The Playboy Panel: Student Revolt

Panelists

Ewart Brown, 23, is a sophomore medical student and two-letter man (track and soccer) at Howard University in Washington, D. C. During the 1967–1968 academic year, as student-body president, he led a coalition of campus political organizations in a successful five-day take-over of the school's administration building as a protest against the disregard of their demands for self-disciplining authority over student violations of college rules. It was the first all-black seizure of a college administration building in the country. Having participated in a student symposium at the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions in Santa Barbara, Brown now works through student government and occasionally with Washington's Black United Front and PRIDE, Incorporated, to make Howard "a black institution controlled by blacks to solve black problems."

Harry Edwards, 26, is a Cornell graduate student in sociology and a political activist who has lectured on the philosophy and tactics of social change to black student unions on over 60 campuses throughout the nation. When Cornell's blacks seized the student union last spring, there were rumors that armed white fraternity men were about to attack, and Edwards is alleged to have advised the militants to take defensive measures by smuggling in guns and ammunition. A onetime holder of the junior college discus record and a former varsity basketball player, he organized last year's Olympics boycott and is now centrally concerned with the burgeoning Federation of Black Athletes. Edwards' published work in this area includes two books, Revolt of the Black Athlete and Up Toward Liberation, and articles in magazines ranging from Sports Illustrated to Trans-action, the sociological journal in which his piece "Confrontation at Cornell," written with Professor William Friedland, appeared last June.

Edgar Friedenberg, 48, has a joint professorship in sociology and education at the State University of New York at Buffalo. He received both his B. S. (Centenary College) and M. S. (Stanford University) in chemistry by the age of 18, and his Ph.D. in education at the University of Chicago. An anti-establishment educational theorist, Friedenberg was one of the first sociologists to recognize youth as an oppressed group, and today is a leading defender of student dissent. His humanistic interest in adolescents, particularly in relation to our educational institutions, has been expressed in several published works—The Vanishing Adolescent, Coming of Age in America, The Dignity of Youth and Other Atavisms and Self-Perception in the University, written with Julius Roth.

Buell Gallagher, 65, was president of the City College of New York from 1952 to 1961 and, after one year as chancellor of California State Colleges, returned to CCNY in 1962. Last spring, he resigned amid a furor surrounding educational budget cuts and the college's disruptive student revolt. During the massive protest, further complicated by open racial conflict, Gallagher became increasingly disillusioned with the intransigence of black-militant leadership and the patterned reactions of "old-line doctrinaire liberals." Despite the crisis, Gallagher refused to bring police on campus and was finally forced into the unpopular decision of closing the college in order to facilitate student negotiations. He is also an ordained Congregationalist minister, the recipient of 15 academic and honorary degrees, and a former assistant commissioner of the U. S. Office of Education.

Samuel I. Hayakawa, 63, is the president of San Francisco State College, succeeding Robert Smith, who resigned during the campus disorders last November, which began as a massive black studentled strike to protest State's "racist policies" and to press for a black-studies department and a larger share in the college's decision-making processes. By resorting to the extensive use of police on campus during the San Francisco State crisis, Hayakawa was able to restore an uneasy order. Though these actions gained him notoriety and popularity with many people, his reliance on police to cool the conflict by force alienated many members of his own faculty and, in the opinion of some, further polarized the academic community. Long one of the nation's leading semanticists, Hayakawa has also written such highly regarded books as Language in Thought and Action, Symbol, Status, and Personality and Dimensions of Meaning, written with William Dresser. Before joining the San Francisco State faculty, Hayakawa spent five years as a columnist for the Defender, Chicago's major black newspaper, was on the board of directors of The Institute of Jazz Studies in New York and a lecturer in English at the University of Chicago. Hayakawa is also editor of ETC, the journal of the International Society for General Semantics.

Tom Hayden, 29, a graduate of the University of Michigan, has led and allied himself with radical forces on every major revolutionary issue since the free-speech movement in 1964, and with liberal reform since the civil rights movement of the early Sixties. He registered black voters for SNCC in the South, established community organizations in the Northern ghettos and was one of the principal founders of the Students for a Democratic Society. In 1965, Hayden traveled to Hanoi with Communist dialectician-historian Herbert Aptheker and New Left theorist Staughton Lynd, and later to Czechoslovakia for a conference of American antiwar activists and leaders of Vietnam's National Liberation Front. He has also met with American and Vietnamese negotiators in Paris to work for the release of American prisoners of war. As one of the demonstration leaders during last year's Democratic Convention in Chicago, Hayden has been indicted under the anti-riot section of the 1968 Civil Rights Act and faces a possible ten-year sentence if convicted at the trial, which is scheduled for this month. His published works include The Other Side, written with Staughton Lynd, Rebellion in Newark; most recently, Repression and Rebellion.

Christopher Jencks, 32, is codirector of The Cambridge Institute and an associate professor of education at Harvard University, where he earned both his bachelor's degree in English literature and his master's in education. His provocative writings in the latter field have appeared in such publications as The Saturday Evening Post, The New Republic, Harper's and The Atlantic. In collaboration with sociologist David Riesman, he has also written The Academic Revolution, an analysis of the current crisis in American education. A self-described maverick, Jencks supported the Harvard student strike last April but not the occupation of University Hall that preceded it.

Phillip Abbott Luce, 30, who once led trips to Cuba as a member of the leftist Progressive Labor Party, now serves as Director of College Services of the conservative Young Americans for Freedom, while completing work on his Ph.D. in political science. Hoping to mobilize a conservative counteroffensive to the activities of the student left, with which hebecame disenchanted in 1965, he has lectured at numerous universities and debated such New Left spokesmen as Jerry Rubin, panelist Tom Hayden and Ramparts' Robert Scheer. In addition to articles in The Saturday Evening Post, National Review, Reader's Digest and the ultraconservative Human Events, Luce has written three books—The New Left, Road to Revolution and The Intelligent Student's Guide to Survival.

Linda Morse, 25, began her political involvement as a member of the free-speech movement while attending college in New England in 1964. She dropped out after two years to join the civil rights struggle as a volunteer worker in Philadelphia's Fellowship House, a center for black cultural education and community organization. From 1965 to 1968. she worked for New York's Fifth Avenue Peace Parade Committee, helping to stage a series of massive peace demonstrations, and was executive secretary of the Student Mobilization Committee until last year. Now living in Berkeley, she is active in a variety of radical groups, including the Women's Liberation Front.

[Q] Playboy: Increasingly, in the past several years, the campuses of America have been transformed into ideological—and often literal—battlegrounds as the demands of militant students for sw eping educational and social reforms clashed with the intransigence of university administrations and state and local authorities. The student protest movement, which began as an apparently limited dispute over free speech on the Berkeley campus of the University of California five years ago, has now become a major international issue, arousing as much passion and political polarization as the racial crisis or the war in Vietnam, with both of which it has been linked. The escalation of demonstration and counter-demonstration, disruption and suppression has divided the nation so profoundly that the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence, established by President Johnson after Senator Robert F. Kennedy's assassination, issued in June a 3600-word statement on student disorder that concluded: "The problem of campus unrest is more than a campus problem. Its roots lie deep in the larger society. There is no single cause, no single solution. We urge all Americans to reject hasty and simplistic answers…. Students are unwilling to accept the gaps between professed ideals and actual performance. They see afresh the injustices that remain unremedied…. Today's intelligent, idealistic students see a nation which has achieved the physical ability to provide food, shelter and education for all, but has not yet devised social institutions that do so. They see a society, built on the principle that all men are created equal, that has not yet assured equal opportunity in life. They see a world of nation-states with the technical brilliance to harness the ultimate energy, but without the common sense to agree on methods of preventing mutual destruction." The report was prefaced with the statement: "So threatening is the situation, so essential is the need for understanding and calm appraisal, that this commission feels compelled to speak now rather than to remain silent until publication of its final report next fall." In an effort to confront this explosive subject in the calm and understanding spirit recommended by the commission, we have asked nine leading spokesmen on both sides of the dispute—college presidents, radical students representing both black and white campus protest groups, professors and educational theorists—to participate in an unprecedented discussion on the student revolt and the far-reaching issues it has raised. To begin with, let's try to establish the relative strength of the opposing forces. Critics of campus unrest contend that the majority of students are either apathetic or actively hostile to the protesters. Are the rebels really only a small minority of the student population?

[A] Hayden: That's the same bullshit they've been handing out for years about how 90 percent of the Vietnamese are either pro-government or indifferent neutrals. The fact is that the Viet Cong could never have carried on a revolutionary war for 23 years against two great military powers without the sympathy and active assistance of the people, any more than the student revolution in this country could exist without widespread campus support. The old Chinese revolutionary axiom about the people being the water and the rebels the fish holds just as true on American campuses as it does in Asian jungles. I think the overwhelming majority of students are sympathetic to the basic goals of the movement: withdrawal of U. S. troops from Vietnam, elimination of institutionalized racism, raising the living standards of the poor and, in general, placing greater decision-making power in the hands of the people.

[A] Not everybody who's sympathetic, of course, is willing to actively participate in the movement, and there are also inevitable differences of opinion over how to realize these goals. Some students still feel that it's possible to reform the system from within. But a good-sized minority of students disagrees and feels that to accomplish such goals, you've got to change the whole system from top to bottom and replace it with something new and healthy. Though some students believe this can be done peacefully, or relatively peacefully, a small yet significant number are committed to true revolutionary action in order to change the system by any and all means necessary. That's where I stand, of course, and our numbers are growing every day.

[A] Hayakawa: I think Mr. Hayden is deluding either himself or his followers—or both—if he thinks that his kind of revolutionary methods have the support of anything more than an infinitesimal fraction of the student population of this country. The vast majority of students may, indeed, be in favor of some of the specific goals he's just enumerated—after all, who isn't opposed to war and poverty and racism?—but it's a far cry from that to supporting tactics of mindless violence and intimidation. The great bulk of American students are primarily concerned with finishing their educations and earning their degrees, not with burning administration buildings. So far, they haven't actively opposed the minority of violent demonstrators—although I'm certain you'll see a significant increase in such opposition soon—but that in no way means they're sympathetic to them. If anything, they're like bystanders at a mugging. I believe it's the purpose and duty of a university administration to represent this silent majority of moderate students, and that's what I've tried to do at San Francisco State, where at least 15,000 out of our 18,000 students want to go to school and pursue their studies without disrupting the university on behalf of a few peripatetic revolutionary demagogs like Mr. Hayden.

[A] Edwards: I don't dig all this crap about the moderate majority. There isn't any middle of the road left in this country. You're either with the movement or against it, because if you're not willing to take the measures that are necessary to correct the problem—and they have to be radical measures today—then you automatically become part of the problem. It's the same thing with the so-called Negro moderates; they're either chumps who don't know what's going on or they're conscious traitors to their race. As for moderate whites, they're as much responsible for the racial problem as George Wallace. If you won't act to cure the sickness and rottenness of this system, then you're responsible for it. And that makes you the enemy.

[A] Luce: That kind of extremist attitude is precisely what's driving more and more students away from the New Left. Mr. Edwards is way off base when he says that you automatically become a tool of the establishment or an ally of George Wallace the moment you oppose these left-wing lunatics with a fetish for violence. Individuals like myself on the New Right and organizations like the Young Americans for Freedom, who are opposing these left-wing crazies, aren't doing it because we love Johnson or Nixon or the whole stultifying bureaucracy of the Federal Government, or because we don't want the things that are wrong with this society reformed. We're fighting them because we oppose violence and collectivism and totalitarianism and the Nazi storm-trooper tactics they use against anybody who opposes them. We'd be glad to sit down and debate ideological and social goals with the SDS all night, and we might even find ourselves in agreement on some points—but we refuse to be strong-armed by those who employ violence in the name of peace, and intimidation in the name of dissent.

[A] Morse: Right-wingers like Mr. Luce use this whole business of opposing our tactics as a smoke screen to conceal their opposition to our goals. Whatever they say, they are tools of the system, and they're dedicated to perpetuating everything that's wrong with it. They're failing, however, because just as Tom Hayden said, the movement is steadily growing stronger, despite all attempts to suppress it. Fortune magazine, which is hardly a New Left journal, recently did a breakdown of student support for the movement; it estimated that 40 percent are with us while the other 60 percent are mostly interested in getting through college. Many of these, however, sympathize with us on specific issues. Now, when you consider how relatively new the movement is and all the opposition and intimidation it's had to face, 40 percent is a damn impressive figure. And it's going up all the time. Perhaps most encouraging of all is what's happening in high schools all over the country. In New York City, for example, more than 50 percent of the high schools have had serious student protests, and these were supported by all kinds of students—middle-class, lower-class, black, Puerto Rican, white. As these newly radicalized high school students enter college, you'll find that our constituency has been very significantly broadened. You're going to need a lot more than clubs and tear gas and guns to hold down this generation of students; and if you continue to escalate the violence against us, you'll find growing numbers of students fighting back in self-defense.

[Q] Playboy: Is violence of any kind—offensive, defensive or retaliatory—a justifiable expression of protest?

[A] Hayakawa: Of course not—no more than rape is an acceptable expression of desire.

[A] Gallagher: I would have to agree with Dr. Hayakawa on this point. Force and violence just can't be tolerated, even in their relatively mild forms, such as blocking school doorways or intimidating the opposition.

[A] Edwards: If you call blocking a doorway violence, then what are you going to call the things you're going to see in the years ahead? What you should understand here is that under extreme circumstances, violence is not only the most effective but the only tactic open to us. Students are basically powerless, which puts them in pretty much the same bag as black people; they control no armies or police forces, make no guns or ammunition, own no factories and, in general, have no real influence within the context of the existing system, which is rotten to the core. In many cases where students have petitioned and demonstrated non-violently for redress of grievances, they have been met by establishment violence on the part of a Gestapo euphemistically called law-enforcement officers. So it's apparent that the only thing the student has going for him is his potential for disruption, his ability to throw a monkey wrench into the well-oiled social machinery. About the only option left to us, if we want to have an influence in society, is this capacity to disrupt or destroy. It's not an abstract moral issue; it's the simple reality of our situation.

[A] Luce: To contend that violence is the only tactic open to students seeking change is pure bat droppings. The only tiling violence will ultimately achieve on campus is the total suppression of dissent. Mr. Edwards is obviously intelligent enough to realize that violence is a two-way street and that the power structure is more than capable of putting down the infantile leftism he espouses in the guise of revolutionary sloganeering.

[A] Hayakawa: I agree. This kind of argument is like saying that the only way to improve airline service is to shoot down the planes.

[Q] Playboy: One dramatic and recent aspect of the increasing militancy among campus radicals was the appearance of guns during a Cornell demonstration. Mr. Edwards, in fact, is alleged to have been the one who advised the students to carry those guns. Why?

[A] Edwards: I supported the decision of the black students at Cornell to arm themselves for self-defense because they had been attacked by white fraternity boys. Black people are through being attacked with impunity and without consequence.

[Q] Playboy: Would you advise them to carry—or use—guns only in clear cases of self-defense?

[A] Edwards: I would hope that they would never have to be used, but I don't put any ceiling on what tactics should be employed if colleges and universities continue to use armed force in suppressing protests against their role as research and recruiting arms for the State Department and Defense Department, engaging in research on chemical-bacteriological warfare, perfecting counterinsurgency strategy—for use in Harlem and Watts as well as in the Third World War—and working on doomsday machines to blow up the entire world.

[A] The system and the Government supported by all these fat cats who piss in their pants over student violence are killing hundreds of thousands of people in Vietnam and creating an arms race that one scientist has said makes nuclear holocaust by the year 2000 a statistical probability. Yet these same people turn around in horror because some students block a doorway or occupy a building with guns. What goddamn hypocrisy! I say to hell with the library building that's taken over; people are more important than brick. What I care about is preventing bombs from falling—or at least knowing, if they do fall, that I did my best to prevent it. If that mushroom cloud does open up over my head one day, I don't want to be sitting at a drawing board using my slide rule; I want to be politically involved. What the movement is out to do is stop the systematic destruction of human beings on all levels—in the ghettos, in the countries we exploit, on the battlefields of Vietnam. Tearing up a library or taking over an administration building or throwing some computers out the window is pretty insignificant when you consider what we're trying to do and the forces we're up against.

[A] Hayakawa: If you're really trying to demilitarize the United States instead of increasing its reliance on armed force, you're sure going about it in a funny way.

[Q] Playboy: Do you think the appearance of guns on campus augurs the course future disruptions will take?

[A] Jencks: I wouldn't be at all surprised if weapons show up among some black groups again, particularly on campuses neighboring on black ghettos, which give the militants a constituency on which to draw. By and large, the black groups seem more prepared to defend themselves with violence against violence than the white student radicals are. There is a developing discussion of the merits of armed self-defense among militant white groups now, although I think it's still some way off. But if you are absolutely convinced—as they are—that your demands are just, and that anyone who opposes them is part of an oppressive system that should be overthrown, you're bound to turn to violence eventually.

[A] Brown: I think the Cornell incident simply underscores the fact that students—black and white—are totally committed and will take any measures they feel necessary for self-defense and, in some vital areas, for the furthering of their demands. If the students deem it necessary, they will arm for their own protection.

