Education: Harvard and Beyond: The University Under Siege

(7 of 10)

A recent poll conducted for FORTUNE showed that about 40% of students enter college with the hope of bringing about change in the world. And that may be the crux of the problem. In hitting out at the university, the student rebels hit out at a society that they do not respect. Why don't they? Perhaps because the society does not sufficiently respect itself. It is a commonplace that today's young are raised permissively. More important, they are raised in an atmosphere in which conviction is too often asserted either apologetically or with an excessive, bullying vehemence that only masks a lack of true certainty. Increasingly, American society has failed to persuade its young that experience (hence age) counts for something, and that reasonable patience in the attainment of goals is necessary. The cry is for instant gratification, instant realization of ideals. Rosemary Park, former president of Barnard College, urges adults to "examine their judgments. We will find then that their concern with public issues off the campus is a search for absolutes, an absolute wrong to be righted, civil rights; the exploitation of an innocent society to be protected, Viet Nam."

Professors are probably not meant to provide absolutes. Unfortunately, they no longer provide even models, unless they happen to be political activists. The civil rights movement, the Kennedys, McCarthy—each of these sufficed for a time, until submerged by death or defeat. But Viet Nam continued, Chicago receded. Nixon won. The remaining target is the nearest at hand: the vexed, vulnerable university.

By now it takes a cool head to distinguish between campus reformers, who hope to salvage the university, and campus revolutionaries, who hope to savage it. When extremists halt classes, they kill the spirit of a university in somewhat the same way that the Nazis did in the 1930s. Seizing buildings is only slightly less dangerous. A recent Harris poll showed that 89% of Americans wanted police to quell campus rebels, whatever the radicalizing effect on moderate students. Voters are pushing state legislators for repressive laws. California has more than 100 such bills before its senate and assembly: One provides five-year sentences for class disrupters; another would empower a new state agency to seize a troubled campus and fire every official, from the president down.

Do extremists want that? Some do. In their view, it would ripen the U.S. for revolution. And yet the university is one of the best possible bases from which sane radicals can expect to mount sizable political support in the U.S. Only the campus is ideally equipped to analyze or attack poverty and pollution, to appeal to the ghetto as well as suburbia. How it should so use those skills is an open question, but if radicals seriously hope to change society, destroying universities is sheer lunacy. The trouble is, of course, that their goal is less reform than romance—coming alive in action. At the Sorbonne last year, one rebel happily chalked on a wall: "The more I make revolution, the more I make love, the more I make love, the more I make revolution."