Education: The Men in the Middle

• Share

(2 of 3)

In three years at Buffalo, Meyerson has not only resisted political pressure from outside the university and forestalled disruptive efforts from within, but has also pushed ahead with major reforms. To relieve academic parochialism, Buffalo created seven faculties, each headed by a provost and incorporating related academic departments and professional schools. Nonacademic research has been shunted into separate research institutes, and Meyerson has called on all faculty members, including himself, to teach. So that students "may experience neighborhood within the metropolis that is the university," Meyerson (whose academic background is in urban affairs and environmental design) is establishing a series of small colleges.

When students presented nine demands for radical changes in university governance and policy last month, Meyerson responded by calling a convocation of students and faculty, reading a set of counterdemands. The result: a week-long campus-wide teach-in on university reform that has elicited 120 specific proposals from departments, ad hoc groups and individuals. When 175 radical-led students seized the university administration building recently, Meyerson sat and talked with the occupiers for two hours. Persuasion unavailing, he got a court order directing each student to show cause why he should occupy the administrative offices. The occupiers filed quietly out.

A complex, subtle intellectual, Meyerson is a passionate advocate of university "reformation." Says he: "The American university in the 20th century has adapted itself to change less than any institution in our society. It is true that the scale of universities has changed, but change of scale without change of style may be suicidal."

EDWARD H. LEVI, UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO. Levi, 57, met his first challenge from dissident students just two months after he became president. In January, radical students occupied the university's administration building to protest a decision not to rehire an assistant professor of sociology. They also demanded an equal voice in faculty hiring and firing. Levi, who had been law dean and provost at Chicago, was concerned above all with preserving the institution that he loves and whose reason for being, he says, is simply "to be one of the great universities."

The new president coolly weighed the alternatives: seize the building and risk destroying the university, or let the students keep it and wear them down. He took the gentle course, conducted business from his house while the university continued to function almost normally. He refused, however, to negotiate "with a gun at his head," as one fac ulty member put it. After 16 days, the occupiers, denied broad support because there had been no violence to galvanize apathetic students, gave up. Not one of their "nonnegotiable" demands was granted.