Making new radicals
he logic of these events is truly wonderful. The blocking of recruiters on campus has nothing to do with the governance of an educational institution. Whether it was run by the state, the trustees, the faculty, the students, or the janitors, any university might consider it reasonable to give space for recruiters to talk to students, and if these were blocked, any administration might well decide at some point to call police. But then the liberal students and faculty move into action. First, shocked at the calling of police, they demand that new governance arrangements be created. Then, because they dislike the tactics chosen to remove the disrupters, they demand amnesty for them. Finally, because they have been forced into a tactical alliance with the disrupters—after all, the liberals are defending them against the administration—they begin to find the original positions of the disrupters, with which the liberals had very possibly originally disagreed, more attractive.
We are all aware that calling in the police radicalizes the students and faculty (so aware that many students and faculty protesting President Pusey's action at Harvard said, "Why did he do it, he knows it radicalizes us"—they spoke as if they knew that, according to the scenario, they were supposed to be outraged, and they were). We are less aware that the radicalization extends not only to the police issue and the governance issue but to the content of the original demands. A demand to which one can remain indifferent or opposed suddenly gains enormously greater moral authority after one has been hit on the head by the police for it. Thus, the first mass meeting of the moderate student element after the police bust, in Memorial Church, refused to take a position on ROTC and asked only for a student referendum, and referenda, as we know, generally turn out in favor of retaining ROTC in some form on campus. It is for this as well as for other reasons that SDS denounces votes and majority rule as "counterrevolutionary." But the second meeting of the moderate students, in the Soldiers Field Stadium a few days later, adopted a far more stringent position, hardly different from SDS's. And a few days after that, the distinguished faculty, which had devoted such lengthy attention to ROTC only a short time before, returned to discuss it again, and also took a more severe position.
The recourse to violence by the radical students at Harvard was therefore successful. The issue of ROTC, which was apparently closed, was reopened. The issue of university expansion, which excited few people, became a major one. The issue of black studies, which everyone had thought had been settled for a time, and decently, with the acceptance of the Rosovsky report, was reopened by the black students. It might have been anyway, but certainly the SDS action encouraged the reopening.
The SDS takes the position that these are no victories—by the nature of their analysis of the structure of society, government, and university in this country, there can be no victories, short of the final, indefinable "basic social change." Thus, the fact that the university faculty and corporation have now adopted a resolution which will remove ROTC from campus entirely (even the rental of facilities, according to the mover of the new faculty resolution, would be improper) demonstrates, according to SDS, that the university has not given an inch. Why? Because the resolution says the university will facilitate student efforts to take ROTC as an outside activity, off campus, presumably in the way it facilitates student efforts to find jobs or nearby churches. "Abolish ROTC," the SDS ROTC slogan, it now appears, means that not only must students not be allowed to take ROTC on campus; the university must not give them the address where they might take it off campus. One can be sure that if this "facilitating" clause were not in the resolution, the SDS would find other means of claiming that the university is intransigent by definition, the power structure must be—and that there has been no victory.
On university expansion, the corporation and the various schools of the university have come up with the most detailed account to demonstrate that the direct impact of the university on housing has been minor and moderated. The indirect impact is hardly controllable—psychoanalysts want to live in Cambridge, millionaires' children want to live in Cambridge (and some of those after all contribute to radicals' causes), students want to live there, and faculty members want to live there. Any reasonable attempt to moderate the situation—as, for example, Harvard's effort to build low-cost or moderate-cost housing—is denounced by the radicals. Could there be any more convincing demonstration that the demands are tactical, not designed to improve the housing situation (if it were, it might prevent the anger that hopefully leads to the revolution), but serve as a rallying slogan whereby liberals can be turned into radicals?
The issue of the black demands is a different matter; these are raised by the black students and not tactical. They are deeply felt, if often misguided. Thus, the key demand of formal student equality in recruiting faculty goes against one of the basic and most deeply held principles of the university—that the faculty consists of a body of scholars who recruit themselves without outside interference, whether from government, trustees, or students. For the purpose of maintaining a body of scholars, students are an "outside" force—they are not part of the body of scholars. But if the black demands are not raised tactically by the black students, they are adopted tactically by the white radicals—as they were at Harvard, with the indescribably simple phrase, "accept all Afro demands."
