition and intimidation it's
had to face, 40 percent is a damn impressive figure. And it's going up all
the time. Perhaps most encouraging of all is what's happening in high
schools all over the country. In New York City, for example, more than 50
percent of the high schools have had serious student protests, and these
were supported by all kinds of students-middle-class, lower-class, black,
Puerto Rican, white. As these newly radicalized high school students enter
college, you'll find that our constituency has been very significantly
broadened. You're going to need a lot more than clubs and tear gas and guns
to hold down this generation of students; and if you continue to escalate
the violence against us, you'll find growing numbers of students fighting
back in self-defense.


PLAYBOY: Is violence of any kind-offensive, defensive or retaliatory-a
justifiable expression of protest?
HAYAKAWA: Of course not-no more than rape is an acceptable expression of
desire.
GALLAGHER: I would have to agree with Dr. Hayakawa on this point. Force and
violence just can't be tolerated, even in their relatively mild forms, such
as blocking school doorways or intimidating the opposition.
EDWARDS: If you call blocking a doorway violence, then what are you going to
call the things you're going to see in the years ahead? What you should
understand here is that under extreme circum stances, violence is not only
the most effective but the only tactic open to us. Students are basically
powerless, which puts them in pretty much the same bag as black people; they
control no armies or police forces, make no guns or ammunition, own no
factories and, in general, have no real influence within the context of the
existing system, which is rotten to the core. In many cases where students
have petitioned and demonstrated nonviolently for redress of grievances,
they have been met by establishment violence on the part of a Gestapo
euphemistically called law-enforcement officers. So it's apparent that the
only thing the student has going for him is his potential for disruption,
his ability to throw a monkey wrench into the well-oiled social machinery.
About tile only option left to us, if we want to have an influence in
society, is this capacity to disrupt or destroy. It's not an abstract moral
issue; it's the simple reality of our situation.
LUCE: To contend that violence is the only tactic open to students seeking
change is pure bat droppings. The only thing violence will ultimately
achieve on campus is the total suppression of dissent. Mr. Edwards is
obviously intelligent enough to realize that violence is a two-way street
and that the power structure is more than capable of putting down the
infantile leftism he espouses in the guise of revolutionary sloganeering.
HAYAKAWA: I agree. This kind of argument is like saying that the only way to
improve airline service is to shoot down the planes.


PLAYBOY: One dramatic and recent aspect of the increasing militancy among
campus radicals was the appearance of guns during a Cornell demonstration.
Mr. Edwards, in fact, is alleged to have been the one who advised the
students to carry those guns. Why?
EDWARDS: I supported the decision of the black students at Cornell to arm
themselves for self-defense because they had been attacked by white
fraternity boys. Black people are through being attacked with impunity and
without consequence.
PLAYBOY: Would you advise them to carry-or use-guns only in clear cases of
self-defense?
EDWARDS: I would hope that they would never have to be used, but I don't put
any ceiling on what tactics should be employed if colleges and universities
continue to use armed force in suppressing protests against their role as
research and recruiting arms for the State Department and Defense Department
engaging in research on chemical-bacteriological warfare, perfecting
counterinsurgency strategy-for use in Harlem and Watts ass well as in the
Third World War-and working on doomsday machines to blow up the entire
world.
The system and the Government supported by all these fat cats who piss in
their pants over student violence are killing hundreds of thousands of
people in Vietnam and creating an arms race that one scientist has said
makes nuclear holocaust by the year 2000 a statistical probability. Yet
these same people turn around in horror because some students block a
doorway or occupy a building with guns. What goddamn hypocrisy! I say to
hell with the library building that's taken over; people are more important
than brick. What I care about is preventing bombs from falling-or at least
knowing, if they do fall, that I did my best to prevent it. If that mushroom
cloud does open up over my head one day, I don't want to be sitting at a
drawing board using my slide rule; I want to be politically involved. What
the movement is out to do is stop the systematic destruction of human beings
on all levels-in the ghettos, in the countries we exploit, on the
battlefields of Vietnam. Tearing up a library or taking over an
administration building or throwing some computers out the window is pretty
insignificant when you consider what we're trying to do and the forces we're
up against.
HAYAKAWA: If you're really trying to demilitarize the United States instead
of increasing its reliance on armed force, you're sure going about it in a
funny way.
PLAYBOY: Do you think the appearance of guns on campus augurs the course
future disruptions will take?
JENCKS: I wouldn't be at all surprised if weapons show up among some black
groups again, particularly on campuses neighboring on black ghettos, which
give the militants a constituency on which to draw. By and large, the black
groups seem more prepared to defend themselves with violence against
violence than the white student radicals are. There is a developing
discussion of the merits of armed self-defense among militant white groups
now, although I think it's still some way off. But if you are absolutely
convinced-as they are-that your demands are just, and that anyone who
opposes them is part of an oppressive system that should be overthrown,
you're bound to turn to violence eventually.
BROWN: I think the Cornell incident simply underscores the fact that
students-black and white-are totally committed and will take any measures
they feel necessary for self-defense and, in some vital areas, for the
furthering of their demands. If the students deem it necessary, they will
arm for their own protection.
HAYAKAWA: I think you're wrong. I think the carrying of guns at Cornell
frightened the people who did it as much as the people it was designed to
intimidate. So I suspect that the appearance of guns in student
demonstrations is going to be pretty rare from now on, even among the far-
out groups.
HAYDEN: MY impression is that the Cornell blacks will be emulated around the
country. But we'll see.
LUCE: I hate having to agree with you, but I fear this is a terror tactic
we're going to see employed with increasing frequency. When I was a member
of Progressive Labor, we used to go to meetings and demonstrations with the
express purpose of provoking violence-for no other reason than that we knew
it would get us attention in the media. So I'm afraid you'll see more of
this kind of thing from these madmen.
GALLAGHER: You may be right, but I hope not. It's a product of the myth that
violence is the only way to get things done. Once people believe that, they
don't even try the alternative methods of picketing and petitioning-let
alone the normal channels of peaceful democratic political action. They go
directly into violent protest. I think the probability of serious violence
in the future is so real a threat that the universities must take every
precaution to keep lethal weapons of all kinds off campus. Force only
escalates counterforce, and thus is completely nonproductive. The critical
problem is: How can the establishment use nonviolence effectively when
protesters insist on eliciting violence themselves?
FRIEDENBERG: All this emphasis on violence in the student struggle is really
quite absurd. The relevant questions to be asked are what the struggle is
all about, what are the issues and the goals, not whether the tactics
employed are violent or nonviolent-particularly when such a broad
interpretation is placed on the word violence as to encompass any method
of protest short of writing plaintive letters to your Congressmen. All
conflict becomes more or less violent at a certain point unless it can be
resolved, and the student protest movement is no exception.
PLAYBOY: As you know, some militants consider violence not only inevitable
but desirable, on the grounds that the ends of social reform justify the
means. How do you feel about this?
JENCKS: Under certain circumstances, I think the ends do justify the means.
That's certainly true where the issues are really urgent and where
nonviolent remedies have proved clearly inadequate. So there are situations
where violence can be justified. In fact, of course, most Americans really
accept that principle. We don't think a man should always do what the courts
or the police or the law seems to require--not if the law is sufficiently
unjust. But most Americans don't feel that the laws the students break are
all that unjust.
GALLAGHER: I don't think there are any situations where violence can be
justified. The dogma that the ends justify the means is pure cant, and
self-serving pseudo rationalization, however important the issues that
motivate your cause. Always and every time, the means determine the results;
the ends are shaped by the process itself.
HAYDEN: I think all this talk about violence and all the fear about trigger-
happy students is really irrelevant, because there hasn't been anywhere near
as much student-initiated violence on campus as the right-wing types would
like you to believe. In most cases, when violence occurs, it's directed
against students by police; and so far, most students haven't really fought
back in any effective or concerted manner. But our opponents obviously like
to blow what student violence there is way out of proportion, because it's a
great piece of propaganda for them to use against the movement. Newsweek,
for example, recently ran a cover photograph showing a young white brother
with long hair who appeared to be hurling a flaming bomblike object at the
police. But when the photograph was checked, it turned out that he was
merely throwing a tear-gas canister back at the police, who had launched a
barrage against the demonstrators.
Now, let me make it clear that I don't disavow violence as a tactic under
certain circumstances-far from it, in fact-but I do believe there is a
conspiracy to sell the public the idea that we're on the attack and turning
the campuses into arsenals for a full-scale war. In the case of Harry and
the Cornell gun thing, the news media systematically conveyed the impression
that students had taken over the administration building with rifles and
pistols, when, in fact they didn't arm themselves until reports reached them
that a mob of armed fraternity men was on the way over to tear them up. That
was a clear case of self-defense, and yet anybody who watched the incident
on television or saw that picture of the brothers leaving the building got
just the opposite in pression. Over and over, the self-defense aspect of our
violence has been played down, and the extent of the violence itself has
been completely exaggerated in order to prepare a rationalization for
further repression.
PLAYBOY: While you see a conspiracy by the media to distort the motives and
methods of the student movement, conservative legislators have accused the
press of aiding the protesters by exaggerating not their violence but their
strength and significance, in order to get sensational copy. Is there any
truth to this?
LUCE: Yes, of course there is. Any time two or three people make some
incredible demand of a university, the press immediately picks it up and
sensationalizes it. But if the majority of students on a campus refuse to go
along with the militants and won't boycott classes or join demonstrations,
you practically never hear about it. That kind of news is seldom covered,
while the media give national platform to every extremist no matter how
little campus support it might have. The media have made the militants seem
far more popular and powerful than they are; they've implanted bogeymen in 
the minds of a lot of average citizens, who get the impression from TV that
every campus is seething with rebellion.
JENCKS: Many campuses are, which is why I disagree with the idea that the
movement is some kind of synthetic media creation, or that the extent of
discontent has been exaggerated any more than any other news event by TV and
press coverage. Of course, the press always overexposes a novelty, because
that's what the public wants, and it's probably true that there are fewer
activists than a lot of people would suppose after reading The New York
Times' Sunday summary of campus disturbances for the week. There has been a
tendency to overemphasize the influence of well-organized protest groups
like SDS, rather than to probe the sense of generalized discontent felt by
enormous numbers of students who don't belong to any particular group but
who are unhappy and alienated and ready to support a protest movement.
That's been the main failing of the press in this whole area.
FRIEDENBERG: That's part of the problem, but it's more complex than just a
question of oversimplification or exaggeration of a specific incident. What
has really appalled me lately is the way people react to media coverage,
even fair and balanced coverage such as you find on the standard evening
network news shows. They read into it only what they want to see. Thus, a
good objective report will be picked up and turned into an occasion for
hysteria by many people. I do think, however, that Mr. Hayden is correct in
saying that the media themselves have erred in their tendency to create the
impression that campus violence is far more serious and widespread than it
really is. But this is understandable, because press and TV tend to single
out a violent episode for its dramatic content, no matter how isolated it
may be in the context of the over-all situation. If violence had not
occurred, the media would have had to invent it-and in some cases they have.
GALLAGHER: I know from firsthand experience what Dr. Friedenberg is talking
about. At CCNY recently, I saw some television cameramen stand around
wearily for half an hour without getting a picture. Finally, the audio man
talked briefly with the cameraman, then began pushing and shoving a student,
who became quite irate. There was a scuffle, and then the cameraman said,
"OK, we've got our picture, let's go." That shot probably came out later on
the TV screen as a dramatic incident of campus violence. Of course, this is
an old news adage: no trouble, no story.
HAYAKAWA: This is absolutely true, and the dissident students know how to
take advantage of the media, often demonstrating solely for the benefit of
the television cameras. There's an element of exhibitionism here, and some
aspects of instant theater, which naturally appeals to television newsmen
anxious to fill space with original and exciting events. All the same, I'm
keenly aware that the imperatives of the media can be exploited by people
other than radical students.
In my own case, it was a piece of great good fortune that the day I climbed
onto the militants' sound truck to rip out the loud-speaker wires, I was
wearing a tam-o'-shanter. The combination of that esoteric headgear and my
impulsive action apparently registered with great effect on people's
imaginations when they saw it on television-far more than anything I could
have planned or said. And ever since, I've had excellent access to the
media, which must be very frustrating to the other side. Instead of simply
complaining how the militants exploit the media against the universities, we
should probably learn how to use tile media for our own ends and beat the
revoLutionaries at their own  game. But as it stands today, the mass media
do help the militants, and their violence is very often designed simply to
get them on the TV screen.
JENCKS: What tends to happen through this sort of coverage is that people
begin to confuse campus protest with the kind that takes place in the
ghettos. The violence that has occurred on most campuses has been trivial,
but when people watch TV and see four students throwing rocks through the
windows of an administration building, it automatically merges in their
minds with the burning down of Detroit. When you really look at it
objectively, the amount of damage done to campus property and the number of
people injured is almost minuscule-and most of those who are injured are
students at the other end of police night sticks. If all the campus violence
across the country took place in one ghetto in a major city, it would be
described as a minor disturbance; and yet you have millions of Americans
with this chilling vision of total chaos and destruction ravaging the
campuses. I think what accounts for this confusion, and the hysteria it
induces, is that one expects violence in a ghetto, whereas in the context
of a university one expects peace and tranquility. And thus even minor
disruptions are blown up out of all proportion to their actual seriousness.
HAYAKAWA: Disruptions that would be minor anywhere else are serious on a
campus, because the real issue is not violence itself but the radical-
directed assault on academic freedom.
BROWN: If you had true academic freedom, there wouldn't be any need for
violence. But when we talk about the role of the media in covering campus
violence, we should be grateful that millions of people have had the chance
to witness these incidents for themselves. I feel that the networks have
actually performed a public service by dramatizing the fact that the
students are deeply dissatisfied, and enabling a lot of people whom we
couldn't have reached on our own to hear our demands. The universities would
like to sweep these disputes under the rug, but they can't do that with the
TV cameras on them.
HAYAKAWA: I'm not quite as sanguine about the role of the press, although I
think most newsmen are sincerely trying to present a fair and balanced
picture of what's happening on the campuses. But the basic distortion here
is not concerned with the media covering the occasional violence-violence is
news after all, and no one can blame them for reporting it-but the fact that
they focus almost exclusively on the violence. I don't know what could be
done to correct this sort of thing. One can't really blame the media; it's
just tile rules of the game. I don't think you could ever get around it
without altering the whole show-business orientation of news, which thrives
on disaster, whether on the campuses or in the ghettos. But it's a very
unfortunate situation because by stressing such sporadic violence, the media
contribute to a popular belief that the revolutionaries are the principal
element on our campuses, whereas in reality they constitute less than five
percent of the total national student body and are concentrated in
relatively few schools.


