Misbehavioural sciences

AMERICA MURRAY KEMPTON

New York—The student rebellion brings out only infrequently the best in the young and all too frequently the worst in the middle-aged.

There is much talk about malice on both sides and not enough about simple confusion.

Americans, particularly academics, do not have a firm enough sense of place. We have in general led lives so protected from historical disasters that we have trouble distinguishing the merely disturbing from the apocalyptic.

The faculty of City College of New York met last week to consider the crisis presented to it by the occupation of a portion of its cam- pus by 150 rebellious Negro students. As mat- ters wore on, there were fewer than 200 per- sons present out of a teaching staff of 1,700.

(These are, most of the time, scenes played by a very few actors.) It was a debate which never deviated from polemical abstraction. The radicals talked about the desperation of the oppressed; and at least one conservative ex- panded on the need to stand up to terror. Neither of these images of confrontation seemed to have much relation to the real faces of the Negro delegation arrayed before them.

These rebels had, to be sure, arranged them- selves in patterns strongly influenced by Peter Brook; still, the disguises did not seem so im- penetrable as to support impressions of terror and desperation. One wishes that academics would look at people with some of the objec- tivity we hope they still bring to the laboratory. But the heads of departments continue to talk as though they are in the Winter Palace in Petrograd and dissident junior instructors con- tinue to talk as though they are in the Sierra Maestra; and no debate can be of much use unless the parties have some sense of common ground It becomes clear very soon that most teachers at City College do not know the Negro students because they are not their students.

Perhaps a thousand of the 11,000 day students at City College are Negro; and, of these, 800 are enrolled in SEEK, a programme which aims

at equipping the academically-deprived to be regular students. SEEK has its own teaching

staff and curriculum; I cannot say for sure that SEEK enrollees are entirely cut off from the rest of the school; but I did notice that a SEEK student next to me was able to identify the only two Negro faculty members who spoke, and none of the white ones. The experience of these discussions sought to set anyone's teeth against words that are merely epithets; never- theless it is rather hard to think of SEEK as any- thing but an educational ghetto.

Yet no speaker at the faculty meeting talked about SEEK, favourably or otherwise, as an educational experiment; there seemed to be an entire lack of functional interest in it. There seemed, indeed, among these persons of great intelligence, a general absence of functional interest in anything outside their own dis- ciplines. The meeting opened with an aimless dispute about what power the faculty really had to render a decision, which ended when a young man in Black Panther beret assumed the micro- phone. 'First this cat says that the faculty has no power, be commented, 'and then this other dude comes along and says that the faculty has more power than the president.'

There was a sudden passage of general laughter. The saddest thought was that the only moment of common response between these strangers had been in this brief occasion of shared confusion.

This is a trouble which comes to the college not, you decide, from interior promptings but from shouts in the street. There is very little in these deliberations to suggest that the essen- tial indifference of men of goodwill is really changed. It is notable, for example, that even persons otherwise affronted by Negro demands accept the principle of separate departments of black studies, small as is their expectation that they will be useful.

After all, one City College professor of physics said, 'It is their funeral. They will suffer or they will prosper; it will have very little effect on the rest of us.' He was being facetious; but some of his feeling has to be seen as part of the readiness so many academics have to accept a programme for which they have such small respect.

Black studies are a good deal cheaper than really intensive remedial education, just as the dole and slums are cheaper than corrective measures like the Job Corps. Even Harvard, wealthy as it is, agrees to give its Negro students control over their own black studies pro- gramme. After all, it is their funeral. Yet none of these institutions would grant its students any such power in any other department; men do not that easily give away anything they think worth having.

Despite the alarms, we may best be able to see the real future of these disturbances at Columbia, where the Students for a Democratic Society work desperately and futilely to be what they were a year ago. Columbia will not call the police again, and the revolution is wholly dependent on the counter-revolution's mistakes.

Last week sos summoned the students of the New York high schools to come to Columbia's campus and protest against their exclusion from the chances of higher education; 2,000 were expected and only 200 came, to sit down decorously and briefly at the administration buildings and then to depart with an assurance from Dean Carl Hovde that he would call them back. SOS passed out leaflets for its mass-meet- ing that night. 'Confused? Bewildered? Come Anyway,' the leaflet said. Even after this expres- sion of the prevailing sense of futility, there were 500 students present; they gave no sense of knowing what to do.

And yet last spring's revolution seems, in rhetoric at least, to be this spring's conventional wisdom. Andrew Cordier, Columbia's acting president, reports on negotiations to persuade the Naval Reserve Officers' Training Corps to withdraw from the campus and announces plans to abandon classified defence programme re- search. The Faculty of International Affairs passes a resolution condemning disruption on the campus after first resolving: 'that this faculty commends the teaching staff, students and administration for their constructive efforts . . . to place this university in the forefront of American educational institutions in its pro- grammes of Afro-American studies, urban studies and in the governance and procedures of the university.'

The abolition of military training, the sever- ance of links with the defence establishment, some thought for the welfare of the people who live around Columbia, a place for the faculty and students in the government of the univer- sity: I do not argue the merits of these aspira- tions. It is enough that Columbia now boasts about its concern for them and that less than a year ago they were the demands of a rebel- lion vehemently condemned by all respectable institutions. SDS is fading away, the illusion of its danger and the usefulness of many of its nuisances alike unrecognised.