[A] Hayakawa: I think you're wrong. I think the carrying of guns at Cornell frightened the people who did it as much as the people it was designed to intimidate. So I suspect that the appearance of guns in student demonstrations is going to be pretty rare from now on, even among the far-out groups.

[A] Hayden: My impression is that the Cornell blacks will be emulated around the country. But we'll see.

[A] Luce: I hate having to agree with you, but I fear this is a terror tactic we're going to see employed with increasing frequency. When I was a member of Progressive Labor, we used to go to meetings and demonstrations with the express purpose of provoking violence—for no other reason than that we knew it would get us attention in the media. So I'm afraid you'll see more of this kind of thing from these madmen.

[A] Gallagher: You may be right, but I hope not. It's a product of the myth that violence is the only way to get things done. Once people believe that, they don't even try the alternative methods of picketing and petitioning—let alone the normal channels of peaceful democratic political action. They go directly into violent protest. I think the probability of serious violence in the future is so real a threat that the universities must take every precaution to keep lethal weapons of all kinds off campus. Force only escalates counterforce, and thus is completely nonproductive. The critical problem is: How can the establishment use nonviolence effectively when protesters insist on eliciting violence themselves?

[A] Friedenberg: All this emphasis on violence in the student struggle is really quite absurd. The relevant questions to be asked are what the struggle is all about, what are the issues and the goals, not whether the tactics employed are violent or nonviolent—particularly when such a broad interpretation is placed on the word violence as to encompass any method of protest short of writing plaintive letters to your Congressmen. All conflict becomes more or less violent at a certain point unless it can be resolved, and the student protest movement is no exception.

[Q] Playboy: As you know, some militants consider violence not only inevitable but desirable, on the grounds that the ends of social reform justify the means. How do you feel about this?

[A] Jencks: Under certain circumstances, I think the ends do justify the means. That's certainly true where the issues are really urgent and where nonviolent remedies have proved clearly inadequate. So there are situations where violence can be justified. In fact, of course, most Americans really accept that principle. We don't think a man should always do what the courts or the police or the law seems to require—not if the law is sufficiently unjust. But most Americans don't feel that the laws the students break are all that unjust.

[A] Gallagher: I don't think there are any situations where violence can be justified. The dogma that the ends justify the means is pure cant, and self-serving pseudo rationalization, however important the issues that motivate your cause. Always and every time, the means determine the results; the ends are shaped by the process itself.

[A] Hayden: I think all this talk about violence and all the fear about trigger-happy students is really irrelevant, because there hasn't been anywhere near as much student-initiated violence on campus as the right-wing types would like you to believe. In most cases, when violence occurs, it's directed against students by police; and so far, most students haven't really fought back in any effective or concerted manner. But our opponents obviously like to blow what student violence there is way out of proportion, because it's a great piece of propaganda for them to use against the movement. Newsweek, for example, recently ran a cover photograph showing a young white brother with long hair who appeared to be hurling a flaming bomblike object at the police. But when the photograph was checked, it turned out that he was merely throwing a tear-gas canister back at the police, who had launched a barrage against the demonstrators.

[A] Now, let me make it clear that I don't disavow violence as a tactic under certain circumstances—far from it, in fact—but I do believe there is a conspiracy to sell the public the idea that we're on the attack and turning the campuses into arsenals for a full-scale war. In the case of Harry and the Cornell gun thing, the news media systematically conveyed the impression that students had taken over the administration building with rifles and pistols, when, in fact, they didn't arm themselves until reports reached them that a mob of armed fraternity men was on the way over to tear them up. That was a clear case of self-defense, and yet anybody who watched the incident on television or saw that picture of the brothers leaving the building got just the opposite impression. Over and over, the self-defense aspect of our violence has been played down, and the extent of the violence itself has been completely exaggerated, in order to prepare a rationalization for further repression.

[Q] Playboy: While you see a conspiracy by the media to distort the motives and methods of the student movement, conservative legislators have accused the press of aiding the protesters by exaggerating not their violence but their strength and significance, in order to get sensational copy. Is there any truth to this?

[A] Luce: Yes, of course there is. Any time two or three people make some incredible demand of a university, the press immediately picks it up and sensationalizes it. But if the majority of students on a campus refuse to go along with the militants and won't boycott classes or join demonstrations, you practically never hear about it. That kind of news is seldom covered, while the media give a national platform to every extremist, no matter how little campus support he might have. The media have made the militants seem far more popular and powerful than they are; they've implanted bogeymen in the minds of a lot of average citizens, who get the impression from TV that every campus is seething with rebellion.

[A] Jencks: Many campuses are, which is why I disagree with the idea that the movement is some kind of synthetic media creation, or that the extent of discontent has been exaggerated any more than any other news event by TV and press coverage. Of course, the press always overexposes a novelty, because that's what the public wants, and it's probably true that there are fewer activists than a lot of people would suppose after reading The New York Times' Sunday summary of campus disturbances for the week. There has been a tendency to overemphasize the influence of well-organized protest groups like SDS, rather than to probe the sense of generalized discontent felt by enormous numbers of students who don't belong to any particular group but who are unhappy and alienated and ready to support a protest movement. That's been the main failing of the press in this whole area.

[A] Friedenberg: That's part of the problem, but it's more complex than just a question of oversimplification or exaggeration of a specific incident. What has really appalled me lately is the way people react to media coverage, even fair and balanced coverage such as you find on the standard evening network news shows. They read into it only what they want to see. Thus, a good objective report will be picked up and turned into an occasion for hysteria by many people. I do think, however, that Mr. Hayden is correct in saying that the media themselves have erred in their tendency to create the impression that campus violence is far more serious and widespread than it really is. But this is understandable, because press and TV tend to single out a violent episode for its dramatic content, no matter how isolated it may be in the context of the over-all situation. If violence had not occurred, the media would have had to invent it—and in some cases they have.

[A] Gallagher: I know from firsthand experience what Dr. Friedenberg is talking about. At CCNY recently, I saw some television cameramen stand around wearily for half an hour without getting a picture. Finally, the audio man talked briefly with the cameraman, then began pushing and shoving a student, who became quite irate. There was a scuffle, and then the cameraman said, "OK, we've got our picture, let's go." That shot probably came out later on the TV screen as a dramatic incident of campus violence. Of course, this is an old news adage: no trouble, no story.

[A] Hayakawa: This is absolutely true, and the dissident students know how to take advantage of the media, often demonstrating solely for the benefit of the television cameras. There's an element of exhibitionism here, and some aspects of instant theater, which naturally appeals to television newsmen anxious to fill space with original and exciting events. All the same, I'm keenly aware that the imperatives of the media can be exploited by people other than radical students.

[A] In my own case, it was a piece of great good fortune that the day I climbed onto the militants' sound truck to rip out the loud-speaker wires, I was wearing a tam-o'-shanter. The combination of that esoteric headgear and my impulsive action apparently registered with great effect on people's imaginations when they saw it on television—far more than anything I could have planned or said. And ever since, I've had excellent access to the media, which must be very frustrating to the other side. Instead of simply complaining how the militants exploit the media against the universities, we should probably learn how to use the media for our own ends and beat the revolutionaries at their own game. But as it stands today, the mass media do help the militants, and their violence is very often designed simply to get them on the TV screen.

[A] Jencks: What tends to happen through this sort of coverage is that people begin to confuse campus protest with the kind that takes place in the ghettos. The violence that has occurred on most campuses has been trivial, but when people watch TV and see four students throwing rocks through the windows of an administration building, it automatically merges in their minds with the burning down of Detroit. When you really look at it objectively, the amount of damage done to campus property and the number of people injured is almost minuscule—and most of those who are injured are students at the other end of police night sticks. If all the campus violence across the country took place in one ghetto in a major city, it would be described as a minor disturbance; and yet you have millions of Americans with this chilling vision of total chaos and destruction ravaging the campuses. I think what accounts for this confusion, and the hysteria it induces, is that one expects violence in a ghetto, whereas in the context of a university one expects peace and tranquillity. And thus even minor disruptions are blown up out of all proportion to their actual seriousness.

[A] Hayakawa: Disruptions that would be minor anywhere else are serious on a campus, because the real issue is not violence itself but the radical-directed assault on academic freedom.

[A] Brown: If you had true academic freedom, there wouldn't be any need for violence. But when we talk about the role of the media in covering campus violence, we should be grateful that millions of people have had the chance to witness these incidents for themselves. I feel that the networks have actually performed a public service by dramatizing the fact that the students are deeply dissatisfied, and enabling a lot of people whom we couldn't have reached on our own to hear our demands. The universities would like to sweep these disputes under the rug, but they can't do that with the TV cameras on them.

[A] Hayakawa: I'm not quite as sanguine about the role of the press, although I think most newsmen are sincerely trying to present a fair and balanced picture of what's happening on the campuses. But the basic distortion here is not concerned with the media covering the occasional violence—violence is news, after all, and no one can blame them for reporting it—but the fact that they focus almost exclusively on the violence. I don't know what could be done to correct this sort of thing. One can't really blame the media; it's just the rules of the game. I don't think you could ever get around it without altering the whole show-business orientation of news, which thrives on disaster, whether on the campuses or in the ghettos. But it's a very unfortunate situation, because by stressing such sporadic violence, the media contribute to a popular belief that the revolutionaries are the principal element on our campuses, whereas in reality they constitute less than five percent of the total national student body and are concentrated in relatively few schools.

[Q] Playboy: What kind of university, and what kind of student body, is most likely to become involved in protest?

[A] Jencks: It appeared as recently as a year or so ago that you were most likely to have student protest movements in schools with high academic standards, where most of the students were affluent white middle-class kids attending liberal-arts colleges or universities. But things have changed so quickly in the past year, and protests have become so widespread, that you can no longer make such a generalization. At this point it's impossible to say what kind of school is most likely to experience student protest, because it can hit anywhere from Harvard to a state agricultural institute.

[A] Gallagher: That's quite correct. Almost any school in the country can be affected. There used to be a time when we college administrators sat on secure pedestals in our ivory towers, and the campuses were placid intellectual oases where nothing ever happened. I have since been surprised, and the few administrators who have not yet been similarly surprised soon will be. You can't escape it, because the various causative factors are everywhere. It is a phenomenon of 20th Century American higher education that once students recognize social evils, they will protest them, and they will do it on campus, because that's where they are and that's where whatever influence they have can be directly exercised.

[A] Luce: I think it's important to point out that the real extremists on campus are still almost invariably the children of the affluent and not the kids who have to sweat out an education to prepare themselves for a livelihood. Another important factor is that despite what Professor Jencks said about the left expanding its base, the overwhelming majority of radicals are connected with the liberal-arts centers, which have become hotbeds of militancy. This is understandable, because liberal-arts students have much more trouble relating to the technological era in which we live than students in, say, engineering or the natural sciences. They feel generally lost and useless in this computerized age, because they don't understand technology or its role in modern society, and thus they become alienated. A lot of them, too, are just spoiled and bored, overprivileged kids who vent their frustrations in campus politics and radical rhetoric. I call these people Mustang Maoists, because if a revolution ever did occur, they'd drive to the barricades in their sports cars. They're visceral radicals, because their radicalism isn't based on any real understanding of Marxism or revolutionary theory or on any firsthand experience of poverty or exploitation, but on a gut reaction against a system they don't understand or relate to.

[A] Friedenberg: I cannot dismiss these students just because most of them—the white ones, anyway—come from middle-class backgrounds. That's one of the significant and impressive aspects of this situation and is precisely why militancy is so common at what have generally been considered the good universities, which have a large proportion of students from upper-status backgrounds who have reason to suppose they will be the future leaders of society. These students feel an especially acute disappointment at the turn this society has taken, and particularly at the university's increasing negligence in training them for social leadership or preparing them for a life that will have some meaning. And this gives their rebellion added impact.

[A] Hayakawa: I'm afraid that's only a surface evaluation of their rebellion. What is really happening is that we're witnessing the rise of an arrogant elitist student movement, the overwhelming majority of whom are from wealthy families and attending the fashionable and expensive universities. In fact, we are now beginning to undergo in the United States what has already occurred in the underdeveloped countries, where the university students consider themselves an elite with a mission to improve the lot of the vast majority of poverty-stricken and illiterate peasants, if necessary by rebelling against the system and overthrowing it. The universities have inevitably been politicized because there is no effective literate political movement beyond the schools, and very often no democratic channels to peacefully effect social change.

[A] We're beginning to see the same phenomenon here in the United States, where an elite student body of wealthy origins regards the rest of the population with the same benignly patronizing contempt as the students in an underdeveloped country regard the mass of peasantry. These student mandarins are also determined to "save" the majority—even if they don't want to be saved. Of course, there is no justification for this attitude in America, because in our society the butcher, the baker and the candlestick maker all have a vote and the right to be consulted on every issue; but the elitist student says. "What the hell does a butcher or a baker or a candlestick maker know about Vietnam, or the draft, or racial injustice, or the military-industrial complex?" He says, "I know about such things, so I'll decide these issues my way, whatever the yahoos think or however they vote."

[A] The elitists feel they're the only educated people in the country, and this inevitably breeds a totalitarian, antidemocratic attitude and a willingness to use violence and coercion against those who differ with them. I would agree with Mr. Luce that this type of student is found mainly in the liberal-arts centers and the humanities, very seldom in the sciences. There seems to be nothing in the study of chemistry that makes you feel like a superior order of being, but you study Plato and you begin to believe you're a philosopher—and a philosopher should be king. This is a dangerous trend, and it jeopardizes the democratic principles on which this country was founded.

[A] Brown: Jive! The students don't think of themselves as any kind of an elite but as people who are challenging the real elite—those who control all of our destinies, those who control the system. The students would like to make democracy real instead of just a slogan. My knowledge of the subject is more or less restricted to the black campuses and black students, and we don't consider ourselves a smug elite but people who are angry and disenchanted with everything around us. The only lives we want to control are our own, and we turn to militant measures only because all other means of effecting change have failed.

[Q] Playboy: This is one of the arguments the student militants use to justify disruptive demonstrations on campus. Have these students really exhausted the traditional channels of protest?

[A] Luce: Hell, no, they haven't. And now you're really near the crux of this thing, because that is one of the great lies perpetrated by the left. They keep saying the democratic system doesn't work because the university doesn't listen to them. But in almost every case, they have failed even to try traditional democratic methods of change. Of course, such changes certainly can't be made democratically if the majority oppose change, and that's what really bugs them. I could give you example after example of where they claim that student referendums didn't work, but when you check back, you find there never was a student referendum, or if there was one, the majority of students voted against it. They don't even begin to use the legitimate means of protest, much less exhaust them.

[A] Morse: Luce is, as usual, throwing up a smoke screen, and it's easily provable by a basic truth and some examples. One of the realities of student protest is that white middle-class college students really don't like to fight physically. When confrontations develop, you'll practically always find that everything else has been tried first, and even then our physical response comes only after we've been attacked by the police. That's been almost universally true—at Columbia, Chicago, Stanford and most recently in Berkeley during the people's-park scene, where we literally tried everything, including five straight days of secret negotiations with the university. The Berkeley administration stalled, lied and broke promise after promise, including one that they would not take offensive action on the park without informing us. But at about four A.M. on May 15, 250 police moved on the park in the dead of night and a few hours later, a fence was up. A referendum was held a week or so later and the overwhelming majority of students and faculty voted for the park. Then 40,000 people marched peacefully—but we still don't have it. The response has been Ronald Reagan using a free hour of state-wide TV time to lie about what happened and to threaten us. That's how the "traditional channels" work!

[A] Hayden: The channels are revolving doors.

[A] Hayakawa: To you, but not to most Americans. The thing the radicals forget, or reject, is that democracy doesn't mean that any loud minority can get its way at once. Democracy means that we all have the freedom, even if we're a minority, to try to persuade others to our point of view; that's how you eventually become a majority. Most of Norman Thomas' ideas were regarded as wildly radical for many years, but eventually they became incorporated into the planks of both parties. And relatively speaking, Norman Thomas succeeded pretty fast. But if today's radicals can't get an instant majority, they cry that the whole damn system is corrupt. The very fact that they find themselves frustrated by this process means that they just don't believe in the democratic system.

[A] Edwards: How can we? You're talking about a dreamworld democratic system that doesn't exist and never did exist. If this so-called democracy were not, in fact, a hypocritical oligarchy that is rapidly developing into a Fourth Reich, students and minority groups could work through the normal channels, since they'd need only to point out the injustices in order to get them corrected.

[A] Brown: But the system has long since learned to deal with the traditional tactics of protest without responding to them. We saw this in the civil rights movement with all the sit-ins, marches, and so forth. The system learns to tolerate such things after a while, but nothing significant is ever done to rectify the injustices that put people in the streets in the first place.

[A] Edwards: Whenever students petition or demonstrate for redress of grievances, they are told, "Your grievances have some merit, but you must go through channels to have them corrected." Having neither control of significant channels of communication nor direct access to those with power to correct the problems, students invariably become bogged down in a maze of red tape and legal bottlenecks deliberately geared to maintain the status quo. Students and minorities today are recognizing and rejecting this bureaucratic hocus-pocus, which is an effort on the part of the establishment to buy the time necessary to co-opt dissenting elements into the system without changing it. Our emphasis, therefore, is no longer on adhering dogmatically to the traditional rules but on achieving results. In any struggle, a combatant is in bad shape when he allows his adversary both to choose the weapons to be used and to define the rules of the battle. Under such circumstances, the conflict between the students and the establishment would be the most lopsided confrontation since the lions last ate lunch at the Colosseum. So we say to the Hayakawas: We're not going to play your game by your rules. You choose your tactics and we'll choose ours.