PLAYBOY: What kind of university and what kind of student body, is most
likely to become involved in protest?
JENCKS: It appeared as recently as a year or so ago that you were most
likely to have student protest movements in schools with high academic
standards, where most of the students were affluent white middle-class kids
attending liberal-arts colleges or universities. But things have changed so
quickly in the past year, and protests have become so widespread, that you
can no longer make such a generalization. At this point it's impossible to
say what kind of school is most likely to experience student protest, because
it can hit anywhere from Harvard to a state agricultural institute.
GALLAGHER: That's quite correct. Almost any school in the country can be
affected. There used to be a time when we college administrators sat on
secure pedestals in our ivory towers, and the campuses were placid
intellectual eases where nothing ever happened. I have since been surprised,
and the few administrators who have not yet been similarly surprised soon
will be. You can't escape it, because the various causative factors are
everywhere It is a phenomenon of 20th Century American higher education
that once students recognize social evils, they will protest them, and they
will do it on campus, because that's where they are and that's where
whatever influence they have can be directly exercised.
LUCE: I think it's important to point out that the real extremists on campus
are still almost invariably the children of the affluent and not the kids
who have to sweat out an education to prepare themselves for a livelihood.
Another important factor is that despite what Professor Jenks said about
the left expanding its base, the overwhelming majority of radicals are
connected with the liberal-arts centers, which have become hotbeds of
militancy. This is understandable, because liberal-arts students have much
more trouble relating to the technological era in which we live than
students in, say, engineering or the natural sciences. They feel generally
lost and useless in this computerized age, because they don't understand
technology or its role in modern society. And thus they become alienated. A
lot of them, too, are just spoiled and bored, overprivileged kids who vent
their frustrations in campus politics and radical rhetoric. I call these
people Mustang Maoists, because if a revolution ever did occur, they'd drive
to the barricades in their sports cars. They're visceral radicals, because
their radicalism isn't based on any real understanding of Marxism or
revolutionary theory or on any firsthand experience of poverty or
exploitation, but on a gut reaction against a system they don't understand
or relate to.
FRIEDENBERG: I cannot dismiss these students just because most of them-the
white ones, anyway-come from middle-class backgrounds. That's one of the
significant and impressive aspects of this situation and is precisely why
militancy is so common at what have generally been considered the good
universities, which have a large proportion of students from upper-status
backgrounds who have reason to suppose they will be the future leaders of
society. These students feel all especially acute disappointment at the turn
this society has taken, and particularly at the university's increasing
negligence in training them for social leadership or preparing them for a
life that will have some meaning. And this gives their rebellion added
impact.
HAYAKAWA: I'm afraid that's only a surface evaluation of their rebellion.
What is really hapenning is that we're witnessing the rise of an arrogant
elitist student movement, the overwhelming majority of whom are from wealthy
families and attending the fashionable and expensive universities. In fact,
we are now beginning to undergo in the United States what has already
occurred in the underdeveloped countries, where the university students
consider themselves an elite with a mission to improve the lot of the vast
majority of poverty-stricken and illiterate peasants, if necessary by
rebelling against the system and overthrowing it. The universities have
inevitably been politicized because there is no effective literate political
movement beyond the schools, and very often no democratic channels to
peacefully effect social change.
    We're beginning to see the same phenomenon here in the Unites States,
where an elite student body of wealthy origins regards the rest of the
population with the same benignly patronizing contempt as the students in an
underdeveloped country regard the mass of peasantry. These student mandarins
are also determined to "save" the majority-even if they don't want to be
saved. Of course, there is no justification for this attitude in America,
because in our society the butcher, the baker and the candlestick maker all
have a vote and the right to be consulted on every issue; but the elitist
student says, "What the hell does a butcher or a baker or a candlestick
maker know about Vietnam, or the draft, or racial injustice, or the
military-industrial complex?" He says, "I know about such things, so I'll
decide these issues my way, whatever the yahoos think or however they vote."
The elitists feel they're the only educated people in the country, and this
inevitably breeds a totalitarian, anti-democratic attitude and a willingness
to use violence and coercion against those who differ with them. I would
agree with Mr. Luce that this type of student is found mainly in the
liberal-arts centers and the humanities, very seldom in the sciences. There
seems to be nothing in the study of chemistry that makes you feel like a
superior order of being, but you study Plato and you begin to believe you're
a philosopher--and a philosopher should be king. This is a dangerous trend,
and it jeopardizes the democratic principles on which this country was
founded.
BROWN: Jive! The students don't think of themselves as any kind of an elite
but as people who are challenging the real elite-those who control all of
our destinies, those who control the system. The students would like to make
democracy real instead of just a slogan. My knowledge of the subject is more
or less restricted to the black campuses and black students, and we don't
consider ourselves a smug elite but people who are angry and disenchanted
with everything around us. The only lives we want to control are our own,
and we turn to militant measures only because all other means of effecting
change have failed.


PLAYBOY: This is one of the arguments the student militants use to justify
disruptive demonstrations on campus. Have these students really exhausted
the tra ditional channels of protest?
LUCE: Hell, no, they haven't. And now you're really near the crux of this
thing, because that is one of the great lies perpetrated by the left. They
keep say ing the democratic system doesn't work because the university
doesn't listen to them. But in almost every case, they have  failed even to
try traditional democratic methods of change. Of course, such changes
certainly can't be made democratically if the majority oppose change, and
that's what really bugs them. I could give you example after example of
where they claim that student referendums didn't work, but when you check
back, you find there never was a student referendum, or if there was one,
the majority of students voted against it. They don't even begin to use the
legitimate means of protest, much less exhaust them.
MORSE: Luce is, as usual, throwing up a smoke screen, and it's easily
provable by a basic truth and some examples. One of the realities of student
protest is that white middle-class college students really don't like to
fight physically. When confrontations develop, you'll practically always
find that everything else has been tried first, and even then our physical
response comes only after we've been attacked by the police. That's been
almost universally true--at Columbia, Chicago, Stanford and most recently in
Berkeley during the people's-park scene, where we literally tried everything
including five straight days of secret negotiations with the university. The
Berkeley administration stalled, lied and broke promise after promise,
including one that they would not take offensive action on the park without
informing us. But at about four A.M. On May 15, 250 police moved on the
park in the dead of night and a few hours later, a fence was up. A
referendum was held a week or so later and the overwhelming majority of
students and faculty voted for the park. Then 40,000 people marched
peacefully--but we still don't have it. The response has been Ronald Reagan
using a free hour of state-wide TV time to lie about what happened and to
threaten us. That's how the "traditional channels" work!
HAYDEN: The channels are revolving doors.
HAYAKAWA: To you, but not to most  Americans. The thing the radicals forget,
or reject, is that democracy doesn't mean that any loud minority can get
its way at once. Democracy means that we all have the freedom, even if we're
a minority, to try to persuade others to our point of view; that's how you
eventually become a majority. Most of Norman Thomas' ideas were regarded as
wildly radical for many years, but eventually they became incorporated into
the planks of both parties. And relatively speaking, Norman Thomas succeeded
pretty fast. But if today's radicals can't get an instant majority they cry
that the whole damn system is corrupt. The very fact that they find
themselves frustrated by this process means that they just don't believe in
the democratic system.
EDWARDS: How can we? You're talking about a dreamworld democratic system
that doesn't exist and never did exist. If this so-called democracy were
not, in fact, a hypocritical oligarchy that is rapidly developing into a
Fourth Reich, students and minority groups could work through the normal
channels, since they'd need only to point out the injustices in order to get
them corrected.
BROWN: But the system has long since learned to deal with the traditional
tactics of protest without responding to them. We saw this in the civil
rights movement with all the sit-ins, marches and so forth. The system
learns to tolerate such things after a while, but nothing significant is
ever done to rectify the injustices that put people in the streets in the
first place.
EDWARDS: Whenever students petition or demonstrate for redress of
grievances, they are told, "Your grievances have some merit, but you must go
through channels to have them corrected." Having neither control of
significant channels of communication nor direct access to those with power
to correct the problems, students invariably become bogged down in a maze of
red tape and legal bottlenecks deliberately geared to maintain the status
quo. Students and minorities today are recognizing and rejecting this
bureaucratic hocus-pocus which is an effort on the part of the establishment
to buy the time necessary to co-opt dissenting elements into the system
without changing it. Our emphasis therefore is no longer on adhering
dogmatically to the traditional rules but on achieving results. In any
struggle, a combatant is in bad shape when he allows his adversary both
to choose the weapons to be used and to define the rules of the battle.
Under such circumstances, the conflict between the students and the
establishment would the the most lopsided confrontation since the lions last
ate lunch at the Coliseum. So we say to the Hayakawas: We're not going to
play your game by your rules. You choose your tactics and we'll choose ours.


PLAYBOY: Some college administrators believe that tile only way to avoid
continued disruption and violence is to call in the police at the outset of
a demonstration and swiftly disperse the demonstrators-with whatever force
is necessary. What do you think of this tactic?
BROWN: I think it stinks. It's not only the most brutal but also the most
stupid tactic that's been used so far.
FRIEDENBERG: Police on campus are certainly very dangerous. I think Robert
Maynard Hutchins, in a recent issue of _The Center_ Magazine, put it as
succinctly as possible when he wrote that the police should never be brought
in, and for one simple reason: They cannot he trusted. It would be fine if
they were able to control crowds and aggression without the kind of class
hatred for students that leads to violence, but as it is now, anyone who
brings the police onto campus must know that they're going to bust the
heads of the kids.
GALLAGHER: I don't think you can generalize on the use of police or any
other tactic. You have to make a pragmatic judgment in each instance. If the
demonstrating group is very small, police may be advisable, but at the same
time, you run the risk of escalating the situation through their presence.
I wouldn't hesitate to call police to protect life and limb, but aside from
that, it's a tricky matter. From my own experience, though, I can and do
give the lie to the assertion that you can't trust them. Last November, the
police arrested 170 persons at CCNY-half of them students-without hurting a
hangnail.  They came prepared for peaceful nonresistance from students and
non-students. They met no violence and therefore meted out none. Of course,
if the police can be induced to come onto campus without their night sticks,
guns and handcuffs-with nothing but their bare hands and uniforms the
student reaction is hound to be much better. An absence of force on the part
of the police keeps the general situation at a much lower key.
HAYAKAWA: To rule out the use of armed police when violence threatens or
exists is simple abdication of administrative responsibility. Of course,
police must be well trained and disciplined; but the police question has
arisen on campuses the world over only because lawbreakers make police
protection necessary. The answer is not to disarm the police but to
de-escalate the violence.


PLAYBOY: But if the police could be persuaded to leave their guns behind,
wouldn't this contribute to such a de-escalation?
GALLAGHER: Of course it would-and in many cases they can be persuaded.
Contrary to the opinion of some people, police are human beings. In my
experience at City College, the police are more than ready-anxious, in fact-
to avert any form of violence, because they, too, are concerned with their
own image. But at the same time, I fear the repressive action of the state.
It's too easy for the self-promoting politician to intrude his blunt fingers
into campus affairs and profit by it in terms of votes the following
November. This vitiates the integrity and independence of any institution
of higher learning. But it's also true that if we're going to have freedom
from political interference, we've got to have a pretty good record of
on-campus performance.
BROWN: We must be talking about different people, because the cops I've seen
in action would be lost without their weapons. If you ask a cop to lay down
his gun and night stick, what do you expect him to use? Brains? You must be
kidding. These men are like hungry wolves. They wait straining at the leash
for the word to he given; then they tear into us with their night sticks,
tear gas and guns. One night last March, after a cop had thrown a tear-gas
canister into a quiet dormitory at Howard, unarmed brothers ran out into the
street screaming and cursing. Within minutes there were ten carloads of cops
on the campus. They were equipped with everything from mace to shotguns, and
they damn sure didn't come to negotiate. They came nigger hunting.
EDWARDS: I think the administrators who call police on campus are actually
serving the cause of the student revolt. For that reason, I can foresee
situations where I would be elated by such action, even though the price in
busted heads or even in deaths would be high-but not as high as the price
people pay daily just to exist in this unjust society. Repression and
brutality invariably give rise to more intense and more revolutionary
confrontations, with hitherto uncommitted elements being drawn into the
conflict, since most students will tend to join or at least become
sympathetic to the goals of the demonstrators. So as long as there are so
few administrators moving promptly and rationally to correct injustices, I
would just as soon see a person like Hayakawa in power rather than a
political magician like Perkins at Cornell, who tries to stand up and be
counted on both sides of the fence at once. No one brought more unity to the
student body at San Francisco State than Hayakawa, and the struggle
desperately needs such unity under fire. So send in your cops; they're our
best recruiting agents.
LUCE: It's for just those reasons that it's a mistake ever to let the police
on campus unless a situation gets completely out of hand and there's no
other course open. In most cases, when the police are called in during the
early stages of a campus problem, they give credibility to the radicals'
contention that the struggle is really one of the student body against the
power structure, because when cops drag the radicals out of a hall or a
building, other students often join the radicals out of an emotional kind of
identification and sympathy. So I think it's obvious that the police in many
cases have inadvertently helped the radicals in just that way, as Mr.
Edwards rather gleefully points out.
HAYAKAWA: It helps them more if you abdicate your responsibility to maintain
peace on campus. I assumed the presidency in the middle of one of these
crises, and I made the decision very early that the only mistake is to call
the police on campus after a disturbance has started. I decided that the
police were going to be on campus in a pre-emptive function. And so, on
December second when I became president, there were police in every
classroom building and a bunch of supplementary police just off campus who
could come whenever called upon. As a result, the uproar didn't start in
classrooms, although classroom destruction had been a favorite indoor sport
until then; it was pushed out into the streets, where it could be more
easily controlled with a minimum of injuries and property damage. Throughout
the disruptions of December and January, I employed the tactic of having the
police on hand before anything happened, rather than using them just to pick
up the pieces-and I think this worked out pretty well.


PLAYBOY: Your critics contend that police have no place on campus even as a
deterrent, since institutions of higher education must be free of pressure
from the civil authorities in order to function effectively. How would you
answer them?
HAYAKAWA: No one wants to see police on campus but it's the demonstrations,
not their cure, that shatter the academic atmosphere. Even so, I have seen
many of my colleagues shocked at the very sight of a policeman on campus,
even a policeman there for the protection of their own classes. Some of them
even go into hysterics, crying, "I can't teach, I can't teach. There are
police around." I try to tell them that if the police weren't there, there'd
be a goon squad of radical students busting up their classes, but you just
can't reach them. They say, "I can't teach in a police state." What utter
nonsense. I agree that police shouldn't have to be on campus at all, but
even more importantly, the protest tactics that require the use of police
shouldn't be on campus, either. I like the medieval idea of the university
as a sanctuary from the world and a refuge from all the military strife,
power politics, economic reprisal and so on that characterize the larger
society. Street fighting and gangsterism have no place in such an academic
community; but once the gangsters and street fighters invade the campus what
are you going to do? Just roll over and die?
BROWN: Dr. Hayakawa, you just explained in a nutshell the major reason for
strife on your campus. You want a university to function as a sanctuary
from the world; we want the university to help eradicate the world's evils
by plunging headfirst into the daily operations of this mad, racist planet.
Can you see that today's university in its isolated approach, actually
produces war-mongers, racketeers and Southern Senators? And that these men
run the country? I'd like to see you walk up to Strom Thurmond or Mendel
Rivers and try to convert them with some philosophy you formulated in your
sanctuary. In my concept of the new black university we would concern
ourselves with preventing these crackers from keeping black kids hungry and
poorly housed. I wish they would roll over and die.
FRIEDENBERG: It seems to me that what Dr. Hayakawa is saying essentially is
that the use of pressure and certain kinds of force are perfectly legitimate
tools-for everybody but students. This means that in social conflict in this
country, force is illegitimate only when it is not institutionalized. I was
greatly inconvenienced, for example, while traveling to a number of
conferences to discuss student disruptions by the perfectly legitimate
strike of American Airlines, which denied me means of travel and left large
numbers of people stranded and in rather awkward positions. The airline
employees made use of interference and disruption of services that was far
more than symbolic, and they weren't about to permit any scabbing, either.
But people didn't panic over it the way they do over student interference
with a university's functioning.
EDWARDS: The airline strike is a good analogy, because just as efforts to
suppress strikes almost invariably lead to violence, administrators who take
a hard line only escalate repression and increase the number of issues at
stake, and when they do that they inevitably bring more people into
confrontation. Any administrator who takes a hard line is only going to
start more battles-and create more rebels to fight them.
JENCKS: It's certainly true that violence against the radicals does
galvanize the apathetic. But there are many constructive alternatives to
violence. If the administration would respond to the students at the outset
and do the kinds of things they urge them to do, in certain instances they
wouldn't need to resort to violence, because some of the issues would never
arise. Of course, the situation varies tremendously from place to place,
depending on whether the students who engage in the initial action really
care about a specific issue or whether they're primarily interested in
radicalizing the rest of the student body, in which case they need and
welcome a confrontation. And at that point, most administration tactics
fail.


