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Campus "Unrest" demonstrations and consequences, 1970-1971

Newsletter: MEASURE, Documentary Supplements No. 2 Page 3

of interesting mail. I want to read you some sentences from a letter which came into my hands a few days ago. I won't tell you the name of the teacher who wrote it, nor the name of the university at which he teachers. What I ask you to notice is simply the letter's general tone. It says: "These past few days have been very depressing ones at the University..... Yesterday gangs of students armed with pipes and clubs marched through the campus destroying and beating - and the police were not even called.... The administration has caved in completely and I believe that [our University]... is now in a worse state than Cornell was [a year ago]. I myself feel that I can no longer teach here [,] and I shall resign come what may."
Of course, if the various developments and tendencies alluded to in these lines were the only developments and tendencies on our campuses, it would be easy to guess what kind of universities we are going to have in America. We would have universities from which most of the teachers have fled in despair, in which the administrators were mere puppets and rubber stamps, and in which a small portion of the student body , organized in gangs and bearing make shift arms, would lord it over all the other students and over anyone else who might be foolish enough to come onto the campus which would not include thee cops, because they would never be called, and would never appear. 
I do not sketch such a picture in order to make fun of the teacher who wrote the letter - a man, by the way, whom I have strong reason to be grateful to and respect. Neither have I sketched the picture to create an image of something I would want to say is impossible. It is a fact that teachers are now fleeing from our universities. It is a fact that there are university administrations in America who will submit to any indignity and comply with any demand by radical student extremists without showing the least sense of their own integrity or moral independence. It is true that armed gangs of students, often accompanied by armed non student allies, are increasingly roaming our campuses with nearly perfect impunity. It i true that some of our universities are already virtual wrecks, Columbia remaining the best example, and the wrecks are more wrecked than people generally have been led to believe. You may remember that President Hayakawa of San Francisco State College, after surviving a speaking engagement at Columbia a few weeks ago, during which every conceivable insult was thrown his way by a segment of the student audience, said that he had never had any idea until he saw the crowd there that night at Columbia how bad the university crisis in America has now become. And Columbia is not the only damaged university in the country - far from it. To be blunt, if we want a lot of wounded and dead universities in the United States, all we need to do is let things go on in the way they are going and we shall certainly have them. 
I hope things will NOT go on in the same way. I believe there are some university teachers who will NOT leave the universities just because of disruption, obscenity, physical assault, libel, arson and bombs. The teachers I speak of may not be exactly courageous , but they are certainly obstinate, and they can see for themselves that they would lose very heavily, were they to go. And even if they do leave the universities as a last, very last resort, the universities, in a manner of speaking, will leave with them ! For we need to be clear about what universities are and what they are for. The subject is not an obscure one. The underlying reasons for the existence of universities could be phrased somewhat as follows: because most of us learn in the course of experience that the universe is beautiful, many of us attempt to be good, in the course of trying to be good, some of us become especially concerned to know what is true; among such persons, not a few - the better to learn - come together in particular places most of which are called universities; and the purpose of universities is learning. 
Of course, a visitor coming onto the campus of an American university in 1970 would find all sorts of things going on that have no apparent connection with learning. Were the visitor shocked by the spectacle, we might try to calm his fears by explaining to him that, in the United States, a

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of interesting mail. I want to read you some sentences from a letter which came into my hands a few days ago. I won't tell you the name of the teacher who wrote it, nor the name of the university at which he teachers. What I ask you to notice is simply the letter's general tone. It says: "These past few days have been very depressing ones at the University..... Yesterday gangs of students armed with pipes and clubs marched through the campus destroying and beating - and the police were not even called.... The administration has caved in completely and I believe that [our University]... is now in a worse state than Cornell was [a year ago]. I myself feel that I can no longer teach here [,] and I shall resign come what may." Of course, if the various developments and tendencies alluded to in these lines were the only developments and tendencies on our campuses, it would be easy to guess what kind of universities we are going to have in America. We would have universities from which most of the teachers have fled in despair, in which the administrators were mere puppets and rubber stamps, and in which a small portion of the student body , organized in gangs and bearing make shift arms, would lord it over all the other students and over anyone else who might be foolish enough to come onto the campus which would not include thee cops, because they would never be called, and would never appear. I do not sketch such a picture in order to make fun of the teacher who wrote the letter - a man, by the way, whom I have strong reason to be grateful to and respect. Neither have I sketched the picture to create an image of something I would want to say is impossible. It is a fact that teachers are now fleeing from our universities. It is a fact that there are university administrations in America who will submit to any indignity and comply with any demand by radical student extremists without showing the least sense of their own integrity or moral independence. It is true that armed gangs of students, often accompanied by armed non student allies, are increasingly roaming our campuses with nearly perfect impunity. It i true that some of our universities are already virtual wrecks, Columbia remaining the best example, and the wrecks are more wrecked than people generally have been led to believe. You may remember that President Hayakawa of San Francisco State College, after surviving a speaking engagement at Columbia a few weeks ago, during which every conceivable insult was thrown his way by a segment of the student audience, said that he had never had any idea until he saw the crowd there that night at Columbia how bad the university crisis in America has now become. And Columbia is not the only damaged university in the country - far from it. To be blunt, if we want a lot of wounded and dead universities in the United States, all we need to do is let things go on in the way they are going and we shall certainly have them. I hope things will NOT go on in the same way. I believe there are some university teachers who will NOT leave the universities just because of disruption, obscenity, physical assault, libel, arson and bombs. The teachers I speak of may not be exactly courageous , but they are certainly obstinate, and they can see for themselves that they would lose very heavily, were they to go. And even if they do leave the universities as a last, very last resort, the universities, in a manner of speaking, will leave with them ! For we need to be clear about what universities are and what they are for. The subject is not an obscure one. The underlying reasons for the existence of universities could be phrased somewhat as follows: because most of us learn in the course of experience that the universe is beautiful, many of us attempt to be good, in the course of trying to be good, some of us become especially concerned to know what is true; among such persons, not a few - the better to learn - come together in particular places most of which are called universities; and the purpose of universities is learning. Of course, a visitor coming onto the campus of an American university in 1970 would find all sorts of things going on that have no apparent connection with learning. Were the visitor shocked by the spectacle, we might try to calm his fears by explaining to him that, in the United States, a