Spring of Discontent

IT was the first full week of the spring semester on many campuses, and students responded to the symbolic change of seasons by provoking a spate of violent clashes with authorities. Almost everywhere, the "confrontations," as the students like to call them, were precipitated by the now familiar demands of black students and their white sympathizers. They were asking for segregated student facilities, more courses in black culture, more black students and teachers, and a greater voice in the hiring and firing of faculty. Even where efforts are being made to meet their demands, they are still unsatisfied. In some cases, uncompromising campus militants seem more interested in disorganizing college administrations than in reorganizing curriculums. Often, they are succeeding. And school authorities and government officials, for the most part, are taking an increasingly hard-line approach to the student rebels. Items: >At the University of Wisconsin in Madison, National Guardsmen were called in to restore order after black students and their allies had disrupted classes for three days. "The university will not be closed down," flatly declared Governor Warren P. Knowles, who first sent in 900 troopers, then dispatched another 1,000 the next day as the number of rebels grew from 1,500 to 5,000 overnight. Using clubs, tear gas and bayonets, the Guardsmen and police dispersed numerous bands of student strikers; 21 students were arrested. Determined not to give in to student demands for a voice in faculty appointments and amnesty for all demonstrators --past, present and future--Chancellor H. Edwin Young vowed that the troops will remain "as long as needed." But at week's end, he announced that they would be withdrawn for "tonight, Saturday, Sunday and forever"--provided there were no new disturbances. -- At Duke University in Durham, N.C., some 70 members of the Afro-American Society seized the ground floor of the administration building, dubbed it the "Malcolm X Liberation School" and held it for ten hours. Their principal desire: a black-studies program similar to those being started at Harvard, Yale and other Northern schools. When university officials finally gave the students one hour to vacate the building or face criminal prosecution, the rebels abandoned their sit-in. But just as it seemed that violence had been avoided by the administration's firmness, a 90-minute brawl erupted between police, the black protesters and 1,000 white student supporters. After tear gas and clubs failed to break up the demonstration, the police departed under a fusillade of insults. By then, three dozen students and police had been injured; five people, four of them Duke students, were arrested. Governor Robert W. Scott quickly placed the North Carolina National Guard on alert.

-At City College of New York, 100 members of an organization that calls itself "The Black and Puerto Rican Student Community" angrily spurned what C.C.N.Y. President Buell G. Gallagher called "affirmative answers to all their demands," occupied the administration building, broke into Gallagher's office and sampled his private stock of liquor. Despite the provocations, C.C.N.Y. officials tried the tactic of ignoring the demonstrators, and it worked--for the moment. After four hours, the students left.

> At the University of Illinois at Urb ana-Champaign, students tried several ways of disrupting the campus. About 200 of them, led by members of Students for a Democratic Society, staged a "grovel-in" in the driveway of University President David D. Henry's house and read off a list of grievances including an appeal for more black students and a condemnation of the school's "white racist" policies. The students also tried to tie up telephone lines to administrative offices and to book appointments with campus officials in an effort to keep them too busy to perform their jobs. Nonetheless, Illinois was able to hold classes on schedule. -- At Roosevelt University in Chicago, black students dramatized the usual list of demands by taking over classes in psychology, political science and literature from regular teachers and delivering their own black-oriented lectures. After meeting with the dissidents, Dean of Students Lawrence Silverman announced that he had negotiated a truce, but the students evidently felt otherwise. They sent Silverman a note declaring their intention to continue disrupting classes "by any means necessary," then made good their threat by taking over a history class the very next day. Having warned them that further disruptions could lead to expulsion, Silverman must now prepare to take action against the defiant students.

> At Berkeley, members of the Third World Liberation Front, which is composed of blacks, Mexican Americans, Chinese Americans and other racial minorities, extended their strike for an autonomous college of ethnic studies into a third week. Though the university has not been seriously disrupted by the strikers so far, the daily campus demonstrations mounted to new violence last week as police battled students near Sather Gate. Thirty-five people were arrested on charges of obstructing a public thoroughfare, bringing the total number of arrests made during the strike to 75. With T.W.L.F. leaders committed to accepting no compromise, no immediate end to the dispute was in prospect.

Nothing that U.S. students did last week, however, quite measured up to what happened north of the border at Sir George Williams University in downtown Montreal. There, students protesting alleged racism on the part of a young white biology teacher climaxed a 13-day occupation of the school's computer center by turning it into a shambles. They started a major fire in the building, littered the street with a blizzard of blank punch cards, and, like latter-day Luddites, demolished the two computers with axes. Riot police broke through barricades and arrested 97 people, but not before the rioters had done more than $2,000,000 of damage, twice the previous record for destruction of property, which was set only last month by radicals at Tokyo University.

Whether or not the final rampage in Montreal was provoked by the arrival of police, the damage was clearly out of all proportion to the grievances, real or imagined. Said Acting Principal Douglass Clarke: "The time for generosity is over." Clarke said he intends to press charges against the rebels, who have been booked for half a dozen kinds of conspiracy and are being held without bail. "Painful as the task may be," Clarke explained, "the university has the duty to see that academic freedom is preserved and that no one is permitted to threaten or destroy its functions." If tried and convicted, the rioters--28 of whom are not even students at Sir George Williams--could receive prison sentences stretching from five years to life.

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