PLAYBOY: Some administrators contend that the best policy is to make
concessions that will split the liberals from the radicals and thus give the
administration the opportunity to take disciplinary action against the
hard-core militants. What do volt think of this tactic?
HAYAKAWA: It's a good policy to follow if you can. The stated objectives of
the extremists aren't basically different from the stated objectives of the
more moderate liberals-that is, they all want educational reform or social
justice or ethnic studies or whatever. The real problem is not what they
want but the means they use to secure it-not their goals but their tactics.
It's the extremists who commit such illegal acts as campus disruption,
throwing bricks, tearing up library index cards and so forth, and you have
to get after these people without opposing the legitimate reforms that the
faculty and administration also very profoundly desire, particularly in a
place like San Francisco State where the faculty is every bit as interested
as tile students in social justice, racial equality and educational reform.
So it's not really difficult to split moderates from militants if, at
the same time you're employing hard tactics, you announce your willingness
to be liberal in a number of areas. Very early in the student strike, for
example, we announced that the black-studies program was authorized to go
ahead; we established faculty positions for it, etc. We made a number of
such announcements that affected many of the moderates and liberals who
heard the messages, and in effect split them from the radicals.
EDWARDS: The students of today are much too sophisticated to fall for this
kind of simple-minded ploy, which is just an updating of the old carrot-and
-stick bit. They can see that limited concessions do nothing to change the
relationship between Cornell University and South Africa, or between
R.O.T.C. and the Vietnam war. It's meaningless for an administrator to come
in and say, "OK, because you object to the fact that the Chase Manhattan
Bank invests heavily in South Africa, we won't allow their people to recruit
on campus-but we won't give up our Chase Manhattan stock." That's no
concession: it's just an attempt to defuse and deflect protest by granting
empty concessions that don't really change anything. The students see
through this kind of hypocrisy.
MORSE: Yes, this divide-and-conquer tactic doesn't work, and it never will.
It may impede a particular movement at some point in its development, but
the fact that the campus revolts are still going on shows that the
administrations haven't learned to handle things, and they won't until they
face the fundamental questions, which they seem incapable of doing.
BROWN: I actually tend to think Dr. Hayakawa's tactic could be fairly
effective, but it's still bad and I'm opposed to it. Everyone within the
university-faculty students, administration-ought to be able to sit down and
find out who is wrong and who is right, and then determine in which
direction the university ought to go, so that we get not stopgap concessions
but serious and basic changes in our institutions.
LUCE: There's nothing wrong with a university's conceding on valid points
such as black studies, dorm regulations, abolition of in loco parentis, and
I don't care whether these concessions bring the liberals in, split them off
from the radicals or anyone else. But for a university simply to accede to
radical demands purely as a political tactic or out of fear is, I think, not
only unrealistic but dangerous.


PLAYBOY: A few liberal administrators have successfully avoided violent
confrontation by meeting with dissident students before the situation
becomes critical and seeking to enlist their active assistance in realizing
reforms. Don't you think this is a tactic other college administrations
might emulate?
JENCKS: Certainly--where the dissident leaders can be identified in advance.
But the difficulty is that the people who lead demonstrations-the occupation
of a building, let's say-aren't usually those who have previously been
recognized by the administration as leaders; or they are people to whom the
administration is reluctant to lend legitimacy by negotiating with them. On
campuses that have a relatively small SDS chapter-which is frequently the
situation-the university administrators usually keep hoping that they won't
have to do business with SDS, since they would rather do business with the
student government or with some other elected representatives of the whole
student body.
GALLAGHER: I think an administrator ought to respond very quickly to any
request for conversations-by SDS or any other group. Immediate response is
usually a good solution, not only because it may avert further trouble but
because it's the administrator's duty to relate to fellow human beings
intelligently and with respect. And in doing so, I would be much less
concerned with averting future trouble than with the necessity of building
affirmative contacts with the student body and strengthening democratic
processes. I put my faith in the viability of peaceful change, because I
think the basic values lie in human relationships.
EDWARDS: If you really want to resolve these problems within the democratic
process and avoid violence and confrontation, the only thing to do is to
call a constituent assembly of the entire university every semester, in
which you would discuss what problems the university faces and what steps
should be taken to solve them, andi then open the whole thing up to
suggestions. Give students a chance to take the microphone and make
themselves heard. The assembly would prepare reports on what has been done,
what the university is trying to do, where the students have failed in
following up their own demands and how they can most effectively participate
in the decision-making process.
LUCE: Now, that is sensible. It's vital that we have a nonviolent approach
to opening up channels of communication among students and faculty and
administrators. The assembly idea would certainly be supported by
libertarian conservatives.
EDWARDS: I'm convinced this is the only peaceful means of confronting these
problems. I don't care if the school stops all business for a week each
semester to hold such assemblies, but it's got to be done. This way you'd
really be dealing with problems, not just cooling off pressure and
postponing a worse conflict.
HAYDEN: Even on the one campus where the tactic of delay and avoidance of
confrontation has had some apparent success-the University of Chicago-the
administration was able to sit it out and then expel 43 students not because
it was so strong or its psychology of attrition so brilliant but because the
student movement itself was so weak. It wasn't so much a case of the
administration's success as it was of the students' failure to mobilize the
forces on and off campus-graduate students, ghetto blacks and poor whites-
that could have won the struggle. Of course, it may also have been that
their demands weren't correct or that the timing wasn't correct; but
whatever the specific reasons, they failed. This was only one instance,
however, and I think it would be a great mistake for people to believe that
this is an effective way to defuse rebellions.
MORSE: Once the kids at the University of Chicago begin to realize that they
are being co-opted by such tactics, that their real demands aren't going to
be met, they are going to develop new tactics that won't be co-optable by
the university.
JENKS: Exactly. You can keep escalating the resistance in one way or another
until it becomes a situation the administration can't afford to wait out. If
it's a straight sit-in of the nonviolent variety, the wait-'em-out theory is
workable, but it doesn't always-and it won't always-stop at that.
LUCE: I don't agree that the wait-'em-out approach is ever workable. As I
suggested earlier, one sure way to invite a worse situation, in which police
will be needed, is to take no firm action against people who move into a
hall and take it over, violating private property and the rights of other
students who want to use those facilities. A policy of sitting back and
doing nothing at first and then later taking action seems to me to only play
into the hands of the radicals, since most of the militants who engage in
lawlessness do so because they know it's easy and they can get away with it.
But it becomes much more difficult to be a revolutionary if you know you're
going to get drafted or expelled or maybe arrested or lose your grades. The
willingness to run such risks is what separates the real revolutionaries
from the majority of students.


PLAYBOY: Would the banning of groups such as SDS and Progressive Labor on
campus reduce the likelihood of violent demonstrations?
GALLAGHER: On the contrary. When you ban them, you only drive them
underground, make them conspiratorial, and therefore much more enticing to
many students and probably more effective. Any organization that wants to
function on the campus should be permitted to do so, provided it honestly
states its goals and identifies its principal officers, who can be held
responsible for what the organization does.
LUCE: I agree that any group should be allowed on campus and allowed to
express its ideas, however abhorrent they may be, without persecution-but
only until such time as it engages in illegal or violent activity. The line
between speech and action is very clear, and if a group crosses that line
into illegality, then the university has both the right and the obligation
to take strong action against it.
HAYAKAWA: The idea of banning SDS is certainly appealing, but such groups
would only reappear under other names or meet off campus, so I doubt the
desirability of trying to ban extremists.
BROWN: It would only backfire, anyway, as Dr. Gallagher says, because people
tend to gravitate to banned organizations, banned words, banned ideas,
banned literature. That's why every time somebody like U.S. Deputy Attorney
General Kleindienst threatens to put student "ideological criminals" in
internment centers, more and more people become uptight and the ranks of the
disenchanted swell.


PLAYBOY: Attorney General Mitchell and other Federal officials have charged
that among these "ideological criminals" are dedicated Communists holding
high positions within the student protest movement. Is there any truth to
this claim?
BROWN: Oh, sure, we're all part of the "international Communist conspiracy,"
getting our orders straight from Moscow in the Russian embassy's diplomatic
pouch. Anybody on campus knows that the Communist Party has about as much
relevance to this movement as the Woman's Christian Temperance Union;
they're conservatives, man. Of course, there are people in the movement who
identify with Marxist-Leninist revolution, but they're far removed from the
traditional Communist position and don't have affiliations with any
Communist government or political party. We're willing to accept the honest
help of anybody in this struggle-Communist, vegetarian, Rosicrucian-but the
Communists have no organizational hold on us. We don't take instructions
from anybody; we define our own issues and decide our own tactics.
HAYAKAWA: I think there is a common direction to much of this rebellion; the
Attorney General and the FBI seem to have solid reasons to believe that at
least elements of it are oriented, if not to Moscow, then certainly to
Peking and Havana. This doesn't mean that even a majority of the protesting
students share this orientation, but it's certainly true that groups like
Progressive Labor are openly Maoist. Let's not look under the bed for Reds,
but let's not delude ourselves into thinking they play no role whatsoever in
this struggle.
HAYDEN: You are looking under the bed for Reds, but what you're going to
find is not the old type of American Communist-who was basically just a
pro-Soviet new Deal liberal--but revolutionaries who believe in a democratic
humanist socialism. Of course, this charge that we're all sinister Marxist
traitors will be given increasing currency now, because the Government is
looking for an excuse to purge us, and the international-Communist-
conspiracy label can be quite effective in softening up the public for
tough new repressive measures.


PLAYBOY: Apart from its specific charges of Communist involvement, how do
you feel about the Nixon Administration's demand for a general crackdown on
student dissent?
LUCE: I'd oppose it. We have too many Federal edicts as it is; the
Government has attempted to encroach on the rights and privileges of the
American people for too long and in too many areas already. Campus problems
as they now exist can be better solved by the students themselves than by
either state legislatures or the Federal Government.
HAYAKAWA: I would agree that the role of the Federal Government should be an
extremely limited one, since problems on most campuses are problems for the
administration itself or local government to deal with. But there have been
times when things have escalated to the point where Federal troops have had
to be called in. That's what President Eisenhower had to do at Central High
School in Little Rock in order to prevent white racists from closing down
that school; and the same kind of thing occurred in Alabama and Mississippi.
Notice that when the Federal Government intervened with men armed with
bayonets on those occasions, the liberal community didn't raise a peep about
it; they thought it was a fine thing and applauded the Government's action.
Somehow they don't respond the same way when campuses are equally threatened
by left-wing militants. I believe that the right of people of all colors to
an equal education is something that's built into this system, and if the
rights of the people have to be protected ultimately by Federal
intervention, well, the Government has the power and the authority and the
duty to do what's necessary. I don't expect any present or future crises
connected with radical student protest to reach that point; I hope not,
anyway. But I do think the Government should always be willing, if asked, to
do what would be most helpful for any university in turmoil.
FRIEDENBERG: If the Government would do nothing at all, it would be very
helpful, indeed.


PLAYBOY: Isn't it likely that the Government will attempt to work through
state and local authorities, providing encouragement and investigative
support, rather than intervene directly?
JENCKS: I would guess so. If there is tough repression in the form of
large-scale arrests, prosecutions, expulsions from colleges and so forth-and
there may well be-then it will most likely be done by local authorities
rather than by the Federal Government. Whenever there has been a move toward
authoritarianism in America, it's generally been local rather than national
in origin, and the local district attorney and police invariably have been
given prime responsibility for carrying it out-even if the inspiration came
from above. It's much easier for Mayor Daley or a Southern sheriff to be a
really repressive force than it is for the Federal Government. It's usually
less visible, for one thing, and therefore less embarrassing internationally
and less likely to create widespread domestic opposition. The national
liberal community reads The New York Times, and if violent repression by
local police happens in Duluth, it either doesn't make the Times or it's
buried on page 5a. But if Mr. Kleindienst or Attorney General Mitchell had
the FBI round up SDS members from all over the country and put them in
Federal detention centers, everybody would be up in arms.
On the other band, there's very little fuss about local prosecution of small
numbers of radicals for "inciting- to riot." Local repression can create a
climate of fear that will inhibit a lot of people from saying or doing
anything out of line, even if they think the status quo is rotten. And local
repression, especially if the FBI and Justice Department informally
coordinate it, may also pick off the most effective leaders one by one,
without trying to round up everybody.
MORSE: There's no doubt that local authorities are doing their best right
now to crush student protest. Hundreds of demonstrators in the people's-park
uproar at Berkeley were shot at, gassed or busted on heavy felonies. But the
movement will survive this oppression. As leaders get picked off, new
leaders will emerge. I don't think the Government has a very good idea who
the real leaders are anymore. They know some national figures and some
locally prominent people, but this is a fluid movement and leadership is
coming from everywhere, Washington can send out its dossiers to local
authorities, but for every one of us they put in jail, there will be ten to
take our place.
FRIEDENBERG: I doubt that much Federal encouragement of state, county and
city officials is really necessary. Most local agencies seem only too happy
to prosecute protesters entirely on their own. I'm very afraid that as
national hysteria and backlash build, we'll see more and more repression of
this kind.


PLAYBOY: Some observers of the student movement feel that by precipitating
such backlash and the repression it engenders, the students are in danger
not only of making it worse for themselves but of creating a social
situation more reactionary than the one they set out to remedy. Do you think
there's any truth to this argument?
FRIEDENBERG: I'm afraid so. The backlash is likely to bring about a
political and social climate nearly indistinguishable from fascism, except
that it will be in a slightly new form. It will be very different from the
McCarthy era-much quieter, and with much more use of detention. What
frightens me particularly is the increasingly active involvement of the
courts as an instrument of repression, which is something new and very
sinister and deadly for America, because the courts have traditionally been
the protectors of liberty against the incursions of a hostile and demanding
legislature or executive. There are hundreds of kids now being held in jail
who have been busted for offenses like contempt of court, and for this there
is really no defense, since the use of court orders to get kids out of
buildings automatically makes their offense contempt of court, which is much
more general and far easier to apply arbitrarily than trespass charges. So
the backlash is a very real threat to the democratic process.
GALLAGHER: There's no Question about a coming backlash, and recent actions
by Congress and many state legislatures indicate that it's already upon us.
In some cases, this is really what the radicals want-a form of polarization
that they hope to turn to their advantage; in other cases, it's not what
they desire, but they're still ready to run the risk of it. The great danger
is that whenever anarchy develops, it will inevitably lead to a hunger for
order that may ultimately result in the establishment of a near dictatorship
or a police state. I think a strong backlash is the inevitable response to
the chaos on many campuses.
EDWARDS: Students and black people are catching so much hell from the
frontlash that the backlash doesn't really matter. I doubt very seriously if
the right wing can do any more to students today than the so-called liberals
have already done. A student who gets sent off to Vietnam because he has
less than a C average, a student who can't get into college because of
standards set by white liberal academicians-what more could George Wallace
do to him? Absolutely nothing.
HAYDEN: I wouldn't even call it a backlash; I would simply say that we have
brought out the trite character of the people in power. Their racist-
imperialist mentality was ugly to begin with and no one expected that they
would become nicer once we started to challenge them. Now they really have
to fight to maintain their power, and it looks to me like the Reagans of
this country, along with the police chiefs, are trying to create a situation
in which they can utilize these incidents of unrest to get rid of not only
the radicals but also the liberals, whom they hate just as much-including
liberals in the school administrations. Everywhere I go to speak, some state
legislator gets up and asks why the university is bringing Hayden to speak
on the campus. An investigation begins; the president of the university is
put on the hot seat and the pressure on him becomes so great that in order
to preserve his job, he does the work of the right wing for them. It wasn't
really Reagan or the regents at Berkeley who denied credit for the Cleaver
course or for my course; it was the liberal administration, which thought by
so doing that it would prevent a take-over by the right wing. Well, a
university is already taken over by the right wing when the liberals simply
capitulate to what the right wing wants. It's not a backlash; the people in
power are simply being forced to define their corrupt position more
precisely.
HAYAKAWA: Whether you call it backlash or insist, as Mr. Hayden does, on
calling it the expression of a corrupt mentality, I think the public and
governmental response so far has been quite moderate. Most sane people
object to the campus uproar but still believe in the traditional democratic
values, and will try, as I will try, to prevent the backlash from gaining
too much momentum. This is where college administrators have to show some
strength and character, so that they can distinguish between the really
repressive measures some legislators may propose and those measures that are
reasonable and necessary for tile maintenance of peace on campus.
Incidentally, I don't think the backlash is going to come in the form of
dramatic repressive laws that limit personal freedoms as much as in the form
of reduced appropriations for state-supported institutions; but even this
would be a tragic thing, because the 98 percent of students who are
interested only in pursuing their studies would then have to pay the price
for the two percent who are really responsible for the trouble. San
Francisco State, for example, is the only one in a system of 18 colleges
that has experienced this kind of violent and prolonged disruption but the
students of all 18 colleges in the state will have to suffer if the
taxpayers get mad enough. So the radicals are setting the college system in
America back in many ways.
HAYDEN: The college system per se isn't worth preserving unless it adjusts
itself to human goals and values, which it shows no sign of doing. Until and
unless it does, the campuses will be the scene of continuous and growing
conflict.
LUCE: That's typical New Left irresponsibility. You're sowing the seeds of
chaos, and you don't even care about the whirlwind you're going to reap.
You're creating a backlash that can do much more than deprive colleges of
Federal appropriations; it can also create a repressive atmosphere that will
crush all dissent, legitimate as well as violent. But I'm still optimistic
that the responsible majority of students will hand together and stop this
lunacy before it goes much further.


