Campus Communiqu

As some college officials tell it, the student "revolution" is dying or dead. According to Chicago's Urban Research Corp., which monitors student unrest, that is anything but true. In fact, major campus disruptions have increased this year to a rate of more than one per day. Last week, as the spring riot season neared, the tumult worsened at troubled campuses across the U.S.

> At Cornell, racial tension returned. Angry blacks looted and vandalized the new university store, started a bonfire of stolen goods, and roamed the campus, breaking windows and overturning cars. The rampage came in response to a $100,000 fire--apparently set by arsonists--that recently gutted the Africana Studies and Research Center. The fire destroyed the year-old center's library, and a number of manuscripts. It also reminded many that a cross burning last spring helped provoke the much publicized seizure of the student union by armed blacks. In sympathy last week, 150 white students staged a sit-in at the trustees' office to support the blacks' demands for a new center building and black guards to protect black housing. Cornell President Dale R. Corson asked the FBI to probe the fire and posted a $10,000 reward to help catch the arsonists. As black anger deepened, Corson imposed an 11 p.m.-to-7 a.m. campus curfew and got a court injunction to prevent further disruption.

> At Hunter College, a coalition of 17 militant student groups chained doors, blocked hallways, raided cafeterias, and virtually shut down the 19,000-student (mostly women) school's campus in Manhattan. The so-called "People's Coalition" made 34 demands, including equal student and faculty representation on all policymaking bodies, greater autonomy for the Black and Puerto Rican Studies department, and curriculum changes at Hunter High School, which is affiliated with the college. Mrs. Jacqueline Wexler, a former nun who recently became Hunter's new president, agreed with many of the demands and suspended classes to permit broader participation in negotiations, but she refused to deal only with the radical demonstrators. She was also reluctant to call in the police. "I'm not about to give them a holocaust they can drum up student sympathy with," she said.

> At Stanford, President Kenneth Pitzer posted guards outside the ROTC classroom building to repel antiwar student raiders. The move came in response to two weeks of almost daily rallies and vandalism inspired by a recent faculty vote that may restore academic credit (barred last April) to ROTC. During the turmoil, one student was found trying to turn his Mustang into a fire bomb by soaking it with gasoline. On April Fools' Day, a masked assailant poured a bucket of red paint over Pitzer.

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