Retreat of a Reconciler

At private campuses like Harvard and Columbia, most protesters are basically against the moral indifference of affluent America. Things are far earthier at the tuition-free City College of New York, where the great majority of lower-middle-class students shun protest and still believe in education as salvation --the key to affluence. Unfortunately, those yearnings have all but started a race war between some of C.C.N.Y.'s black and white students, a war that may have tragic significance for other public colleges across the U.S. The situation grew so bad last week that C.C.N.Y. President Buell G. Gallagher resigned.

Despite its grimy setting in Harlem, C.C.N.Y. has been a major force in shaping U.S. intellectual life. Created in 1847 by a referendum of the city's people, the college at once set high admission standards and offered free education to thousands of immigrants' children who survived the grinding competition. A kind of proletarian Harvard, it produced a long list of financiers, writers and scientists, including Bernard Baruch, Felix Frankfurter, Upton Sinclair, Lewis Mumford and Jonas Salk. As the flagship campus of the 15-college City University of New York, it now has 20,000 students.

Defying Jim Crow. No man seemed better fitted to head C.C.N.Y. than Buell Gallagher, who took the job in 1952. An ordained Congregational minister, he had spent ten years as president of Alabama's predominantly Negro Talladega College, where "we lived together, Negroes and whites, without any distinction, defying Jim Crow." He had later taught ethics in California and served as assistant U.S. Commissioner of Education. As a scholar, administrator and civil libertarian, Gallagher zealously defended C.C.N.Y.'s academic excellence and fought hard to meet the rising educational aspirations of the city's growing Negro and Puerto Rican population.

Unhappily, those goals conflicted. To help minority group students, C.C.N.Y. admitted and gave special tutoring to less-qualified freshmen, but the numbers remained low. In April, 200 black and Puerto Rican students locked themselves inside the gates of the college's south campus. They wanted admissions policy to reflect the racial composition of the city's high schools, which are 45% nonwhite, compared with 12% at C.C.N.Y. They demanded control of faculty hiring and firing in the tutoring program, and a separate degree-granting school of black and Puerto-Rican studies. Backed by the politically appointed board of higher education, which controls C.C.N.Y., Gallagher closed the college to permit undisturbed negotiations.

Awaiting Justice. That tactic immediately roused assorted candidates for New York's forthcoming mayoralty campaign. They demanded that Gallagher reopen the college. He refused, fearing racial violence. When his politically sensitive board then directed him to resume classes, Gallagher said that he would "go to jail" rather than use police to clear the campus. Last week the south campus occupiers finally decamped under court order. But when school reopened, bitter fighting broke out between blacks and whites. As angry whites saw it, the long shutdown had damaged their education, while mass admission of blacks and Puerto Ricans threatened to devalue their diplomas.

Three days of disruptions and bloody racial battles, the burning of the student auditorium and "the intrusion of politically motivated outside forces" persuaded Gallagher to quit. "A man of peace, a reconciler, a man of compassion must stand aside for a time and await the moment when sanity returns, and brotherhood based on justice becomes a possibility," said Gallagher. Other presidents of public colleges, equally subject to racial strife, could only regard his defeat with foreboding.

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