[Q] Playboy: Some college administrators believe that the only way to avoid continued disruption and violence is to call in the police at the outset of a demonstration and swiftly disperse the demonstrators—with whatever force is necessary. What do you think of this tactic?

[A] Brown: I think it stinks. It's not only the most brutal but also the most stupid tactic that's been used so far.

[A] Friedenberg: Police on campus are certainly very dangerous. I think Robert Maynard Hutchins, in a recent issue of The Center Magazine, put it as succinctly as possible when he wrote that the police should never be brought in, and for one simple reason: They cannot be trusted. It would be fine if they were able to control crowds and aggression without the kind of class hatred for students that leads to violence, but as it is now, anyone who brings the police onto campus must know that they're going to bust the heads of the kids.

[A] Gallagher: I don't think you can generalize on the use of police or any other tactic. You have to make a pragmatic judgment in each instance. If the demonstrating group is very small, police may be advisable, but at the same time, you run the risk of escalating the situation through their presence. I wouldn't hesitate to call police to protect life and limb, but aside from that, it's a tricky matter. From my own experience, though, I can and do give the lie to the assertion that you can't trust them. Last November, the police arrested 170 persons at CCNY—half of them students—without hurting a hangnail. They came prepared for peaceful nonresistance from students and non-students. They met no violence and therefore meted out none. Of course, if the police can be induced to come onto campus without their night sticks, guns and handcuffs—with nothing but their bare hands and uniforms—the student reaction is bound to be much better. An absence of force on the part of the police keeps the general situation at a much lower key.

[A] Hayakawa: To rule out the use of armed police when violence threatens or exists is simple abdication of administrative responsibility. Of course, police must be well trained and disciplined; but the police question has arisen on campuses the world over only because lawbreakers make police protection necessary. The answer is not to disarm the police but to de-escalate the violence.

[Q] Playboy: But if the police could be persuaded to leave their guns behind, wouldn't this contribute to such a de-escalation?

[A] Gallagher: Of course it would—and in many cases they can be persuaded. Contrary to the opinion of some people, police are human beings. In my experience at City College, the police are more than ready—anxious, in fact—to avert any form of violence, because they, too, are concerned with their own image. But at the same time, I fear the repressive action of the state. It's too easy for the self-promoting politician to intrude his blunt fingers into campus affairs and profit by it in terms of votes the following November. This vitiates the integrity and independence of any institution of higher learning. But it's also true that if we're going to have freedom from political interference, we've got to have a pretty good record of on-campus performance.

[A] Brown: We must be talking about different people, because the cops I've seen in action would be lost without their weapons. If you ask a cop to lay down his gun and night stick, what do you expect him to use? Brains? You must be kidding. These men are like hungry wolves. They wait straining at the leash for the word to be given; then they tear into us with their night sticks, tear gas and guns. One night last March, after a cop had thrown a tear-gas canister into a quiet dormitory at Howard, unarmed brothers ran out into the street screaming and cursing. Within minutes there were ten carloads of cops on the campus. They were equipped with everything from Mace to shotguns, and they damn sure didn't come to negotiate. They came nigger hunting.

[A] Edwards: I think the administrators who call police on campus are actually serving the cause of the student revolt. For that reason, I can foresee situations where I would be elated by such action, even though the price in busted heads or even in deaths would be high—but not as high as the price people pay daily just to exist in this unjust society. Repression and brutality invariably give rise to more intense and more revolutionary confrontations, with hitherto uncommitted elements being drawn into the conflict, since most students will tend to join or at least become sympathetic to the goals of the demonstrators. So as long as there are so few administrators moving promptly and rationally to correct injustices, I would just as soon see a person like Hayakawa in power rather than a political magician like Perkins at Cornell, who tries to stand up and be counted on both sides of the fence at once. No one brought more unity to the student body at San Francisco State than Hayakawa, and the struggle desperately needs such unity under fire. So send in your cops; they're our best recruiting agents.

[A] Luce: It's for just those reasons that it's a mistake ever to let the police on campus unless a situation gets completely out of hand and there's no other course open. In most cases, when the police are called in during the early stages of a campus problem, they give credibility to the radicals' contention that the struggle is really one of the student body against the power structure, because when cops drag the radicals out of a hall or a building, other students often join the radicals out of an emotional kind of identification and sympathy. So I think it's obvious that the police in many cases have inadvertently helped the radicals in just that way, as Mr. Edwards rather gleefully points out.

[A] Hayakawa: It helps them more if you abdicate your responsibility to maintain peace on campus. I assumed the presidency in the middle of one of these crises, and I made the decision very early that the only mistake is to call the police on campus after a disturbance has started. I decided that the police were going to be on campus in a pre-emptive function. And so, on December second when I became president, there were police in every classroom building and a bunch of supplementary police just off campus who could come whenever called upon. As a result, the uproar didn't start in classrooms, although classroom destruction had been a favorite indoor sport until then; it was pushed out into the streets, where it could be more easily controlled with a minimum of injuries and property damage. Throughout the disruptions of December and January, I employed the tactic of having the police on hand before anything happened, rather than using them just to pick up the pieces—and I think this worked out pretty well.

[Q] Playboy: Your critics contend that police have no place on campus even as a deterrent, since institutions of higher education must be free of pressure from the civil authorities in order to function effectively. How would you answer them?

[A] Hayakawa: No one wants to see police on campus, but it's the demonstrations, not their cure, that shatter the academic atmosphere. Even so, I have seen many of my colleagues shocked at the very sight of a policeman on campus, even a policeman there for the protection of their own classes. Some of them even go into hysterics, crying, "I can't teach, I can't teach. There are police around." I try to tell them that if the police weren't there, there'd be a goon squad of radical students busting up their classes, but you just can't reach them. They say, "I can't teach in a police state." What utter nonsense. I agree that police shouldn't have to be on campus at all, but even more importantly, the protest tactics that require the use of police shouldn't be on campus, either. I like the medieval idea of the university as a sanctuary from the world and a refuge from all the military strife, power politics, economic reprisal and so on that characterize the larger society. Street fighting and gangsterism have no place in such an academic community; but once the gangsters and street fighters invade the campus, what are you going to do? Just roll over and die?

[A] Brown: Dr. Hayakawa, you just explained in a nutshell the major reason for strife on your campus. You want a university to function as a sanctuary from the world; we want the university to help eradicate the world's evils by plunging headfirst into the daily operations of this mad, racist planet. Can't you see that today's university, in its isolated approach, actually produces warmongers, racketeers and Southern Senators? And that these men run the country? I'd like to see you walk up to Strom Thurmond or Mendel Rivers and try to convert them with some philosophy you formulated in your sanctuary. In my concept of the new black university, we would concern ourselves with preventing these crackers from keeping black kids hungry and poorly housed. I wish they would roll over and die.

[A] Friedenberg: It seems to me that what Dr. Hayakawa is saying essentially is that the use of pressure and certain kinds of force are perfectly legitimate tools—for everybody but students. This means that in social conflict in this country, force is illegitimate only when it is not institutionalized. I was greatly inconvenienced, for example, while traveling to a number of conferences to discuss student disruptions by the perfectly legitimate strike of American Airlines, which denied me means of travel and left large numbers of people stranded and in rather awkward positions. The airline employees made use of interference and disruption of services that was far more than symbolic, and they weren't about to permit any scabbing, either. But people didn't panic over it the way they do over student interference with a university's functioning.

[A] Edwards: The airline strike is a good analogy, because just as efforts to suppress strikes almost invariably lead to violence, administrators who take a hard line only escalate repression and increase the number of issues at stake; and when they do that, they inevitably bring more people into confrontation. Any administrator who takes a hard line is only going to start more battles—and create more rebels to fight them.

[A] Jencks: It's certainly true that violence against the radicals does galvanize the apathetic. But there are many constructive alternatives to violence. If the administration would respond to the students at the outset and do the kinds of things they urge them to do, in certain instances they wouldn't need to resort to violence, because some of the issues would never arise. Of course, the situation varies tremendously from place to place, depending on whether the students who engage in the initial action really care about a specific issue or whether they're primarily interested in radicalizing the rest of the student body, in which case they need and welcome a confrontation. And at that point, most administration tactics fail.

[Q] Playboy: Some administrators contend that the best policy is to make concessions that will split the liberals from the radicals and thus give the administration the opportunity to take disciplinary action against the hard-core militants. What do you think of this tactic?

[A] Hayakawa: It's a good policy to follow if you can. The stated objectives of the extremists aren't basically different from the stated objectives of the more moderate liberals—that is, they all want educational reform or social justice or ethnic studies or whatever. The real problem is not what they want but the means they use to secure it—not their goals but their tactics. It's the extremists who commit such illegal acts as campus disruption, throwing bricks, tearing up library index cards and so forth, and you have to get after these people without opposing the legitimate reforms that the faculty and administration also very profoundly desire, particularly in a place like San Francisco State, where the faculty is every bit as interested as the students in social justice, racial equality and educational reform. So it's not really difficult to split moderates from militants if, at the same time you're employing hard tactics, you announce your willingness to be liberal in a number of areas. Very early in the student strike, for example, we announced that the black-studies program was authorized to go ahead; we established faculty positions for it, etc. We made a number of such announcements that affected many of the moderates and liberals who heard the messages, and in effect split them from the radicals.

[A] Edwards: The students of today are much too sophisticated to fall for this kind of simple-minded ploy, which is just an updating of the old carrot-and-stick bit. They can see that limited concessions do nothing to change the relationship between Cornell University and South Africa, or between R. O. T. C. and the Vietnam war. It's meaningless for an administrator to come in and say, "OK, because you object to the fact that the Chase Manhattan Bank invests heavily in South Africa, we won't allow their people to recruit on campus—but we won't give up our Chase Manhattan stock." That's no concession; it's just an attempt to defuse and deflect protest by granting empty concessions that don't really change anything. The students see through this kind of hypocrisy.

[A] Morse: Yes, this divide-and-conquer tactic doesn't work, and it never will. It may impede a particular movement at some point in its development, but the fact that the campus revolts are still going on shows that the administrations haven't learned to handle things, and they won't until they face the fundamental questions, which they seem incapable of doing.

[A] Brown: I actually tend to think Dr. Hayakawa's tactic could be fairly effective, but it's still bad and I'm opposed to it. Everyone within the university—faculty, students, administration—ought to be able to sit down and find out who is wrong and who is right, and then determine in which direction the university ought to go, so that we get not stopgap concessions but serious and basic changes in our institutions.

[A] Luce: There's nothing wrong with a university's conceding on valid points such as black studies, dorm regulations, abolition of in loco parent is, and I don't care whether these concessions bring the liberals in, split them off from the radicals or anyone else. But for a university simply to accede to radical demands purely as a political tactic or out of fear is, I think, not only unrealistic but dangerous.

[Q] Playboy: A few liberal administrators have successfully avoided violent confrontation by meeting with dissident students before the situation becomes critical and seeking to enlist their active assistance in realizing reforms. Don't you think this is a tactic other college administrations might emulate?

[A] Jencks: Certainly—where the dissident leaders can be identified in advance. But the difficulty is that the people who lead demonstrations—the occupation of a building, let's say—aren't usually those who have previously been recognized by the administration as leaders; or they are people to whom the administration is reluctant to lend legitimacy by negotiating with them. On campuses that have a relatively small SDS chapter—which is frequently the situation—the university administrators usually keep hoping that they won't have to do business with SDS, since they would rather do business with the student government or with some other elected representatives of the whole student body.

[A] Gallagher: I think, an administrator ought to respond very quickly to any request for conversations—by SDS or any other group. Immediate response is usually a good solution, not only because it may avert further trouble but because it's the administrator's duty to relate to fellow human beings intelligently and with respect. And in doing so, I would be much less concerned with averting future trouble than with the necessity of building affirmative contacts with the student body and strengthening democratic processes. I put my faith in the viability of peaceful change, because I think the basic values lie in human relationships.

[A] Edwards: If you really want to resolve these problems within the democratic process and avoid violence and confrontation, the only thing to do is to call a constituent assembly of the entire university every semester, in which you would discuss what problems the university faces and what steps should be taken to solve them, and then open the whole thing up to suggestions. Give students a chance to take the microphone and make themselves heard. The assembly would prepare reports on what has been done, what the university is trying to do, where the students have failed in following up their own demands and how they can most effectively participate in the decision-making process.

[A] Luce: Now, that is sensible. It's vital that we have a nonviolent approach to opening up channels of communication among students and faculty and administrators. The assembly idea would certainly be supported by libertarian conservatives.

[A] Edwards: I'm convinced this is the only peaceful means of confronting these problems. I don't care if the school stops all business for a week each semester to hold such assemblies, but it's got to be done. This way you'd really be dealing with problems, not just cooling off pressure and postponing a worse conflict.

[A] Hayden: Even on the one campus where the tactic of delay and avoidance of confrontation has had some apparent success—the University of Chicago—the administration was able to sit it out and then expel 43 students not because it was so strong or its psychology of attrition so brilliant but because the student movement itself was so weak. It wasn't so much a case of the administration's success as it was of the students' failure to mobilize the forces on and off campus—graduate students, ghetto blacks and poor whites—that could have won the struggle. Of course, it may also have been that their demands weren't correct or that the timing wasn't correct; but whatever the specific reasons, they failed. This was only one instance, however, and I think it would be a great mistake for people to believe that this is an effective way to defuse rebellions.

[A] Morse: Once the kids at the University of Chicago begin to realize that they are being co-opted by such tactics, that their real demands aren't going to be met, they are going to develop new tactics that won't be co-optable by the university.

[A] Jencks: Exactly. You can keep escalating the resistance in one way or another until it becomes a situation the administration can't afford to wait out. If it's a straight sit-in of the nonviolent variety, the wait-'em-out theory is workable, but it doesn't always—and it won't always—stop at that.

[A] Luce: I don't agree that the wait-'em-out approach is ever workable. As I suggested earlier, one sure way to invite a worse situation, in which police will be needed, is to take no firm action against people who move into a hall and take it over, violating private property and the rights of other students who want to use those facilities. A policy of sitting back and doing nothing at first and then later taking action seems to me to only play into the hands of the radicals, since most of the militants who engage in lawlessness do so because they know it's easy and they can get away with it. But it becomes much more difficult to be a revolutionary if you know you're going to get drafted or expelled or maybe arrested or lose your grades. The willingness to run such risks is what separates the real revolutionaries from the majority of students.

[Q] Playboy: Would the banning of groups such as SDS and Progressive Labor on campus reduce the likelihood of violent demonstrations?

[A] Gallagher: On the contrary. When you ban them, you only drive them underground, make them conspiratorial, and therefore much more enticing to many students and probably more effective. Any organization that wants to function on the campus should be permitted to do so, provided it honestly states its goals and identifies its principal officers, who can be held responsible for what the organization does.

[A] Luce: I agree that any group should be allowed on campus and allowed to express its ideas, however abhorrent they may be, without persecution—but only until such time as it engages in illegal or violent activity. The line between speech and action is very clear, and if a group crosses that line into illegality, then the university has both the right and the obligation to take strong action against it.

[A] Hayakawa: The idea of banning SDS is certainly appealing, but such groups would only reappear under other names or meet off campus, so I doubt the desirability of trying to ban extremists.

[A] Brown: It would only backfire, anyway, as Dr. Gallagher says, because people tend to gravitate to banned organizations, banned words, banned ideas, banned literature. That's why every time somebody like U. S. Deputy Attorney General Kleindienst threatens to put student "ideological criminals" in internment centers, more and more people become uptight and the ranks of the disenchanted swell.

[Q] Playboy: Attorney General Mitchell and other Federal officials have charged that among these "ideological criminals" are dedicated Communists holding high positions within the student protest movement. Is there any truth to this claim?

[A] Brown: Oh, sure, we're all part of the "international Communist conspiracy," getting our orders straight from Moscow in the Russian embassy's diplomatic pouch. Anybody on campus knows that the Communist Party has about as much relevance to this movement as the Woman's Christian Temperance Union; they're conservatives, man. Of course, there are people in the movement who identify with Marxist-Leninist revolution, but they're far removed from the traditional Communist position and don't have affiliations with any Communist government or political party. We're willing to accept the honest help of anybody in this struggle—Communist, vegetarian, Rosicrucian—but the Communists have no organizational hold on us. We don't take instructions from anybody; we define our own issues and decide our own tactics.

[A] Hayakawa: I think there is a common direction to much of this rebellion; the Attorney General and the FBI seem to have solid reasons to believe that at least elements of it are oriented, if not to Moscow, then certainly to Peking and Havana. This doesn't mean that even a majority of the protesting students share this orientation, but it's certainly true that groups like Progressive Labor are openly Maoist. Let's not look under the bed for Reds, but let's not delude ourselves into thinking they play no role whatsoever in this struggle.