PLAYBOY: There are already some signs of a student backlash on campus
against the more radical groups such as SDS. Organized and unorganized
groups of students opposed to radical activists counterdemonstrated at
several schools last year. Do you see the possibility of more clashes between
conservative and radical students?
HAYAKAWA: There's no doubt at all in my mind that the majority of students
are disillusioned with the radicals. I can't predict to what degree they're
going to take active countermeasures to protect their educational rights,
but I think that such a movement is beginning to appear on the horizon. On
our campus, for example, students have formed what is known as the Committee
for an Academic Environment, a group of fairly progressive people on the
whole, representing the broad moderate and liberal group; the outright
conservatives are in the Young Americans for Freedom. The members of the
committee are all for Negro student demands and for educational reform, but
they simply won't tolerate any more of this violence. I also understand that
at the University of North Carolina, an organization has been formed called
the Hayakawa Society; the members are apparently not at all conservative but
liberal and middle-of-the-road students who also refuse to countenance any
more violence and disruption on their campus.
BROWN: Listening to Dr. Hayakawa makes me think that if a student leader
today wanted to get $1,000,000 from the Government, he could announce he
was going to form a counterprotest movement; he'd have no trouble getting
the money. But I don't think this is an indication of how most students
feel, since disenchantment with the system runs deep in most institutions,
even if there's only a core group of people who are willing to act on their
commitments.
HAYDEN: And the right wing on campus isn't built on ideological commitment
of any kind. Most of these groups are fostered and protected by the
Hayakawas; they didn't have any independent existence before the protests
and they still won't after the protests. Hayakawa's Committee for an
Academic Environment probably contains 12 people; at least that's the figure
I hear. I think there will always be a minority of students who are law-and
-order freaks, but the vast majority of students will be more or less
sympathetic toward our goals, although always uncertain about our methods
-not because they consider our methods immoral but because our methods can
lead to being put in jail or kicked out of school, and nobody makes a
commitment like that lightly. But forget all this crap about a big
right-wing backlash on campus; it's just a myth.
GALLAGHER: I disagree that it's a myth and I think that we'll probably be
seeing an increasing number of counterprotests. I'm not sure how much of
this will come from the great silent middle, but in reaction to the protests
of the New Left and the Old Left, one always observes the recurrence of what
I would call latent McCarthyism-and not Gene McCarthy-in the offing. It's a
frightening thing to see polarizations of this kind beginning to develop in
the student body, because it carries the implicit threat of physical
violence between ideologically opposed student groups.
LUCE: Though the left has always tried to promote violence for tactical
reasons, we have tried to protest their tactics in a peaceful way. I do see,
however, a positive resistance developing on the campus against left-wing
terrorism-not some kind of new McCarthyism, but a principled opposition to
left-wing violence. I'm inclined to believe that we're actually coming close
to the zenith of left-wing terrorism, because the resistance has already
begun on a number of campuses. People are beginning to understand that
terrorism, collectivism and socialism are evils to be opposed; but ours has
to be a battle that commits students to positive change without becoming
part of this incredible backlash phenomenon, which would drastically limit
dissent on the campuses. This libertarian opposition to the left is being
led to a very large degree by the organization that I work for-the Young
Americans for Freedom. We're calling on students to stand up to those who
would try to take over their classrooms and disrupt the functioning of the
university. I think we can show the world, if it pays any attention to what
we're doing, that this tactic works. At Stanford, where the left tried to
occupy a building, our people simply sat down in front of the doors and
said, "You're not going to take over this building," The left wing then
perpetrated violence on our people and broke into the building. Pictures
were taken of this and it showed the administration, the alumni and the
other students that the radicals were themselves violent, beating up
innocent students who were nonviolently trying to prevent them from
invading private property. If the left attacks our people, I think other
students will soon come to our aid, because we're showing that we support
and believe in private property and the right of students to attend classes.
And this movement is growing. The membership of Y. A. F. has doubled in the
past year; we presently have over 44,000 members.
HAYDEN: Headed, in your case, by the only member of our generation to follow
the pattern of the ideological fanatics of the Thirties who shifted from
far-left dogmatism to far-right dogmatism-from Progressive Labor to a job as
consultant to the House Un-American Activities Committee and an executive of
Y. A. F.
JENCKS: Whatever his origins, Mr. Luce is exaggerating the strength of his
present supporters. The right wing on campus just isn't a major force as
things stand now, although that isn't to say it couldn't develop into one.
It's not a potent factor, because many, perhaps most, of those who are out
of sympathy with the student protests also feel very little loyalty to the
authorities, the establishment, the administration, the cops. Consequently,
they're just not natural recruits for an anti-radical movement, even though
they're not politically radical themselves.
HAYDEN: That's true, and it's also true that there have been very few cases
where we have directed any violence against other students. In most cases,
we've taken the attitude that our fellow students are not the enemy, but
we're well aware that certain small groups of reactionary students,
especially jocks, are organized. They go out wearing anti-SDS arm bands and
provoke violence by attacking picket lines for the benefit of photographers.
These people claim they're being deprived of their right to education while
a strike or demonstration is going on, but that's cover-up bullshit, since
there are always all kinds of classroom buildings or off-campus centers
open;  so in no way is their right to education jeopardized. What is
jeopardized is their comfortable and serene view of the university as a
kind of factory where they get a credential to go into industry and become a
success in life. So when they attempt to walk through our lines, it's not
their right to education that's being violated; it's our right to oppose the
system. And more and more people are recognizing our right to self-defense
when somebody tries to walk through our lines. If they do that, they're
going to be stopped-first by being talked to, second by being ushered away;
but if that doesn't work and they start attacking us, then we're going to
defend ourselves. We're not frightened by violence or threats of violence,
because we recognize that the things which motivate this movement are so
vital that they must be fought for with every means at our disposal.




PLAYBOY: What are the basic motivations of the movement?
LUCE: Some have tried to assign the cause of unrest to a general sense of
anonymity and alienation on the part of the students; but it's not quite
that simple, because in a technological age such as ours, everyone feels a
certain amount of alienation, apathy and frustration-conservatives as well
as radicals. It's natural to question this complex and often oppressive
society.
JENCKS: It's not only natural but commendable and imperative that students
question the character of the society they'll be joining. They're worried
about the future. They have only a few years in college to figure out what
to do with themselves, what kind of work to do, whether or not to get
married, how to live their lives. Since they are on the verge of integrating
themselves into society, they certainly ought to be worried about what that
society is like.
HAYDEN: They have good reason to worry, because they are beginning to
realize that society is not fundamentally stable, that in fact it's in the
process of collapsing. Students are profoundly affected by this transition,
and they're looking for something new to replace the old decaying values and
lend meaning and purpose to their lives.
MORSE: We're taught concepts like democracy and brotherly love all our lives
-by our parents, by the Church, in school civics courses. The values
themselves are beautiful, but then you look around and see that practically
no one-certainly not the people who run this country-ever acts on these
principles. And when you realize that, it causes a big change in your
outlook.
EDWARDS: This contradiction between pious word and ugly deed-in regard to
the 1964 Civil Rights Act, for example, which promised everything and
delivered nothing-ultimately forces people to become revolutionary. When you
work within the system and get only hollow legislation, then you have to
move outside the system into revolutionary activities. We have been pushed
into this, not so much by a lack of faith in the system but because the
system hasn't even kept the promises it so blatantly made to us.
HAYAKAWA: That's pure hokum. It's a rationalization to blame the hypocrisy
of society for student radicalism. Why does the love generation go around
exuding messages of hate? Because hypocrisy is not just a vice of the
establishment but a universal human failing. There's not a single damn one
of us who is able to live up to all his beliefs and aspirations. It's easy
to accuse somebody else of being a hypocrite, but we're not so ready to
recognize our own hypocrisy. What's at the heart of things here is the
revolt of one generation against another. Let's say your father is a
successful stockbroker. You can say: "You've devoted your life to money.
You're materialistic. You created a world in which there is injustice, war,
et cetera." This is simply a way of rejecting the old man, asserting your
own virility and independence.
EDWARDS: There is certainly a generational conflict here, but it's not
simply the child breaking away from the parent, and you make a big mistake
to dismiss it so smugly. Students are looking for new ways to deal with the
same old problems, because the traditional means have failed miserably. They
can't look to their parents for the answers to these problems, because their
parents are part of the problems, and most parents often don't even
recognize that the problems exist. If some white radical student goes home
over the summer and talks to his parents about what happened at Cornell and
tries to articulate the situation that the blacks find themselves in, his
parents will think he's part of a sinister plot to overthrow the Government.
That's why students are breaking away from the system as well as from their
parents.
LUCE: You people talk about "the system" like Hitler talked about the Jews;
you make it a scapegoat and a justification for every kind of extremism. The
New Left says that because the United States is involved in the war in
Vietnam, students are justified in burning up papers or tearing apart a
president's office. What they're really saying, with total illogicality, is
that because the United States is involved in a war abroad, then people
should be involved in a war at home, and because they don't want to fight
in Vietnam, they'll fight the Government on the campus. It all ends in
nihilism. And what are the roots of this nihilism? Full wallets and empty
heads.
GALLAGHER: It is unfortunately true that this student movement seems less
concerned with seeking something better than with scorning what exists. The
revolutionary generation of the Thirties was euphoric, while this generation
is dysphoric. The Thirties generation was utopian; it had a hope and a
structure. But this generation has no utopia; instead of hope, it has
despair, and it has no structure for the future. But it's easy to understand
why, when you consider that this is the first generation that has lived from
childhood under the shadow of the bomb. This is one of the basic facts
separating these kids from their elders, because, in a very real sense, our
younger generation lives in expectation of apocalypse.
EDWARDS: That expectation of apocalypse is precisely what turns me on about
this generation of students. To live with the fact of the bomb, a person has
to be genuinely brave and have a lot of faith to bother keeping on with the
struggle. Because we're not facing just one bomb; we're facing everything
from overpopulation, pesticides, pollution of the water and the biosphere to
the hydrogen bomb and chemical-bacteriological warfare. And there's an
excellent chance that these bombs will catch up with humanity before
humanity begins to solve its problems. The fact that students are not
utterly cynical, and resigned in the face of all this but are looking for
ways to confront the situation is most impressive to me, and gives me faith
in this generation and for the future.
FRIEDENBERG: Using this "shadow of the bomb" business is a picturesque
explanation that tends to write off student protest as an anxiety response
to various threats. It's actually more a matter of being fed up with a
system that today's students are beginning to realize is responsible for the
whole mess.
HAYAKAWA: But the world has always been a mess and, according to our
preachers, moral values have been crumbling every Sunday since I was born.
The bomb and Vietnam and racial prejudice and all the other issues we've
been discussing don't lie at the root of the student unrest. I believe
profoundly that even if this country's current problems were wiped out
overnight, this particular kind of student protest would continue-because it
isn't motivated as much by a concern with realistic issues as by
psychological factors.
GALLAGHER: I'm intrigued with the fact that this generation of students not
only grew up with the bomb but was also the first to be raised on the
permissive doctrines of Dr. Spock. This general permissiveness is new and
the net result is that my generation gets bewildered when our children don't
act as we expect children to act.
MORSE: You may think we're radical because of Dr. Spock's permissiveness;
and Hayakawa, because we're rebelling against our parents, but both are
condescending rationalizations. Speaking for myself, there hasn't been any
single cause for my radicalization; it was a slow, evolutionary process over
a period of several years. My politics have changed gradually but
drastically since the first free-speech movement-and this holds true of
everybody who's gone through the movement-because you inevitably grow more
radical the more you participate, the more you see people beaten up, the
more you study and read and find out about things like nerve gas and
chemical and biological warfare. You begin to see that the things this
Government is doing are incredible, not only in the political and racial
areas but even in the way they fuck up the natural environment. Look at the
Santa Barbara oil leak; they just let it leak and they think of that as
minor, since it's not killing people-just fish and wildlife. But it's still
outrageous. Then there's Vietnam, and what they're doing in black
communities, and what they're doing to students. The more you know about
what's going on domestically and what this country is doing internationally,
the more you see that all this is part of one sick system, and the closer
you come to the point where you just want to tear the whole system down,
rend it limb from limb and build something completely new.
I have a tremendous sense of urgency just looking at things like the train
full of nerve gas going from the Rocky Mountains to the New Jersey shore,
and thinking about what could happen. We've got to stop these things or
there won't be any planet left for us to live on. The bastards are just
going to devastate the whole world, pollute it, destroy its natural
resources and eventually blow it up. But the Government doesn't worry about
the consequences of what it's doing; it just plows ahead like the bulldozer
that ran down a clergyman-protester in Cleveland a few years ago. It almost
makes you want to go out and shoot somebody out of sheer frustration-every
cop and every Government official in sight. But isolated individual acts
like that won't make the changes we need. We've got to build a revolutionary
movement to change the whole system completely-in an organized way. I just
wonder if we'll make it in time. It's really kind of scary.
BROWN: Everything you've said is undeniable, but you're still talking
predominately from the position of white radicalism. I have to put these
issues in black perspective. The black student is involved in a two-stage
process. He is involved first in discovering himself and eradicating the
pervasive self-hatred that has been instilled in him by a wicked system. He
then has the job of trying to help his brothers cross the same gap from
Negro to black, from slave to sovereign human being. For black people, all
the problems of alienation, the bomb and the changing moral fiber of society
are piled on top of the overriding problem of being black in a sick white
society; so we have to be doubly radical. We are concerned about all the
problems confronting our society-because, like it or not, we are part of
that society-but our first concern is awakening the black conscience,
building black pride and laying the groundwork for a struggle to gain our
rights.


PLAYBOY: So far we've talked primarily about the societal causes of unrest.
To what extent are academic and social conditions within the university
itself a cause?
EDWARDS: To the extent that universities fail to provide real education,
they certainly generate unrest and militancy. It's not an accident that
students call the big schools factories, because they grind out the
replacement parts that keep the corporate machinery humming in high gear.
The function of the university today is to teach people how to make a
living, which is an indirect way of saying that it exists to fill positions
in the Dow Chemical Company, the military-industrial complex and the
country's political machinery-and most students involved in the protest
movement don't care to become part of that machinery.
MORSE: You just have to look at the percentages of students who are dropping
out of the system. Business is very scared today, because it's not getting
the cream of the college crop like it did in the Fifties. The best students
are more interested in jobs like teaching and social work; they're alienated
from the corporate structure and they're disgusted by what they see business
and Government doing. Many of them, in fact, are reaching the decision that
they're going to have to work to destroy what Government and business are
doing.
GALLAGHER: You say "many," but I suspect that only a very small percentage
feels so alienated that they have committed themselves to the destruction of
the system rather than to its constructive reform. As far as the
university's relationship to business and Government is concerned, there is
undoubtedly an unconscious continuation of the university's traditional role
as a professional school to train men for later professional life. To that
extent, the university's purposes are identified with those of the society
around it: but it's a perversion of fact to argue that the university is
manipulating students into the corporate structure. The important thing,
though, isn't really whether it's true or not but whether it is believed-and
acted upon as belief. And, unfortunately, it is both believed and acted
upon.
LUCE: This notion has really been ballyhooed by the left. They've tried to
use it as a propaganda tool to make people feel that the university is only
serving big business, but I'm inclined to believe that this isn't what the
university is doing, and I don't think the majority of students buy that
kind of simplistic analysis either.
GAL1AGHER: It's only a partially correct analysis. And the left also fails
to give the universities credit for being the breeding ground of their own
dissent.
HAYDEN: That's like crediting German concentration camps for breeding
anti-Nazis. The universities are a breeding ground, all right; they're the
brain centers of the capitalist system, and the kids know it. The University
of California, for example, currently does most of the agricultural research
that benefits the wealthy growers of the state-at the expense of the farm
workers. The University of California also engages in a wide variety of
military research, including work on nuclear weapons. and many other
universities across the country are doing the same thing. It's only logical,
because if you look at the boards of university trustees at all schools,
you'll find that they are comprised almost universally of successful white
middle-aged businessmen-not labor, not minorities, not youth. The boards,
consequently, are nothing but one big Babbit warren dedicated to serving
the power structure, not the needs of the students. This is the basic truth
about our university system, not whether dissenting ideas are permitted on
campuses. Such dissent would be meaningful only if it were institutionalized
-and the administrations don't show any signs of establishing institutes
of guerrilla warfare or departments of revolution. But the schools have
institutionalized their ties to the military-industrial complex, and this is
what has radicalized thousands of students who recognize that the complex is
directly responsible for the initiation and continuation of our vicious and
immoral aggression in Vietnam.
GALLAGHER: Not so. If any one thing is built into the fabric of the American
university at its best, it is the freedom to differ, to challenge, to
dissent, to create. This includes the right to be angry about injustice. It
does not include the right to establish a new intolerance as the norm of
truth and to kick off campus anyone who disagrees. The glory of the Church
is its martyrs, prophets and heretics; but when they, in turn,
institutionalize their new orthodoxies, they lose the right to be tolerated
by those whom they will not tolerate. Give me no new fascisms for old.


