Mr Kennan And The Student Problem

Press, Volume CIX, Issue 31967, 19 April 1969, Page 4

Mr Kennan And The Student Problem

Democracy and the Student Left By George Kennan. Hutchinson. 239 pp. In January. 1988, the “New York Times” Sunday Magazine published a short article by the distinguished retired American diplomat George Kennan, entitled “Rebels without a Programme” repeating an address which Kennan bad given a few weeks earlier at the opening of a new college library at Swarthmore. The response was overwhelming; hundreds of letters poured in from students, teachers and parents. The reactions varied from that of a lady correspondent who was so impressed that she offered to support Kennan for the Presidency, to that of an indignant Professor of Philosophy who challenged Mr Kennan to a duel and called on him to stage a personal breakdown in front of his children.

The original address has now been republished, together with a selection from the ensuing correspondence, and Kennan's further reflections in the light of these reactions. The result is a document which is crucial to the understanding of the present student discontents In the United States. “The world seems to be full today of embattled students ... photographs of them may be seen daily: screaming, throwing atones, breaking windows, overturning cars, being beaten or dragged about by police and. in the case of those on other continents, burning libraries.” Nothing, Kennan points out, could be further from the traditional ideal of the university as a place of learning with a certain remoteness

from the contemporary acene. There have been few equivalents; perhaps the student disturbances in the later years of Tsarist Russia provide the nearest parallel. What Is the explanation for this phenomenon? What deductions should we draw? Kennan fully agrees that the students have many valid grounds for discontent It is not the students, after all, who are responsible for the plight of the Negroes or the urban poor in the South or in the Northern ghettos. It is not the students who are responsible for America's Involvement in “a seemingly endless and cruel war in Vietnam.” The students can hardly be expected to ignore these problems. Yet clearly the present situation Is a most unhappy one, for the universities whose work is disrupted, for society which is deprived of a valu . able source of constructive idealism, and for the students who feel that they are forced ’ into their attitude of rejec- , tion by the unreasonable demands which the system ’ makes on them. The situa- ! tion can only be remedied in Kennan’s view by concerted action on the part of the government, of the universities , and of the students them- , selves.

The major share of responsibility must lie with the government which must recognise that It is “foolish to try to conduct eruel, messy wars —wars of obscure origin and rationale, fought in theatres halfway round the world—with draftee personnel.” The government must leam to communicate with the students in a situation {there the

traditional vocabulary of American politics, “the hearty bombast, the banging of the chauvinistic bell," no longer reaches them. The universities can help by showing more confidence in their values and standards. But the students too have an essential role to play. They must, in Kennan’s view, be prepared to forgo the luxury of rejection of the system, their total repudiation of the traditional political channels and their Insistence on immediate relationship between cause and effect; and to show more understanding for the human predicament and the Inevitability of compromise in human affairs and the need for constructive reform. Kennan is still optimistic enough to believe that reconciliation is possible and that in the end it may turn out that “these two ways, seemingly in conflict, have enriched each other, as conflicting human forces so often do . . He has, at any rate, made a most valuable contribution to the debate, and even though our problems are so much less intractable here in New Zealand, and the

confrontation so much less acute, it is a contribution which deserves the widest consideration here as in the United States.

Filming General Patton’s career in Spain, 20th Century Fox have found that the problems of re-creating the last war do not diminish with time. The cardboard helmets of their “German" soldiers buckle in the rain, which in Spain falls mainly on the plain where tank battles have to be fought >'