[A] Hayden: You are looking under the bed for Reds, but what you're going to find is not the old type of American Communist—who was basically just a pro-Soviet New Deal liberal—but revolutionaries who believe in a democratic humanist socialism. Of course, this charge that we're all sinister Marxist traitors will be given increasing currency now, because the Government is looking for an excuse to purge us, and the international-Communist-conspiracy label can be quite effective in softening up the public for tough new repressive measures.

[Q] Playboy: Apart from its specific charges of Communist involvement, how do you feel about the Nixon Administration's demand for a general crackdown on student dissent?

[A] Luce: I'd oppose it. We have too many Federal edicts as it is; the Government has attempted to encroach on the rights and privileges of the American people for too long and in too many areas already. Campus problems as they now exist can be better solved by the students themselves than by either state legislatures or the Federal Government.

[A] Hayakawa: I would agree that the role of the Federal Government should be an extremely limited one, since problems on most campuses are problems for the administration itself or local government to deal with. But there have been times when things have escalated to the point where Federal troops have had to be called in. That's what President Eisenhower had to do at Central High School in Little Rock in order to prevent white racists from closing down that school; and the same kind of thing occurred in Alabama and Mississippi. Notice that when the Federal Government intervened with men armed with bayonets on those occasions, the liberal community didn't raise a peep about it; they thought it was a fine thing and applauded the Government's action. Somehow they don't respond the same way when campuses are equally threatened by left-wing militants. I believe that the right of people of all colors to an equal education is something that's built into this system, and if the rights of the people have to be protected ultimately by Federal intervention, well, the Government has the power and the authority and the duty to do what's necessary. I don't expect any present or future crises connected with radical student protest to reach that point; I hope not, anyway. But I do think the Government should always be willing, if asked, to do what would be most helpful for any university in turmoil.

[A] Friedenberg: If the Government would do nothing at all, it would be very helpful, indeed.

[Q] Playboy: Isn't it likely that the Government will attempt to work through state and local authorities, providing encouragement and investigative support, rather than intervene directly?

[A] Jencks: I would guess so. If there is tough repression in the form of large-scale arrests, prosecutions, expulsions from colleges and so forth—and there may well be—then it will most likely be done by local authorities, rather than by the Federal Government. Whenever there has been a move toward authoritarianism in America, it's generally been local rather than national in origin, and the local district attorney and police invariably have been given prime responsibility for carrying it out—even if the inspiration came from above. It's much easier for Mayor Daley or a Southern sheriff to be a really repressive force than it is for the Federal Government. It's usually less visible, for one thing, and therefore less embarrassing internationally and less likely to create widespread domestic opposition. The national liberal community reads The New York Times, and if violent repression by local police happens in Duluth, it either doesn't make the Times or it's buried on page 58. But if Mr. Kleindienst or Attorney General Mitchell had the FBI round up SDS members from all over the country and put them in Federal detention centers, everybody would be up in arms.

[A] On the other hand, there's very little fuss about local prosecution of small numbers of radicals for "inciting to riot." Local repression can create a climate of fear that will inhibit a lot of people from saying or doing anything out of line, even if they think the status quo is rotten. And local repression, especially if the FBI and Justice Department informally coordinate it, may also pick off the most effective leaders one by one, without trying to round up everybody.

[A] Morse: There's no doubt that local authorities are doing their best right now to crush student protest. Hundreds of demonstrators in the people's-park uproar at Berkeley were shot at, gassed or busted on heavy felonies. But the movement will survive this oppression. As leaders get picked off, new leaders will emerge. I don't think the Government has a very good idea who the real leaders are anymore. They know some national figures and some locally prominent people, but this is a fluid movement and leadership is coming from everywhere. Washington can send out its dossiers to local authorities, but for every one of us they put in jail, there will be ten to take our place.

[A] Friedenberg: I doubt that much Federal encouragement of state, county and city officials is really necessary. Most local agencies seem only too happy to prosecute protesters entirely on their own. I'm very afraid that as national hysteria and backlash build, we'll see more and more repression of this kind.

[Q] Playboy: Some observers of the student movement feel that by precipitating such backlash and the repression it engenders, the students are in danger not only of making it worse for themselves but of creating a social situation more reactionary than the one they set out to remedy. Do you think there's any truth to this argument?

[A] Friedenberg: I'm afraid so. The backlash is likely to bring about a political and social climate nearly indistinguishable from fascism, except that it will be in a slightly new form. It will be very different from the McCarthy era—much quieter, and with much more use of detention. What frightens me particularly is the increasingly active involvement of the courts as an instrument of repression, which is something new and very sinister and deadly for America, because the courts have traditionally been the protectors of liberty against the incursions of a hostile and demanding legislature or executive. There are hundreds of kids now being held in jail who have been busted for offenses like contempt of court, and for this there is really no defense, since the use of court orders to get kids out of buildings automatically makes their offense contempt of court, which is much more general and far easier to apply arbitrarily than trespass charges. So the backlash is a very real threat to the democratic process.

[A] Gallagher: There's no question about a coming backlash, and recent actions by Congress and many state legislatures indicate that it's already upon us. In some cases, this is really what the radicals want—a form of polarization that they hope to turn to their advantage; in other cases, it's not what they desire, but they're still ready to run the risk of it. The great danger is that whenever anarchy develops, it will inevitably lead to a hunger for order that may ultimately result in the establishment of a near dictatorship or a police state. I think a strong backlash is the inevitable response to the chaos on many campuses.

[A] Edwards: Students and black people are catching so much hell from the frontlash that the backlash doesn't really matter. I doubt very seriously if the right wing can do any more to students today than the so-called liberals have already done. A student who gets sent off to Vietnam because he has less than a C average, a student who can't get into college because of standards set by white liberal academicians—what more could George Wallace do to him? Absolutely nothing.

[A] Hayden: I wouldn't even call it a backlash; I would simply say that we have brought out the true character of the people in power. Their racist-imperialist mentality was ugly to begin with, and no one expected that they would become nicer once we started to challenge them. Now they really have to fight to maintain their power, and it looks to me like the Reagans of this country, along with the police chiefs, are trying to create a situation in which they can utilize these incidents of unrest to get rid of not only the radicals but also the liberals, whom they hate just as much—including liberals in the school administrations. Everywhere I go to speak, some state legislator gets up and asks why the university is bringing Hayden to speak on the campus. An investigation begins; the president of the university is put on the hot seat and the pressure on him becomes so great that in order to preserve his job, he does the work of the right wing for them. It wasn't really Reagan or the regents at Berkeley who denied credit for the Cleaver course or for my course; it was the liberal administration, which thought by so doing that it would prevent a take-over by the right wing. Well, a university is already taken over by the right wing when the liberals simply capitulate to what the right wing wants. It's not a backlash; the people in power are simply being forced to define their corrupt position more precisely.

[A] Hayakawa: Whether you call it backlash or insist, as Mr. Hayden does, on calling it the expression of a corrupt mentality, I think the public and governmental response so far has been quite moderate. Most sane people object to the campus uproar but still believe in the traditional democratic values, and will try, as I will try, to prevent the backlash from gaining too much momentum. This is where college administrators have to show some strength and character, so that they can distinguish between the really repressive measures some legislators may propose and those measures that are reasonable and necessary for the maintenance of peace on campus.

[A] Incidentally, I don't think the backlash is going to come in the form of dramatic repressive laws that limit personal freedoms as much as in the form of reduced appropriations for state-supported institutions; but even this would be a tragic thing, because the 98 percent of students who are interested only in pursuing their studies would then have to pay the price for the two percent who are really responsible for the trouble. San Francisco State, for example, is the only one in a system of 18 colleges that has experienced this kind of violent and prolonged disruption, but the students of all 18 colleges in the state will have to suffer if the taxpayers get mad enough. So the radicals are setting the college system in America back in many ways.

[A] Hayden: The college system per se isn't worth preserving unless it adjusts itself to human goals and values, which it shows no sign of doing. Until and unless it does, the campuses will be the scene of continuous and growing conflict.

[A] Luce: That's typical New Left irrresponsibility. You're sowing the seeds of chaos, and you don't even care about the whirlwind you're going to reap. You're creating a backlash that can do much more than deprive colleges of Federal appropriations: it can also create a repressive atmosphere that will crush all dissent, legitimate as well as violent. But I'm still optimistic that the responsible majority of students will band together and stop this lunacy before it goes much further.

[Q] Playboy: There are already some signs of a student backlash on campus against the more radical groups such as SDS. Organized and unorganized groups of students opposed to radical activists counterdemonstrated at several schools last year. Do you see the possibility of more clashes between conservative and radical students?

[A] Hayakawa: There's no doubt at all in my mind that the majority of students are disillusioned with the radicals. I can't predict to what degree they're going to take active countermeasures to protect their educational rights, but I think that such a movement is beginning to appear on the horizon. On our campus, for example, students have formed what is known as the Committee for an Academic Environment, a group of fairly progressive people on the whole, representing the broad moderate and liberal group; the outright conservatives are in the Young Americans for Freedom. The members of the committee are all for Negro student demands and for educational reform, but they simply won't tolerate any more of this violence. I also understand that at the University of North Carolina, an organization has been formed called the Hayakawa Society; the members are apparently not at all conservative but liberal and middle-of-the-road students who also refuse to countenance any more violence and disruption on their campus.

[A] Brown: Listening to Dr. Hayakawa makes me think that if a student leader today wanted to get $1,000,000 from the Government, he could announce he was going to form a counterprotest movement; he'd have no trouble getting the money. But I don't think this is an indication of how most students feel, since disenchantment with the system runs deep in most institutions, even if there's only a core group of people who are willing to act on their commitments.

[A] Hayden: And the right wing on campus isn't built on ideological commitment of any kind. Most of these groups are fostered and protected by the Hayakawas; they didn't have any independent existence before the protests and they still won't after the protests. Hayakawa's Committee for an Academic Environment probably contains 12 people; at least that's the figure I hear. I think there will always be a minority of students who are law-and-order freaks, but the vast majority of students will be more or less sympathetic toward our goals, although always uncertain about our methods—not because they consider our methods immoral but because our methods can lead to being put in jail or kicked out of school, and nobody makes a commitment like that lightly. But forget all this crap about a big right-wing backlash on campus; it's just a myth.

[A] Gallagher: I disagree that it's a myth and I think that we'll probably be seeing an increasing number of counterprotests. I'm not sure how much of this will come from the great silent middle, but in reaction to the protests of the New Left and the Old Left, one always observes the recurrence of what I would call latent McCarthyism—and not Gene McCarthy—in the offing. It's a frightening thing to see polarizations of this kind beginning to develop in the student body, because it carries the implicit threat of physical violence between ideologically opposed student groups.

[A] Luce: Though the left has always tried to promote violence for tactical reasons, we have tried to protest their tactics in a peaceful way. I do see, however, a positive resistance developing on the campus against left-wing terrorism—not some kind of new McCarthyism but a principled opposition to left-wing violence. I'm inclined to believe that we're actually coming close to the zenith of left-wing terrorism, because the resistance has already begun on a number of campuses. People are beginning to understand that terrorism, collectivism and socialism are evils to be opposed; but ours has to be a battle that commits students to positive change without becoming part of this incredible backlash phenomenon, which would drastically limit dissent on the campuses.

[A] This libertarian opposition to the left is being led to a very large degree by the organization that I work for—the Young Americans for Freedom. We're calling on students to stand up to those who would try to take over their classrooms and disrupt the functioning of the university. I think we can show the world, if it pays any attention to what we're doing, that this tactic works. At Stanford, where the left tried to occupy a building, our people simply sat down in front of the doors and said, "You're not going to take over this building." The left wing then perpetrated violence on our people and broke into the building. Pictures were taken of this: and it showed the administration, the alumni and the other students that the radicals were themselves violent, beating up innocent students who were non-violently trying to prevent them from invading private property. If the left attacks our people, I think other students will soon come to our aid, because we're showing that we support and believe in private property and the right of students to attend classes. And this movement is growing. The membership of Y. A. F. has doubled in the past year; we presently have over 44,000 members.

[A] Hayden: Headed, in your case, by the only member of our generation to follow the pattern of the ideological fanatics of the Thirties who shifted from far-left dogmatism to far-right dogmatism—from Progressive Labor to a job as consultant to the House Un-American Activities Committee and an executive of Y. A. F.

[A] Jencks: Whatever his origins, Mr. Luce is exaggerating the strength of his present supporters. The right wing on campus just isn't a major force as things stand now, although that isn't to say it couldn't develop into one. It's not a potent factor, because many, perhaps most, of those who are out of sympathy with the student protests also feel very little loyalty to the authorities, the establishment, the administration, the cops. Consequently, they're just not natural recruits for an anti-radical movement, even though they're not politically radical themselves.

[A] Hayden: That's true, and it's also true that there have been very few cases where we have directed any violence against other students. In most cases, we've taken the attitude that our fellow students are not the enemy, but we're well aware that certain small groups of reactionary students, especially jocks, are organized. They go out wearing anti-SDS arm bands and provoke violence by attacking picket lines for the benefit of photographers. These people claim they're being deprived of their right to education while a strike or demonstration is going on, but that's cover-up bullshit, since there are always all kinds of classroom buildings or off-campus centers open; so in no way is their right to education jeopardized. What is jeopardized is their comfortable and serene view of the university as a kind of factory where they get a credential to go into industry and become a success in life. So when they attempt to walk through our lines, it's not their right to education that's being violated; it's our right to oppose the system. And more and more people are recognizing our right to self-defense when somebody tries to walk through our lines. If they do that, they're going to be stopped—first by being talked to, second by being ushered away; but if that doesn't work and they start attacking us, then we're going to defend ourselves. We're not frightened by violence or threats of violence, because we recognize that the things which motivate this movement are so vital that they must be fought for with every means at our disposal.

[Q] Playboy: What are the basic motivations of the movement?

[A] Luce: Some have tried to assign the cause of unrest to a general sense of anonymity and alienation on the part of the students; but it's not quite that simple, because in a technological age such as ours, everyone feels a certain amount of alienation, apathy and frustration—conservatives as well as radicals. It's natural to question this complex and often oppressive society.

[A] Jencks: It's not only natural but commendable and imperative that students question the character of the society they'll be joining. They're worried about the future. They have only a few years in college to figure out what to do with themselves, what kind of work to do, whether or not to get married, how to live their lives. Since they are on the verge of integrating themselves into society, they certainly ought to be worried about what that society is like.

[A] Hayden: They have good reason to worry, because they are beginning to realize that society is not fundamentally stable, that in fact it's in the process of collapsing. Students are profoundly affected by this transition, and they're looking for something new to replace the old decaying values and lend meaning and purpose to their lives.

[A] Morse: We're taught concepts like democracy and brotherly love all our lives—by our parents, by the Church, in school civics courses. The values themselves are beautiful, but then you look around and see that practically no one—certainly not the people who run this country—ever acts on these principles. And when you realize that, it causes a big change in your outlook.

[A] Edwards: This contradiction between pious word and ugly deed—in regard to the 1964 Civil Rights Act, for example, which promised everything and delivered nothing—ultimately forces people to become revolutionary. When you work within the system and get only hollow legislation, then you have to move outside the system into revolutionary activities. We have been pushed into this, not so much by a lack of faith in the system but because the system hasn't even kept the promises it so blatantly made to us.

[A] Hayakawa: That's pure hokum. It's a rationalization to blame the hypocrisy of society for student radicalism. Why does the love generation go around exuding messages of hate? Because hypocrisy is not just a vice of the establishment but a universal human failing. There's not a single damn one of us who is able to live up to all his beliefs and aspirations. It's easy to accuse somebody else of being a hypocrite, but we're not so ready to recognize our own hypocrisy. What's at the heart of things here is the revolt of one generation against another. Let's say your father is a successful stockbroker. You can say: "You've devoted your life to money. You're materialistic. You created a world in which there is injustice, war, et cetera." This is simply a way of rejecting the old man, asserting your own virility and independence.

[A] Edwards: There is certainly a generational conflict here, but it's not simply the child breaking away from the parent, and you make a big mistake to dismiss it so smugly. Students are looking for new ways to deal with the same old problems, because the traditional means have failed miserably. They can't look to their parents for the answers to these problems, because their parents are part of the problems, and most parents often don't even recognize that the problems exist. If some white radical student goes home over the summer and talks to his parents about what happened at Cornell and tries to articulate the situation that the blacks find themselves in, his parents will think he's part of a sinister plot to overthrow the Government. That's why students are breaking away from the system as well as from their parents.

[A] Luce: You people talk about "the system" like Hitler talked about the Jews; you make it a scapegoat and a justification for every kind of extremism. The New Left says that because the United States is involved in the war in Vietnam, students are justified in burning up papers or tearing apart a president's office. What they're really saying, with total illogicality, is that because the United States is involved in a war abroad, then people should be involved in a war at home, and because they don't want to fight in Vietnam, they'll fight the Government on the campus. It all ends in nihilism. And what are the roots of this nihilism? Full wallets and empty heads.

[A] Gallagher: It is unfortunately true that this student movement seems less concerned with seeking something better than with scorning what exists. The revolutionary generation of the Thirties was euphoric, while this generation is dysphoric. The Thirties generation was utopian; it had a hope and a structure. But this generation has no utopia; instead of hope, it has despair, and it has no structure for the future. But it's easy to understand why, when you consider that this is the first generation that has lived from childhood under the shadow of the bomb. This is one of the basic facts separating these kids from their elders, because, in a very real sense, our younger generation lives in expectation of apocalypse.

