The President Who Wouldn't Get Mad

Two long-haired coeds, strumming guitar and banjo, sang "I ain't gonna study war no more" as some 400 students lounged, chatted, laughed and played cards in the offices and corridors of the six-story University of Chicago administration building. Signs propped against the walls suggested the cause for which students had invaded the place: to try to keep draft boards from inducting boys on the basis of class rank. One sign said, DON'T USE MY GRADES TO MURDER STUDENTS--meaning that students who get high marks make their inferiors more vulnerable to conscription. The demonstrators came prepared for a long siege, bringing books, sandwiches, apples and sleeping bags for a more comfortable stay.

Jacqueline, the Pro. The seizure was carried out without a hitch, doubtless because some of the leaders, such as Student Jacqueline Goldberg, a little young lady in tennis shoes, knew all the tricks. Coed Goldberg was a member of the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley. Chicago demonstration leaders used walkie-talkies to coordinate student action, staked out the building floors variously for sleeping, socializing and folk singing, turned the registrar's office into their command post, sent runners out to bring food, and commandeered "broom squads" to pick up litter.

Deftly, Chicago's President George W. Beadle avoided a Berkeley-type slugging match with the students. He and his staff stayed away from the building during the 36-hour occupation. Instead he told the demonstrators that "Those who attempt to coerce in one direction today should realize that a university which bows to this kind of force will bow to other kinds of coercion tomorrow." Economics Professor Gerhard Meyer, a refugee from Hitler's Germany, told the squatters: "This is coercion, morally wrong and self-defeating." Faced with the Beadle tactic of avoiding battle but refusing to surrender, the students, with exams just around the bend, gave in and moved out.

Ado about Nothing. To a majority of Chicago students, the sit-in seemed like much ado about nothing. The university's administration, like that of most U.S. schools, gives grade information to draft boards only on the request of the students concerned. And if a student could not thus prove himself a deferrable brilliant scholar, starting May 14, he could take the Selective Service System's Qualification Test, which many high school seniors could pass. The Chicago sit-in leaders held that the university, by not refusing cooperation with draft boards, is implicitly backing the war in Viet Nam. Beadle's nonbelligerent response showed the argument to be embarrassingly limp.

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