Why not?
IAN MacGREGOR
University in Revolt: A History of the Columbia Crisis Jerry L. Avorn and others (Macdonald 42s) In one of his short stories Dylan Thomas complains about the books he was given for Christmas as a child which told him 'every- thing about the wasp, except why'. This book is about the weeks of agitation, sit-ins and (in the end) violence that nearly des- troyed Columbia University in New York in the spring of last year. Written by the staff of the university's undergraduate news- paper, it is thorough, well-researched and, within limits, impartial. Indeed it tells one in vast detail everything imaginable about the Columbia crisis—except why.
The events at Columbia were enormously complicated, but the outline is reasonably straightforward. Two issues engaged the attention of politically-minded students. One was the university's connection with a government research agency called the Institute for Defence Analyses. Students believed, probably rightly, that IDA was assisting the American war effort, especially in Vietnam. The other was the building of a university gymnasium in city property on the edge of Harlem. Only a small part of the gym was to be used by neighbourhood residents, most of them negros and Puerto Ricans. At the same time the university, a private institution, was run along the most old-fashioned authoritarian lines. The faculty had little contact with the trustees. Student discipline was entirely a matter for the autocratic president.
With a hundred or so students bent on disruption, and an administration deter- mined (at first) not to abdicate any of its powers, the inevitable happened. The students sat in. The administration tried to crack down. More students sat in. The faculty, torn between loyalty to the univer- sity and distaste for the administration's methods, split down the middle. Eventually, with nearly every major building on the campus occupied, the police were sum- moned. Their brutality (for once the word is appropriate) in clearing the buildings built up even more student support for the radicals and drove an even deeper wedge between faculty and administrators.
So much in this account is clear. Not much else is. As so often in modern report- ing, it is a case of too many facts ('the quiet, gaunt professor of Russian made his way onto a ledge"), too little effort to elicit significant truths. We are told little about the backgrounds, beliefs and motives of the militant students, nothing at all about the trustees, who emerge as shadowy villains but whose number must have included some disinterested men of good will. Oddly enough, we are not even told how it all came out: this is The Mouse Trap without the final act.
All the same, this book could be read with profit by anyone involved in managing higher education in Britain. Two points stand out. The first is that there are students, a few, who do wish to destroy the university as we have come to know it. Their motives matter less than their inten- tions. They cannot be bought off. It is these students with whom most university teachers —gentle, liberal, rather like the Mensheviks in I917—are peculiarly ill-equipped to deal. The second point is that the militants' argu- ments, false and shallow though they are, appeal in a vague sort of way to thousands of bien pensant undergraduates—the semi- skilled intelligentsia of the future. It follows that almost any amount of ingenuity and tact is worth expending in the cause of keeping militants and moderates from making common cause. The months of committee meetings may be boring, but a single headmasterly act can undo everything. At Columbia the moderates also sat in.
Previous page