PLAYBOY: Would the student revolt continue on any significant scale without
the impetus of the war in Vietnam?
EDWARDS: It certainly would, because the war has given all the divergent
factions-SDS, the Panthers, black student groups-a focus for coalition, made
it clear that we're not just dealing with a system that is anti-black but a
system that is anti-humanity, a system that has committed genocide against
every minority group it has come into contact with, from the American
Indians right on down to the Vietnamese. These facts won't be changed by the
end of the war. The movement will go on, because the basic issues at stake
are the system and the atrocities it continues at home and abroad. Given the
nature of the beast, there will be more Vietnams, and we will have to
continue this struggle for many years.
JENCKS: It's true that radical student dissension would continue without
Vietnam. But if Nixon were to stop the war and give the impression that he
was seriously trying to do something about the racial situation in this
country, moderate support for radical protest would probably dry up. A
moderate is almost by definition a fellow who doesn't get too worked up
about anything until it hits him in the face and he can't look the other way
anymore. The war and the riots in the black ghettos have made a lot of
moderates think about what is wrong with America, but if society gives them
half a chance, I'm afraid they'll turn their attention to more enjoyable
things.
LUCE: I think so, too. The radicals need the war; they use it to sucker
moderate students into their movement with the argument that the war is
symptomatic of the rottenness of the whole society. To some extent, this
tactic has worked, and the war has lent fantastic impetus to the tendency of
young people to question the entire American system. It's generally because
of the war and their opposition to it that the radicals have been able to
mobilize students on other issues, too. I think the leftists would find
their movement falling apart if the war suddenly ended. This is actually the
Achilles' heel of their cause-the fact that it's essentially a single-issue
protest.
HAYDEN: That's just not true. The protest existed before the war, it flows
from basic conditions in this country, not from any one single policy such
as Vietnam.
MORSE: It's true that a few years ago, things were very much oriented around
the single anti-war issue. But opposition to Vietnam, as Mr. Luce correctly
points out, has given us insights into the nature of the entire system, and
over the past two or three years the issues have become broader and broader,
until today, a large percentage of the student movement finally understands
what capitalism really means and what imperialism really means and what the
United States is really doing at home and all over the world. In fact,
you'll find now that many of the issues that stir people most emotionally
have nothing to do with the war.
BROWN: Right. If the war were to stop tomorrow, people would turn their
attention to the problems of racism and poverty and exploitation, which
existed in this country long before Vietnam. This is particularly true of
black students, who are affected most directly by these conditions. Although
they're concerned about the war, they are even more deeply concerned about
the issues that immediately affect their lives and destinies and the hell of
a job they have in front of them in the dangerous fight for self-
determination. If the war were to end tomorrow, there might be a slackening
off of militancy on white campuses but not among black students. We're just
at the beginning of a long, hard road.
FRIEDENBERG: I certainly agree that there will always be enough issues to
protest about in the kind of society we have, but without the Vietnam war,
the situation wouldn't have reached what the nuclear physicists call
critical mass. It's true that a lot of the student protests haven been
directly connected with Vietnam, but the war and the draft are always in the
background, shadowing the students' lives. Without a doubt, the draft has
done more than any other factor to intensify student opposition to the war
and to the system.


PLAYBOY: How do you feel about the present Selective Service System?
GALLAGHER: The draft laws as they are now established are immoral, for the
heavy victims are the poor and the black. They're the ones who do the dying.
But even the student who is deferred is victimized, because the draft laws
vitiate the academic process by creating all the wrong reasons for going to
college. And look at the violence it does to the grading system: A professor
who gives a student an F will he told, "You just poured napalm on that kid."
If we have to have a draft and there are those who think we can get along
well without one-then it should be on a straight lottery basis.
HAYAKAWA: Amen!
LUCE: I agree that the draft system in the U. S. is an abortion as it
stands, but I don't think a lottery system is any solution. There shouldn't
be any draft at all, period. This is one of the few points on which the New
Left and the New Right are in full agreement. No matter how you rationalize
it, Selective Service is really selective slavery, and the lottery would
just be another kind of auction block. The draft is both immoral and
unconstitutional. What we ought to have is a volunteer military.
HAYAKAWA: It seems to me that if we're going to have a draft at all, it
should be applicable to every young man-rich or poor, white or black-whether
he's a student or not.
FRIEDENBERG: It's no longer a question of mere class or race discrimination
but of genocide against the poor and the blacks, who bear the brunt of the
system.
HAYAKAWA: A system that many white middle-class college students seem
content to live with. When one of this privileged majority accepts a 2-S
deferment, he is saying in essence, "Let the poor and the niggers fight the
war." I think one of the reasons the war protest on campus takes such
extreme and unrealistic positions is that the students don't have to go to
war and for the most part don't have friends or relatives who have to go to
war. So it just becomes an abstract academic issue to them. This is why
they're happy to play their guitars in the privileged sanctuary of the
university while the poor and the minorities die in Vietnam.
HAYDEN: It's typical phony liberalism to favor "equalizing" the draft.
Although I agree that middle-class students shouldn't be granted special
privileges, that doesn't mean we want equal participation in killing and
equal submission to draft-board tyranny. No one should be involuntarily
drafted; the right to decide how and when you die is a sacred individual
decision, not a question to be settled by the Pentagon or General Hershey.
FRIEDENBERG: Yes, the draft is serving a thoroughly immoral purpose, and I
personally find it hard to condemn any lawful means of evading it.
GALLAGHER: Look at the way certain majors, such as physics or medicine, are
deferred while others, like English or philosophy, are not. The suggestion
that men who are going into medicine or science are more valuable to society
than men who are going to be poets, philosophers or politicians is another
one of the arbitrary and immoral judgments made by a society that is too
much governed by the military-industria1 complex. I would argue that every
good poet, every fine musician, every effective social worker is just as
valuable to society as a scientist or a doctor.


PLAYBOY: One major aspect of the anti-war and anti-draft movement has been
the campaign to remove R. O. T. C. programs from the nation's campuses. In
view of the immensity of the military establishment, is this a relatively
minor target on which to expend so much time and energy?
FRIEDENBERG: Not to the students, because R. O. T. C. is a constant reminder
of the presence and influence of the military. The military manner, the
guns in the campus armory, the punishment drills, the discipline in command,
all these things grate on any sense of the university as a free community of
scholars. But it's important to note that it didn't occur to anyone that
R.O.T.C. was bad enough to protest against until the threshold of
irritability about the military was reached because of its exploits in
Vietnam.
GALLAGHER: Most students will tell you frankly, "Let's face it; it's not
R. O. T. C. that we're bothered about; it's Vietnam. And one of the best
ways to attack it is by getting rid of R.O.T.C." My own judgment is that as
long as a military exists in this country, then the method of procuring
officers through R. O. T. C, is a sound and satisfactory one-provided it's
voluntary; I'm firmly opposed to compulsory R. O. T. C.
HAYAKAWA: The war clouds the issue here, but I also think it's a valuable
thing to have R. O. T. C. at a university. For one thing, it guarantees that
future officers will have considerable exposure to civilian thought and
training, and that's always healthy. I also think R.O.T.C. could be upgraded
academically if courses in foreign languages, business administration and so
on were incorporated into the program for credit.
EDWARDS: That'll never work. R. O. T. C. is an academic joke. You might as
well have a major in bubble blowing. But more important, I don't think the
University should have any association with the war machine in this country
R. O. T. C. brings a bunch of crewcutted, beer-bellied, flag-waving
Neanderthals like General Hershey onto the campus with their warmongering
mentality. Let tham go to West Point or Annapolis or the Coast Guard Academy
with that shit. The university should teach people how to live, not how to
die.


PLAYBOY: Mr. Edwards is on record against not only the R. O. T. C. but any
form of war-related research on campus. How do the rest of you feel about
it?
HAYAKAWA: In the first place, I think the term war research is a loaded one.
I know from the personal experience of many friends that much of what is
called war research is really very innocuous. Some of it deals with
linguistics, some with marine biology, some with medical examinations, some
with survival aids. These things may have military uses, but they also have
vast civilian application. In fact, a lot of research goes on under military
sponsorship not because it has warlike implications but because the military
is the easiest place to get the money.
EDWARDS: That's just hot air. This kind of research serves only to
incorporate the university into the military-industrial complex. It's just
the Pentagon using its unofficial branches to perpetrate and perpetuate the
kind of atrocities that are going on in Vietnam. Well, the time has come to
stop being used, to sever those ties and make the university a free
institution with the power to question such things as the immorality of
bacteriological warfare. But Cornell, to name one of many schools, can't
very well question germ warfare while it's being researched on its own
agricultural campus.
BROWN: That's right. Dr. Hayakawa's acknowledgment that the military is the
easiest place to get the money simply highlights the war-oriented nature of
the whole Government. All that crap about "vast civilian application" of
Government-financed research on campus is nothing but an excuse, a cop-out.
MORSE: The actual civilian application of military research on campus
consists of its use on us and on the black community. The blister and nausea
gases developed by our upstanding universities and used in Vietnam were also
used on us during the people's-park crisis at Berkeley-and Stanford is doing
research on counterinsurgency to be applied in South Africa and in the black
communities here.
JENCKS: It's certainly true that a great deal of military research is pretty
blood-curdling, whether its intended application be on rebels in Asia and
Latin America or on blacks and students here at home. But on a more abstract
level, the basic problem is that a lot of academic people have developed a
moral attitude that says research is always good, whatever its ethical,
political and human consequences. And that's the attitude we've got to
change.
GALLAGHER: The difference between 1944 and 1969 on this question is very
interesting. In 1944, it was a very patriotic thing to he engaged in war
research.
FRIEDENBERG: That's true, but both the times and the wars are different. I
think it's inappropriate for a university to serve its Government's military
needs if that Government is immoral or if those military needs are wholly
destructive. Whatever the case in World War Two, the Government of the
United States of America in 1969 is immoral and its military objectives
are obscene.
EDWARDS: And perhaps the most obscene aspect of the war, from a black
vantage point, is its inherently racist character-racist not only in the
sense that it annihilates Vietnamese but that it slaughters thousands of
young black Americans and, by dislocating all our national priorities, makes
it impossible to allocate the Federal funds necessary to relieve the
hardships of black people at home. Which is another reason black students
are rebelling against the system.
BROWN: Yes, Vietnam has been a major factor in the black student movement;
but its main reason for being is an intensified awareness that the
universities, like the country at large, are exploiting and dehumanizing
black people.


PLAYBOY: In what ways?
BROWN: In every way. Oh, a few courses have been renamed Black or
Afro-American as a token concession, but the educational institutions
haven't even begun to make the wholesale adjustments needed to deal with the
problems of black students and the black community at large.
FRIEDENBERG: True. Virtually nothing is being done by the universities or
society for poor people generally, except for those few who are well enough
endowed with native intelligence and aggression to exploit college for
subsequent professional advantage. The question facing the schools up to now
has been whether they should make a special effort to admit applicants who,
because of educational privation in inferior ghetto elementary and high
schools, normally wouldn't be accepted. Until very recently, the colleges
had done nothing along these lines, but some advances are beginning to be
made as the universities admit the urgency of the problem and recognize a
greater obligation to the larger community in which they exist. At Buffalo,
for instance, we now have a program to admit black students who can't meet
the academic standards expected of middle-class whites with a good secondary
educational background.
JENCKS: Even with such special programs, I'm very skeptical about how much
an institution like a university can do for black students, much less for
black people generally. It seems to me that the things universities are good
at are not, by and large, the things either the black students or the black
communities need at the moment. In terms of committing traditional academic
resources to the education of black people in traditional ways, I think
they've done as much as a reasonable man might expect of them at this stage.
What they haven't done is invent new ways of reaching students, black and
white alike, who can't be reached by ordinary academic methods. They've been
very reluctant, for example, to hire people to teach who haven't been
thought of as educators in the traditional sense-people like Eldridge
Cleaver, who don't have degrees and whose skills are not specifically
academic. The universities have been hostile to teaching methods that don't
involve classrooms, and even more hostile to definitions of what's worth
learning that go beyond just acquiring facts, techniques and theories, to
include all of what a man or a woman is. No university is really concerned
with the students' feelings, their sense of self-respect or their ethical
and political commitments; but these are the kinds of things the black
students care about. I don't know if a university can teach these things,
but they are reluctant even to try.
LUCE: I'm afraid that any special programs the universities adopt in this
area, no matter how well intentioned, will fail, because the basic problem
lies in the inferior schools the black students attend before they ever
reach college. Educational standards in ghetto schools have obviously not
been equal to those provided whites, and what we should be doing now is
improving standards in those schools to ensure blacks an education that will
allow them to enter college on the same achievement level as whites. I think
we're deluding ourselves if we believe that by simply throwing the doors
open to a set number of blacks, they're going to be automatically qualified
scholastically and make a successful adjustment to tile university. Black
people should have the same rights to attend college as whites, but the
racial scene in the United States is not going to be improved by admitting
large numbers of blacks without the proper scholastic qualifications, and
tensions may even be exacerbated when such students find that their
inadequate preparation puts them at a disadvantage in academic competition
with white students. So reforms must be made in elementary and high schools,
since by the time the average black student is ready to go to college, he
is already at an educational disadvantage.
GALLAGHER: New York City illustrates this rather tragically. Last year, the
city graduated approximately 40,000 students from high school, and out of
that number, only 700 blacks and Puerto Ricans were granted the academic
diploma that admits them to college. Those figures speak for themselves.


PLAYBOY: Critics of preferential-admission programs for blacks contend that
since most black students are educationally deprived through inferior
preparatory school training, there is a danger that admitting large numbers
to college through special dispensation will lower existing educational
standards. How would you respond to this argument?
MORSE: This whole idea that blacks aren't ready for college is a vicious
circle deal. The reason a lot of them may not be as well prepared as whites
is that the Government isn't willing to put enough money into the shitty
elementary and high schools. Blacks are forced to attend these schools, and
then the establishment turns around and says it's too bad, but blacks just
don't have the educational background for college. That's typical of this
system.
FRIEDENBERG: Whatever loss of excellence the universities might suffer by
accommodating black students isn't very important, because academic
standards and achievements have been largely illusory in their social
effects; there is absolutely no correlation between collegiate achievement
and subsequent success. This was pointed out by studies conducted at the
State University of Iowa and the University of North Carolina, which showed
that in a large number of professions-including major ones such as law and
medicine-there is no connection between the success of these people who
years after graduation were making prominent contributions to their
respective fields and their class ranking or grades while at college. So
what students learn in a college classroom is generally irrelevant to actual
life, and that holds true for both white and black students.


