Universities: Columbia: Threat of Chaos

Despite the bitter violence of last spring's rebellion, Columbia University's summer session has been surprisingly placid. Student radicals quietly conducted their own "Summer Liberation School" in a university-owned frat house, enticing nearly 600 young activists to such courses as racism in textbooks and Marxist philosophy. An uncoordinated assortment of trustee, alumni, faculty and student committees ponderously probed the campus problems —but to such little effect that chaos is likely to greet the reopening of classes next month.

Remote Powers. Despite the need to ease tension on the campus, the administration of President Grayson Kirk has concentrated on defining new procedures for handling discipline and demonstrations. Kirk has also called in a major Manhattan public relations agency to advise the university—a move that smacks more of image building than real change. His only concrete concession to reform so far has been the appointment of Associate English Professor Carl F. Hovde as new Dean of Columbia College. Hovde is an admirer of student activists and welcomes the fact that the spring rebellion shook the place up. Most students, he believes, only want "a university in which they can in every sense believe." Despite Hovde's appointment, even one of the university's administrators contends that Kirk still "hasn't the slightest idea of what happened last year. He's a Bourbon—he learns nothing and forgets nothing."

The board of trustees, who promised a re-examination of the entire governing structure of the university, has offered nothing specific so far. Apparently fed up with the unresponsiveness of both trustees and administrators to the need for change, Columbia's journalism dean, Edward W. Barrett, resigned this month after complaining about "authoritarian rule by remote, inaccessible powers." He urged that younger people, including some students and faculty, be made trustees (the average age is now 62). In filling a new vacancy, the board last week ignored this advice, passed over such proposed candidates as Negro Psychologist Kenneth Clark to select its usual type: Wall Street Investment Banker Harold A. Rousselot, 61.

The only detailed plan offered so far this summer has come from the university's Alumni Federation, which expressed "unreserved pride" in Kirk, called for stern limits on protests and stronger student government. It also proposed the creation of a 15-man board of visitors to check out complaints about the operation of each of the university's 15 schools. The boards would include trustee-appointed alumni, students, administrators and outside specialists. But Kirk is cool even to that modest proposal.