IN addition to its regular staff of ' correspondents, TIME'S news-gathering network includes 26 part-time correspondents--or stringers, as we call them--on college campuses across the U.S. Until recently, the job required only occasional reporting to New York, most often about the mood on campus or some development in the field of education. "An assignment was something of an event," recalls Cornell Stringer Mark Katz. "It broke the monotony and helped the exchequer." Today, things are quite different. With campus unrest a major fact of American life, hardly a week goes by when TIME'S stringers are not called upon to report on the activities of students, professors and administrators. Indeed, our campus stringers provided much of the reportage for this week's cover story on the waves of protest and dissent crashing over the U.S.

Many of them are editors of student newspapers. All are deeply involved in campus activities, and are thus in a position to report for TIME with special sensitivity and immediacy. Yet for the stringer, a particular difficulty lies in reconciling the dual role of student and journalist. Berkeley's Stringer Mark Gladstone is also assistant city editor of the Daily Californian and deeply committed to the strike on campus. "Staying objective is obviously impossible," he says. "The dilemma is to realize your bias and cover the event as fairly and completely as you can." Nevertheless, adds Yale Stringer Tom Warren, "the dual role of reporter-student often provides a latitude unavailable to members of the separate groups. Last weekend, behind police lines, I found myself the target of rocks and bottles thrown by demonstrators. Later I was with friends when we were bombarded by tear gas. Consequently I found myself better able to comprehend the emotions of the opposing group."

Sometimes there is a difficult third role to fulfill: that of citizen. One night recently David Aikman, TIME'S stringer at the University of Washington, discovered Thompson Hall, where his own office is located, in flames. He had little hesitation in helping to chase down a suspected arsonist. "No man tries to burn down a building as a protest unless he is in the last stages of revolt against his own condition," says Aikman. "For me, the inescapable melancholy of the incident was twofold: that any student could be so distressed by the law of the land as to consider such chilling destructiveness the only source of redress, and that this sort of act is now a national commonplace."

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