PLAYBOY: In addition to the question of inequitable academic standards,
isn't the high cost of education another factor contributing to the still
tiny proportion of black college students?
GALLAGHER: Of course it is. And that's why many schools remain the preserve
of the white middle anti upper-middle class.
EDWARDS: There's never been any question about that. Colleges primarily
serve everyone from the middle class on up, and the ones on the bottom stay
at the bottom. That's why I don't buy all this crap about preserving
academic standards and not lowering entrance requirements. That attitude is
all part of the corrupt elitist philosophy that has dominated American
education all along.
LUCE: I don't believe the relatively small number of blacks on campus has
anything to do with this mystical Marxist "class" bit. If you're going to
get into the economic aspects of the question, you could blame the unions
for the black man's plight a hell of a lot easier than the universities.
There are more black Ph.D.s in this country than there are black members of
the bricklayers or steam-fitters union. So it's not essentially an economic
problem, though black students definitely do require certain kinds of extra
assistance.
BROWN: And it should start by allowing all black students to go to school
free. They should also have economic assistance while in college-but we
should be very careful to see that such aid is not the type that will evolve
into control of their education by the Government or any other "benefactor."
FRIEDENBERG: I would oppose singling out black students for a free education
just because they're black. It's a question of the right of poor people to
attend school. But since a large percentage of poor people are black, they
would naturally receive a major share of financial assistance.
EDWARDS: If you address yourself to the whole problem of black people,
you'll find that money is actually only part of it. What difference does it
make if black people are given big grants if they still have to live in
Harlem, over which they have virtually no political or economic control?
What difference does it make if a black student has a $6000-a-year
fellowship at Cornell if he still has to take sociology and history classes
in which he turns to the back of the textbook and finds under "negro"; "See
also delinquency, illegitimacy, crime and illiteracy"? What difference does
it make if they give me all the money I need to go to school if I still
can't really become a part of the academic community-let alone American
society-because I'm black?
What blacks are saying is, "Look, man, I don't want to live in a dormitory
that's 99 percent honkie; if I have a choice, I'd rather live in a dorm
that's all black, where I can have meaningful conversations and
relationships with the people there, where I can get together and talk about
anything, something besides race." I've lived in white dormitories, and what
happened every time was that I couldn't go to the shower or the john or
downstairs to watch television without someone walking up and saying: "Hey,
man, I want to ask you something...." I always had to be a spokesman, a
representative, never just myself, another guy, a fellow student. Not only
that, but I usually wasted my time, because the cracker I was talking to
wasn't going to do anything anyway he wasn't going to act to correct the
situation. So it's not an economic thing but a matter of changing the entire
concept of the university to make it a place that's relevant to all its
students, rather than one oriented totally toward the needs and desires of
the white majority. This is one of the reasons black students are demanding
all-black dormitories on predominantly white campuses. It's also one of the
reasons for setting up black-study centers to teach us about our history and
culture.
FRIEDENBERG: The demand for black-study centers is understandable, and they
would probably serve some good purposes. But it would be foolish to try to
teach, say, a black history that excludes white history in a society that
has been dominated, however wrongly, by whites. If you're talking about
Pocahontas, you can't ignore John Smith.
HAYAKAWA: Yes, but you can't focus only on John Smith, either, if you're
going to tell the whole story-as we have focused only on whites in American
history. When you consider the fact that there are some 22,000,000 negroes
in the United States, you realize you're talking about a lot more people
than live in many other nations of the world-more than in Belgium, Holland,
Denmark or Israel. And they have a long and honorable history, and a fertile
subculture. There is a great and in many ways inspiring lesson to be learned
from the story of a people who survived under almost impossible conditions
in this country, and ultimately were neither assimilated nor destroyed but,
in one way or another, managed to work out a place for themselves in our
society. There is no other situation exactly analogous to this in the whole
of world history. How the American Negro got where he is and where he would
like to go from here are vitally important questions not only for the black
mall but for all of us in America to study. Most of you are white and I'm
Oriental, but all our fates are intimately entwined with what happens to the
black man, so we cannot afford to be ignorant of his history. Unfortunately,
this history has so far been imperfectly written or not written at all,
because historians have never thought it worth going into research on the
negro in a serious way; so much of the important work has yet to be done.
GALLAGHER: It certainly does. The history books that mention Crispus Attucks
in a half-sentence reference on the American Revolution, and after that
refer to the slaves as one of the causes of the Civil War, and then mention
nothing else about the black man in American history, have to be rewritten
to include him in his proper role, which has been a very significant one.
The same goes for courses in American literature, which teach the works of
John Greenleaf Whittler but disregard the works of James Weldon Johnson.
Study of one's cultural or racial history-be it black, white, yellow, red or
brown-is essential, because it builds one's self-image and thus generates
self-respect and self-pride. That the Afro-American should know all about
his African and his American history is not the question; the question is
where the emphasis will be placed in teaching such history. We are going
through a phase of American life at the moment that is familiar to any
student of history. A group that has been dependent must become independent
before it can really be interdependent. Since we are now in the phase of
independence, it's perfectly natural and healthy that the emerging group is
asserting itself and stretching its muscles. We should encourage this self
assertion-provided it carries with it the seeds of a future that leads to
eventual interdependence.
LUCE: As I hope I've made clear, I'm in favor of black studies, and I think
they should be incorporated into the curriculums of every university, but
I'm emphatically opposed to the demand of many black student groups that
such courses and centers be segregated, with only blacks teaching and
attending. This is just academic apartheid, and doubly detrimental precisely
because the role of the black man has to be pointed out not only to blacks
but to whites in this country. The way to do that, obviously, is to teach
an integrated brand of sociology or history within an integrated educational
system. I'd like to see everyone in the university structure of the United
States gain the same knowledge of the black man's role in history, but not
through racially restricted separatist courses.
BROWN: I'm sure it would do white students good to sit in on such courses,
but that's not the basic issue, The main thing is the need for black
students to determine the validity of black-studies programs; no white
instructor, no white administrator can be allowed to determine or evaluate
any black-studies curriculum. For many years, we have submitted to what we
were told was a progressive curriculum, but we found that it excluded us. So
now we're going to set up our own curriculum, and if we want a course called
James Brown 101, we'll have it.
EDWARDS: I'm afraid we're a long way from that. A professor like myself, for
instance, would not be tolerated as a teacher of the kind of courses I have
in mind. In a course on the black community, I would be telling the truth
about oppression, about brutality, racism and the corruption of white cops,
about the paternalistic and coercive role of the Federal Government in the
black community, about the exploitative activities of various other official
agencies in the black community. What would happen if I then began to talk
about how to rid ourselves of these oppressive devils' You know what would
happen. So, you see, in practical terms, a genuine black curriculum is
impossible within the structure of American society today. Any real black-
studies program would quickly become a center around which to mobilize young
black people as political activists on behalf of the black man, and the
power structure wouldn't permit that to happen.


PLAYBOY: Mightn't some conservatives say this lends credence to charges that
black-studies centers are intended to serve as little more than training
grounds for revolutionaries?
BROWN: Revolutionaries are born, not trained. They are born out of the
situation that oppresses them and they develop internally. But people who
have a revolutionary spirit don't necessarily have guns on their shoulders.
With the black-studies program, we intend to intensify our exposure of the
contradictions between whites and blacks, and most likely we'll produce more
angry people; but this anger will give us momentum and solidarity. And from
there we can move toward a common ideology and a united revolutionary
struggle.
GALLAGHER: I suppose there are some people who live in a fantasy world where
they think Of themselves as young Frantz Fanons Or Che Gueveras or Joans of
Arc, and want to get off in the mountains by themselves and dream up their
revolutions and then return to the ghetto with their machetes and their
Molotov cocktails their knives and their guns to lead a liberation army. But
this kind of fantasizing is engaged in by very few, and its total impact is,
I think, much more rhetorical than anything else.
EDWARDS: Our revolution isn't rhetorical. If you set up a real black
university or an autonomous black school, that school is going to be
oriented toward meeting the real needs of black people; and when you begin
to speak about meeting the needs of black people you naturally begin to talk
about identifying the causes or the specific problems facing black people.
This inevitably takes you back to racism, and if you talk about the causes
of racism, then you have to talk about ways of remedying them. You run
through abolition, through accommodation through integration and the whole
philosophy of nonviolence, and you finally realize that tile only way to
solve the problem is the way it has been solved historically by other people
facing the same situation: revolution.
That's why those of us who are organizing black communities, who are
organizing revolts on campus, who are moving against the system, believe in
bringing about confrontation, because through it we can expose the
contradictions of the system and create an atmosphere in which people are
more susceptible to being educated to the institutionalized inequities of
this society and to the fact that it is no longer necessary or even relevant
to move against the individual cracker or individual nigger-such as Roy
Wilkins-because they are merely spokes in the wheel. It is now necessary to
move against the system itself. As the confrontation grows, we will begin to
mobilize the larger numbers of individuals who are going to be needed in
order to bring about enough pressure for the system to change either
violently or nonviolently. All our efforts on issues such as black-studies
centers are directed toward this basic goal of awakening black people to
their needs and organizing a revolutionary movement to fight for them.


PLAYBOY: Despite such militance, some campus administrators have evinced a
tendency to treat black protesters less harshly than their white
counterparts. Why?
FRIEDENBERG: The more sophisticated the campus, the more likely it is that
black students will be treated leniently. Dr. Hayakawa at San Francisco
State and Robben Fleming at the University of Michigan seem to be the
leading spokesmen for the lenient approach to handling black militants,
because they say they understand that the demands of black people are just,
even though their methods may be wrong.
MORSE: What such administrators are really trying to do is to split the
black and white protesters by mollifying the blacks and coming down hard on
the whites, in order to play on the prejudices in both groups. But I don't
think it's going to work.
BROWN: A great deal depends on where the school is. Columbia, for example is
situated in the heart of the black community, and any unnecessarily strong
discipline against blacks could have spilled over into the community. In
Oshkosh, you would probably find about 100 black folks in the whole town, so
they could afford to come down hard on some isolated niggers.
GALLAGHER: There's considerable truth to that. I'l admit that my own actions
in this area have been in part influenced by the probable repercussions in
the surrounding community and city. Normally, I would think it wrong to
differentiate between militant blacks and whites on the basis of their race,
and I would ordinarily treat them alike. But at City College, located as it
is in Harlem, one knows that the evocation of a massive counterforce of
police against either small or large groups of black protesters is likely to
result in a community involvement that would make Watts or Detroit look tame
by comparison. This isn't fear but prudent consideration.
FRIEDENBERG: Another reason for different treatment is that the protests
themselves are different. In the first place, black protest is in essence a
confirmation of society's values. The blacks are saying, "You have injured
me by refusing to grant my proper share of what is here for everybody." Now,
this is quite easy for college presidents to deal with in principle, because
they can reply, "We know you're right and we're going to see that you get
your slice of the pie if we possibly can-though there are political
problems." This may not soothe black people, but it's something the
presidents feel they can honestly do-or try to do. The white militants, on
the other hand, are doing something very different. They're saying, "The
society is corrupt, the rewards are corrupt, this whole system is corrupt,
and we don't want what you have to offer. We want a university we can use to
direct ourselves to different values, to different goals, to a different
kind of life." That's much more threatening to the university, to its real
raison d'etre, than the black demands, and it's a situation you can't get
away from by making a few concessions. I think, finally, that the white
militants often tragically delude themselves that they have potential
supporters among the blacks over any period of time, because many black
leaders have come to be quite skeptical of them. It's not necessarily a
suspicion of exploitation by the whites, but rather a cool realization that
they don't have to go nearly as far as the SDSers to get what they want.
They have far less to begin with and the things they want are far more
tangible, far easier to realize.
EDWARDS: It may surprise you to learn that black revolutionaries reject this
system as totally as many white radicals: they'll tell you they don't want a
slice of pie if the pie is riddled with worms. University administrators may
treat us differently from white protesters because they feel we can be
bought off easier, but they'll soon find out they're as wrong as Mr.
Friedenberg in his analysis of our demands and of what will and will not
satisfy us. But he's right about our mistrust of whites-even white radicals.
If you can find me a black person who isn't suspicious of whites in general,
whatever their politics, I'l show you a black person who should be in a
mental institution. I'm as suspicious of whites as flies are of spider webs,
because too many blacks have been trapped and killed by whites, and I think
that's just being honest about the subject. So I don't see any lasting
coalitions emerging except on the larger issues-the issues of moving against
the educational institutions and the system as a whole.
BROWN: Whether or not whites and blacks work together depends to a great
extent on the location and the personalities involved. On the West Coast,
there is a sort of tense, perilous coexistence between black student leaders
and SDS people. But there are people in SDS and other white organizations
who do understand our problems, and the only difficulty that arises is the
one in which there are white students in positions of leadership over black
students, That's a problem, because we have to develop our own leaders, and
it's difficult to ask a white cat to come into an organization where he can
go only so far in terms of running the show. But that's how it is, and if
he wants to work with us, he's got to realize this and accept it.
MORSE: The whole Black Panther movement has created very basic changes in
the black-white relationships that have prevailed for the past few years.
It's essentially a process of white students overcoming the racism that has
been drummed into them for all the years of their lives and realizing the
necessity of a united struggle against the power structure. The black
movement also had to go through a stage where it withdrew from the white in
order to become whole politically; only then was it strong enough to build
an equal alliance with the white movement. Building this united
revolutionary coalition is a slow process, because of all the prejudices and
misconceptions on both sides, but I think it will happen. We've got to clean
all the old garbage out of our minds-from race and class prejudice to male
chauvinism, which relegates women to second-class citizenship in this
society.


PLAYBOY: You seem to share the view of the growing feminist movement that
women are systematically discriminated against in every area of American
life, from the campus to the business board room. How do the rest of you
feel about it?
HAYAKAWA: I really don't know if there has been any pattern of
discrimination against women on campus. But I can attest that in a school
like San Francisco State, which has always been a coeducational institution,
women have equal opportunities with men and all the advantages they're
willing to make use of.
GALLAGHER: With all due respect to Dr. Hayakawa, I don't think there's much
doubt that there has been a long-standing pattern of discrimination against
women in American higher education. Until 1836, when the first coeducational
college was founded, only men attended colleges or universities, and if a
woman desired a higher education she had to go to a female seminary. The
time for separate universities for men and women has long passed, and the
few remaining such schools will soon become coeducational.
MORSE: Yes, but that's no solution to the basic problem. Coeducation is as
phony as token integration unless women are given equal rights within the
university, which in most cases just doesn't happen. Women are not treated
seriously in terms of scholarship or teaching, because people automatically
assume that they're just going to get married and breed babies. This isn't
something unique with colleges, of course; it's part of a whole system in
which women are still treated as inferior, despite the ritual lip, service
to equal opportunity. And women themselves are brainwashed from childhood
to consider marriage and children and housekeeping their ultimate goal in
life. We're taught from all early age to be decorative and "feminine"
-whatever that is-to discuss things but never to argue, to be emotional but
not brainy, because otherwise we would be, God forbid, competing with men.
We're even conditioned to think of other women as enemies, as threats to our
sexual security, and as a result, it's not easy to be close friends with
another woman.
It's forced into our heads all the time that we can define ourselves only
in terms of men-as sexual objects or mothers or glorified domestic help. And
it's also forced into men's heads to think of women as bodies rather than as
intellectual, political or creative beings in their own right-often not even
as human beings, in fact. Obviously, we're going to have to turn both men's
and women's minds around if we're going to make any progress. We're starting
to do it now within the movement in terms of our relationships with our men.
In various sections of the country, we've formed a group called the Women's
Liberation Front, which feels that women in the United States are an
oppressed group-oppressed economically, socially, sexually and mentally. The
Front was formed because we discovered that the radical student movement
failed to answer the needs of women, and we began going through an intensely
personal stage of meetings where we dragged out all the stereotypes, myths
and prejudices against women and discussed them and gained a better
understanding of ourselves in relationship to society and to men.
HAYDEN: I think this is a damn good development, because the movement itself
has significant male-supremacist tendencies that have to be overcome.
MORSE: It sure does. There's a whole tone in the movement that says the
women should be medics, trained in nursing to take care of guys injured in
demonstrations, Or relegated to office and clerical positions, cranking a
mimeograph handle while the guys make all the political decisions. This is
beginning to change now, but some of the men are really uptight about it
all. It's not easy for even a radical to jettison all the garbage this
system plants in your brain. Already there have been a number of marriages
within the movement that have broken up because the men just couldn't take
some of the little things involved, like doing the dishes and taking care of
the child equally with the woman-let alone larger things like accepting a
woman as his intellectual and social equal. But we're moving ahead. Six
months ago, Women's Liberation was laughed at by the majority of the
movement; today it's beginning to be treated as a serious political force.
EDWARDS: I'm completely sympathetic to you on all this. But women, like
blacks or students in general, won't realize any of these changes until they
reach the point where they really threaten the system. When they begin to
jump on faculty members and take over buildings-or burn them down-then
they'll start getting some justice from the system.
MORSE: Right. Women's Liberation realizes that the whole system will have to
change if our needs are to be met. But we've also discovered, through
reading and talking with Vietnamese and Cuban women, that it's possible to
have a revolution without meeting all the needs of women. Castro, in June of
]967, praised Cuban women for fighting side by side with their men, but with
the revolution won, he said it was time for women to go back to the kitchen
and the children, because if they didn't, who would feed the men at
lunchtime when they returned from their jobs, and so on. That's why women
everywhere have to get together, cutting across all national, ideological,
class and color lines. Black women, white women, middle-class women and
lower-class women have to unite and organize as a political movement
separate from general revolutionary causes.


