Pondering the Problems

"This is the American way of doing things—to expect to solve all the world's problems in four days," complained Sulak Sivaraksa, editor of Bangkok's Social Science Review. Crumped U.S. Economist Carl Kaysen: "Everyone wants to talk and no one wants to listen." The occasion for their disgrunllement was a four-day meeting last week in Princeton of some 90 inter national intellectuals assembled for a look at "The U.S.—Its Problems, Impact and Image in the World." The conferees, naturally enough, were dismayed by the problems themselves, but perhaps even more so by the impossibility of getting a roomful of intellectuals to agree on what to do about them.

The conference was sponsored by the International Association for Cultural Freedom, based in Paris and funded largely by the Ford Foundation. At a cost of about $80,000, the I.A.C.F. gave the incoming Nixon Administration a searching set of speculations about the state of the U.S. today and where it is heading. France's Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber, journalist and author of the bestselling The American Challenge, voiced a note of urgency in opening the conference. "America, as the leading industrial power, is the crucial battlefield," he said. "The crisis you are living through we will have to face in the future." Some of the matters discussed:

∙THE RACES. The nation's racial problems "are now hampering its clear vision in dealing with the rest of the world," contended Writer Harold Cruse (The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual). Black Power, said Cruse, is a necessary step on the way to eventual integration; the Negro must develop his own identity before he can successfully join U.S. society as an equal. Cruse described Black Power as "a belated attempt to get an economic and political share of the American pie," but insisted that it is uniquely American and unrelated to European theories of class struggle. Although most participants denounced the idea of black separatism—John Oakes, editor of the New York Times editorial page, called it "impractical, unreal and immoral"—CORE Director Roy Innis unflinchingly defended it.

∙UNIVERSITIES. Sociologist Daniel Bell argued that today "the source of power comes from theoretical knowledge—and, as this is the case, the university will replace the corporation as the main source of innovation and direction. The university is the gatekeeper of society." If that is true, said Poland's Jan Kott, a professor of comparative literature, the U.S. university is not ready for the task. "After a year at Berkeley," he explained, "I think the university is a green zone of escape, not a real place in a real world. Two days after the takeover of Nanterre, De Gaulle was tottering, but two months after the takeover of Columbia—nothing. This green zone has to become more involved."