How to Roast a Marshmallow

Never known for his reluctance to discuss any question, Vice President Spiro Agnew spoke out last week on campus violence. Addressing a Republican dinner at Fort Lauderdale, Fla., the Vice President delivered a speech that went largely unreported. Yet, though unremarked, it was, even by Agnewistic standards, remarkable. He took a hard line on student radicals and the militant left, urged a return to oldtime religion, and continued his earlier attacks on parts of the American intellectual community. Blasting those university authorities who "capitulate" to militant student demands, he laid down a program for preventing and dealing with campus disturbances. Excerpts from Agnew's speech:

LET us not be naive enough to believe that there are no seeds of revolution in the rebellion that radical young people describe as "the movement." Let us be candid enough to face the fact that the spawning ground and sanctuary of the movement is the American university. Few institutions are more vital to a free society; none is so susceptible to capture and destruction by the radical left. Small wonder, then, that each year a new group of impressionable consumers falls victim to the totalitarian ptomaine dispensed by those who disparage our system.

The real pity is that many of the students of our universities really feel that the theatrical radicals are the architects of a brave, new compassionate world, spiced with "rock" music, "acid" and "pot." There is a . . . group of students committed to radical change through violent means. Some of these may be irretrievable; all will require very firm handling. This is the criminal left that belongs not in a dormitory, but in a penitentiary. The criminal left is not a problem to be solved by the department of philosophy or the department of English--it is a problem for the Department of Justice.

When peace comes through appeasement and capitulation that sellout is intellectual treason. A concise and clear set of rules for campus conduct should be established, transmitted to incoming freshmen, and enforced enforced--with immediate expulsion the penalty for serious violations. The rule of reason is the guiding principle in an academic community, and those who apply the rule of force have no business there. It is folly for universities confronted with their current crisis in our turbulent times to open their doors to thousands of patently unqualified students. [President Robben] Fleming [of the University of Michigan, who acceded to black students' demands for the enrollment of 900 black students by 1971] buckled under to a few squads of kid extortionists. As for the vigor of my criticism of President Fleming, it was conscious--based on the old Cub Scout theory that the best way to put a tough coat on a marshmallow is to roast it.

We must look to how we are raising our children. They are, for the most part, the children of affluent, permissive, upper-middle-class parents who learned their Dr. Spock and threw discipline out the window--when they should have done the opposite. They are the children dropped off by their parents at Sunday school to hear the "modern" gospel from a "progressive" preacher more interested in fighting pollution than fighting evil--one of those pleasant clergymen who lifts his weekly sermons out of old newsletters from a National Council of Churches that has cast morality and theology aside as "not relevant" and set as its goal on earth the recognition of Red China and the preservation of the Florida alligator. Today, by the thousands--without a cultural heritage, without a set of spiritual values, and with a moral code summed up in that idealistic injunction "Do your own thing," Junior--his pot and Portnoy secreted in his knapsack--arrives at "the Old Main" and finds there a smiling and benign faculty even less demanding than his parents.

We must look to the university that receives [our] children. Is it prepared to deal with the challenge of the non-democratic left? One modest suggestion for my friends in the academic community: the next time a mob of students, waving their non-negotiable demands, starts pitching bricks and rocks at the Student Union--just imagine they are wearing brown shirts or white sheets--and act accordingly. Let us support those courageous administrators, professors and students who are standing up for the traditional rights of the academic community. Can it be that within the faculty lounges there is also a Great Silent Majority?

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