PLAYBOY: Once you have such a strong organizational base, would you be
prepared to employ the same methods on behalf of women's rights as today's
black militants and student radicals?
MORSE: Damn right, we would. It's all part of the same fight, after all. I
remember that before Eldridge Cleaver went underground, he made a remark to
the effect that women should not define themselves as revolutionaries but
should just sleep with revolutionaries. This upset a lot of us, and when we
called him on it later, he asked one of us if she would be willing to kill
for Women's Liberation and she said, "Well, I don't know; I'd be more
willing to be killed for it." Cleaver replied, "If you're going to define
yourself as a revolutionary-and not just sleep with one-you're going to have
to be prepared to both die for the revolution and kill for the revolution,
and that includes Women's Liberation." That kind of took some of us aback at
first; but on reflection, some of us "extremists" think that's exactly what
we'll have to do.
LUCE: I'm dumb struck. All I can say is God help us all.
HAYDEN: The importance of what Linda's been saying is that you can't have a
revolution just based on one or two issues, like changes in the university
or the military. You've got to have a total commitment to get rid of all the
sickness in society, and the revolutionaries themselves have to be purged of
the materialism and corruption of this society. If men and women keep living
in continuous jealousy of each other, in continuous competition for control
and domination of each other, and if they're ridden with all the security
hang-ups of this materialistic system, then the overpowering appeal of the
system will win out against any kind of revolutionary effort. The importance
of Women's Liberation is that it's a movement within a movement, triggered
by the needs of women to be full human beings. It's going to help us
revolutionize our relationships within the movement, and from that healthy
position it will extend outward.
EDWARDS: I think it's about time people recognized that ours is a male-
chauvinist society just as much as it's a racist society. You can see it
clearly right on the campuses, in the way recruiters come to interview
prospective accountants, attorneys or engineers. A chick may have the
highest grades in her class, but they'll still pick even a mediocre male
student over her. Of course, their rationalization is that she'll stay on
the job only for a year or two and then get married, whereas with a man,
they think they don't have to worry. The result is that they never allow a
woman to realize her full potential, in these or any other fields.
FRIEDENBERG: Women on campus are also discriminated against enormously in
the area of academic appointments, particularly in terms of tenure and
regardless of how competent they are.
LUCE: Yes, and another problem is that in a great many schools, subtle
pressure is applied on career-oriented women to enter fields that are
traditionally female, such as library science, social work, nursing, grammar
and high school teaching. Just one more expression of the old prejudices.
MORSE: You'll notice also that all of the fields you've mentioned involve
taking care of people in one form or another, which is considered the
woman's role in this society. There's no room for women in fields that
require intellectual or physical aggressiveness.
GALLAGHER: This isn't so much a deliberate policy as it is the dead hand of
tradition. The old argument was that women were inherently different in
nature from men and that, therefore, it was only natural that they have a
different kind of education-one that should teach them the womanly arts:
housekeeping, cooking, sewing and so on. These old traditions die hard. In
America, women are nowhere represented in medicine, for example, in terms
of their percentage of the population; whereas in the Soviet Union, three
quarters of the medical doctors are women. The American tradition of male
dominance has dictated that women, if they are to be educated at all, must
be given the kind of education that will never challenge the male role. So a
great deal remains to be done not only in terms of the specific curriculum
and the educational process but in altering the general attitudes of
society.
MORSE: But before you can alter these attitudes effectively, you've got to
make people aware of the true sickness of society and convince them that the
only answer to these problems is basic institutional change that can meet
the real needs of the majority of exploited Americans-white workers,
minorities, women and students. And, frankly, I don't think that's going to
happen-not without revolution.


PLAYBOY: Are you dismissing the possibility that school administrations
-especially liberal ones-will move to meet your legitimate demands.
MORSE: Not completely; anything's possible, I suppose-but I can't hold out
much hope for a human response from an inhuman institution.
LUCE: Of course not-because you don't really want reform. And I don't doubt
that you'd refuse to admit the fact that many reforms have already taken
place. Hard-core revolutionaries like Miss Morse aren't really interested in
making the system work; they're interested in making it stop-and then
dismantling it. Some of them have said as much to me, admitting outright
that the real issue isn't R. O. T. C. or the draft or the war or Dow
recruiters or anything of that sort. The real issue is student power-total
student power. Other issues are just used to rope in the gullible.
MORSE: When you claim that we want to dismantle the system, all you're
saying is that we recognize the wholesale rottenness of the system, and we
know it can't be changed through half measures. More and more students are
recognizing that the educational system must change totally or be destroyed
totally-because we're not going to tolerate a university that supports mass
killing in Vietnam by doing war research for the Government; we're not going
to put up with a university that trains most of the officers for the Army;
and we're not going to collaborate with a university that perpetuates
racism. The movement isn't going to sell out on these issues, and we're not
going to be scared off, either; so the university will either change itself
or it will all come tumbling down. Don't think we can't do it. Look at
Berkeley: It's becoming a second-rate university after decades of being
first-rate, and if it doesn't learn anything soon, it'll shortly become
third-rate-all because of the uproars on campus. It's probable, of course,
that the universities literally cannot change, because they're too
intimately involved in the whole structure of the military-industrial
complex. They're part of the system, and it may be impossible for them to
reform without the whole society being changed in the process.
EDWARDS: Right. In fact, the universities have a slim chance of surviving at
all, because they have so many intimate ties to the military and economic
institutions of imperialism that it would be cutting their own throats to
even try to change in a meaningfully radical way. And even if they do try,
they're not going to do it quickly enough to avoid the really gigantic
confrontations that will occur when black-white coalitions become the rule
instead of the exception.
BROWN: I don't know what's going to happen, but I do think everything
depends on whether or not people are willing to sit down and reason with one
another; if they are, chaos can be avoided. It's when the talking stops that
the violence begins.
FRIEDENBERG: And if that talking doesn't accomplish something significant in
the way of basic institutional reform-and soon-there's a good chance of
total defeat for both sides. By that I mean that eventually the law-
enforcement agencies, local and Federal, will mount a sufficient force of
repression to squash the dissidents completely, and that will also mean the
death of the university as an intellectual institution.
JENCKS: Yes, that's a very real danger. The only way to answer protest is to
change the character of our society. Right now, the students have what I
consider a very accurate perception that the establishment is not trying to
change society in any fundamental way. They also see that unless there are
fundamental changes, the problems are going to get worse, not better. As
long as students recognize this, they will raise hell with institutions that
represent the establishment-and that means universities. The only way a
university is likely to avoid attack from its students today is for its
leadership to get out in front in opposing the status quo effectively. And
that's tough on the annual budget.
HAYAKAWA: I don't agree that the university must become a revolutionary
vanguard in order to meet student demands. And I also think the demagogs of
the left are simply lying when they say the university won't change except
under violent pressure. In fact, the universities are constantly changing,
sometimes slowly and sometimes very rapidly, but peaceful reforms just don't
get nationwide TV and press coverage. Of course, there is the matter of the
subjectivity of time sense-that is, what do you meals by slow or fast?
GALLAGHER: What Dr. Hayakawa is referring to is what I would call the
existentialism of this generation and academic mentalities find it very
difficult to understand existentialists. The academic approach wants to
analyze everything and understand it from all sides and put it into
committee; months or years later, some reports finally emerge with proposals
in them. The existentialist, on the other hand, says, "Act now!" The
academician runs the risk of analyzing indefinitely and never performing,
and the existentialist runs the opposite risk of acting without sufficient
data and blundering horribly. We urgently need a synthesis of the two
approaches. Meanwhile, we are going to have continuous troubles and uproars.
Above all, we have to realize that the problem won't be solved by gadgets
and gimmicks; a fundamental reorientation of the entire philosophy of the
university is needed. Objective research, objective assessment of values,
suspended judgment and all the disciplines of the academic mind are going
to have to be wedded, somehow, to the existentialist commitment to
humanistic goals. Right now, these philosophies are like ships passing in
the night, not communicating with each other at all. There are bound to be
increased tensions, increased misunderstandings , increased bitterness,
estrangement, alienation and violence until we gut these two alien factions
into a real dialog. And I believe this creative dialog and the reforms it
call generate must happen in the universities before they can happen in
society at large. The university must lead the rest of the nation.
FRIEDENBERG: This is really the basic question, the most important question
in our whole discussion: Can the universities be reformed without prior
reform in society at large? The students think so-and so, apparently, does
Dr. Gallagher.  Realizing how the universities relate to the entire economy
in a very central and crucial way, the students believe that if you can
force the university to reform, you will cause the rest of society to reform
also. This is logical, but not very realistic, I'm afraid. I just don't
think the universities can change fast enough-or radically enough-to change
society in ally meaningful or enduring way. And unless society is changed,
no changes in the university can be truly meaningful or enduring, either.
The result, I fear, will be mounting frustration-and a concomitant
escalation in violence and disorder.
MORSE: I don't see this in such either/or terms. Society isn't going to be
run by the present U. S. Government until midnight one day and then at one
minute past 12 by the revolutionaries. The change is going to be gradual.
There will be sections that we gain control over, as the N. L. F. has done
in the villages of Vietnam, and sections that Washington still dominates, as
it does the area around Saigon, and sections where the fighting continues to
rage. The blacks will be taking over their own communities, and we'll be
talking over the colleges, and there will be more and more liberated
territory, but the establishment isn't going to fold up all at once. So in
this context, some universities will be reformed before the whole society
is. But the whole university system. of course. won't be improved until the
entire society is changed.
LUCE: I'm really glad you've given us the specifics of your "revolution."
Talk about the politics of the sandbox. This is a marvelous example of the
illogic of playing at revolution. In case you haven't noticed. There is a
real difference between the objective conditions in the United States and
those in Vietnam. These differences notwithstanding, your comments are
absurd. You're trying to put people on if you don't realize that the
Government isn't going to passively sit back and allow you to destroy the
country. Your slogans are kamikaze radicalism disguised as Maoism.
Obviously, you want to destroy the system that exists, but I pity the people
of this country once you gain power.
HAYDEN: We only want the power to correct the institutionalized injustices
of this society. We recognize that America isn't Vietnam, but the issues
that motivate revolutionaries in both countries are the same. It's not a
question of "destroying" this country when we say that basic changes are
needed. We simply recognize that you can't have a free university in an
unfree society. Any campus reforms that may be pushed through by the
movement today will be perverted and eventually turned against us-even black
studies. Today's seeming reform will be tomorrow's oppression: look at
welfare and public housing. The only answer is revolution-not just in this
country but around the world. Why? Because our immense technology which
could and should be used to feed the people and raise the standard of
living is instead being used to send people to the moon and airlift military
hordes all over the world to occupied and quasi-occupied countries. And the
only reason this technology is being used to conquer the world and then the
planets, instead of being used to benefit humanity is because a few men at
the top-not the people as a whole-decided it that way.
A lot of kids in this country are finally beginning to realize this-more of
them every day-and so are millions of starving people in the third world.
Their liberation movements, presently climaxing in Vietnam, are beginning to
prove that the cost of maintaining the American empire might be more than
the empire is worth. This is going to be settled in our lifetimes-one way or
the other. I don't think America can win against all the people's liberation
movements of the world. It can blow up the whole planet, of course, but it
just can't win-because too many people, including millions in this country,
will not let themselves be enslaved or manipulated for the interests of a
few. This is the context in which I look at the campus rebellions. They are
part of the world-wide revolution against domination by Washington's "Free
World," and they can't succeed until the revolution as a whole succeeds. We
can either win or lose, but the other side can only lose. We won't stop
fighting, and they can't kill us all without killing themselves in the
process.
JENCKS: I agree that the campus revolts are part of a world-wide attack on
traditional ways of doing business, dividing up the pie and exercising
authority. But in Vietnam, the N. L. F. offers a genuine social and
political alternative, whereas on the campus, the student movement doesn't,
because it has so far failed to offer any coherent ideas about building a
new society to replace the old one. Until it does, Washington or Wall Street
doesn't need to lose much sleep.
LUCE: The leaders of the protest do have a program, and it would create a
totalitarian slave state. The students who follow the militants so
mindlessly should ask where they are being led. I've been to Cuba and I know
the kind of education you get after a Marxist revolution. Many more people
are getting an education in Cuba now, but it's all pure indoctrination, and
the same would happen here if these types took over. Academic freedom,
intellectual freedom and everything the students think they're fighting for
would vanish and be replaced by an authoritarian ideology and a program of
dogmatic instruction. The universities would turn into puppet factories.
BROWN: Did you say "turn into puppet factories"? What in the hell do you
think they are now? Castro isn't doing any more harm to the minds of Cuban
children than you and your ancestors did to black kids like me when you
forgot us in the history books and taught us about a white Jesus and a white
Santa Claus and a white world we didn't belong to. At least Castro is
instilling a spirit of nationalism and sell-respect in young Cubans, while
our schools have been human meat grinders.


PLAYBOY: What kind of people do you think our universities should be turning
out?
MORSE: People who can relate to and help build a revolutionary world.
JENCKS: I suppose many students today would agree with that--though the
majority would prefer a less startling word than revolutionary like human.
There's no question that the university should be a place where those who
want to devote themselves to changing society can learn the relevant
personal and political skills. But even a postrevolutionary society needs
people with technical skills, too, and not all these people will be
interested in politics. Right now, you can describe a doctor or a teacher as
"a cog in the corporate machine," but in another society he may be a "hero
of socialist labor." The fact remains that all societies need doctors, and
universities seem to be the best place to train them.
BROWN: Maybe so, but the university has a much larger responsibility to
society-even if society doesn't have the sense to recognize it: to train
people, whether they're headed for a career in medicine, law, education or
anything else, to think freely and independently and creatively. If the
university abdicates that responsibility, the schools will continue to be
assembly lines turning our hordes of high-grade morons-specialists who are
plugged into jobs that any well-constructed robot could perform. Ask any
college graduate if the four years he spent in school really help him on
the job and he'll just laugh. A vast number of Howard University graduates,
for example, end up working in the Post Office. Hell, they could have
bypassed college and started sorting mail right after high school. The
schools are programed to turn out such zombies, because that's all society
wants or expects. But it's not enough. We've got to produce a generation of
generalists-men and women who, whatever their major fields of interest, also
understand the problems of the world and have the will and the compassion
and the imagination to help solve them. If we don't, there won't be any
world left. If the university ignores that responsibility-the survival of
humanity-it'll just blow up with the rest of us.
GALLAGHER: Despite the present sense of thermonuclear emergency, which we
all share, I don't think the function of the university has changed. Its
real job has always been to teach men to think independently. The failure of
our present system is that it gives the student only two choices-to conform
like a herd animal or to rebel and take the consequences. These are the only
alternatives today; he must be a yes man or a no man. But he must have the
opportunity to be something more than a conformist or a rebel; he must be
able to say what he thinks, and to have it count. The function of the
university should be to teach him to be a thoughtful and productive member
of society. If the university really did that, the social responsibility Mr.
Brown talks about would be automatically fulfilled. Rational, independent
men will neither blow up the world nor pander to its immoralities.
LUCE: I don't think the university should try to produce any particular type
of graduate. The individual should be his own creation, and all the
university should do is expose him to so many different questions that his
capacity to think for himself, if he has any, will be aroused. What he does
with that capacity is then his own business.
FRIEDEFIBERG: Precisely. The university is not a factory and shouldn't
manufacture a "product"-even a humane, socially committed product. It
shouldn't produce revolutionaries or "responsible citizens" or any other
types. If we must use the metaphor of production, the students should be
their own manufacturers and create the selves they want to be. If the
university encourages independent thought, the rest will take care of
itself.
MORSE: The problem is that the university doesn't encourage independent
thought. It wants to train men and women who don't think about the evils of
this society and whose principal values are consumerism, money worship,
fetishistic job security and moral hypocrisy.
EDWARDS: And as long as that remains its aim, society will go right on
heading for hell in a hand basket, and you can expect more uprisings
everywhere.
LUCE: This litany of doom is beginning to get tiresome. It's absolutely
vital for students to think independently, but it's a myth that society will
squash them for it-or turn them into robots. I know lots of archheretics and
iconoclasts who are also holding very good jobs. The great fiction of total
repression and conformity in our society is absurd, because a man can still
stand up in this country and speak his mind-and even make a difference
-without getting sacked or landing in jail for it.
HAYDEN: You try handing that bullshit to the people who stood up and spoke
their minds in Chicago at the Democratic Convention or in dozens of other
places around this country and got beaten or jailed or killed for it. But we
don't shrink from that kind of repression and brutality, because it has a
great educative function. Ten years ago, I certainly didn't believe the
things I believe now; what educated and radicalized me was standing up and
speaking my mind-and taking the brutal consequences. Struggling with the
power structure in this country is what made me a revolutionary, not reading
radical books. That's why I'm still interested in student power. It's
unimportant in itself, considering the enormity of the world's problems; but
when the students start to fight for their rights, they learn what the
establishment is really like, and it makes revolutionaries out of them.


