Bonaparte's Retreat

Ever since the student protest movement at the University of California degenerated into a naughty-naughty display of obscene words in March, it has fallen into impotent fragments. Last week Mario Savio, the protest leader who got so much attention that he quit his studies to protest full time, mounted his customary podium on Berkeley's Sproul Hall steps to tell 3,000 students that he was quitting as leader of the Free Speech Movement.

Apart from his usual tirade against Cal's "institutional tyranny," Savio did not really explain what was bothering him or what he expects to do now. His cryptic excuse for quitting was: "Lest I feel deserving of the charge of 'Bonapartism,' which even I sometimes have made against myself, I'd like to wish you good luck and goodbye." In a rambling letter to the campus Daily Californian, Savio indicated that he had not lost his selfesteem. "I should do a great disservice to our community if I were to make myself indispensable," he wrote. "And in recent weeks I have become very nearly indispensable."

Actually, Savio had failed to stir any widespread campus sympathy for his latest claim that the university had ignored "due process" in suspending three students for taking part in the "filthy-speech movement" and flatly expelling one: Savio's longtime F.S.M. Crony Arthur Goldberg. At a later rally, some 2,500 students gathered to hear a few remaining F.S.M. members announce that the organization was being dissolved. In its place, insisted Jack Weinberg, an unemployed former Cal student, would grow a "Free Student Union" patterned after oldtime trade unions and open to "all students who are interested in anything." Students drifted away in droves before the rally was over.

But the Berkeley crisis and its myriad interpretations--and misinterpretations--were certain to linger long and spread far. Last week the Student Association at the University of Strathclyde in Scotland voted 72 to 66 to disassociate itself from Strathclyde's plan to award an honorary degree to Cal's President Clark Kerr. The students protested his "illiberal views over the rights of the students of the University of California to organize themselves on the campus." The Glasgow students had it all wrong. If anything, Kerr had handled the student rebellion too gingerly.

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