The anatomy of student revolt

PERSONAL COLUMN JOHN SEARLE

In several years of fighting for, fighting against and simply observing student revolts in the United States and Europe, I have been struck by certain recurring patterns of action and internationally common styles in the rhetoric of confrontation. Leaving out student revolts in Turkey, Czechoslovakia and Spain—all of which have rather special features—and con- fining ourselves to the us and the advanced industrial democracies of Western Europe, it seems to me to be possible to discern certain family resemblances in the successful campus rebellions. In general, successful student revolts in these countries tend to occur in three identi- fiable phases or stages.

In the beginning, the revolt always has—at least in the mythology of local administrations —the same two features: there is only 'a very small minority' of troublemakers, and 'they have no legitimate grievances.' These condi- tions, I have found in visits to campuses all over the us and Western Europe, are, by common administrative consent, universal. They are also the reasons why 'it won't happen here'; that is, they are always the reasons why 'this campus won't become another Berkeley' or, lately, 'another Columbia.' I have discovered inciden- tally, that a legitimate grievance is defined as one in which the students win. If you win, it turns out that your grievance was legitimate all along; if you lose, then alas for you, you had no legitimate grievance.

'The small minority with no legitimate grievance' starts out by selecting an issue. Curiously, almost any old issue will do. At Berkeley it concerned the campus rules on political activity; at Columbia it was the loca- tion of a gym; at Nanterre a protest at the offices of TWA and the Chase Manhattan Bank; at Essex it was a visit by a representative of the Ministry of Defence; and many places have used recruiters from the Dow Chemical Com- pany and other variations on the theme of the war in Vietnam.

Almost any issue will do, provided it has two crucial features: (1) It must be an issue that can be somehow related to a Sacred Topic. In the United States, the Sacred Topics. are the First Amendment, race and the war in Viet- nam—in that order, though I believe that in the last year race has been pulling ahead of the

First Amendment. (In France, la revolution is itself a Sacred Topic.) If the issue can be related to a Sacred Topic, then the majority of students, even though they would not do'any- thing about it themselves, will at least be sym- pathetic to the demonstrators' position in the early stages. (2) The issue has to be one on which the university authorities cannot give in.

The authorities must initially refuse your de- mands. If you win, you have lost. If the authorities give in to your demands there is nothing for it but to pick another issue and start all over.

The demand, therefore, has to be presented in the maximally confrontationalist style. This usually requires a demonstration of some sort, and sit-ins are not uncommon at this 'stage, though a 'mass meeting' or march to present your demands will often do as well. The num- ber of people in Stage One is usually small, but they serve to 'educate' the campus, to 'dramatise' the issue. It is a good idea, though not always necessary in Stage One, to violate as many campus rules or civil laws as you possibly can, in as visible a manner as you possibly can, during the initial presentation of your demands. In other words, you should challenge the authorities to take disciplinary action against you, and generally they will oblige by suspending a few of your leaders.

Stage One closes when the administration rejects your demands, admonishes you to better behaviour in the future and, if possible, brings some of your leaders to university dis- cipline for rule violations in the demonstra- tions. Berkeley 1964 and Paris 1968 are the models of a well-managed Stage One.

In Stage Two the original issue is trans- formed so that the structure of authority in the university is itself the target. This is achieved by the following method. The fact that the university rejected the original demands and, even more, the fact that the university dis- ciplined people for rule violation in making those demands are offered as conclusive proof that the university is the real enemy of the forces of truth and justice on the Sacred Topic. Thus, if the original demand was related to the war in Vietnam, the fact that the university disciplined a student for rule violation in mak- ing the demand is proof that the university is really working for the war and that it is out to 'crush dissent.'

If, for example, the demonstrations •were against Dow Chemical Company recruiters on campus, the fact of university discipline proves that the university is really the handmaiden (or whore) of the military-industrial complex.

And the fact that the university refuses to cancel plans for the gym (Columbia) or does cancel plans for the Cleaver course (Berkeley) demonstrates that the university is really a racist institution. Why would anybody try to dis- cipline our fellow students and refuse our just demands if they weren't racists, warmongers or dissent-crushers, as the case might be? And, indeed, can't we now see that thg university is really just a part of much larger forces of oppression (imperialism, racism) in our Ameri- can society? In the face of such proof, only the most callous or evil would fail to join us in our struggle to make this a livable univer- sity, a place where we can be truly free.