[A] Edwards: That expectation of apocalypse is precisely what turns me on about this generation of students. To live with the fact of the bomb, a person has to be genuinely brave and have a lot of faith to bother keeping on with the struggle. Because we're not facing just one bomb; we're facing everything from overpopulation, pesticides, pollution of the water and the biosphere to the hydrogen bomb and chemical-bacteriological warfare. And there's an excellent chance that these bombs will catch up with humanity before humanity begins to solve its problems. The fact that students are not utterly cynical and resigned in the face of all this but are looking for ways to confront the situation is most impressive to me, and gives me faith in this generation and for the future.

[A] Friedenberg: Using this "shadow of the bomb" business is a picturesque explanation that tends to write off student protest as an anxiety response to various threats. It's actually more a matter of being fed up with a system that today's students are beginning to realize is responsible for the whole mess.

[A] Hayakawa: But the world has always been a mess and, according to our preachers, moral values have been crumbling every Sunday since I was born. The bomb and Vietnam and racial prejudice and all the other issues we've been discussing don't lie at the root of the student unrest. I believe profoundly that even if this country's current problems were wiped out overnight, this particular kind of student protest would continue—because it isn't motivated as much by a concern with realistic issues as by psychological factors.

[A] Gallagher: I'm intrigued with the fact that this generation of students not only grew up with the bomb but was also the first to be raised on the permissive doctrines of Dr. Spock. This general permissiveness is new and the net result is that my generation gets bewildered when our children don't act as we expect children to act.

[A] Morse: You may think we're radical because of Dr. Spock's permissiveness; and Hayakawa, because we're rebelling against our parents, but both are condescending rationalizations. Speaking for myself, there hasn't been any single cause for my radicalization; it was a slow, evolutionary process over a period of several years. My politics have changed gradually but drastically since the first free-speech movement—and this holds true of everybody who's gone through the movement—because you inevitably grow more radical the more you participate, the more you see people beaten up, the more you study and read and find out about things like nerve gas and chemical and biological warfare. You begin to see that the things this Government is doing are incredible, not only in the political and racial areas but even in the way they fuck up the natural environment. Look at the Santa Barbara oil leak; they just let it leak and they think of that as minor, since it's not killing people—just fish and wildlife. But it's still outrageous. Then there's Vietnam, and what they're doing in black communities, and what they're doing to students. The more you know about what's going on domestically and what this country is doing internationally, the more you see that all this is part of one sick system, and the closer you come to the point where you just want to tear the whole system down, rend it limb from limb and build something completely new.

[A] I have a tremendous sense of urgency just looking at things like the train full of nerve gas going from the Rocky Mountains to the New Jersey shore, and thinking about what could happen. We've got to stop these things or there won't be any planet left for us to live on. The bastards are just going to devastate the whole world, pollute it, destroy its natural resources and eventually blow it up. But the Government doesn't worry about the consequences of what it's doing; it just plows ahead like the bulldozer that ran down a clergyman-protester in Cleveland a few years ago. It almost makes you want to go out and shoot somebody out of sheer frustration—every cop and every Government official in sight. But isolated individual acts like that won't make the changes we need. We've got to build a revolutionary movement to change the whole system completely—in an organized way. I just wonder if we'll make it in time. It's really kind of scary.

[A] Brown: Everything you've said is undeniable, but you're still talking predominantly from the position of white radicalism. I have to put these issues in black perspective. The black student is involved in a two-stage process. He is involved first in discovering himself and eradicating the pervasive self-hatred that has been instilled in him by a wicked system. He then has the job of trying to help his brothers cross the same gap from Negro to black, from slave to sovereign human being. For black people, all the problems of alienation, the bomb and the changing moral fiber of society are piled on top of the overriding problem of being black in a sick white society; so we have to be doubly radical. We are concerned about all the problems confronting our society—because, like it or not, we are part of that society—but our first concern is awakening the black conscience, building black pride and laying the groundwork for a struggle to gain our rights.

[Q] Playboy: So far we've talked primarily about the societal causes of unrest. To what extent are academic and social conditions within the university itself a cause?

[A] Edwards: To the extent that universities fail to provide real education, they certainly generate unrest and militancy. It's not an accident that students call the big schools factories, because they grind out the replacement parts that keep the corporate machinery humming in high gear. The function of the university today is to teach people how to make a living, which is an indirect way of saying that it exists to fill positions in the Dow Chemical Company, the military-industrial complex and the country's political machinery—and most students involved in the protest movement don't care to become part of that machinery.

[A] Morse: You just have to look at the percentages of students who are dropping out of the system. Business is very scared today, because it's not getting the cream of the college crop like it did in the Fifties. The best students are more interested in jobs like teaching and social work; they're alienated from the corporate structure and they're disgusted by what they see business and Government doing. Many of them, in fact, are reaching the decision that they're going to have to work to destroy what Government and business are doing.

[A] Gallagher: You say "many," but I suspect that only a very small percentage feels so alienated that they have committed themselves to the destruction of the system rather than to its constructive reform. As far as the university's relationship to business and Government is concerned, there is undoubtedly an unconscious continuation of the university's traditional role as a professional school to train men for later professional life. To that extent, the university's purposes are identified with those of the society around it: but it's a perversion of fact to argue that the university is manipulating students into the corporate structure. The important thing, though, isn't really whether it's true or not but whether it is believed—and acted upon as belief. And, unfortunately, it is both believed and acted upon.

[A] Luce: This notion has really been ballyhooed by the left. They've tried to use it as a propaganda tool to make people feel that the university is only serving big business, but I'm inclined to believe that this isn't what the university is doing, and I don't think the majority of students buy that kind of simplistic analysis either.

[A] Gallagher: It's only a partially correct analysis. And the left also fails to give the universities credit for being the breeding ground of their own dissent.

[A] Hayden: That's like crediting German concentration camps for breeding anti-Nazis. The universities are a breeding ground, all right: they're the brain centers of the capitalist system, and the kids know it. The University of California, for example, currently does most of the agricultural research that benefits the wealthy growers of the state—at the expense of the farm workers. The University of California also engages in a wide variety of military research, including work on nuclear weapons, and many other universities across the country are doing the same thing. It's only logical, because if you look at the boards of university trustees at all schools, you'll find that they are comprised almost universally of successful white middle-aged businessmen—not labor, not minorities, not youth. The boards, consequently, are nothing but one big Babbitt warren dedicated to serving the power structure, not the needs of the students. This is the basic truth about our university system, not whether dissenting ideas are permitted on campuses. Such dissent would be meaningful only if it were institutionalized—and the administrations don't show any signs of establishing institutes of guerrilla warfare or departments of revolution. But the schools have institutionalized their ties to the military-industrial complex, and this is what has radicalized thousands of students who recognize that the complex is directly responsible for the initiation and continuation of our vicious and immoral aggression in Vietnam.

[A] Gallagher: Not so. If any one thing is built into the fabric of the American university at its best, it is the freedom to differ, to challenge, to dissent, to create. This includes the right to be angry about injustice. It does not include the right to establish a new intolerance as the norm of truth and to kick off campus anyone who disagrees. The glory of the Church is its martyrs, prophets and heretics: but when they, in turn, institutionalize their;new orthodoxies, they lose the right to be tolerated by those whom they will not tolerate. Give me no new fascisms for old.

[Q] Playboy: Would the student revolt continue on any significant scale without the impetus of the war in Vietnam?

[A] Edwards: It certainly would, because the war has given all the divergent factions—SDS, the Panthers, black student groups—a focus for coalition, made it clear that we're not just dealing with a system that is anti-black but a system that is anti-humanity, a system that has committed genocide against every minority group it has come into contact with, from the American Indians right on down to the Vietnamese. These facts won't be changed by the end of the war. The movement will go on, because the basic issues at stake are the system and the atrocities it continues at home and abroad. Given the nature of the beast, there will be more Vietnams, and we will have to continue this struggle for many years.

[A] Jencks: It's true that radical student dissension would continue without Vietnam. But if Nixon were to stop the war and give the impression that he was seriously trying to do something about the racial situation in this country, moderate support for radical protest would probably dry up. A moderate is almost by definition a fellow who doesn't get too worked up about anything until it hits him in the face and he can't look the other way anymore. The war and the riots in the black ghettos have made a lot of moderates think about what is wrong with America, but if society gives them half a chance, I'm afraid they'll turn their attention to more enjoyable things.

[A] Luce: I think so, too. The radicals need the war; they use it to sucker moderate students into their movement with the argument that the war is symptomatic of the rottenness of the whole society. To some extent, this tactic has worked, and the war has lent fantastic impetus to the tendency of young people to question the entire American system. It's generally because of the war and their opposition to it that the radicals have been able to mobilize students on other issues, too. I think the leftists would find their movement falling apart if the war suddenly ended. This is actually the Achilles' heel of their cause—the fact that it's essentially a single-issue protest.

[A] Hayden: That's just not true. The protest existed before the war; it flows from basic conditions in this country, not from any one single policy such as Vietnam.

[A] Morse: It's true that a few years ago, things were very much oriented around the single anti-war issue. But opposition to Vietnam, as Mr. Luce correctly points out, has given us insights into the nature of the entire system, and over the past two or three years the issues have become broader and broader, until today, a large percentage of the student movement finally understands what capitalism really means and what imperialism really means and what the United States is really doing at home and all over the world. In fact, you'll find now that many of the issues that stir people most emotionally have nothing to do with the war.

[A] Brown: Right. If the war were to stop tomorrow, people would turn their attention to the problems of racism and poverty and exploitation, which existed in this country long before Vietnam. This is particularly true of black students, who are affected most directly by these conditions. Although they're concerned about the war, they are even more deeply concerned about the issues that immediately affect their lives and destinies and the hell of a job they have in front of them in the dangerous fight for self-determination. If the war were to end tomorrow, there might be a slackening off of militancy on white campuses but not among black students. We're just at the beginning of a long, hard road.

[A] Friedenberg: I certainly agree that there will always be enough issues to protest about in the kind of society we have, but without the Vietnam war, the situation wouldn't have reached what the nuclear physicists call critical mass. It's true that a lot of the student protests haven't been directly connected with Vietnam, but the war and the draft are always in the background, shadowing the students' lives. Without a doubt, the draft has done more than any other factor to intensify student opposition to the war and to the system.

[Q] Playboy: How do you feel about the present Selective Service System?

[A] Gallagher: The draft laws as they are now established are immoral, for the heavy victims are the poor and the black. They're the ones who do the dying. But even the student who is deferred is victimized, because the draft laws vitiate the academic process by creating all the wrong reasons for going to college. And look at the violence it does to the grading system: A professor who gives a student an F will be told, "You just poured napalm on that kid." If we have to have a draft—and there are those who think we can get along well without one—then it should be on a straight lottery basis.

[A] Hayakawa: Amen!

[A] Luce: I agree that the draft system in the U. S. is an abortion as it stands, but I don't think a lottery system is any solution. There shouldn't be any draft at all, period. This is one of the few points on which the New Left and the New Right are in full agreement. No matter how you rationalize it, Selective Service is really selective slavery, and the lottery would just be another kind of auction block. The draft is both immoral and unconstitutional. What we ought to have is a volunteer military.

[A] Hayakawa: It seems to me that if we're going to have a draft at all, it should be applicable to every young man—rich or poor, white or black—whether he's a student or not.

[A] Friedenberg: It's no longer a question of mere class or race discrimination but of genocide against the poor and the blacks, who bear the brunt of the system.

[A] Hayakawa: A system that many white middle-class college students seem content to live with. When one of this privileged majority accepts a 2-S deferment, he is saying in essence, "Let the poor and the niggers fight the war." I think one of the reasons the war protest on campus takes such extreme and unrealistic positions is that the students don't have to go to war and for the most part don't have friends or relatives who have to go to war. So it just becomes an abstract academic issue to them. This is why they're happy to play their guitars in the privileged sanctuary of the university while the poor and the minorities die in Vietnam.

[A] Hayden: It's typical phony liberalism to favor "equalizing" the draft. Although I agree that middle-class students shouldn't be granted special privileges, that doesn't mean we want equal participation in killing and equal submission to draft-board tyranny. No one should be involuntarily drafted; the right to decide how and when you die is a sacred individual decision, not a question to be settled by the Pentagon or General Hershey.

[A] Friedenberg: Yes, the draft is serving a thoroughly immoral purpose, and I personally find it hard to condemn any lawful means of evading it.

[A] Gallagher: Look at the way certain majors, such as physics or medicine, are deferred while others, like English or philosophy, are not. The suggestion that men who are going into medicine or science are more valuable to society than men who are going to be poets, philosophers or politicians is another one of the arbitrary and immoral judgments made by a society that is too much governed by the military-industrial complex. I would argue that every good poet, every fine musician, every effective social worker is just as valuable to society as a scientist or a doctor.

[Q] Playboy: One major aspect of the anti-war and anti-draft movement has been the campaign to remove R. O. T. C. programs from the nation's campuses. In view of the immensity of the military establishment, is this a relatively minor target on which to expend so much time and energy?

[A] Friedenberg: Not to the students, because R. O. T. C. is a constant reminder of the presence and influence of the military. The military manner, the guns in the campus armory, the punishment drills, the discipline in command, all these things grate on any sense of the university as a free community of scholars. But it's important to note that it didn't occur to anyone that R. O. T. C. was bad enough to protest against until the threshold of irritability about the military was reached because of its exploits in Vietnam.

[A] Gallagher: Most students will tell you frankly, "Let's face it; it's not R. O. T. C. that we're bothered about; it's Vietnam. And one of the best ways to attack it is by getting rid of R. O. T. C." My own judgment is that as long as a military exists in this country, then the method of procuring officers through R. O. T. C. is a sound and satisfactory one—provided it's voluntary; I'm firmly opposed to compulsory R. O. T. C.

[A] Hayakawa: The war clouds the issue here, but I also think it's a valuable thing to have R. O. T. C. at a university. For one thing, it guarantees that future officers will have considerable exposure to civilian thought and training, and that's always healthy. I also think R. O. T. C. could be upgraded academically if courses in foreign languages, business administration and so on were incorporated into the program for credit.

[A] Edwards: That'll never work. R. O. T. C. is an academic joke. You might as well have a major in bubble blowing. But more important, I don't think the university should have any association with the war machine in this country. R. O. T. C. brings a bunch of crewcutted, beer-bellied, flag-waving Neanderthals like General Hershey onto the campus with their warmongering mentality. Let them go to West Point or Annapolis or the Coast Guard Academy with that shit. The university should teach people how to live, not how to die.

[Q] Playboy: Mr. Edwards is on record against not only the R. O. T. C. but any form of war-related research on campus. How do the rest of you feel about it?

[A] Hayakawa: In the first place, I think the term war research is a loaded one. I know from the personal experience of many friends that much of what is called war research is really very innocuous. Some of it deals with linguistics, some with marine biology, some with medical examinations, some with survival aids. These things may have military uses, but they also have vast civilian application. In fact, a lot of research goes on under military sponsorship not because it has warlike implications but because the military is the easiest place to get the money.

[A] Edwards: That's just hot air. This kind of research serves only to incorporate the university into the military-industrial complex. It's just the Pentagon using its unofficial branches to perpetrate and perpetuate the kind of atrocities that are going on in Vietnam. Well, the time has come to stop being used, to sever those ties and make the university a free institution with the power to question such things as the immorality of bacteriological warfare. But Cornell, to name one of many schools, can't very well question germ warfare while it's being researched on its own agricultural campus.

[A] Brown: That's right. Dr. Hayakawa's acknowledgment that the military is the easiest place to get the money simply highlights the war-oriented nature of the whole Government. All that crap about "vast civilian application" of Government-financed research on campus is nothing but an excuse, a cop-out.

[A] Morse: The actual civilian application of military research on campus consists of its use on us and on the black community. The blister and nausea gases developed by our upstanding universities and used in Vietnam were also used on us during the people's-park crisis at Berkeley—and Stanford is doing research on counterinsurgency to be applied in South Africa and in the black communities here.

[A] Jencks: It's certainly true that a great deal of military research is pretty bloodcurdling, whether its intended application be on rebels in Asia and Latin America or on blacks and students here at home. But on a more abstract level, the basic problem is that a lot of academic people have developed a moral attitude that says research is always good, whatever its ethical, political and human consequences. And that's the attitude we've got to change.

[A] Gallagher: The difference between 1944 and 1969 on this question is very interesting. In 1944, it was a very patriotic thing to be engaged in war research.

[A] Friedenberg: That's true, but both the times and the wars are different. I think it's inappropriate for a university to serve its Government's military needs if that Government is immoral or if those military needs are wholly destructive. Whatever the case in World War Two, the Government of the United States of America in 1969 is immoral and its military objectives are obscene.

[A] Edwards: And perhaps the most obscene aspect of the war, from a black vantage point, is its inherently racist character—racist not only in the sense that it annihilates Vietnamese but that it slaughters thousands of young black Americans and, by dislocating all our national priorities, makes it impossible to allocate the Federal funds necessary to relieve the hardships of black people at home. Which is another reason black students are rebelling against the system.

