America Looks At Its Young Rebels

Press, Volume CIX, Issue 31981, 7 May 1969, Page 9

America Looks At Its Young Rebels

(From

FRANK OLIVER,

. N.Z.P..4.

special correspondent;

WASHINGTON, May 5. It simply could not happen at Harvard. But it did. It couldn’t happen at Cornell, or at Princeton, or at half a dozen other tip-top universities, but it did. The student troubles at Harvard did more to shock the nation than any others. Everyone is therefore asking why, and the answers are varied and often strange, for this is a complicated business. The student disorders have now divided the country into roughly three groups, just as the Vietnam war divided the country into hawks, doves and (alleged) owls. . Now one has the Leftists who think the students, no matter how extreme they are, should be given just about everything they demand. There are the Rightists, who think the rebelling students should be tossed out, or put in gaol or put in the front line in Vietnam. And in the middle is a small group, but a growing one, that thinks the students have some justifiable demands to make on institutions of higher learning, but who complicate affairs by going to extremes and turn themselves into hoodlums. i This third group feels that students have a right to protest, a right to picket or petition, and a God-given right to dissent, but that when students riot, set fires, take i over buildings and defend them with firearms, when they use bullhorns to disrupt the peace, then they are hoodlums and should be dealt with by the law. The Rightists say, in effect: “Toss these college punks into the Army and let the G.Ls knock sense into their heads.” The sensible middle view expresses horror at this, saying that this is what happens in Russia, in China and other authoritarian areas, that no-one has the right to knock sense into anyone’s head. The Rightists dislike the appearance of the so-called hippies, with their long hair . and unshaven faces and look- ■ ing, it must be admitted, anything but clean. They pro'ceed to suggest: “These

people should be held down by force, shaved, washed and, while you are about it, wash out their mouths with strong soap.” The sensible people in the middle say that while they don't like the appearance of these rebels, there is no law against “kooky clothes,” long hair, or even dirt. They may pollute the air, but the courts have not ruled on that subject yet As one writer puts it: “The defiant cultivation of filth is, of course, a clinical sign of psychological disturbance. I feel sorry for the kids who cannot know the psychological price they will pay for regressing to the animal level. But excessive response to the dirty is as distasteful to me as their said glorification of discomfort disguised as freedom.”

People ask what are students in the colleges so unhappy about? Again, the answers are varied.

Again one comes back to the Vietnam war. Everyone is apt, at some time or other, to blame the war for things they detest or find disturbing; but during the spring vacation I spoke to several students who are a year or two either side of the age of 20, they do think that the war is immoral and want nothing to do with it; and they revolt against anything of a military nature. But they have other problems. They dislike the enormous classes which today’s conditions force on the faculty—and they blame the faculty and college administrations. They feel they are not getting as good an education as their forefathers received.

Colleges are bursting at the seams as more and more students seek higher education. Conditions are uncomfort-able-even dormitories are packed tight, like sardine cans.

The students dislike professors who do not particularly like teaching because that interferes with their research work; and they dislike the system of tenure whereby rather fuddy-duddy professors cling to jobs they do not do well but can not be got rid of. But, writes Leo Rosten, a man of reason: “These things do not mean that we should turn our colleges over to self • dramatising militants whose most conspicuous talent is to over-simplify problems whose complexity they do not begin to comprehend. “Rebels who. think they should prevail because they

dissent are deluded. Dissenters have no greater moral or political rights than nondissenters.” A writer in the “Washington Post” says people concerned with campus turmoil, as distinct from those who express “moral superiority,” should probably be thinking about “the college admissions mills now grinding out what amounts to destiny for millions of anxious young people,” He sees the universities as the “sieve” of American society, the sieve separating the men from the boys, separating those who have a chance to “make it" and those who do not. Colleges this year are receiving as many as six times the number of applications as they have vacancies, and many youngsters who merit higher education are going to be disappointed—and they are not happy about it. Then there is the demand by the young for “participation,” by which they mean a voice in the way colleges

and universities are run, the courses held, and a dozen other things. There just does not seem to be sufficient room at the top, and this leads to frustration and anger. The most unenviable jobs in the country today are the college presidencies, for those who hold them must try to deal with the force generated by thousands of youths who want the old order of education ended but do not really know what they do want, or what the end would be if their demands were met.

As James Reston asks in the “New York Times:” Do the young radicals really want to go through the agony of exercising power or merely the excitement of fighting for it? Leo Rosten winds up an article by quoting Burke to rebellious students and the Rightists who want them tossed out: “Men of intemoerate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters.”