If this attempt to make the university the primary target is successful, the number of people involved in Stage Two will increase enormously. Large numbers of students who will not demonstrate illegally against the war in Vietnam or for free speech will demon- strate illegally if they can demonstrate against someone's being disciplined for illegally demonstrating against the war in Vietnam or for free speech. The original issue is made much more personal, local and 'relevant' to their life as students by being redefined, with the university authorities as the main enemy. The war in Vietnam is a long way off, but the chancellor's office is just across the campus. This redefinition of the issue so that the uni- versity authorities become the main target is crucial to the success of the entire operation and is the essential characteristic of a success- ful Stage Two.

Speeches, leaflets, meetings and articles in student papers all serve to create a certain rhetorical climate in which charges that would normally be thought to verge on the prepos- terous can gain currency and acceptability.

Thus, the president of the university is a racist, the board of regents is trying to run the uni- versity for its personal profit, the university is fundamentally an agent of the Pentagon and so on. Anyone who remembers the witch hunts of the 1950s will recognise the distinctive features of this rhetorical atmosphere: the pas- sionate conviction that our side is right and the other side not only wrong but evil, the urgency of the issue, the need for all of us to stand united against the threat (of com- munism or the military-industrial complex, depending on your choice of era) and, most important, the burning sincerity of all but the most intelligent.

To accuse a professor of doing secret war research for the Defence Department-nowadays has the same delicious impact that accusations of secret communist party membership did a decade ago. And one even reads the same

sort of nervous, apologetic prose on the part of the accused: "I was consultant [to the Institute for Defense Analysis] from 1964-67, when I went to meetings and listened and offered comments; however, you will not find my name on the reports," he said' (The Daily Californian, 5 November 1968). The ultimate in such accusations—leaving out such horren- dous charges as 'He worked for the CIA'- are 'He's racist' and 'He is in favour of the war.' We are, incidentally, going to see a great deal more of this left-McCarthyism in the next few years on college campuses, especially in the United States.

In Stage Two certain new and crucial ele- ments enter the fray—television and the faculty. It sounds odd to describe the jobs television does but here they are: it provides a leader and it dignifies the proceedings. The mechan- isms by which television provides the movement with a leader are not generally well under- stood. It looks as if the movement chooses a leader and he addresses the nr cameras on its behalf. But that is rarely what happens; in fact, that almost never happens.

What happens is that among the many speakers who appear at rallies and such, some are more telegenic than others; and the TV reporters and cameramen, who can only use a small amount of footage anyway, are pro- fessional experts at picking the one who will make the most interesting news shots. The man they pick then becomes the leader or spokes- man or symbol of the movement. Of course, his selection has to be approved by the move- ment, so any TV selection is subject to ratifi- cation by the crowd. If they don't like him, the Tv people have to find somebody else, but among the many leaders who are acceptable to the demonstrators, television plays an im-portant role in the eventual success of one or

another.

Thus Mario Savio in Berkeley, Daniel Cohn- Bendit in Paris and Mark Rudd at Columbia were people with relatively little leadership position prior to Stage One, but who, as a result of their own qualities and the fact that the television people chose them to present as leaders, were elevated to the status of leaders, at least symbolically. Both Savio and Rudd have complained of this television exaggera- tion. Actually, Cohn-Bendit -is, the purest case of mass publicity as a factOr in 'selecting a leader, for Jacques Sauvageot, the leader of the student union, and Alain Geismar, the head of the teachers' union, were both authen- tic campus leaders and organisers well before Stage One ever got going, but neither is much good on Iv, so neither ever attained Cohn- Bandit's symbolic stature. In a sense, the fact that television plays such an important role in the.selection of the leader doesn't much matter because it is a feature of this type of political movement that leaders don't lead (they may manipulate, but lots of people who are not 'leaders' do that as well).

In a 'crazy kind of way, television also digni- fies the proceedings. If you are at a demon- stration at noon and you can go home apd watch yourself on the six o'clock-news, it sud- denly means that the noon behaviour is lifted out of the realm of juvenile shenanigans and becomes genuine historical stuff. If you are there on the box it must be pretty serious, an authentic revolutionary event.

This is a McLuhanite generation, raised with a feel for publicity in general and TV in par- ticular. When I was an undergraduate, if you got kicked out of university yout went some- where else and tried to forget about it; nowadays you would immediately call a TV news conference and charge that you did not get due process. As a news medium, television requires the visually exciting, and campus demonstrations are ideal telegenic events; they are dramatic, colourful, often violent, and in slack moments the cameras can rest on the bearded, barefoot hippies or the good-looking, long-haired girls. In return for useful footage, the media men provide the dignity and self- respect that ,ordinary people derive from mass publicity.