[A] Brown: Yes, Vietnam has been a major factor in the black student movement; but its main reason for being is an intensified awareness that the universities, like the country at large, are exploiting and dehumanizing black people.

[Q] Playboy: In what ways?

[A] Brown: In every way. Oh, a few courses have been renamed Black or Afro-American as a token concession, but the educational institutions haven't even begun to make the wholesale adjustments needed to deal with the problems of black students and the black community at large.

[A] Friedenberg: True. Virtually nothing is being done by the universities or society for poor people generally, except for those few who are well enough endowed with native intelligence and aggression to exploit college for subsequent professional advantage. The question facing the schools up to now has been whether they should make a special effort to admit applicants who, because of educational privation in inferior ghetto elementary and high schools, normally wouldn't be accepted. Until very recently, the colleges had done nothing along these lines, but some advances are beginning to be made as the universities admit the urgency of the problem and recognize a greater obligation to the larger community in which they exist. At Buffalo, for instance, we now have a program to admit black students who can't meet the academic standards expected of middle-class whites with a good secondary educational background.

[A] Jencks: Even with such special programs, I'm very skeptical about how much an institution like a university can do for black students, much less for black people generally. It seems to me that the things universities are good at are not, by and large, the things either the black students or the black communities need at the moment. In terms of committing traditional academic resources to the education of black people in traditional ways, I think they've done as much as a reasonable man might expect of them at this stage. What they haven't done is invent new ways of reaching students, black and white alike, who can't be reached by ordinary academic methods. They've been very reluctant, for example, to hire people to teach who haven't been thought of as educators in the traditional sense—people like Eldridge Cleaver, who don't have degrees and whose skills are not specifically academic. The universities have been hostile to teaching methods that don't involve classrooms, and even more hostile to definitions of what's worth learning that go beyond just acquiring facts, techniques and theories, to include all of what a man or a woman is. No university is really concerned with the students' feelings, their sense of self-respect or their ethical and political commitments; but these are the kinds of things the black students care about. I don't know if a university can teach these things, but they are reluctant even to try.

[A] Luce: I'm afraid that any special programs the universities adopt in this area, no matter how well intentioned, will fail, because the basic problem lies in the inferior schools the black students attend before they ever reach college. Educational standards in ghetto schools have obviously not been equal to those provided whites, and what we should be doing now is improving standards in those schools to ensure blacks an education that will allow them to enter college on the same achievement level as whites. I think we're deluding ourselves if we believe that by simply throwing the doors open to a set number of blacks, they're going to be automatically qualified scholastically and make a successful adjustment to the university. Black people should have the same rights to attend college as whites, but the racial scene in the United States is not going to be improved by admitting large numbers of blacks without the proper scholastic qualifications, and tensions may even be exacerbated when such students find that their inadequate preparation puts them at a disadvantage in academic competition with white students. So reforms must be made in elementary and high schools, since by the time the average black student is ready to go to college, he is already at an educational disadvantage.

[A] Gallagher: New York City illustrates this rather tragically. Last year, the city graduated approximately 40,000 students from high school, and out of that number, only 700 blacks and Puerto Ricans were granted the academic diploma that admits them to college. Those figures speak for themselves.

[Q] Playboy: Critics of preferential-admission programs for blacks contend that since most black students are educationally deprived through inferior preparatory school training, there is a danger that admitting large numbers to college through special dispensation will lower existing educational standards. How would you respond to this argument?

[A] Morse: This whole idea that blacks aren't ready for college is a vicious-circle deal. The reason a lot of them may not be as well prepared as whites is that the Government isn't willing to put enough money into the shitty elementary and high schools. Blacks are forced to attend these schools, and then the establishment turns around and says it's too bad, but blacks just don't have the educational background for college. That's typical of this system.

[A] Friedenberg: Whatever loss of excellence the universities might suffer by accommodating black students isn't very important, because academic standards and achievements have been largely illusory in their social effects; there is absolutely no correlation between collegiate achievement and subsequent success. This was pointed out by studies conducted at the State University of Iowa and the University of North Carolina, which showed that in a large number of professions—including major ones such as law and medicine—there is no connection between the success of these people who (continued on page 233)Playboy Panel(continued from page 116) years after graduation were making prominent contributions to their respective fields and their class ranking or grades while at college. So what students learn in a college classroom is generally irrelevant to actual life, and that holds true for both white and black students.

[Q] Playboy: In addition to the question of inequitable academic standards, isn't the high cost of education another factor contributing to the still tiny proportion of black college students?

[A] Gallagher: Of course it is. And that's why many schools remain the preserve of the white middle and upper-middle class.

[A] Edwards: There's never been any question about that. Colleges primarily serve everyone from the middle class on up, and the ones on the bottom stay at the bottom. That's why I don't buy all this crap about preserving academic standards and not lowering entrance requirements. That attitude is all part of the corrupt elitist philosophy that has dominated American education all along.

[A] Luce: I don't believe the relatively small number of blacks on campus has anything to do with this mystical Marxist "class" bit. If you're going to get into the economic aspects of the question, you could blame the unions for the black man's plight a hell of a lot easier than the universities; there are more black Ph.D.s in this country than there are black members of the bricklayers or steam-fitters union. So it's not essentially an economic problem, though black students definitely do require certain kinds of extra assistance.

[A] Brown: And it should start by allowing all black students to go to school free. They should also have economic assistance while in college—but we should be very careful to see that such aid is not the type that will evolve into control of their education by the Government or any other "benefactor."

[A] Friedenberg: I would oppose singling out black students for a free education just because they're black. It's a question of the right of poor people to attend school. But since a large percentage of poor people are black, they would naturally receive a major share of financial assistance.

[A] Edwards: If you address yourself to the whole problem of black people, you'll find that money is actually only part of it. What difference does it make if black people are given big grants if they still have to live in Harlem, over which they have virtually no political or economic control? What difference does it make if a black student has a $6000-a-year fellowship at Cornell if he still has to take sociology and history classes in which he turns to the back of the textbook and finds under "Negro": "See also delinquency, illegitimacy, crime and illiteracy"? What difference does it make if they give me all the money I need to go to school if I still can't really become a part of the academic community—let alone American society—because I'm black?

[A] What blacks are saying is, "Look, man, I don't want to live in a dormitory that's 99 percent honkie; if I have a choice, I'd rather live in a dorm that's all black, where I can have meaningful conversations and relationships with the people there, where I can get together and talk about anything, something besides race." I've lived in white dormitories, and what happened every time was that I couldn't go to the shower or the john or downstairs to watch television without someone walking up and saying: "Hey, man, I want to ask you something...." I always had to be a spokesman, a representative, never just myself, another guy, a fellow student. Not only that, but I usually wasted my time, because the cracker I was talking to wasn't going to do anything anyway; he wasn't going to act to correct the situation. So it's not an economic thing but a matter of changing the entire concept of the university to make it a place that's relevant to all its students, rather than one oriented totally toward the needs and desires of the white majority. This is one of the reasons black students are demanding all-black dormitories on predominantly white campuses. It's also one of the reasons for setting up black-study centers to teach us about our history and culture.

[A] Friedenberg: The demand for black-study centers is understandable, and they would probably serve some good purposes. But it would be foolish to try to teach, say, a black history that excludes white history in a society that has been dominated, however wrongly, by whites. If you're talking about Pocahontas, you can't ignore John Smith.

[A] Hayakawa: Yes, but you can't focus only on John Smith, either, if you're going to tell the whole story—as we have focused only on whites in American history. When you consider the fact that there are some 22,000,000 Negroes in the United States, you realize you're talking about a lot more people than live in many other nations of the world—more than in Belgium, Holland, Denmark or Israel. And they have a long and honorable history, and a fertile subculture. There is a great and in many ways inspiring lesson to be learned from the story of a people who survived under almost impossible conditions in this country, and ultimately were neither assimilated nor destroyed but, in one way or another, managed to work out a place for themselves in our society. There is no other situation exactly analogous to this in the whole of world history. How the American Negro got where he is and where he would like to go from here are vitally important questions not only for the black man but for all of us in America to study. Most of you are white and I'm Oriental, but all our fates are intimately entwined with what happens to the black man, so we cannot afford to be ignorant of his history. Unfortunately, this history has so far been imperfectly written or not written at all, because historians have never thought it worth going into research on the Negro in a serious way; so much of the important work has yet to be done.

[A] Gallagher: It certainly does. The history books that mention Crispus Attucks in a half-sentence reference on the American Revolution, and after that refer to the slaves as one of the causes of the Civil War, and then mention nothing else about the black man in American history, have to be rewritten to include him in his proper role, which has been a very significant one. The same goes for courses in American literature, which teach the works of John Greenleaf Whittier but disregard the works of James Weldon Johnson. Study of one's cultural or racial history—be it black, white, yellow, red or brown—is essential, because it builds one's self-image and thus generates self-respect and self-pride. That the Afro-American should know all about his African and his American history is not the question; the question is where the emphasis will be placed in teaching such history. We are going through a phase of American life at the moment that is familiar to any student of history. A group that has been dependent must become independent before it can really be interdependent. Since we are now in the phase of independence, it's perfectly natural and healthy that the emerging group is asserting itself and stretching its muscles. We should encourage this self-assertion—provided it carries with it the seeds of a future that leads to eventual interdependence.

[A] Luce: As I hope I've made clear, I'm in favor of black studies, and I think they should be incorporated into the curriculums of every university, but I'm emphatically opposed to the demand of many black student groups that such courses and centers be segregated, with only blacks teaching and attending. This is just academic apartheid, and doubly detrimental precisely because the role of the black man has to be pointed out not only to blacks but to whites in this country. The way to do that, obviously, is to teach an integrated brand of sociology or history within an integrated educational system. I'd like to see everyone in the university structure of the United States gain the same knowledge of the black man's role in history, but not through racially restricted separatist courses.

[A] Brown: I'm sure it would do white students good to sit in on such courses, but that's not the basic issue. The main thing is the need for black students to determine the validity of black-studies programs; no white instructor, no white administrator can be allowed to determine or evaluate any black-studies curriculum. For many years, we have submitted to what we were told was a progressive curriculum, but we found that it excluded us. So now we're going to set up our own curriculum, and if we want a course called James Brown 101, we'll have it.

[A] Edwards: I'm afraid we're a long way from that. A professor like myself, for instance, would not be tolerated as a teacher of the kind of courses I have in mind. In a course on the black community, I would be telling the truth about oppression, about brutality, racism and the corruption of white cops, about the paternalistic and coercive role of the Federal Government in the black community, about the exploitive activities of various other official agencies in the black community. What would happen if I then began to talk about how to rid ourselves of these oppressive devils? You know what would happen. So, you see, in practical terms, a genuine black curriculum is impossible within the structure of American society today. Any real black-studies program would quickly become a center around which to mobilize young black people as political activists on behalf of the black man, and the power structure wouldn't permit that to happen.

[Q] Playboy: Mightn't some conservatives say this lends credence to charges that black-studies centers are intended to serve as little more than training grounds for revolutionaries?

[A] Brown: Revolutionaries are born, not trained. They are born out of the situation that oppresses them, and they develop internally. But people who have a revolutionary spirit don't necessarily have guns on their shoulders. With the black-studies program, we intend to intensify our exposure of the contradictions between whites and blacks, and most likely we'll produce more angry people; but this anger will give us momentum and solidarity. And from there we can move toward a common ideology and a united revolutionary struggle.

[A] Gallagher: I suppose there are some people who live in a fantasy world where they think of themselves as young Frantz Fanons or Ché Guevaras or Joans of Arc, and want to get off in the mountains by themselves and dream up their revolutions and then return to the ghetto with their machetes and their Molotov cocktails, their knives and their guns to lead a liberation army. But this kind of fantasizing is engaged in by very few, and its total impact is, I think, much more rhetorical than anything else.

[A] Edwards: Our revolution isn't rhetorical. If you set up a real black university or an autonomous black school, that school is going to be oriented toward meeting the real needs of black people; and when you begin to speak about meeting the needs of black people, you naturally begin to talk about identifying the causes of the specific problems facing black people. This inevitably takes you back to racism, and if you talk about the causes of racism, then you have to talk about ways of remedying them. You run through abolition, through accommodation, through integration and the whole philosophy of nonviolence, and you finally realize that the only way to solve the problem is the way it has been solved historically by other peoples facing the same situation: revolution.

[A] That's why those of us who are organizing black communities, who are organizing revolts on campus, who are moving against the system, believe in bringing about confrontation, because through it we can expose the contradictions of the system and create an atmosphere in which people are more susceptible to being educated to the institutionalized inequities of this society and to the fact that it is no longer necessary or even relevant to move against the individual cracker or individual nigger—such as Roy Wilkins—because they are merely spokes in the wheel. It is now necessary to move against the system itself. As the confrontation grows, we will begin to mobilize the large numbers of individuals who are going to be needed in order to bring about enough pressure for the system to change, either violently or non-violently. All our efforts on issues such as black-studies centers are directed toward this basic goal of awakening black people to their needs and organizing a revolutionary movement to fight for them.

[Q] Playboy: Despite such militance, some campus administrators have evinced a tendency to treat black protesters less harshly than their white counterparts. Why?

[A] Friedenberg: The more sophisticated the campus, the more likely it is that black students will be treated leniently. Dr. Hayakawa at San Francisco State and Robben Fleming at the University of Michigan seem to be the leading spokesmen for the lenient approach to handling black militants, because they say they understand that the demands of black people are just, even though their methods may be wrong.

[A] Morse: What such administrators are really trying to do is to split the black and white protesters by mollifying the blacks and coming down hard on the whites, in order to play on the prejudices in both groups. But I don't think it's going to work.

[A] Brown: A great deal depends on where the school is. Columbia, for example, is situated in the heart of the black community, and any unnecessarily strong discipline against blacks could have spilled over into the community. In Oshkosh, you would probably find about 100 black folks in the whole town, so they could afford to come down hard on some isolated niggers.

[A] Gallagher: There's considerable truth to that. I'll admit that my own actions in this area have been in part influenced by the probable repercussions in the surrounding community and city. Normally, I would think it wrong to differentiate between militant blacks and whites on the basis of their race, and I would ordinarily treat them alike. But at City College, located as it is in Harlem, one knows that the evocation of a massive counterforce of police against either small or large groups of black protesters is likely to result in a community involvement that would make Watts or Detroit look tame by comparison. This isn't fear but prudent consideration.

[A] Friedenberg: Another reason for different treatment is that the protests themselves are different. In the first place, black protest is in essence a confirmation of society's values. The blacks are saying, "You have injured me by refusing to grant my proper share of what is here for everybody." Now, this is quite easy for college presidents to deal with in principle, because they can reply, "We know you're right, and we're going to see that you get your slice of the pie if we possibly can—though there are political problems." This may not soothe black people, but it's something the presidents feel they can honestly do—or try to do. The white militants, on the other hand, are doing something very different. They're saying, "The society is corrupt, the rewards are corrupt, this whole system is corrupt, and we don't want what you have to offer. We want a university we can use to direct ourselves to different values, to different goals, to a different kind of life." That's much more threatening to the university, to its real raison d'être, than the black demands, and it's a situation you can't get away from by making a few concessions. I think, finally, that the white militants often tragically delude themselves that they have potential supporters among the blacks over any period of time, because many black leaders have come to be quite skeptical of them. It's not necessarily a suspicion of exploitation by the whites, but rather a cool realization that they don't have to go nearly as far as the SDSers to get what they want. They have far less to begin with, and the things they want are far more tangible, far easier to realize.

[A] Edwards: It may surprise you to learn that black revolutionaries reject this system as totally as many white radicals: they'll tell you they don't want a slice of pie if the pie is riddled with worms. University administrators may treat us differently from white protesters because they feel we can be bought off easier, but they'll soon find out they're as wrong as Mr. Friedenberg in his analysis of our demands and of what will and will not satisfy us. But he's right about our mistrust of whites—even white radicals. If you can find me a black person who isn't suspicious of whites in general, whatever their politics. I'll show you a black person who should be in a mental institution. I'm as suspicious of whites as flies are of spider webs, because too many blacks have been trapped and killed by whites, and I think that's just being honest about the subject. So I don't see any lasting coalitions emerging except on the larger issues—the issues of moving against the educational institutions and the system as a whole.

[A] Brown: Whether or not whites and blacks work together depends to a great extent on the location and the personalities involved. On the West Coast, there is a sort of tense, perilous coexistence between black student leaders and SDS people. But there are people in SDS and other white organizations who do understand our problems, and the only difficulty that arises is the one in which there are white students in positions of leadership over black students. That's a problem, because we have to develop our own leaders, and it's difficult to ask a white cat to come into an organization where he can go only so far in terms of running the show. But that's how it is, and if he wants to work with us, he's got to realize this and accept it.

[A] Morse: The whole Black Panther movement has created very basic changes in the black-white relationships that have prevailed for the past few years. It's essentially a process of white students overcoming the racism that has been drummed into them for all the years of their lives and realizing the necessity of a united struggle against the power structure. The black movement also had to go through a stage where it withdrew from the white in order to become whole politically: only then was it strong enough to build an equal alliance with the white movement. Building this united revolutionary coalition is a slow process, because of all the prejudices and misconceptions on both sides, but I think it will happen. We've got to clean all the old garbage out of our minds—from race and class prejudice to male chauvinism, which relegates women to second-class citizenship in this society.