Once again, this is the kind of slogan that is guaranteed to create the broadest measure of disruption, disorder, and radicalization. Just as in the case of ''abolish ROTC" or "no expansion," "accept all Afro demands" has a wonderful accordionlike character, so that no matter what the university does in response, the SDS can insist that nothing really has been accomplished, the ruling class and the corporation still stand supreme, and the work of building toward the revolution must continue.
There is only one result of a radical action that means success for the radicals—making new radicals. In this sense, the Harvard action has been an enormous success. Those who know something of the history of Marxism and Leninism will be surprised to see this rather esoteric definition of success for true radical movements now emerging full-blown in the midst of the SDS, which began so proudly only a few years ago by breaking with all previous ideology and dogma. "Build the cadres" was the old slogan: "build the cadres," because any reform will only make the peasants and workers happier or more content with their lot, and will thus delay the final and inevitable revolution.
The aim of action, therefore, is never its ostensible end—the slogan is only a tactic—but further radicalization, "building the cadres," now "the movement." The terrible effect of such an approach is to introduce corruption into the heart of the movement, and into the hearts of those who work for it, because the "insiders" know that the ostensible slogans are only tactical, that one can demand anything no matter how nonsensical, self-contradictory, and destructive, because the aim is not the fulfillment of demands, but the creation of new radicals who result from the process that follows the putting forward of such demands: violence by the revolutionaries, counterviolence by the authorities, radicalization therefore of the bystanders, and the further "building of the movement."
What justifies this process, of course, is the irredeemable corruption of the society and all its institutions, and therefore the legitimacy of any means to bring it all down.
The failure of the liberals
iberals like to make the distinction between themselves and radicals by saying to radicals, "We approve of your aims but disapprove of your means." This in effect is what the liberal student body and faculty of Harvard did. It disagreed with the occupation of University Hall, the physical ejection of the deans, the breaking into the files. But it said, in effect, by its actions, we think the issues you raised are legitimate ones. Thus, we will revise our carefully thought out position on ROTC, and we will change our position on black studies.
On university expansion, the faculty acted just as a faculty should; it accepted the proposals of a committee that had been set up some time before, a committee on the university and the city, chaired by Professor James Q. Wilson. It followed its agenda and its procedures rather than the agenda set for it by the radicals. It received neither more nor less abuse for this action than for its efforts to accommodate radical demands on ROTC. I think the proper liberal response was: "We disagree totally with your means, which we find abhorrent, we disagree totally with your ends, which are the destruction of any free and civil society; some of the slogans you have raised to advance your ends nevertheless point to real faults which should be corrected by this institution, which has shown by its past actions on various issues that it is capable of rational change without the assistance of violence from those who wish to destroy it, and we will consider them."
Oddly enough, the discussion of the ostensible aims, even though the liberal position was that the aims were valid, was terribly muted. The liberals were hampered in their discussion first by lack of knowledge of the issues (how many had gone into the intricacies of relocation and the provision of housing for the poor?), and second by the feeling that some of these issues were not really the business of the faculty. In the case of ROTC, the key issue, the faculty tried to find an "educational" component to justify the action that might assuage the passions of student radicals. Thus, the argument on ROTC was carefully separated from any position on the Vietnam War, and a resolution was passed ostensibly for educational purposes, simply because it had been determined that ROTC did not have any place in a university.
This was nonsense. The educational reasons for action against ROTC were settled when it was determined the courses should not get academic credit and the ROTC instructors should not get faculty standing. Why was it necessary to go on and specify that no facilities should be provided? Space is given or rented for all sorts of noneducational purposes on the campus—religious, athletic, social, and so on. What had happened was that under the guise of responding as an educational body to political demands, the faculty had accepted a good part of the political demands, and implicitly a good part of the political analysis, that led to them. It would have been more honest to denounce the Vietnam War than to remove ROTC. After all, what role has ROTC played in getting us into that quagmire? It was civilians, such as Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, who did that.
