The beleaguered campus
AMERICA GEOFFREY WAGNER
Geoffrey Wagner is an Associate Professor at the City College of New York.
New York—`You can't have a revolution every day,' said the SOS (Students for a Demo- cratic Society) student when forced to admit lack of support for occupation of yet another university building.
Still, student demonstrators around America aren't doing so badly. The spring putsch is in full swing. The front page of the New York Times currently carries a run-down of campus commotions that reads like some Second World War report from the various fronts: Cornell occupied by gun-toting blacks, Harvard Yard an inferno of billy-swinging cops, Stanford occupied, Palo Alto taken over by sheriff's deputies, more Columbia buildings 'seized.'
Last week, in New York City alone two Columbia buildings were taken over by the sos (a government professor having his face opened in the process by part of a dismem- bered chair), the uptown campus of New York University the subject of seditious arson, and three out of four of the huge city, or municipal, or tax-supported, colleges closed down on account of student occupation and/or van- dalism. My own campus at the City College of New York has been occupied for over two weeks by 'blacks' (actually, mostly Harlem high school students delighted at both the holiday and the adventure), replete with Vietcong flags and 'demands' (never requests, these days) for something called 'open admissions.' Our presi- dent, meanwhile, 'negotiates,' the only difficulty being that he has actually resigned, chaos being added to confusion as he is served with two show-cause orders from taxpayers (whose taxes
'At least I can assure you that your money won't be going on mental hospitals or comprehensive schools' pay for the college) as to why he should not re- open the place. One of these is being handled by Mario Procaccino, a recent aspirant for mayor.
It has long been evident to all concerned that the best, possibly the only, way of resolv- ing the crisis is to award every `black' in New York City a higher degree at birth. What defines a `black' is something else again. Not long ago I had a charming Chinese Trinidadian in one of my classes who had emigrated to Brazil, where he had become, for some reason, a Jewish convert and ardent Zionist, removing briefly to Israel, whence he returned to America via London and `the dear country of my nativity.' He could speak Portuguese and Hebrew, but, alas, no Swahili. Soon, no doubt, the size of his feet, or the hue of his hair, will be the diacritica of his worthiness for higher education.
In short, the situation has got respectably rococo, aided and abetted by the media which play back, or echo to themselves, the sickly ecstasy of this little Hitlerism. The New York Jewish intelligentsia is not deceived. They have seen their parents go into the gas chambers, and cement mixers, in this lifetime. No one of any intellectual calibre supports the present dismantling of American education—Bettel- heim, Schlesinger, Chomsky, the accredited 'liberals' are all against, while the New York Jew is notoriously sensitive to stormtrooper symptoms. I have had a number of negroes in my classes, but never one who had been born in a concentration camp.
Yet the chaos proceeds amain. Evelyn Waugh would not have to change a word of the end- less 'petitions' that thud through one's mail:
'ABOLISH GRADES: No flunk outs. This means the end of forcing students out of school, and of forcing students to compete against each other . .
Anything that begins 'Brothers and Sisters' can be guaranteed to be of equal intellectual stature. It is, of course, all a glorious pipe- dream. A guaranteed flunkless degree accom- panied by a guaranteed $25,000 income for all `working people' thereafter (this has actually been proposed: by now almost everything has). Rational analysis, and intellectual debate, as I have seen to my cost at endless ardent faculty meetings, can do nothing—nor should it even try. A Wyndham Lewis could want no more.
The tragedy is going to be the intellectual's apathy and frustration. Revolution now. Thinking with the blood (note D. H. Law- rence's flirtation with fascism here). It seems we never learn. Sorel. Turati, Mussolini, Marinetti and the Futurists—the list of those who encouraged the precedence of action over ideology grows ever longer. Tied to it is that contempt for popular support as prerequisite to action which represents a profound dis- sociation of personality for us all. When you act irrespective of consequence (revolution now) you are no more than a pathetic, yet pathic, political schizophrene.
Urban revolutions intensify this split. An idea-less, programme-less Elite comes off the street corner and, encouraged by the media, chucks a few bricks through nearby shop windows, itself decides it is excluding the masses 'for their own sake,' and receives shabby support from a fast-tottering Marcuse, not to mention a Fanon so fatuous that only a deeply guilty or neurotic intelligentsia could ever bother to think twice about him at all (let alone enshrine him in the new Black Studies curricula). The motor-bike gang becomes so akin to the new paramilitary 'politician,' or urban guerrillero, that the one can sit in for the other at will, and does. The 'therapy' of violence frothed out by Fanon becomes the pathology of the Black Panthers, assuming racial extermination in America cognate with that in Hitler's Germany, and setting up terrorist cells to murder moderate civil rights leaders.
The Nazis came to power not through popu- lar support, but by being able to subvert without significant punishment. The Nixon ad- ministration is now starting to move against campus protest. But this is a reaction, not an action. Right-wing hostility will only intensify student dissent, so-called. The race really is between official legislation (against criminal trespass and the like) and healthy repudia- tion of this nascent fascism by moderate students themselves. Unfortunately, the latter requires organisation, and true students, bless them, dislike organising.
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