[Q] Playboy: You seem to share the view of the growing feminist movement that women are systematically discriminated against in every area of American life, from the campus to the business board room. How do the rest of you feel about it?

[A] Hayakawa: I really don't know if there has been any pattern of discrimination against women on campus. But I can attest that in a school like San Francisco State, which has always been a coeducational institution, women have equal opportunities with men and all the advantages they're willing to make use of.

[A] Gallagher: With all due respect to Dr. Hayakawa, I don't think there's much doubt that there has been a longstanding pattern of discrimination against women in American higher education. Until 1836, when the first coeducational college was founded, only men attended colleges or universities, and if a woman desired a higher education, she had to go to a female seminary. The time for separate universities for men and women has long passed, and the few remaining such schools will soon become coeducational.

[A] Morse: Yes, but that's no solution to the basic problem. Coeducation is as phony as token integration unless women are given equal rights within the university, which in most cases just doesn't happen. Women are not treated seriously in terms of scholarship or teaching, because people automatically assume that they're just going to get married and breed babies. This isn't something unique with colleges, of course; it's part of a whole system in which women are still treated as inferior, despite the ritual lip service to equal opportunity. And women themselves are brainwashed from childhood to consider marriage and children and housekeeping their ultimate goal in life. We're taught from an early age to be decorative and "feminine"—whatever that is—to discuss things but never to argue, to be emotional but not brainy, because otherwise we would be, God forbid, competing with men. We're even conditioned to think of other women as enemies, as threats to our sexual security, and as a result, it's not easy to be close friends with another woman.

[A] It's forced into our heads all the time that we can define ourselves only in terms of men—as sexual objects or mothers or glorified domestic help. And it's also forced into men's heads to think of women as bodies rather than as intellectual, political or creative beings in their own right—often not even as human beings, in fact. Obviously, we're going to have to turn both men's and women's minds around if we're going to make any progress. We're starting to do it now within the movement in terms of our relationships with our men. In various sections of the country, we've formed a group called the Women's Liberation Front, which feels that women in the United States are an oppressed group—oppressed economically, socially, sexually and mentally. The Front was formed because we discovered that the radical student movement failed to answer the needs of women, and we began going through an intensely personal stage of meetings where we dragged out all the stereotypes, myths and prejudices against women and discussed them and gained a better understanding of ourselves in relationship to society and to men.

[A] Hayden: I think this is a damn good development, because the movement itself has significant male-supremacist tendencies that have to be overcome.

[A] Morse: It sure does. There's a whole tone in the movement that says the women should be medics, trained in nursing to take care of guys injured in demonstrations, or relegated to office and clerical positions, cranking a mimeograph handle while the guys make all the political decisions. This is beginning to change now, but some of the men are really uptight about it all. It's not easy for even a radical to jettison all the garbage this system plants in your brain. Already there have been a number of marriages within the movement that have broken up because the men just couldn't take some of the little things involved, like doing the dishes and taking care of the child equally with the woman—let alone larger things like accepting a woman as his intellectual and social equal. But we're moving ahead. Six months ago, Women's Liberation was laughed at by the majority of the movement; today it's beginning to be treated as a serious political force.

[A] Edwards: I'm completely sympathetic to you on all this. But women, like blacks or students in general, won't realize any of these changes until they reach the point where they really threaten the system. When they begin to jump on faculty members and take over buildings—or burn them down—then they'll start getting some justice from the system.

[A] Morse: Right. Women's Liberation realizes that the whole system will have to change if our needs are to be met. But we've also discovered, through reading and talking with Vietnamese and Cuban women, that it's possible to have a revolution without meeting all the needs of women. Castro, in June of 1967, praised Cuban women for fighting side by side with their men, but with the revolution won, he said it was time for women to go back to the kitchen and the children, because if they didn't, who would feed the men at lunchtime when they returned from their jobs, and so on. That's why women everywhere have to get together, cutting across all national, ideological, class and color lines. Black women, white women, middle-class women and lower-class women have to unite and organize as a political movement separate from general revolutionary causes.

[Q] Playboy: Once you have such a strong organizational base, would you be prepared to employ the same methods on behalf of women's rights as today's black militants and student radicals?

[A] Morse: Damn right, we would. It's all part of the same fight, after all. I remember that before Eldridge Cleaver went underground, he made a remark to the effect that women should not define themselves as revolutionaries but should just sleep with revolutionaries. This upset a lot of us, and when we called him on it later, he asked one of us if she would be willing to kill for Women's Liberation and she said, "Well, I don't know: I'd be more willing to be killed for it." Cleaver replied, "If you're going to define yourself as a revolutionary—and not just sleep with one—you're going to have to be prepared to both die for the revolution and kill for the revolution, and that includes Women's Liberation." That kind of took some of us aback at first; but on reflection, some of us "extremists" think that's exactly what we'll have to do.

[A] Luce: I'm dumb struck. All I can say is God help us all.

[A] Hayden: The importance of what Linda's been saying is that you can't have a revolution just based on one or two issues, like changes in the university or the military. You've got to have a total commitment to get rid of all the sickness in society, and the revolutionaries themselves have to be purged of the materialism and corruption of this society. If men and women keep living in continuous jealousy of each other, in continuous competition for control and domination of each other, and if they're ridden with all the security hang-ups of this materialistic system, then the overpowering appeal of the system will win out against any kind of revolutionary effort. The importance of Women's Liberation is that it's a movement within a movement, triggered by the needs of women to be full human beings. It's going to help us revolutionize our relationships within the movement, and from that healthy position it will extend outward.

[A] Edwards: I think it's about time people recognized that ours is a male-chauvinist society just as much as it's a racist society. You can see it clearly right on the campuses, in the way recruiters come to interview prospective accountants, attorneys or engineers. A chick may have the highest grades in her class, but they'll still pick even a mediocre male student over her. Of course, their rationalization is that she'll stay on the job only for a year or two and then get married, whereas with a man, they think they don't have to worry. The result is that they never allow a woman to realize her full potential, in these or any other fields.

[A] Friedenberg: Women on campus are also discriminated against enormously in the area of academic appointments, particularly in terms of tenure and regardless of how competent they are.

[A] Luce: Yes, and another problem is that in a great many schools, subtle pressure is applied on career-oriented women to enter fields that are traditionally female, such as library science, social work, nursing, grammar and high school teaching. Just one more expression of the old prejudices.

[A] Morse: You'll notice also that all of the fields you've mentioned involve taking care of people in one form or another, which is considered the woman's role in this society. There's no room for women in fields that require intellectual or physical aggressiveness.

[A] Gallagher: This isn't so much a deliberate policy as it is the dead hand of tradition. The old argument was that women were inherently different in nature from men and that, therefore, it was only natural that they have a different kind of education—one that should teach them the womanly arts: housekeeping, cooking, sewing and so on. These old traditions die hard. In America, women are nowhere represented in medicine, for example, in terms of their percentage of the population; whereas in the Soviet Union, three quarters of the medical doctors are women. The American tradition of male dominance has dictated that women, if they are to be educated at all, must be given the kind of education that will never challenge the male role. So a great deal remains to be done not only in terms of the specific curriculum and the educational process but in altering the general attitudes of society.

[A] Morse: But before you can alter these attitudes effectively, you've got to make people aware of the true sickness of society and convince them that the only answer to these problems is basic institutional change that can meet the real needs of the majority of exploited Americans—white workers, minorities, women and students. And, frankly, I don't think that's going to happen—not without revolution.

[Q] Playboy: Are you dismissing the possibility that school administrations—especially liberal ones—will move to meet your legitimate demands?

[A] Morse: Not completely; anything's possible, I suppose—but I can't hold out much hope for a human response from an inhuman institution.

[A] Luce: Of course not—because you don't really want reform. And I don't doubt that you'd refuse to admit the fact that many reforms have already taken place. Hard-core revolutionaries like Miss Morse aren't really interested in making the system work; they're interested in making it stop—and then dismantling it. Some of them have said as much to me, admitting outright that the real issue isn't R. O. T. C. or the draft or the war or Dow recruiters or anything of that sort. The real issue is student power—total student power. Other issues are just used to rope in the gullible.

[A] Morse: When you claim that we want to dismantle the system, all you're saying is that we recognize the wholesale rottenness of the system, and we know it can't be changed through half measures. More and more students are recognizing that the educational system must change totally or be destroyed totally—because we're not going to tolerate a university that supports mass killing in Vietnam by doing war research for the Government; we're not going to put up with a university that trains most of the officers for the Army; and we're not going to collaborate with a university that perpetuates racism. The movement isn't going to sell out on these issues, and we're not going to be scared off, either; so the university will either change itself or it will all come tumbling down. Don't think we can't do it. Look at Berkeley: It's becoming a second-rate university after decades of being first-rate, and if it doesn't learn anything soon, it'll shortly become third-rate—all because of the uproars on campus. It's probable, of course, that the universities literally cannot change, because they're too intimately involved in the whole structure of the military-industrial complex. They're part of the system, and it may be impossible for them to reform without the whole society being changed in the process.

[A] Edwards: Right. In fact, the universities have a slim chance of surviving at all, because they have so many intimate ties to the military and economic institutions of imperialism that it would be cutting their own throats to even try to change in a meaningfully radical way. And even if they do try, they're not going to do it quickly enough to avoid the really gigantic confrontations that will occur when black-white coalitions become the rule instead of the exception.

[A] Brown: I don't know what's going to happen, but I do think everything depends on whether or not people are willing to sit down and reason with one another; if they are, chaos can be avoided. It's when the talking stops that the violence begins.

[A] Friedenberg: And if that talking doesn't accomplish something significant in the way of basic institutional reform—and soon—there's a good chance of total defeat for both sides. By that I mean that eventually the law-enforcement agencies, local and Federal, will mount a sufficient force of repression to squash the dissidents completely, and that will also mean the death of the university as an intellectual institution.

[A] Jencks: Yes, that's a very real danger. The only way to answer protest is to change the character of our society. Right now, the students have what I consider a very accurate perception that the establishment is not trying to change society in any fundamental way. They also see that unless there are fundamental changes, the problems are going to get worse, not better. As long as students recognize this, they will raise hell with institutions that represent the establishment—and that means universities. The only way a university is likely to avoid attack from its students today is for its leadership to get out in front in opposing the status quo effectively. And that's tough on the annual budget.

[A] Hayakawa: I don't agree that the university must become a revolutionary vanguard in order to meet student demands. And I also think the demagogs of the left are simply lying when they say the university won't change except under violent pressure. In fact, the universities are constantly changing, sometimes slowly and sometimes very rapidly, but peaceful reforms just don't get nationwide TV and press coverage. Of course, there is the matter of the subjectivity of time sense—that is, what do you mean by slow or fast?

[A] Gallagher: What Dr. Hayakawa is referring to is what I would call the existentialism of this generation, and academic mentalities find it very difficult to understand existentialists. The academic approach wants to analyze everything and understand it from all sides and put it into committee; months or years later, some reports finally emerge with proposals in them. The existentialist, on the other hand, says, "Act now!" The academician runs the risk of analyzing indefinitely and never performing, and the existentialist runs the opposite risk of acting without sufficient data and blundering horribly. We urgently need a synthesis of the two approaches. Meanwhile, we are going to have continuous troubles and uproars.

[A] Above all, we have to realize that the problem won't be solved by gadgets and gimmicks; a fundamental reorientation of the entire philosophy of the university is needed. Objective research, objective assessment of values, suspended judgment and all the disciplines of the academic mind are going to have to be wedded, somehow, to the existentialist commitment to humanistic goals. Right now, these philosophies are like ships passing in the night, not communicating with each other at all. There are bound to be increased tensions, increased misunderstandings, increased bitterness, estrangement, alienation and violence until we get these two alien factions into a real dialog. And I believe this creative dialog and the reforms it can generate must happen in the universities before they can happen in society at large. The university must lead the rest of the nation.

[A] Friedenberg: This is really the basic question, the most important question in our whole discussion: Can the universities be reformed without prior reform in society at large? The students think so—and so, apparently, does Dr. Gallagher. Realizing how the universities relate to the entire economy in a very central and crucial way, the students believe that if you can force the university to reform, you will cause the rest of society to reform also. This is logical, but not very realistic, I'm afraid. I just don't think the universities can change fast enough—or radically enough—to change society in any meaningful or enduring way. And unless society is changed, no changes in the university can be truly meaningful or enduring, either. The result, I fear, will be mounting frustration—and a concomitant escalation in violence and disorder.

[A] Morse: I don't see this in such either/or terms. Society isn't going to be run by the present U. S. Government until midnight one day and then at one minute past 12 by the revolutionaries. The change is going to be gradual. There will be sections that we gain control over, as the N. L. F. has done in the villages of Vietnam, and sections that Washington still dominates, as it does the area around Saigon, and sections where the fighting continues to rage. The blacks will be taking over their own communities, and we'll be taking over the colleges, and there will be more and more liberated territory, but the establishment isn't going to fold up all at once. So in this context, some universities will be reformed before the whole society is, but the whole university system, of course, won't be improved until the entire society is changed.

[A] Luce: I'm really glad you've given us the specifics of your "revolution." Talk about the politics of the sandbox. This is a marvelous example of the illogic of playing at revolution. In case you haven't noticed, there is a real difference between the objective conditions in the United States and those in Vietnam. These differences notwithstanding, your comments are absurd. You're trying to put people on if you don't realize that the Government isn't going to passively sit back and allow you to destroy the country. Your slogans are kamikaze radicalism disguised as Maoism. Obviously, you want to destroy the system that exists, but I pity the people of this country once you gain power.

[A] Hayden: We only want the power to correct the institutionalized injustices of this society. We recognize that America isn't Vietnam, but the issues that motivate revolutionaries in both countries are the same. It's not a question of "destroying" this country when we say that basic changes are needed. We simply recognize that you can't have a free university in an unfree society. Any campus reforms that may be pushed through by the movement today will be perverted and eventually turned against us—even black studies. Today's seeming reform will be tomorrow's oppression; look at welfare and public housing. The only answer is revolution—not just in this country but around the world. Why? Because our immense technology, which could and should be used to feed the people and raise the standard of living, is instead being used to send people to the moon and airlift military hordes all over the world to occupied and quasi-occupied countries. And the only reason this technology is being used to conquer the world and then the planets, instead of being used to benefit humanity, is because a few men at the top—not the people as a whole—decided it that way.

[A] A lot of kids in this country are finally beginning to realize this—more of them every day—and so are millions of starving people in the third world. Their liberation movements, presently climaxing in Vietnam, are beginning to prove that the cost of maintaining the American empire might be more than the empire is worth. This is going to be settled in our lifetimes—one way or the other. I don't think America can win against all the people's liberation movements of the world. It can blow up the whole planet, of course, but it just can't win—because too many people, including millions in this country, will not let themselves be enslaved or manipulated for the interests of a few. This is the context in which I look at the campus rebellions. They are part of the worldwide revolution against domination by Washington's "Free World," and they can't succeed until the revolution as a whole succeeds. We can either win or lose, but the other side can only lose. We won't stop fighting, and they can't kill us all without killing themselves in the process.

[A] Jencks: I agree that the campus revolts are part of a world-wide attack on traditional ways of doing business, dividing up the pie and exercising authority. But in Vietnam, the N. L. F. offers a genuine social and political alternative, whereas on the campus, the student movement doesn't, because it has so far failed to offer any coherent ideas about building a new society to replace the old one. Until it does, Washington or Wall Street doesn't need to lose much sleep.

[A] Luce: The leaders of the protest do have a program, and it would create a totalitarian slave state. The students who follow the militants so mindlessly should ask where they are being led. I've been to Cuba and I know the kind of education you get after a Marxist revolution. Many more people are getting an education in Cuba now, but it's all pure indoctrination, and the same would happen here if these types took over. Academic freedom, intellectual freedom and everything the students think they're fighting for would vanish and be replaced by an authoritarian ideology and a program of dogmatic instruction. The universities would turn into puppet factories.

[A] Brown: Did you say "turn into puppet factories'? What in the hell do you think they are now? Castro isn't doing any more harm to the minds of Cuban children than you and your ancestors did to black kids like me when you forgot us in the history books and taught us about a white Jesus and a white Santa Claus and a white world we didn't belong to. At least Castro is instilling a spirit of nationalism and self-respect in young Cubans, while our schools have been human meat grinders.

[Q] Playboy: What kind of people do you think our universities should be turning out?

[A] Morse: People who can relate to and help build a revolutionary world.

[A] Jencks: I suppose many students today would agree with that—though the majority would prefer a less startling word than revolutionary, like human. There's no question that the university should be a place where those who want to devote themselves to changing society can learn the relevant personal and political skills. But even a postrevolutionary society needs people with technical skills, too, and not all these people will be interested in politics. Right now, you can describe a doctor or a teacher as "a cog in the corporate machine," but in another society he may be a "hero of socialist labor." The fact remains that all societies need doctors, and universities seem to be the best place to train them.

