The Bung & the Trough

It was the kind of explosion that occasionally shatters the peace & quiet of a U.S. campus. A popular teacher had been fired, students picketed in his defense, and in the flame and smoke of controversy it soon became hard to tell who was right, or what the shooting was about.

At little Olivet College, a school of Congregational leanings in Olivet, Mich., T. Barton Akeley, 47, had taught political science for twelve years. To townspeople of rural, conservative Olivet, Akeley was a queer fellow: he wore a goatee and a beret, held unpopular opinions, and once appeared downtown in shorts. Some of the alumni looked askance at him: he was critical of fraternities and intercollegiate sports. And to some of Olivet's 17-man board of trustees, Akeley's self-admitted "general disposition to be critical" about college affairs was a stiff pain in the neck.

"How Do You Know?" But most of Akeley's students liked him. To his partisans, he was a Socrates who left no orthodoxy, no complacency and no institution unexamined ("What do you know? How do you know it?"). When two months ago the trustees slipped Socrates the hemlock ("Your usefulness . . . has been fulfilled"), Akeley's student followers picketed the president's office in protest.

Olivet had a brand-new president, cigar-puffing Aubrey L. Ashby, 62, a onetime vice president and general counsel of NBC, and no man to tolerate academic nonsense. He had grave doubts about Olivet's tutorial system, in which Akeley had been a leader. Said he: "A college is like a business--plus . . . When you defy constituted authority, all you have left is anarchy. Student expression has been allowed to run wild here over a period of years. We're not against student expression, but it must run through channels." And faculty critics were worse: "You can't feed at the trough and pull the bung out at the same time . . ." In his convocation address, Ashby promised to use DDT on erring faculty and students.

"An Even Break." Board President Frank W. Blair was certain that Akeley's dismissal would help debt-ridden Olivet increase its endowments; potential donors, he said, had been "discouraged" by the views of "some of the faculty." Olivet's respected town banker, George C. Tyson, was obviously one of the discouraged. Said he: "I couldn't accuse them of being Communists or Reds but they were . . . pink . . . Seems to be in all the colleges--even permeates the churches. A number of us businessmen of the town were hoping to get an administration that would give the businessmen an even break in the discussion of issues. . ."

The American Civil Liberties Union was not so hopeful about Olivet's future. Reported its investigating committee: "It is apparent that Dr. Ashby does not understand the traditions and conditions of academic freedom and responsibility . . ."

On the campus of New York's City College last week, students kicked up a rumpus not because a professor was fired but because he wasn't.

William E. Knickerbocker, 63, chairman of the romance languages department, has been a C.C.N.Y. teacher for 41 years, and eligible to retire for the past six. Three years ago, four members of his department charged Knickerbocker with anti-Semitic sayings & doings; he denied the charges, and the Board of Higher Education exonerated him. Even after New York's City Council unanimously recommended that he be fired, the board stuck by him.

When school started this fall, students marched out of his class. Faced with a rash of sitdown strikes and mass meetings, the administration decided to allow the strikers to transfer to other teachers. Last week the Student Council polled the student body on whether Knickerbocker should be dismissed. For: 4,440; against, 564. The vote was binding on nobody, but at least it showed Professor Knickerbocker exactly where he stood.

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