The Spectrum on Viet Nam

Campus Vietniks, dominating head lines with protest parades, teach-ins, draft-card burnings and fund drives for the Viet Cong, have made it appear that a majority of U.S. students share their views. Now, mainly in reaction to the protesters, overt campus activity in support of U.S. policy is growing. As a petition signed by 1,300 Harvard stu dents puts it, many students "wish to disassociate ourselves from that vocal minority which, distrusting American intentions, seeks to obstruct and mis represent American policy."

Petitions backing U.S. policy are becoming commonplace on campuses. Students at Michigan State gathered 15,897 signatures, at Minnesota 9,000, at Southern Illinois University more than 4,500, at University of Texas near ly 4,000 in just three days, at St. Louis University 2,453, at Stanford 2,300, at Yale 1,000. Contributing 40-c- each, 1,002 students at Princeton sent a $393* telegram to General William Westmoreland's headquarters in Saigon to state their appreciation of "the sacrifices" U.S. troops are making.

Gurgle Drive. Coeds at the University of Texas have written 700 letters to U.S. soldiers in Viet Nam, although Sophomore Barinetta Scott explains that "this is not a pro Viet Nam policy project, it's pro American boys." At Stanford 380 students volunteered to give blood for military and civilian casualties in South Viet Nam; Ohio State held a similar "bleed-in." Michigan State students "adopted" the village of Lang Yen, 60 miles north of Saigon, and so far have sent $740 to help build a school and a marketplace. Two groups have sprung up at Williams to ridicule the Vietnik demonstrators. One, called Gurgle, plans a ten-mile drive between two taverns "to protest nothing." An other, the Student Committee for Restricted Escalated Warfare (SCREW) mimicked a protest demonstration held by the left-wing Students for a Demo cratic Society.

Most serious of the new pro-U.S. organizations is CONSCIENCE (The Com mittee on National Student Citizenship in Every National Case of Emergency), launched at Stanford by two Princeton transfers who said they felt "uncomfortable" over the "incredible extremism on all sides" in California. CONSCIENCE, which is organizing a nationwide "lecture-in" on Nov. 22, argues that pro tests only "discourage the Viet Cong from seeking a peaceful settlement in Viet Nam." Last week CONSCIENCE Chairman Hal Scott invaded the Vietniks' favorite stage, the Sproul Hall steps at the University of California's Berkeley campus, drew 500 listeners. A nearby rally to raise medical supplies for the North Vietnamese mustered only 100 spectators, mostly newsmen.

Magnified Image. The increased pro-U.S. activity has helped create a wide spectrum of student opinion that can be broken into fairly definable categories. On the left are the activist Vietniks, eager to protest the war; next are the doves, who oppose the U.S. role but shun demonstrations; and in the middle are the apathetics, who simply are not concerned enough to think through their own stand. Then come the pragmatists, who may have little enthusiasm for the war but feel that the U.S. is committed to fight it, and on the right the hawks, who are eager to demonstrate their all-out support of the war.

Probably the two most leftist major student bodies are those at Berkeley and the University of Chicago. Even there, the Vietnik images have been much magnified. The best on-the-scene estimate of Berkeley sentiment sees 10% of the students as Vietniks, 15% as doves, 30% as apathetics, 35% as pragmatists, 10% as hawks. Chicago, where every student feels obliged to have an opinion, splits roughly in half over the war. But when Vietniks there tried to get the student body to protest the war and back an intelligence-insulting petition accusing the U.S. of "tacit or active collaboration in the use of torture and other war crimes," a student referendum rejected the proposal, 2,846 to 981.

Elsewhere, pragmatists plus a small minority of hawks dominate campuses. They account for about 90% of the students at Williams, 80% at Princeton and the University of Nebraska, 65% at Texas, 50% at Harvard and Wisconsin. Yale has some 800 hawks and 1,000 pragmatists among its 4,000 undergrads --plus about 1,500 apathetics.

The pragmatic view, which also dominates the University of Southern California, is--in the words of Mery Garber, editor of the U.S.C. Daily Trojan--that "if the U.S. doesn't make a stand in South Viet Nam, it will have to do so somewhere else." The pragmatists also object to rehashing the past. "Those people still debating why we went in are beating a dead horse," says Wisconsin's Daily Cardinal Managing Editor Jean Sue Johnson. "There's no way to just pack up and go home."

Few of those who favor U.S. policy are playing hero. "It's pretty difficult to demonstrate in favor of a war that you might have to fight," says one draftable pragmatist at Williams. And most students, if only by their immersion in humanities, suffer over the inhumanity of war. But the bulk of them also seem to find a higher order of responsibility in standing firm than they do in "packing up and going home."

* The other $7.80 was spent on pizzas for the organizers.

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