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Campus "Unrest" demonstrations and consequences, 1970-1971

Newsletter: MEASURE, Documentary Supplements No. 2 Page 5

affected by the university crisis. They have realized that they must defend themselves and their learning projects, if their projects are to go forward. In order to defend themselves and their projects, they have started to organize. Also they are using their abilities as learners to analyze the university crisis. The more they look into it, the more they see that the crisis is not confined to their own campuses but is national, indeed international, in scope. 
We will understand the situation, I believe, if we will realize that two things are going on simultaneously. On the one side, an effort is being made by a considerable number of people - students, non students, teachers and administrators - to start an anti-democratic revolution in the United States by capturing the universities and using them for non-educational purposes. On the other side, permanent learners within the universities have started an effort to assert the legitimacy and validity of their own occupation. They are not only resisting the attempt of the New Left to capture the universities but also are themselves winning new positions of leadership which may enable them to reorganize the universities in ways more in keeping with their desires. 
The struggle between these opposing forces is already fierce. Some of the most distinguished people in our universities are saying in private, if not in public, that the battle is already lost; that the universities cannot be saved; that our society will be subverted beyond a doubt ; and that the subversion will be all the swifter and more deadly for being conducted in large part without other weapons than cleverly worded leaflets, mimeograph machines, bull horns, and buttons. I partly agree with this view. It seems to me that the universities will not be preserved in the form that we have known them. But I think that, with effort, they will be made to survive in a form far better; that, as rapidly as individual universities are getting wrecked, a new American university - national in scope, unified in spirit, diverse but harmonious in membership - is getting built. I cannot stop to tell you all the reasons I have for thinking that this new American university is already a reality. I can hardly go into details about a development which is real only in general outline. But I think I can ask you to open your minds to certain possible changes. First, the people in our universities who most want to learn will not desert them but instead will stay, organize, and assert control. They will steadily force the issue: EITHER COME TO THE UNIVERSITY TO LEARN, OR DON'T COME. Second, the people in our universities who most want to learn will agree, under stress, that they are proponents of a common cause. They will proceed in many ways to united all the campuses, creating much better coordination and making possible must freer movement between them. Third, the people in our universities who most want to learn will balance control of the universities democratically between campus leaders and non-leaders, and between administrators, students, and teachers, in such a way as to respect the rights and use the abilities of each. 
In brief, we may succeed in creating an American national university wholeheartedly committed to learning, so organized as to permit considerable freedom of movements between its campuses, and balanced democratically to the continuous advantage of everyone directly concerned, including the meek. 

A question remains whether our country would want such a university even were it to have one. What one would like to know, does the American public expect universities to do?
You may think it a strange thing to say, but the university I see fast emerging in America will be one that denies having a social duty to perform. The reason is that learning cannot in its nature be a duty. One can decide in perfect earnest that one wants to learn, and one can try to learn, but whether one actually does learn in the fullest sense of the word is always a matter of hope. No group of learners can fairly promise in advance to ;learn anything worthwhile about anything. By the same token, they cannot fairly

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affected by the university crisis. They have realized that they must defend themselves and their learning projects, if their projects are to go forward. In order to defend themselves and their projects, they have started to organize. Also they are using their abilities as learners to analyze the university crisis. The more they look into it, the more they see that the crisis is not confined to their own campuses but is national, indeed international, in scope. We will understand the situation, I believe, if we will realize that two things are going on simultaneously. On the one side, an effort is being made by a considerable number of people - students, non students, teachers and administrators - to start an anti-democratic revolution in the United States by capturing the universities and using them for non-educational purposes. On the other side, permanent learners within the universities have started an effort to assert the legitimacy and validity of their own occupation. They are not only resisting the attempt of the New Left to capture the universities but also are themselves winning new positions of leadership which may enable them to reorganize the universities in ways more in keeping with their desires. The struggle between these opposing forces is already fierce. Some of the most distinguished people in our universities are saying in private, if not in public, that the battle is already lost; that the universities cannot be saved; that our society will be subverted beyond a doubt ; and that the subversion will be all the swifter and more deadly for being conducted in large part without other weapons than cleverly worded leaflets, mimeograph machines, bull horns, and buttons. I partly agree with this view. It seems to me that the universities will not be preserved in the form that we have known them. But I think that, with effort, they will be made to survive in a form far better; that, as rapidly as individual universities are getting wrecked, a new American university - national in scope, unified in spirit, diverse but harmonious in membership - is getting built. I cannot stop to tell you all the reasons I have for thinking that this new American university is already a reality. I can hardly go into details about a development which is real only in general outline. But I think I can ask you to open your minds to certain possible changes. First, the people in our universities who most want to learn will not desert them but instead will stay, organize, and assert control. They will steadily force the issue: EITHER COME TO THE UNIVERSITY TO LEARN, OR DON'T COME. Second, the people in our universities who most want to learn will agree, under stress, that they are proponents of a common cause. They will proceed in many ways to united all the campuses, creating much better coordination and making possible must freer movement between them. Third, the people in our universities who most want to learn will balance control of the universities democratically between campus leaders and non-leaders, and between administrators, students, and teachers, in such a way as to respect the rights and use the abilities of each. In brief, we may succeed in creating an American national university wholeheartedly committed to learning, so organized as to permit considerable freedom of movements between its campuses, and balanced democratically to the continuous advantage of everyone directly concerned, including the meek. A question remains whether our country would want such a university even were it to have one. What one would like to know, does the American public expect universities to do? You may think it a strange thing to say, but the university I see fast emerging in America will be one that denies having a social duty to perform. The reason is that learning cannot in its nature be a duty. One can decide in perfect earnest that one wants to learn, and one can try to learn, but whether one actually does learn in the fullest sense of the word is always a matter of hope. No group of learners can fairly promise in advance to ;learn anything worthwhile about anything. By the same token, they cannot fairly