By denying to students the right previously established to take military training on the campus the faculty was in effect taking the position that all the works of the United States government, and in particular its military branches, are abhorrent which is exactly the position that SDS wishes to establish. It wishes to alienate students from their society and government to the point that they do not consider how it can be reformed, how it can be changed, how it can be prevented from making mistakes and doing evil, but only how people can be made to hate it.
This may appear an extravagant view of the action of the Harvard College faculty, and yet the fact is that there was little faculty debate on the demands. The liberals implicitly took the stand, "We agree with your aims, we disagree only with your tactics," and in taking this stand were themselves then required to figure out how by their procedures they could reach those aims without violence.
But the aims themselves were really never discussed. The "Abolish ROTC" slogan was never analyzed by the faculty. It was only acted upon. All the interesting things wrapped up in that slogan were left unexplored: the rejection of majority rule (explicit in SDS's rejection of the legitimacy of a referendum on ROTC); the implication that American foreign policy is made by the military; the assumption that the American military is engaged in only vile actions; the hope that by denying the government access to the campus it can be turned into a pariah—and once we manage to turn someone by our actions into a pariah, we can be sure the proper emotions will follow.
The expansion demand was never really discussed, or at any rate insufficiently discussed. It never became clear how different elements contributed to the housing shortage and to the rise of rents in Cambridge. It was never pointed out that the popular demand for rent control would inevitably mean under-the-table operations in which the wealthier Harvard students and faculty could continue to outbid the aged and the workers. The issues of the inevitable conflicts over alternative land uses, and the means whereby they could be justly and rationally resolved, were never taken up.
The faculty did most to argue against the new demand for equal student participation in the committee developing the program of Afro-American studies and recruiting faculty. Even there, one can hardly be impressed with the scale and detail of the faculty discussion, though individual statements, such as Henry Rosovsky's speech, were impressive and persuasive. The key questions of the nature of a university, the role of students within it, the inevitable limits that must be set on democracy and participation if an institution designed to achieve the best, in scholarship and in teaching, is to carry out its functions—all these played hardly any role in the discussion. The students were not educated. To their eyes, reasonable sensible demands were imposed by force on a reluctant faculty. They were right about the force. This was hardly a manly posture for the faculty—at least they should have argued.
There was thus to my mind a serious educational failure at Harvard. All the education, after the occupation and the police bust, was carried on by the radicals. They spoke to the issues they had raised; others did not, or countered them poorly. They established that these issues were important, and thus in the minds of many students their tactics were justified. By student, faculty, and corporation response, their view that the university reacts only to violent tactics was given credence. If this was a failure, of course the chief blame must rest on the faculty. It is their function to educate the students, and the corporation follows their lead and their analysis, when they give one.
There were of course administration failures, too, in not consulting sufficiently widely with students and faculty, and perhaps in calling the police. But these did not justify the faculty in its failure to analyze and argue with the radical demands, and in giving up positions it had just adopted.
I agree with the SDS that the issues should have been discussed—ROTC, campus expansion, black demands. But more than that should have been discussed. The reasons SDS had raised the issues should have been discussed. The basic analysis they present of society and government should have been discussed. The consequences of their analysis and the actions they take to achieve their demands should have been discussed. They should have been engaged in debate. They were not. Instead, they were given an open field and all possible facilities for spreading their view of the world, a view that to my mind is deficient in logic, based on ignorance and passion, contradictory, committed to unattainable aims, and one in which a free university could not possibly operate.
The university now suffers from the consequences of an untempered and irrational attack on American society, government, and university, one to which we as academics have contributed, and on which we have failed to give much light. The students who sat in, threw out the deans, and fought with the police have, after all, been taught by American academics such as C. Wright Mills, Herbert Marcuse, Noam Chomsky, and many, many others. All these explained how the world operated, and we failed to answer effectively. Or we had forgotten the answers. We have to start remembering and start answering.