Toward Reform at Columbia

"Our style of politics is to clarify the enemy, to put him up against the wall," says Mark Rudd, 20, Columbia's leading advocate of student power. Unmistakably up against the wall following the student seizure of five campus buildings, the university last week all but suspended formal undergraduate classes and canceled final exams. At the same time, however, a sense of fresh purpose seemed to be infecting almost everybody on the Morningside Heights campus except Rudd and his radical followers.

The majority of students, faculty members and administration officials appeared to be genuinely interested in undertaking a creative dialogue on how to best lift the university out of the chaos wrought by the demonstrations. Leading the effort was an executive committee of twelve professors, set up by the faculties of Columbia's 15 schools, that won administration commitment to the principle of an increased role in university operations for both students and faculty.

The Game of Trustee. Sealed off to all but those bearing university identification cards, the Columbia campus had an almost festive air. Leaflets dealing with strike issues flooded the campus, and loudspeakers blared out impassioned oratory. A rock band entertained students with well-amplified sounds, and at one point a pro-rebel group staged a mock funeral procession. A group called the Pageant Players acted out skits lampooning the administration, and played a game of their own invention called "Trustee" on what resembled an outsize Monopoly board.

Picketed by strikers, many university classroom buildings were almost empty, but students and teachers convened on campus lawns or in private apartments to resume their work. One art-history instructor had his class meet him, appropriately, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art; a class in Oriental civilization gathered at the New Moon Inn, a Chinese restaurant. Leaders of the strike boasted that all courses held outside of university buildings were really "liberation classes"--and issued daily mimeographed listings of time and location for such courses as "liberated French" and "liberated genetics."

Meanwhile, the campus was being kept in ferment by Rudd, an improbable young revolutionary from a middle-class neighborhood in Maplewood, N.J., whose father deals in real estate, is a lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army Reserve. Capable of inflammatory rhetoric on an improvised platform but often disarmingly polite with his professorial elders. Mark Rudd is a B +average junior majoring in European history. A one time Boy Scout troop leader, Rudd joined the Columbia branch of Students for a Democratic Society last year, lives in an off-campus apartment adorned with posters of Mao and Che (he visited Cuba earlier this year), has tutored youngsters in Harlem in his spare time.

As head of the Columbia student strike, Rudd was clearly trying to shut down the university completely. He led midday rallies at Low Library, threatened to defy university regulations by organizing another demonstration inside a campus building, staged a confrontation with New York City police outside the university's main gate in order to challenge the ban against outsiders on campus. On cue, some 1,000 demonstrators gathered at Broadway and 116th Street. But there was no repetition of the bloody clashes that had marked the previous week's events. Police shrugged off the student taunts, and within two hours the crowd dispersed.

The police were also shrugging off charges of brutality that had arisen from their earlier removal of demonstrators from the occupied campus buildings. After conducting his own investigation. Commissioner Howard Leary insisted that force had been necessary because his men encountered "a good deal of resistance" in entering the buildings. A broader--and presumably more disinterested--study of the disturbances was being conducted by a five-man fact-finding committee appointed by the university and headed by Harvard Law Professor Archibald Cox, former U.S. Solicitor General.

Dropping a Charge. One unanswered question was how the university would discipline participants in the student uprising. S.D.S. leaders--backed by most students--were demanding a general amnesty for everyone, including the 698 who were arrested by police breaking up the siege. A university disciplinary committee recommended that criminal-trespass charges be dropped, but that the rebels be placed on probation for a year and those guilty of theft or vandalism be suspended or expelled. Backed by the trustees, Columbia President Grayson Kirk insisted that the trespass charges could not be dropped; reluctantly, he agreed to let the committee have final disciplinary authority in dealing with students.

At week's end the main hope for restoring peace at Columbia rested with the faculty--and with the majority of students who, while appalled by the police raid and desirous of change, were beginning to doubt whether they really wanted to take over the university after all. Quite clearly, the university was due for "restructuring"--Columbia's word of the week--although even the faculty committee responsible for recommending changes was not sure how. As Philosophy Lecturer Vincent E. Smith told a class last week: "You can't order a reformation Sunday and expect to have it by breakfast on Monday."

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