Education: The Men in the Middle

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Perhaps Chicago's example cannot be applied universally. The school has a long tradition of intellectual discussion that made the vast majority of students unwilling to join the sit-in. Most of its students are in graduate and professional courses, are less subject to undergraduate enthusiasms. Levi has relegated increasing responsibility for the university's conduct to the faculty, by so doing has engaged the support of most professors. And Levi has earned ample respect by years of brilliant scholarship, educational reform and urban involvement. But his example could well be studied by other college administrators. In one demonstration after another across the country, it has been the sudden application of brutal force that changed a mere protest into a bloody battle.

THE REV. THEODORE M. HESBURGH, UNIVERSITY OF NOTRE DAME. Father Hesburgh brought a new approach to campus violence in February when he issued a carefully thought-out set of rules for handling demonstrators. His eight| page letter put students on notice that persons disrupting the campus would be warned, "given 15 minutes of meditation," then suspended if they did not desist. Hesburgh's initiative, which he took only after sounding out faculty, alumni and student groups, brought him quantities of favorable mail, including a letter from President Nixon that warmly endorsed his "forthright stand."

Notre Dame, whose comparatively docile students bear little resemblance to the activists at Berkeley or Columbia, has suffered only modest demonstrations. The one that aroused Father Hesburgh occurred last November, when students held a lie-in in front of the administration building to prevent students from attending interviews with a CIA recruiter. Hesburgh denounced the lie-in as "clearly tyranny," said in his letter that Notre Dame could not tolerate "anyone or any group that substitutes force for rational persuasion," warned that angry reaction to campus violence from legislators might suppress the liberty of universities and "may well lead to a rebirth of fascism."

Hesburgh resisted calls for state and federal action, insisted that "the ultimate solution must come from within the universities." Student protest, he said, is a "resonance of the world's troubles on the part of young people at the university. You cannot ask young people to get involved and not put it to work on the world in which they are living. I think there are many legitimate reasons for protesting today, but the university has to do this according to its proper style, which is rationality and stability, not force and violence."