Two Perceptions

Most Americans view campus tumult through one lens: the press. How should that lens be adjusted? At its annual convention in Manhattan last week, the American Newspaper Publishers Association heard notable answers from two outspoken educators--each of whom expressed a totally different perception of the current student generation.

According to S.I. Hayakawa, president of San Francisco State College, "there is something very pernicious about liberal arts education." Recalling that privileged youths were the first to receive such training, he warned that students who consider themselves "educated to rule" are the first to display "contempt for middle-class values." The "aristocratic, elitist bent" of some liberal arts students, he said, leads easily to their "profound contempt for democracy." Continued Hayakawa: "If the majority of students at Stanford vote for the continuance of ROTC, the elitists will say they'll shut it down anyhow. 'What the hell does the majority know?' they ask."

Class Bias. Hayakawa argued that journalists with a liberal arts background may lend "a class bias to much media coverage of the news." He noted that he himself had to appear in a "picturesque tam-o'-shanter" in order to lure press interest away from the antics of the militants at San Francisco State. By frequently giving the best coverage to the most outrageous students, Hayakawa warned, "the media themselves are setting the stage for serious disturbances in the future."

In contrast, Yale President Kingman Brewster Jr. asked the press to show greater sympathy for the issues raised by student dissenters. An increasing number of "potentially constructive critics, skeptics and heretics," he warned, "are being driven into the ranks of those enraged destructivists who would tear down the system." Even less militant students are beginning to wonder why "basic questions seem ducked, glossed over or ruled out of debate." Said Brewster: "The killing in Viet Nam goes on without prospect of an end, the poor get poorer, the dedication to racial equality is pushed back to the inner limits of constitutional necessity."

Real Questions. As Brewster sees it:

"Most students are smart enough to know there are no easy answers. But they would like their elders to admit that the questions are real." This, he feels, is the responsibility of both the press and the universities. The problems will not be solved quickly, "but the chance of our children to solve them will depend greatly on two things: first, whether or not the younger generation feels that the critic, the skeptic and the heretic are still welcome, even honored and respected, in the United States; and second, whether or not they feel that the channels of communication, persuasion and change are truly open, as the Bill of Rights intended they should be." Warned Brewster: "The ability of universities and newspapers to defend and to utilize their freedom will have much to do with the ability of the young to keep their faith in freedom."

After polling 60,447 U.S. college teachers, the Carnegie Commission on Higher Education reports that the majority, in effect, agreed with Brewster on foreign affairs but sided with Hayakawa's views on campus disruption. While more than half hoped to end the war quickly, 76% thought that disrupters should be expelled, and 80% felt that disruptive student militants are a threat to academic freedom.

Though two-thirds agreed that any school with many blacks should offer black studies, 57% of the teachers were unwilling to lower standards to admit more minority-group students, and 75% opposed relaxing academic requirements to put more minority members on faculties. Still, not all student complaints were rejected. Almost half the teachers believed that most U.S. colleges reward student conformity and crush the creative; 69% agreed that education would improve if courses were made more "relevant" to contemporary life. As Hayakawa might have predicted, faculty in the humanities were more sympathetic to campus radicals than teachers of science, engineering, medicine and other professions. Even so, those most committed to activist goals were not humanities teachers but social scientists.

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