How to Prevent Riots

After a series of campus uprisings, the University of California at Berkeley last January set up a joint student-faculty committee to study ways to avert future disorders. This week the committee—headed by Law Professor Caleb Foote and Graduate Student Henry E. Mayer—released a 250-page report that charged almost everybody involved in past troubles with pursuing "partisan ends" but also recommended some sound proposals as to how the school should govern itself.

The report was quite indiscriminate in its criticism of the present university setup. It argued that Governor Ronald Reagan was "consistently unfriendly" and that the regents had proved "ineffectual in protecting the freedom and integrity" of the school—both propositions that are open to debate. It blamed the university president for failing to give each campus enough autonomy, and Berkeley Chancellor Roger Heyns for not developing a meaningful dialogue with the faculty. The professors, in turn, operated in "a milieu of confusion and uncertainty"—not to mention indifference—with respect to their powers. Too many students, the report said, displayed "an appallingly high rate of disaffection and disinterest toward" their own education. The result was "an atmosphere of distrust and suspicion."

The committee's basic solution to the problem is decentralization in order to interweave students, faculty and administrators into a community seeking common goals. Thus it urged the regents to confine themselves to setting broad policy—something proposed by the regents' own Byrne Report (TIME, May 21, 1965)—and recommended that administrators delegate as much authority as possible to local campuses.

Local Constituencies. At Berkeley, the report proposed breaking up such "unmanageable" units as the freshman and sophomore years of the College of Letters and Science, which has some 6,600 students, into small colleges grouped around related disciplines, each with power to hire and promote teachers. Students would sit on the key committees within departments to help shape policy and would also help evaluate the teaching of their professors. These local "constituencies" would then feed into a more representative—and entirely reorganized—student government and faculty academic senate.

On the key issue of how the university should maintain order at Berkeley—assuming that dialogue will not resolve all tensions—the report proposed that the chancellor should not get directly involved with administering campus discipline. Under the present system, it argued, the chancellor appears to be both prosecutor and judge, which inevitably makes him seem like the students' adversary. Instead, the committee suggested that a new set of campus regulations, subject to the chancellor's veto, should be drawn up by a rules committee representing faculty, students and administration. Violators would be brought to a judgment before a student-conduct court composed of four students and four faculty members. If convicted, a student could appeal to the chancellor for a mitigation of punishment. As for clear violations of criminal law, that would be left entirely in the hands of off-campus courts.