PLAYBOY: What do you think will happen to these radicalized students when
they leave the academic community? How many of them will carry their
activism beyond the university and how many will be co-opted by the system?
MORSE: That's a very difficult question. Part of it's going to depend on how
the movement maintains contact with its members after they get out of
college. One of the problems for a lot of us who are postcollege age has
been the fact that when you're on campus, you can just go up to the student
union and sit around and find out what's happening; whereas once you're on a
40-hour-a-week job and you have a family, you become very, very isolated
unless there's some kind of adult radicaL organization to relate to. And one
of the failures of the white movement so far is that it hasn't created such
organizations. Eventually, I think some kind of nationwide revolutionary
party will have to be organized, but the time hasn't come for that yet.
Meanwhile, we're going to have to develop local community organizations that
can, at some future point, provide people with a base so that they don't get
left behind. Isolation is what makes people drop out.
JENCKS: People don't necessarily have to shed their radicalism when they
leave school. There is a good deal of concern in the professions about the
adult roles SDS alumni can play. There is a radical "grown-up" organization
in New York called the Movement for a Democratic Society, which holds
caucuses among various professional groups: doctors, lawyers, academicians.
They meet to discuss how they can sustain their involvement and commitment,
how they can do something socially useful while holding down a nine-to-five
job-and also to make something socially useful out of that nine-to-five job.
My impression is that a rather high percentage of SDS alumni stay involved
in various active efforts to change society-though they often get less
rhetorical about it.
LUCE: I think most of the radicals finally cop out. As a friend of mine has
pointed out, SDS has the same membership characteristics as a men's room: An
awful lot of them go in, do their thing and leave by the other door. It's
easy to be a radical on campus, where you're isolated from reality. It's
easy to stand up on a platform at a university and call for revolution. It's
even easy to raid the president's office or burn the papers of a professor
or beat up students who want to go to class; the punishments are almost
always minor because of the gentility of the college community. But it's a
different story when you leave this insulated environment and go out into
the world. Try taking over your boss' office and burning his files and see
what happens to you. You'll be canned and probably jailed so fast it'll make
your head spin-and there'll be no crap about amnesty. And even if they don't
get into trouble, postgraduate radicals discover that their revolutionary
fervor doesn't merely lose them friends and ruin their chances for
promotion; it also limits their potential for functioning as free and
productive individuals.
HAYAKAWA: I agree very profoundly. But most postgraduate radicals make their
adjustments to the system quite unprotestingly; they become prosperous
brokers or advertising men or whatever. A good example of this is the fact
that, during the Thirties, many of my fellow graduate students were either
flirting with communism or became actual members of the party. A few of them
stayed with the party through the Forties and Fifties and got prosecuted-and
some of them are still in Federal penitentiaries for various violations-but
the majority gradually metamorphosed into advertising executives or
insurance brokers, joined the teachers union or became scholars in fields
unrelated to communism or any other political philosophy, absorbing
themselves in literature or Renaissance history and took no more part in
politics. The same thing will happen to today's radicals; a small hard core
will continue as revolutionaries, but most will cheerfully join the society
they now condemn so violently.
FRIEDENBERG: I don't know about that. I suspect that a great many of the
black leaders will be co-opted by the system, since all they really want
-apart from self-respect-is their fair share of what the system has to
offer. But among the white radicals, I am astonished and frightened, as well
as really rather deeply moved and impressed, at how few have been co-opted
after leaving college.
HAYDEN: The problem is that while people are students, they simply have more
time and more opportunities to take their concern into the street; but when
they feel the economic pinch after leaving the university, and the
structured opportunities for doing things shrink to zero, and there are no
meaningful jobs available, then they must make adjustments. It's not so much
that their heart goes out of the cause; it's just that in order to survive,
they must work in occupations that have no relevance to either their
humanity or the public interest. There are not going to be any easy
solutions to this problem. People are going to have to learn how to live off
the system by hustling, or to work within it-struggling to form caucuses in
the places where they work-without falling into the trap of believing that
working within the system is the best or the only way to do things. If
they'll get materialism out of their heads, they'll find that it's really
very easy to get by in society, that it's easy to live on the fringes of
society, that it's easy to get enough money to survive-if they're willing to
be failures in traditional career terms. It's striving for what the system
calls success that ties you up and keeps you from accomplishing anything
meaningful.


PLAYBOY: What meaningful things do you think the student revolt has
accomplished so far?
MORSE: The fact that the American people have been hit day after day by
student sit-ins, demonstrations and other actions against the war has
educated them to what is going on in Vietnam and prevented a consensus from
developing in support of the war in this country. That is a tremendously
important thing to have done. The revolt is also making a lot of students
come face to face with the choices they will have to make and decide whether
they will participate in this society as it is or become radicals and
participate in movements for social change.
LUCE: It's possible that at some schools the protests may have awakened
students to the great political, social and racial conflicts that beset the
country, but by and large, the few gains achieved on individual campuses
have been completely offset by the beginnings of the tremendous backlash we
discussed earlier, which is leading to such overreactive steps backward as
the refusal of the public to support school-bond issues; next will come the
repressive Federal legislation I warned about-legislation that may
ultimately outlaw all dissent. In my mind, this is an enormous price to pay
for what the radicals have achieved.
BROWN: Well, I think many positive things have been accomplished, but
foremost among them is the fact that people are finally beginning to take
students seriously. Legislators all over the country are talking about how
to involve students in the running of the educational system. The students
have become a force in this society, and that in itself is a major
accomplishment.
FR1EDENBERG: I would agree that a great deal has been accomplished. For one
thing, we would have Lyndon Johnson as President of the United States right
now except for the revolts on the campuses and the war protest. Considering
who replaced him, I'm not convinced that this has been an unmixed blessing,
but it has certainly accomplished something. I think that a lot of the kids
have also begun to sort out which grievances and which kinds of protest are
legitimate and significant-in a way that will make their future efforts less
fruitless and counterproductive, that will free them to become less pompous
and didactic in articulating and pursuing their goals. Protest has freed
them from many of society's old shibboleths and hang-ups, and they have
begun to realize that society may be youth's enemy, just as youth has been
defined as the enemy of society.
HAYDEN: Yes, and youth is a dangerous enemy. The revolts have shattered the
myth that the American power structure is invincible and has permanent
authority over the minds of young people in this country. We were raised to
believe, by reading C. Wright Mills and Marcuse, that this is a one-
dimensional society in which the possibilities for revolutionary change were
very, very small, not only because of the coercive powers of the
establishment but also because of its adaptive and manipulative powers,
which gave it the capability of brainwashing people into contented drones.
But this has turned out to be an overly pessimistic analysis, and I think
the events of the last decade have established that we are making this a
multidimensional society, that there is not one America and that no one
group or power elite has a claim to speak for the American people. That's a
monumental achievement, it seems to me, in such a short time. The idea that
this is the American century, that America should rule the world and that
everyone in this country is happy has been irrevocably shattered. This, in
turn, has had a lot to do with triggering revolutionary movements around the
world and creating revolutionary questions for people in this country. There
is a growing recognition that the universities and colleges don't simply
alienate white middle-class students and exclude black people; they also
fail to serve the people as a whole. I think we're now on the threshold of
transcending our limited role as a student movement and beginning to grow
into a movement that will spread beyond the campus and eventually become a
majority force in the society.


PLAYBOY: What is your prognosis for the coming academic year? Is campus
protest and disorder likely to continue-and perhaps escalate-or do you
foresee a trend toward resolution of the conflicts?
JENCKS: I think we're going to see more of the same. The expansion of the
movement into high schools is a sign that the situation is likely to become
more intense. And on college campuses, the backlash seems to be growing even
faster than the protest movement. I see repression, frustration and probably
more violence ahead.
FRIEDENBERG: I'm sorry to say that I agree. And the most tragic aspect of
this is that the violence is going to come from the establishment, not from
the students. Before there is any kind of resolution, any kind at all, I
think some students will be imprisoned, some will be killed-and all of them
will be terrified. Our prospects are dark, indeed.
HAYAKAWA: I'm not so pessimistic. I think the forces of reason-let's not
call it backlash-will begin to hold sway now. I think the violence has
peaked. There will be more trouble, but it will be stopped quickly and
firmly. Changes will be made and some problems will be solved, and I think
the majority of students and faculty will make it plain that they want to
get back to the business of of education-not without debate, not without
dissent, but surely without violence and disruption.
BROWN: You're wrong. There will be more violence, because I don't think the
power structure in this country is going to initiate the wholesale changes
that will be necessary to make this a humane nation. I think concessions
will be made to the movement, but only as stopgap measures, only to cool the
pressure. But students aren't going to buy it unless it's real-and
especially not black students. Our struggle didn't begin on the campus and
it won't end there. There are some bitter days ahead.
MORSE: I was a pacifist until about a year ago. I went through the
nonviolent civil rights movement and I went through the pacifist anti-war
movement. We talked, we pleaded, some even became involved in mainstream
politics, only to see their candidates shot down in hotel corridors or
railroaded in smoky Chicago back rooms. The movement has sat in, been
arrested, beaten, cursed and spat on-but in the end, no one's listened. That
leaves us no alternative but revolution.
LUCE: It will never happen. Change is badly needed on the campus, in the
civil rights area, in government, everywhere-and young people on the New
Right want it as badly as those on the New Left. But we know that the means
for change are provided by the Constitution. We're calling for change and
not destruction. The New Right is arguing for the freedom of the individual
against the collectivist nature of the present Government and the
totalitarian proposals of the left wing. No matter how you cut it, the New
Left is philosophically socialistic. We on the right want an end to
government control over the actions of the individual, not simply a
usurpation of that control by New Left totalitarians. I think you'll see
more and more students deserting the left and joining the right-not only out
of disgust for the senselessness of what has happened this year but out of a
desire to get real change accomplished. There may be a few last-ditch
pockets of radical resistance in places like Berkeley and Columbia, but very
soon I think it will be obvious that the left-wing protest movement on
campus is dying.
EDWARDS: I'm sure the rightists in this country wish we were dying, but the
opposite is true. The violent temper is going to become even more intense
than it is now. It was set by the establishment, you know, not by the
students; they sent their pigs in to brutalize the students long before the
students became violent. It's the same old story. Peaceful people with
something to say were beaten up by pigs in Selma and Birmingham. Violence
has always been their answer to the call for change. Well, now they're going
to get a fight. I tell students, "Baby, get a gun and be ready to use it,
because if you're killed out there, it won't make any difference whether
it's by a pig in a blue uniform or one in a white sheet or one in Army
green; you'll be just as dead. So take the whole trip. It wasn't your
violence in the South; it wasn't your violence in Chicago; it's not your
violence in Vietnam. It's theirs. So answer it. Protect yourself."
HAYDEN: The establishment is beginning to experiment with fascism. Fascism
already exists in Vietnam and in the ghettos; and now, with the events in
Berkeley, it's beginning to extend into the white youth culture and the
student community. The shooting and killing of James Rector in BerkeLey was
deliberate; the use of buckshot was deliberate; the torture of prisoners at
Santa Rita prison was deliberate; the state-of-emergency regulations at
Berkeley are deliberate. And it's the fascist elements of their power
structure that are escalating the repression. In Berkeley during the
People's-park demonstration, gas dropped from a helicopter drifted into
schools where youngsters were trying to learn and into hospitals where
children and invalids had to be rushed into oxygen tents. This is the shape
of things to come. The power structure is deliberately escalating the
conflict in steadily increasing doses, hoping to ready the public to accept
higher levels of repression, bigger police budgets, more expulsions from
school and prosecution of protesters, etc. Our task is to convince the
American people that despite the endless barrage of propaganda against us,
we are not their enemy. We think we can do this, just as we helped persuade
the people that the war in Vietnam was only in Johnson's interest, not in
theirs. We'll make Berkeley Ronald Reagan's Vietnam; he can buy short-term
popularity by running on a backlash platform against us, but in the long run
he and everything he stands for are doomed. We're at war; it's a war that
can destroy America or-as we hope-reconstruct the country on a basis of
human values and priorities. It will be a long struggle, and many of us may
not live to see the outcome, but we're prepared. The stakes in this war are
not just America but the future of the world. We don't intend to lose.
GALLAGHER: There's no question that we face a period of deeper polarization,
more intransigent attitudes, more protests-and therefore more counterprotest
and repression. In the universities and colleges, I see more and more
administrators of good will caught between disruption and repression,
between blacklash and backlash-and rendered impotent. I see other
administrators and political forces calling in more police and troops and
consequently radicalizing more students. I see more students-and nonstudents
-angry and afraid. But the power to choose between destruction and
reconstruction is still in our hands. We falter badly; but men, not things,
are still in the saddle. If we miss this chance to save what is good about
America and to correct what is bad, the fault will lie with the extremists
on both sides; but the price will be paid by every American alive-and by
millions yet unborn.
While there is still time, we've got to break out of this spiral of violence
and hatred before it tears the country apart. We must begin by recognizing
that although the tactics used by students are often unjustified and
counterproductive, most of their demands and criticisms are generally valid.
They must be met not with Mace and clubs and bayonets and injunctions but
with forbearance and understanding and-most importantly-with fundamental
reforms. We have to realize that the upheaval on campus and in the ghetto is
all part of a larger crisis-a crisis in human values. It's a crisis that we
still have a chance to resolve if we move now in an all-out effort to remedy
the injustices and heal the sicknesses of our society. Racism, poverty and
war will not be eradicated overnight; much less will we manage immediately
to get rid of such diffuse problems as alienation, hypocrisy and
dehumanization. The millennium will not be delivered with the morning milk.
But we can avert catastrophe if we have the will to do so. On a massive
scale, as our first priority as a nation we must begin the effort and keep
at it. It is not too late for the oncoming generation to be seized by hope
born of constructive struggle, to defeat the pessimism that now enthralls
"the movement." The greatest crime today is not disorder but the despair
that spawns it. We have a great debt not only to the present generation but
to the future. And it must be paid.


PLAYBOY: Looking back on all that's been said, it's our belief that there
has never before been such a thorough and searching presentation of opposing
viewpoints on the crucial issue of campus dissent. It is superfluous to
observe that agreement has not been reached, but you have all done a signal
service by taking time from your crowded schedules to cut through the smoke
screens of acrimony and ad hominem attack in order to elucidate your
positions and analyze (as each of you sees them) the causes of conflict.
This, in itself, must be considered an important step toward the ultimate
achievement of amity and progress to which all men of good will aspire. We
thank you.

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