It is very important in Stage Two that a few faculty members side with the demonstra- tors 'on the issues.' In general, they will not directly condone rule violations, but by sup- porting the issues of Stage One they add a stamp of approval to the whole enterprise and thus have the effect of indirectly excusing the rule violation: 'It is unfortunate, that there should be any disruption of the university, but it really is awful that the administration should kick poor Smith out just for sitting peacefully and non-violently on the dean's desk for a few hours, especially when Smith was only trying to end racism and the war in Vietnam.'

More important, the approval of faculty members provides a source of security and re- inforcement of convictions. An undergraduate engaging in a disruption of university opera- tions is not (at least, not yet) engaging in a conventional and established form of political behaviour. He feels deeply insecure, and the stridency of his rhetoric should not conceal from us the depth of his insecurity. The apparent passionate convictions of most uni- versity demonstrators are in fact terribly fragile, and when away from the crowd many of them are fairly easily talked out of their wildest fantasies. A few faculty members can provide security and reinforcement, and- are therefore a great aid in recruiting more student support. Old-fashioned people, Freudians and such, would say that the student needs the faculty member to play the role of an older sibling in his revolt against the administration- parent.

At the end of Stage Two, there is a large- scale demonstration against the university on the issue of Stage One as transformed by the rhetorical impact of Stage Two. In the United States it takes the form of a large sit-in, though this has recently been developing into the seizure (liberation') of a building, complete With barricaded doors and windows. (In Paris, It was also a matter of building street barri- cades, but street barricades are a French tradition, not easily exportable, that somehow seems to survive; the survival is aided by the presence of small cars that can be used as building material.) When the sit-in or seizure occurs, the university authorities are strongly inclined to—and usually do—call out the police to arrest the people who are sitting in. When that happens, if all has gone according to the scenario, we enter Stage Three, and we enter it with a vengeance.

. The first characteristic of Stage Three is an enormous and exhilarating feeling of revulsion against the calling of the police. The introduc- tion of hundreds of policemen on the campus is regarded as the ultimate crime that any uni- versity administration can commit, and a properly led and well-organised student move- ment will therefore direct all of its efforts in Stages One and Two to creating a situation in which the authorities feel they have no choice but to call the police. Large numbers of faculty members who have so far watched nervbusly from the sidelines, vaguely sympathetic with the students' rhetoric but unwilling to condone

John Searle is a professor of philosophy at the Uni- versity of California at Berkeley. In 1964 he was a faculty leader of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement and from 1965 to 1967 acted as special assistant to the chancellor for student affairs. He was himself educated at the University of Wisconsin and Christ Church, Oxford

the rule violations, are suddenly liberated. They are rejuvenated by being able to side with the forces Of progress against the forces of authority; the anxieties of Stages One and Two are released in a wonderful surge of exhilara- tion: we can hate the administration for calling the cops instead of having to tut-tut at the students for their bad behaviour. On the students' side, there is a similar euphoria. In Berkeley, the student health service reported in 1964 sharp decline in the number of students seeking psychological and psychiatric help during Stage Three.

In the transition to Stage Three, the more police brutality you can elicit by baiting and taunting (or the more the police are able to provide by themselves in the absence of such incitement), the better, but, as any competent leader knows, police brutality is not, strictly speaking; necessary because any large-scale mass arrest will produce accusations of police brutality no matter what happens.

In the face of the sheer horror of the police on campus, the opposition to the movement, especially the opposition among the liberal and moderate students, becomes enfeebled and usually collapses altogether. At this point, there is a general student strike with fairly strong faculty support, and quite often the campus will be completely shut down.

Furthermore, the original demands of Stage One are now only a small part of a marvel- lously escalated series of demands. Sometimes, as in Paris, the Stage One demands may be pretty much forgotten. Who, for example, could remember on the barricades what Cohn-Bendit was agitating for back in Stage One? A typical list of Stage Three demands would comprise the following: The president must be fired (he usually is, in fact).

There must be amnesty for all.

The university must be restructured so as to give the students a major share in all decision-making.

• The administration has to be abolished, or at any rate confined to sweeping sidewalks and such.

The university must cease all cooperation with the Defence Department and other official agencies in the outside community.

Capitalism must end—now.

Society must be reorganised.

