Columbia: Threat of Chaos

Despite the bitter violence of last spring's rebellion, Columbia University's summer session has been surprisingly placid. Student radicals quietly conducted their own "Summer Liberation School" in a university-owned frat house, enticing nearly 600 young activists to such courses as racism in textbooks and Marxist philosophy. An uncoordinated assortment of trustee, alumni, faculty and student committees ponderously probed the campus problems --but to such little effect that chaos is likely to greet the reopening of classes next month.

Remote Powers. Despite the need to ease tension on the campus, the administration of President Grayson Kirk has concentrated on defining new procedures for handling discipline and demonstrations. Kirk has also called in a major Manhattan public relations agency to advise the university--a move that smacks more of image building than real change. His only concrete concession to reform so far has been the appointment of Associate English Professor Carl F. Hovde as new Dean of Columbia College. Hovde is an admirer of student activists and welcomes the fact that the spring rebellion shook the place up. Most students, he believes, only want "a university in which they can in every sense believe." Despite Hovde's appointment, even one of the university's administrators contends that Kirk still "hasn't the slightest idea of what happened last year. He's a Bourbon--he learns nothing and forgets nothing."

The board of trustees, who promised a re-examination of the entire governing structure of the university, has offered nothing specific so far. Apparently fed up with the unresponsiveness of both trustees and administrators to the need for change, Columbia's journalism dean, Edward W. Barrett, resigned this month after complaining about "authoritarian rule by remote, inaccessible powers." He urged that younger people, including some students and faculty, be made trustees (the average age is now 62). In filling a new vacancy, the board last week ignored this advice, passed over such proposed candidates as Negro Psychologist Kenneth Clark to select its usual type: Wall Street Investment Banker Harold A. Rousselot, 61.

The only detailed plan offered so far this summer has come from the university's Alumni Federation, which expressed "unreserved pride" in Kirk, called for stern limits on protests and stronger student government. It also proposed the creation of a 15-man board of visitors to check out complaints about the operation of each of the university's 15 schools. The boards would include trustee-appointed alumni, students, administrators and outside specialists. But Kirk is cool even to that modest proposal.

If the stalemate is to be broken before classes resume, the only hope seems to lie with the faculty. An Executive Committee of the Faculty, officially recognized by trustees and the administration, has appointed a fact-finding commission headed by former U.S. Solicitor General Archibald Cox. While the independent Cox commission studies the causes of the campus disorders, the faculty committee is debating the final form of proposals for change. It is expected to suggest the creation of a faculty senate, a more representative student assembly, and a "collegium" composed of students, faculty, administrators and neighborhood groups. But other faculty members contend that the only way to ease campus antagonisms is to kick Kirk upstairs to a fund-raising post. They also urge the dismissal of criminal charges pending against some 700 protesters, arrested for criminal trespass and resisting arrest. Many of them are slated for trial in September. If such pacifying moves are not made in the next few weeks, argues one committee member, "we might just as well give up and get in some tennis."

Back to Tennis. Columbia's administrators can find little comfort in the fact that the radical Strike Coordinating Committee, which led the rebellion, is in its customary state of confusion over tactics. Some of its leaders want a massive new confrontation with the university as classes open, on the theory that administrators will react harshly, thus generating sympathy for the militants. Others have proposed more subtie harassments, such as gumming up registration by filing wrong information on computer cards. In any case, the administration is preparing for the worst. Last week workmen were installing thick, rockproof Plexiglas windows in Kirk's Low Library office.

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