[A] Brown: Maybe so, but the university has a much larger responsibility to society—even if society doesn't have the sense to recognize it: to train people, whether they're headed for a career in medicine, law, education or anything else, to think freely and independently and creatively. If the university abdicates that responsibility, the schools will continue to be assembly lines turning out hordes of high-grade morons—specialists who are plugged into jobs that any well-constructed robot could perform. Ask any college graduate if the four years he spent in school really help him on the job and he'll just laugh. A vast number of Howard University graduates, for example, end up working in the Post Office. Hell, they could have bypassed college and started sorting mail right after high school. The schools are programed to turn out such zombies, because that's all society wants or expects. But it's not enough. We've got to produce a generation of generalists—men and women who, whatever their major fields of interest, also understand the problems of the world and have the will and the compassion and the imagination to help solve them. If we don't, there won't be any world left. If the university ignores that responsibility—the survival of humanity—it'll just blow up with the rest of us.

[A] Gallagher: Despite the present sense of thermonuclear emergency, which we all share, I don't think the function of the university has changed. Its real job has always been to teach men to think independently. The failure of our present system is that it gives the student only two choices—to conform like a herd animal or to rebel and take the consequences. These are the only alternatives today; he must be a yes man or a no man. But he must have the opportunity to be something more than a conformist or a rebel; he must be able to say what he thinks, and to have it count. The function of the university should be to teach him to be a thoughtful and productive member of society. If the university really did that, the social responsibility Mr. Brown talks about would be automatically fulfilled. Rational, independent men will neither blow up the world nor pander to its immoralities.

[A] Luce: I don't think the university should try to produce any particular type of graduate. The individual should be his own creation, and all the university should do is expose him to so many different questions that his capacity to think for himself, if he has any, will be aroused. What he does with that capacity is then his own business.

[A] Friedenberg: Precisely. The university is not a factory and shouldn't manufacture a "product"—even a humane, socially committed product. It shouldn't produce revolutionaries or "responsible citizens" or any other types. If we must use the metaphor of production, the students should be their own manufacturers and create the selves they want to be. If the university encourages independent thought, the rest will take care of itself.

[A] Morse: The problem is that the university doesn't encourage independent thought. It wants to train men and women who don't think about the evils of this society and whose principal values are consumerism, money worship, fetishistic job security and moral hypocrisy.

[A] Edwards: And as long as that remains its aim, society will go right on heading for hell in a hand basket, and you can expect more uprisings everywhere.

[A] Luce: This litany of doom is beginning to get tiresome. It's absolutely vital for students to think independently, but it's a myth that society will squash them for it—or turn them into robots. I know lots of archheretics and iconoclasts who are also holding very good jobs. The great fiction of total repression and conformity in our society is absurd, because a man can still stand up in this country and speak his mind—and even make a difference—without getting sacked or landing in jail for it.

[A] Hayden: You try handing that bullshit to the people who stood up and spoke their minds in Chicago at the Democratic Convention or in dozens of other places around this country and got beaten or jailed or killed for it. But we don't shrink from that kind of repression and brutality, because it has a great educative function. Ten years ago, I certainly didn't believe the things I believe now; what educated and radicalized me was standing up and speaking my mind—and taking the brutal consequences. Struggling with the power structure in this country is what made me a revolutionary, not reading radical books. That's why I'm still interested in student power. It's unimportant in itself, considering the enormity of the world's problems; but when the students start to fight for their rights, they learn what the establishment is really like, and it makes revolutionaries out of them.

[Q] Playboy: What do you think will happen to these radicalized students when they leave the academic community? How many of them will carry their activism beyond the university, and how many will be co-opted by the system?

[A] Morse: That's a very difficult question. Part of it's going to depend on how the movement maintains contact with its members after they get out of college. One of the problems for a lot of us who are postcollege age has been the fact that when you're on campus, you can just go up to the student union and sit around and find out what's happening: whereas once you're on a 40-hour-a-week job and you have a family, you become very, very isolated unless there's some kind of adult radical organization to relate to. And one of the failures of the white movement so far is that it hasn't created such organizations. Eventually, I think some kind of nationwide revolutionary party will have to be organized, but the time hasn't come for that yet. Meanwhile, we're going to have to develop local community organizations that can, at some future point, provide people with a base so that they don't get left behind. Isolation is what makes people drop out.

[A] Jencks: People don't necessarily have to shed their radicalism when they leave school. There is a good deal of concern in the professions about the adult roles SDS alumni can play. There is a radical "grown-up" organization in New York called the Movement for a Democratic Society, which holds caucuses among various professional groups: doctors, lawyers, academicians. They meet to discuss how they can sustain their involvement and commitment, how they can do something socially useful while holding down a nine-to-five job—and also to make something socially useful out of that nine-to-five job. My impression is that a rather high percentage of SDS alumni stay involved in various active efforts to change society—though they often get less rhetorical about it.

[A] Luce: I think most of the radicals finally cop out. As a friend of mine has pointed out, SDS has the same membership characteristics as a men's room: An awful lot of them go in, do their thing and leave by the other door. It's easy to be a radical on campus, where you're isolated from reality. It's easy to stand up on a platform at a university and call for revolution. It's even easy to raid the president's office or burn the papers of a professor or beat up students who want to go to class; the punishments are almost always minor because of the gentility of the college community. But it's a different story when you leave this insulated environment and go out into the world. Try taking over your boss' office and burning his files and see what happens to you. You'll be canned and probably jailed so fast it'll make your head spin—and there'll be no crap about amnesty. And even if they don't get into trouble, postgraduate radicals discover that their revolutionary fervor doesn't merely lose them friends and ruin their chances for promotion; it also limits their potential for functioning as free and productive individuals.

[A] Hayakawa: I agree very profoundly. But most postgraduate radicals make their adjustments to the system quite unprotestingly; they become prosperous brokers or advertising men or whatever. A good example of this is the fact that, during the Thirties, many of my fellow graduate students were either flirting with communism or became actual members of the party. A few of them stayed with the party through the Forties and Fifties and got prosecuted—and some of them are still in Federal penitentiaries for various violations—but the majority gradually metamorphosed into advertising executives or insurance brokers, joined the teachers union or became scholars in fields unrelated to communism or any other political philosophy, absorbing themselves in literature or Renaissance history and took no more part in politics. The same thing will happen to today's radicals; a small hard core will continue as revolutionaries, but most will cheerfully join the society they now condemn so violently.

[A] Friedenberg: I don't know about that. I suspect that a great many of the black leaders will be co-opted by the system, since all they really want—apart from self-respect—is their fair share of what the system has to offer. But among the white radicals, I am astonished and frightened, as well as really rather deeply moved and impressed, at how few have been co-opted after leaving college.

[A] Hayden: The problem is that while people are students, they simply have more time and more opportunities to take their concern into the street; but when they feel the economic pinch after leaving the university, and the structured opportunities for doing things shrink to zero, and there are no meaningful jobs available, then they must make adjustments. It's not so much that their heart goes out of the cause; it's just that in order to survive, they must work in occupations that have no relevance to either their humanity or the public interest. There are not going to be any easy solutions to this problem. People are going to have to learn how to live off the system by hustling, or to work within it—struggling to form caucuses in the places where they work—without falling into the trap of believing that working within the system is the best or the only way to do things. If they'll get materialism out of their heads, they'll find that it's really very easy to get by in society, that it's easy to live on the fringes of society, that it's easy to get enough money to survive—if they're willing to be failures in traditional career terms. It's striving for what the system calls success that ties you up and keeps you from accomplishing anything meaningful.

[Q] Playboy: What meaningful things do you think the student revolt has accomplished so far?

[A] Morse: The fact that the American people have been hit day after day by student sit-ins, demonstrations and other actions against the war has educated them to what is going on in Vietnam and prevented a consensus from developing in support of the war in this country. That is a tremendously important thing to have done. The revolt is also making a lot of students come face to face with the choices they will have to make and decide whether they will participate in this society as it is or become radicals and participate in movements for social change.

[A] Luce: It's possible that at some schools the protests may have awakened students to the great political, social and racial conflicts that beset the country, but by and large, the few gains achieved on individual campuses have been completely offset by the beginnings of the tremendous backlash we discussed earlier, which is leading to such overreactive steps backward as the refusal of the public to support school-bond issues; next will come the repressive Federal legislation I warned about—legislation that may ultimately outlaw all dissent. In my mind, this is an enormous price to pay for what the radicals have achieved.

[A] Brown: Well, I think many positive things have been accomplished, but foremost among them is the fact that people are finally beginning to take students seriously. Legislators all over the country are talking about how to involve students in the running of the educational system. The students have become a force in this society, and that in itself is a major accomplishment.

[A] Friedenberg: I would agree that a great deal has been accomplished. For one thing, we would have Lyndon Johnson as President of the United Stales right now except for the revolts on the campuses and the war protest. Considering who replaced him, I'm not convinced that this has been an unmixed blessing, but it has certainly accomplished something. I think that a lot of the kids have also begun to sort out which grievances and which kinds of protest are legitimate and significant—in a way that will make their future efforts less fruitless and counterproductive, that will free them to become less pompous and didactic in articulating and pursuing their goals. Protest has freed them from many of society's old shibboleths and hang-ups, and they have begun to realize that society may be youth's enemy, just as youth has been defined as the enemy of society.

[A] Hayden: Yes, and youth is a dangerous enemy. The revolts have shattered the myth that the American power structure is invincible and has permanent authority over the minds of young people in this country. We were raised to believe, by reading C. Wright Mills and Marcuse, that this is a one-dimensional society in which the possibilities for revolutionary change were very, very small, not only because of the coercive powers of the establishment but also because of its adaptive and manipulative powers, which gave it the capability of brainwashing people into contented drones. But this has turned out to be an overly pessimistic analysis, and I think the events of the last decade have established that we are making this a multi dimensional society, that there is not one America and that no one group or power elite has a claim to speak for the American people. That's a monumental achievement, it seems to me, in such a short time. The idea that this is the American century, that America should rule the world and that everyone in this country is happy has been irrevocably shattered. This, in turn, has had a lot to do with triggering revolutionary movements around the world and creating revolutionary questions for people in this country. There is a growing recognition that the universities and colleges don't simply alienate white middle-class students and exclude black people; they also fail to serve the people as a whole. I think we're now on the threshold of transcending our limited role as a student movement and beginning to grow into a movement that will spread beyond the campus and eventually become a majority force in the society.

[Q] Playboy: What is your prognosis for the coming academic year? Is campus protest and disorder likely to continue—and perhaps escalate—or do you foresee a trend toward resolution of the conflicts?

[A] Jencks: I think we're going to see more of the same. The expansion of the movement into high schools is a sign that the situation is likely to become more intense. And on college campuses, the backlash seems to be growing even faster than the protest movement. I see repression, frustration and probably more violence ahead.

[A] Friedenberg: I'm sorry to say that I agree. And the most tragic aspect of this is that the violence is going to come from the establishment, not from the students. Before there is any kind of resolution, any kind at all, I think some students will be imprisoned, some will be killed—and all of them will be terrified. Our prospects are dark, indeed.

[A] Hayakawa: I'm not so pessimistic. I think the forces of reason—let's not call it backlash—will begin to hold sway now. I think the violence has peaked. There will be more trouble, but it will be stopped quickly and firmly. Changes will be made and some problems will be solved, and I think the majority of students and faculty will make it plain that they want to get back to the business of education—not without debate, not without dissent, but surely without violence and disruption.

[A] Brown: You're wrong. There will be more violence, because I don't think the power structure in this country is going to initiate the wholesale changes that will be necessary to make this a humane nation. I think concessions will be made to the movement, but only as stopgap measures, only to cool the pressure. But students aren't going to buy it unless it's real—and especially not black students. Our struggle didn't begin on the campus and it won't end there. There are some bitter days ahead.

[A] Morse: I was a pacifist until about a year ago. I went through the nonviolent civil rights movement and I went through the pacifist anti-war movement. We talked, we pleaded, some even became involved in mainstream politics, only to see their candidates shot down in hotel corridors or railroaded in smoky Chicago back rooms. The movement has sat in, been arrested, beaten, cursed and spat on—but in the end, no one's listened. That leaves us no alternative but revolution.

[A] Luce: It will never happen. Change is badly needed—on the campus, in the civil rights area, in government, everywhere—and young people on the New Right want it as badly as those on the New Left. But we know that the means for change are provided by the Constitution. We're calling for change and not destruction. The New Right is arguing for the freedom of the individual against the collectivist nature of the present Government and the totalitarian proposals of the left wing. No matter how you cut it, the New Left is philosophically socialistic. We on the right want an end to government control over the actions of the individual, not simply a usurpation of that control by New Left totalitarians. I think you'll see more and more students deserting the left and joining the right—not only out of disgust for the senselessness of what has happened this year but out of a desire to get real change accomplished. There may be a few last-ditch pockets of radical resistance in places like Berkeley and Columbia, but very soon I think it will be obvious that the left-wing protest movement on campus is dying.

[A] Edwards: I'm sure the rightists in this country wish we were dying, but the opposite is true. The violent temper is going to become even more intense than it is now. It was set by the establishment, you know, not by the students; they sent their pigs in to brutalize the students long before the students became violent. It's the same old story. Peaceful people with something to say were beaten up by pigs in Selma and Birmingham. Violence has always been their answer to the call for change. Well, now they're going to get a fight. I tell students, "Baby, get a gun and be ready to use it, because if you're killed out there, it won't make any difference whether it's by a pig in a blue uniform or one in a white sheet or one in Army green; you'll be just as dead. So take the whole trip. It wasn't your violence in the South; it wasn't your violence in Chicago; it's not your violence in Vietnam. It's theirs. So answer it. Protect yourself."

[A] Hayden: The establishment is beginning to experiment with fascism. Fascism already exists in Vietnam and in the ghettos; and now, with the events in Berkeley, it's beginning to extend into the white youth culture and the student community. The shooting and killing of James Rector in Berkeley was deliberate; the use of buckshot was deliberate; the torture of prisoners at Santa Rita prison was deliberate; the state-of-emergency regulations at Berkeley are deliberate. And it's the fascist elements of the power structure that are escalating the repression. In Berkeley during the people's-park demonstration, gas dropped from a helicopter drifted into schools where youngsters were trying to learn and into hospitals where children and invalids had to be rushed into oxygen tents. This is the shape of things to come. The power structure is deliberately escalating the conflict in steadily increasing doses, hoping to ready the public to accept higher levels of repression, bigger police budgets, more expulsions from school and prosecution of protesters, etc. Our task is to convince the American people that despite the endless barrage of propaganda against us, we are not their enemy. We think we can do this, just as we helped persuade the people that the war in Vietnam was only in Johnson's interest, not in theirs. We'll make Berkeley Ronald Reagan's Vietnam; he can buy short-term popularity by running on a backlash platform against us, but in the long run he and everything he stands for are doomed. We're at war; it's a war that can destroy America or—as we hope—reconstruct the country on a basis of human values and priorities. It will be a long struggle, and many of us may not live to see the outcome, but we're prepared. The stakes in this war are not just America but the future of the world. We don't intend to lose.

[A] Gallagher: There's no question that we face a period of deeper polarization, more intransigent attitudes, more protests—and therefore more counterprotest and repression. In the universities and colleges, I see more and more administrators of good will caught between disruption and repression, between blacklash and backlash—and rendered impotent. I see other administrators and political forces calling in more police and troops and consequently radicalizing more students. I see more students—and nonstudents—angry and afraid. But the power to choose between destruction and reconstruction is still in our hands. We falter badly; but men, not things, are still in the saddle. If we miss this chance to save what is good about America and to correct what is bad, the fault will lie with the extremists on both sides; but the price will be paid by every American alive—and by millions yet unborn.

[A] While there is still time, we've got to break out of this spiral of violence and hatred before it tears the country apart. We must begin by recognizing that although the tactics used by students are often unjustified and counterproductive, most of their demands and criticisms are generally valid. They must be met not with Mace and clubs and bayonets and injunctions but with forbearance and understanding and—most importantly—with fundamental reforms. We have to realize that the upheaval on campus and in the ghetto is all part of a larger crisis—a crisis in human values. It's a crisis that we still have a chance to resolve if we move now in an all-out effort to remedy the injustices and heal the sicknesses of our society. Racism, poverty and war will not be eradicated overnight; much less will we manage immediately to get rid of such diffuse problems as alienation, hypocrisy and dehumanization. The millennium will not be delivered with the morning milk. But we can avert catastrophe if we have the will to do so. On a massive scale, as our first priority as a nation, we must begin the effort and keep at it. It is not too late for the oncoming generation to be seized by hope born of constructive struggle, to defeat the pessimism that now enthralls "the movement." The greatest crime today is not disorder but the despair that spawns it. We have a great, debt not only to the present generation but to the future. And it must be paid.

Playboy: Looking back on all that's been said, it's our belief that there has never before been such a thorough and searching presentation of opposing viewpoints on the crucial issue of campus dissent. It is superfluous to observe that agreement has not been reached, but you have all done a signal service by taking time from your crowded schedules to cut through the smoke screens of acrimony and ad hominem attack in order to elucidate your positions and analyze (as each of you sees them) the causes of conflict. This, in itself, must be considered an important step toward the ultimate achievement of amity and progress to which all men of good will aspire. We thank you.