Education: Response to Destruction

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In a new academic year, universities the world over will apparently continue to be focal points of alienation, disruption and dissent. Last week New York University grappled with the problems created by the presence of a black extremist on its staff; a number of U.S. university presidents were openly discussing how to handle the prospect of future campus disorders; and in France, an adventuresome Education Minister won legislative 'approval of reforms that might prevent a repetition of this spring's student rebellion.

DOES academic freedom encompass public remarks by a university representative that inflame racial and religious passions? To New York University President James M. Hester, the answer seems to be no. Last week he fired a Negro militant who had claimed that "antiblack Jews" dominated the New York City public schools, and charged that Richard Nixon and Hubert Humphrey were "racist bastards."

Hester's dismissal of John F. Hatchett, 37, as director of N.Y.U.'s new Martin Luther King Jr. Afro-American Student Center, touched off student turbulence at the nation's second-largest private university (total enrollment: 41,130). Until now the school has been relatively calm, largely because of Hester's willingness to engage in tireless talks with students, anticipate their grievances and move to head them off.

Guidance and Culture. Ironically, the Hatchett affair was largely the result of Hester's moving too hastily on a student request. He had set up the Afro-American Center as a response to black-student feelings after King's murder. It was to be a place where black students could meet informally to get guidance on nonacademic problems and discuss black history and culture. Negro students had proposed Hatchett as director, and N.Y.U. approved without adequate checking.

The fact that Hatchett had been fired as a substitute teacher in the New York City schools for taking his sixth-grade class to a Black Power rally in memory of Malcolm X did not unduly alarm N.Y.U. It considered Hatchett's writings on Afro-American culture and religion sound enough to outweigh that error. But apparently no one at N.Y.U. had read a rambling, hysterical attack upon Jewish domination of the schools that Hatchett had written for the journal of the city's African-American Teachers Association. He charged that "antiblack Jews" and "their power-starved imitators, the black Anglo-Saxons" (meaning subservient, "Uncle Tom" Negroes) had inflicted "misery, degradation, racism and cultural genocide daily against my people."

Understandably, a number of Jewish organizations attacked Hatchett's appointment. Sensitive to the fact that N.Y.U. has a large Jewish enrollment, Hester tried to placate the critics. He got former U.N. Ambassador Arthur Goldberg and Federal Judge Constance Baker Motley, N.Y.U.'s first Negro trustee, to review the case, and they endorsed his decision to retain Hatchett. Hester insisted that Hatchett was "not prejudiced against Jews as an ethnic group" but was attacking the educational Establishment of the schools—an argument that Jewish groups thought too ingenuous by far.