Meanwhile, interesting things are happen- ing in the faculty: committees are meeting and drafting resolutions, alliances are being formed and petitions circulated. The faculty govern- ment, by tradition a sleepy and ill-attended body that gently bickers about parking and by-laws, is suddenly packed with record num- bers of passionate and eloquent debaters. There are endless amendments and fights over the symbolism of a 'whereas' clause. Great vic- tories are won and symbolic defeats sustained. Also, in the general unhinging of Stage Three mkey faculty members discover all sorts of long-forgotten grievances they have against the administration. There is simply no end of good grievances; indeed, in our best universities I believe this could be one of the conditions of continued employment: if you can't think up half a dozen really good grievances against the place you are probably not intelligent enough for continued employment in a univer- sity of top calibre.

More important, deep and abiding hostilities and hatreds grow up among various factions in the faculty. Those who are active find that their political role is more important to their standing in the community than their scholarly achievement. No matter what the issues, more energy is expended on hostilities within the faculty than on battle with any non-faculty foes, and the passionate feelings usually go far beyond those found in the democratic politics of the real world. Like nuns struggling for power in a convent, professors seem to lack the distance and detachment to see Stage Three university politics for the engagingly pre- posterous affair it usually is.

So now we have come from the halcyon days of Stage One, in which there was 'only a small minority with no legitimate grievances,' to the full-blown revolutionary ecstasy of Stage Three; the place is shut down, the president is looking for a new job and the effective authorities are a handful of fairly scruffy- looking and unplausible-sounding student leaders. How does it work? What is the fuel on which the mechanism functions?

Before I answer that, I need to make the usual academic qualifications about the model: it is intended only as an analytical framework and not a complete empirical generalisation. Certainly, not all successful student revolts go through these three stages, and I can think of many counter-examples, and so on. Nor do I mean to imply that anybody on either side actually plans his behaviour with these three stages in mind; I am not suggesting that student leaders sit in cellars asking themselves

'Are we in Stage Two yet?' Furthermore, I am not saying that the demonstrators are either in the right or in the wrong on the demands they make. Student demonstrators, like uni- versity administrators, are sometimes right, sometimes wrong. I am just trying to describe a common pattern of events that has recurred in many places and with quite different issues, but it will be obvious from what I have said that I find it at least an inefficient method of resolving campus disputes.

Getting back to the question—What makes it work?—the unique feature of the present situation in universities is the pervasive dislike and distrust of authority. Far more students in the western democracies today—more than, say, ten years ago—hate their governments, police forces and university administrations (there are complex historical reasons for this, most of which have nothing to do with uni- versities). I can, for example, remember when it was quite common for university presidents to be respected and admired, even on their own campuses. Now it is almost unheard of (except after they have been fired).

The strategy of a successful student move- ment is to unite this existing mistrust of authority with genuinely idealistic impulses on one of the Sacred Topics in such a way that • assaults on university authority become a • 'method of expressing that idealism. Each new exercise of authority then becomes further proof that the administration is an enemy of the idealism, and this serves to undermine authority even more. The transition from each stage to the next, remember, is produced by the exercise of authority; and eventually, with • the use of masses of policemen—if all has gone • according to plan—campus authority collapses altogether. The strategy, in short, is to pit `the students' (and not 'the radicals' or 'the small minority') against 'the administration' in a fight that appears to concern a Sacred Topic, and ',then to undermine the administration by pro- voking exercises of authority that will serve to discredit it. The three stages, then, should be seen as a continuous progression, beginning • with the creation of an issue (or issues) and • ending with the collapse of authority.

The demonstrators are always puzzled by the hostility they arouse among the liberal intelligentsia outside the university. But what • the demonstrators perceive as the highest ideal- ism often looks from the outside like a mixture of vandalism and imbecilic dogmatism. Though they can convince themselves that, say, Colum- bia, Stanford and Berkeley are racist institu- tions, few on the outside ever accept this view.

When administrations are defeated, they almost invariably go down as a result of tech- nical mistakes, failure to grasp the nature of the struggle they are engaged in and, most important, their own demoralisation. A con- fident administration bent on defending in- tellectual values, and consequently determined to destroy the power of its essentially anti- intellectual adversary, can generally win. Vic- tory for the administration requires a readi- ness to deal with each of the three stages on its own terms and certain overall strategies involving internal university reforms and the intelligent use of discipline (even including the police when it tomes to the crunch). Curiously, many college administrations in America don't yet seem to perceive that they are all in thlh together. Like buffaloes being shot, they look on with interest when another of their number goes down, without seriously thinking that they may be next.