The Need to Speak Out

In Washington, D.C. last weekend, students by the thousands shuffled in picket lines before the White House on behalf of disarmament with controls, got an early assist from the President himself, who ordered a five-gallon coffee urn sent out. A delegation invited inside found presidential aides lined up to listen. Emerging pleased as punch, one "Turn Toward Peace" picketeer reported, "They said we were a nice balance to the 'cold warriors.' " In the halls of Congress, the disarmament group got shorter shrift from California's Chet Holifield, chairman of the Joint Congressional Atomic Energy Committee. "Somebody has filled 'em full of baloney," grumped Holifield. "You try to talk to them and they just repeat what they've been told." With demonstrations and proclamations--and also with moderate voices and measured argument--students across the nation are astir with a new enthusiasm, and in the process the anemic boredom voguish in the '50s has disappeared.

At U.C.L.A., students voted last week to send $5,000 off to Mississippi to buy appeal bonds for five Freedom Riders. At the University of Chicago, a two-week round-the-clock sit-in outside the president's office won students the right to argue their demand for integration of 150 university-owned apartment houses. At Swarthmore, students from 57 campuses spent the weekend in disarmament seminars. And at the University of California in Berkeley, rallies, demonstrations and caucuses boiled incessantly outside Sather Gate, a casbah for political activists.

Last year on 353 campuses, 315 new political groups formed: 169 conservative, 146 liberal. This year the pace is even faster. Yet the full measure of this new taste for the world's affairs cannot be taken by counting membership lists. For many students, any sort of label seems a libel. At the very source of campus political vigor is a weariness of all formula ideology as too often doctrinaire and compromised.

Agnostics for Catholics. At the Roman Catholic University of Santa Clara, students formed a group to invite agnostic, anticlerical speakers to the campus. At Northwestern, student funds are being spent on a big scale to bring advocates of all causes into college forums. With a sense of moral purpose, students have adopted countless ideological orphans. "In a week of passing through Sather Gate," says Berkeley's Political Science Professor Eugene (The Ugly American) Burdick, "I must pick up 100 pieces of literature urging me to do things like send textbooks to the Philippines or get a fallout-shelter booklet and send it back to Kennedy."*

At Harvard, the "constructive conservative" journal Advance took sharp measure of the Republican Party in its current issue, pronounced it a failure since 1930, criticized its congressional leadership, appraised G.O.P. prospects, and handed out advice: "You have to play to win." The issue won praise from Richard Nixon, and a sharp slap from Republican National Chairman William Miller.

But the causes students champion seem more often moral than solely political. Everywhere civil rights is a crusade, and with its sit-ins and Freedom Rides, it has set the mood of passive insistence that lends a Gandhiesque color to the other causes--banning the bomb, abolishing capital punishment and the House Un-American Activities Committee. Along with this new taste for national affairs has come a killing ennui for student government. On several campuses, 'the student government has been simply abandoned.

They Know More. What accounts for the new concern? At Harvard, Chicago, California, Wisconsin and Ohio State, conservatism in the student body has been interpreted as a revolt against liberal faculties. But this only spurs liberals among the students to greater efforts. At the University of Washington. Historian Giovanni Costigan says that the resurgence of liberalism on his campus came when "the tactics of the right-wingers outraged the students' sense of fair play."

More fundamentally, students simply know more than they did ten years ago, can reason from better grounds. The moral imperatives that lie at the base of the complexities of science and politics create a sense of involvement for everyone.

* The Government has distributed, mostly through post offices, 30 million copies of its rosy-viewed Fallout Protection: What to Know and Do About Nuclear Attack. Nearly 4,000 have been sent back to Washington as a gesture of rejection of the shelter concept.

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