Prospects for Peace, Plans for Defense

As the nation's 7,100,000 college students prepare to return to classes, the question is not whether there will be calm on the campuses but whether the continuing protest wave can be kept below tidal proportions. TIME interviews at a score of institutions last week indicated that many university administrators expect renewed unrest, but they hope that defensive tactics developed from the cruel experiences of recent years, plus concessions to legitimate student demands, will prevent violence and the disruption of entire universities. At Dartmouth, Dean Carroll Brewster was discussing prospects for the fall when a loud noise outside his office window interrupted him. "That's a car, not a shot," he quickly assured his visitor. "I hope it's still a car come October."

In the view of many adults, youth has less to protest about this year than last. Some U.S. troops have been withdrawn from Viet Nam, and presumably more will follow. ROTC is being reduced in status at some schools. Students in many places are gaining a stronger voice in university affairs. Yet to many young people, the pace of change is too slow. The war, the draft, racial tension and poverty still linger. Each class of incoming freshmen in recent years has been more militant than the last; this year's is expected to be no different.

Over the summer, Sam Brown, a former McCarthy campaign aide, has organized a "Viet Nam Moratorium Committee." The group is urging students and faculty across the country to boycott classes on October 15 and devote the day to demonstrating against the war. If the boycott is successful, it will be expanded each month--two days in November, three in December and so on. Separate antiwar demonstrations are planned for the streets of Chicago in October by the dominant wing of Students for a Democratic Society and by the National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Viet Nam. Both could easily stimulate sympathy moves on campus--especially if Mayor Richard Daley's police repeat their performance of August 1968.

Issue of Institutional Racism

Increasingly, students are also taking up more local causes. Says Charles Palmer, 22, new president of the National Students Association: "Viet Nam will still be important, but I think more and more people will be raising the issue of institutional racism." At Duke, for example, Chancellor Pro-Tern Barnes Woodhall expects students to become involved in efforts to unionize the black nonprofessional employees.

The Progressive Labor wing of SDS is turning away from on-campus, student-oriented issues like ROTC and coming to the aid, instead, of oppressed minority groups in the surrounding community. At Michigan, Berkeley and Wisconsin, other radical students and teaching assistants are organizing rent strikes over what they consider to be substandard and overpriced off-campus housing. Efforts such as these could wash back on the universities themselves.

In past years, disorders frequently got out of hand because administrations and faculties were simply not adequately prepared to cope. That is changing. Many universities in recent months have been making firm plans to squelch force as a dissenter's weapon. By commencement time last June, some of the strategy seemed to be successful. Now the practice will be tested for a full school year.

Most administrators are determined to brook no violence. "We are making it clear this year," says University of Houston President Philip Hoffman, "that we are not going to hesitate to bring in the police or the district attorney whenever violence threatens property or life and limb." The University of Miami established a new security office last May; its first director, Fred Doerner Jr., a former legal counsel for the F.B.I., has since hired an assistant and 32 uniformed guards to patrol the campus round the clock.

Dartmouth College administrators, like those at several other institutions, are pleased with the way the court-injunction method worked last spring and plan to repeat the tactic if faced with another building takeover. Yale's strategy, which has been cleared by the faculty, calls first for negotiation, then for police. Many college presidents are reluctant to spell out their tactics clearly in advance, presumably on the theory that uncertainty keeps dissidents off balance. Granville Sawyer, president of predominantly black Texas Southern University, for example, says that his approach involves "a gradual increase of pressure and force until the situation is resolved. I won't tell you how long we would let them occupy a building, but it certainly wouldn't be 24 hours."

Others have chosen to publicize their plans in detail. San Francisco State College President S. I. Hayakawa and San Francisco Mayor Joseph Alioto, for example, have jointly issued specific guidelines covering campus protest. The regulations, says Alioto, boil down to "dissent si, violence no." Violence is defined to include physical blocking of a doorway and occupation of a building as well as throwing bricks and carrying guns. "The city will be prepared to act in advance of possible violence rather than reaction to it," promises Alioto. "We've seen too much of bayonets and buckshot in California."

Satisfying Student Demands That students have had legitimate grievances is now almost universally accepted, and so is the proposition that reforms in advance of crises is the best long-term answer to unrest. The ultra-radicals, of course, can almost never be appeased. But they are relatively impotent if they can win no significant following among the less explosive majority. The concessions being made are therefore aimed at the moderates.

The universities of Wisconsin, Indiana and Minnesota, for example, will all begin black-studies programs for the first time this fall. The University of Iowa will have a new "action-studies program," whereby students can suggest curriculum changes. Northwestern University is including students in a new community council, with faculty and administrators to advise the president on all matters of university policy, and is also turning questions of discipline over to a student board empowered to conduct hearings and appeals on everything short of "major disasters." Cornell University mailed questionnaires to students, faculty and alumni seeking their nominations for a successor to James Perkins, who resigned the presidency after the crisis last spring. Last week the trustees filled the post with the man who was the preferred choice of all three groups, Provost Dale R. Corson, 55.

In an effort to close the generation gap, Maine, Lehigh, Princeton and Vanderbilt have all recently appointed trustees under 30 years old. Most of them are recent graduates. Several state legislatures are considering naming young people to the governing boards of state universities.

George H. Williams, president of American University in Washington, D.C., says he is "very optimistic" because his school has been reducing the number of required courses, encouraging pass-fail grading, and admitting students to the innermost councils of the administration. At Southern Methodist University in Dallas, President Willis Tate called two special conferences of alumni, faculty, administrators and students this summer to discuss "the crisis of the universities." Though the conferees concluded that Tate has the duty to use all necessary force to prevent campus disorder, they also established a student-faculty-administration committee to plan a thorough review and reorganization of the university's decision-making process.

Harvard, Yale, Dartmouth and Brandeis each has not one but two committees working on what is becoming known as "academic governance." Says Dartmouth's Dean Brewster: "Everyone should be given a fair chance to be heard on the critical issues, but the present structure of the college is simply not geared to hearing debate from all parts of the community." While they ponder problems of institutional organization, administrators are going out of their way to prove their tolerance of peaceful student dissent. Brandeis, for instance, has made the main lobby of the administration building available, round the clock, to demonstrators whenever they wish to stage a protest. The Brandeis lobby and similar areas at many other universities will probably not lack enthusiastic performers in the coming months.

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