Uneasy Return to Campus

As college and university administrators await the return of most students this week, their apprehension turns less on the almost certain resumption of protest than on the possibility of terrorist violence. The worst such incident to date, last month's bombing of the mathematics research center at the University of Wisconsin, left a badly demoralized campus amid the rubble. To assess the implications of that bitter event for academic institutions elsewhere, TIME Correspondent Gregory Wierzynski visited the university and sent this report:

So many shattered windows in nearby buildings are now boarded up that one high administration official ruefully calls the institution "Old Plywood U." Nevertheless, the administrators ironically find comfort in the bombing. They believe that it is the peak of long years of frustration that began with the Dow Chemical demonstrations in 1967. The revulsion it will cause among students and faculty, they think, may help reforge understanding between them.

This will not halt the violence on campus, which officials feel represents the acts of a desperate fringe of "crazies." It should, however, prevent the crazies from drumming up support for massive disruptions. Says Chancellor Edwin Young: "I expect more violence this year, but from fewer people."

That is small cheer. The student body has grown highly cynical. Says Anatole Beck, an activist professor: "The kids don't believe anything any more. The skepticism about ever ending the war is everywhere."

Cynicism and disillusionment with academic life go far beyond politics. Last year cheating reached epidemic proportions. Weary of the poisonous atmosphere, many students have moved into apartments or to outlying farm areas. There they have set up communes and cooperatives to experiment with a more constructive and calmer lifestyle.

Departing Professors. Out of fear and weariness, the faculty has lost much of its zest for teaching. Says Hugh Richards, the 51-year-old acting chairman of the physics department: "I guess what depresses me most is that some of my colleagues are taking a second look at whether academic life is where they can make the most effective contribution and be happy." Many liberal arts faculty members are resentful of what they consider the administration's heavyhanded tactics during the past year. Nineteen professors had their pay docked, for instance, because they did not hold classes during the days of protest following the U.S. incursion into Cambodia.

More and more, professors have been leaving the campus immediately after their classes end each day. Many have taken leaves of absence to wait out the current year. Others have left for other universities and more would follow if there were not so few places to go. Less prestigious institutions have little appeal; more prestigious ones have tensions that often are just as bad.

The national campus turmoil has touched off a public backlash that even the traditionally liberal state of Wisconsin has not escaped. In response to pressure from regents, the university administration has rejected the "Princeton plan," which would have given students two weeks off this fall to work in politics. Warns W. Eugene Clingan, assistant vice chancellor for student affairs: "Universities are going to start making demands of their students. The freewheeling days of last May's student strikes cannot be allowed to stand as precedents. We are insisting this year that everyone has rights, not just the radicals. We cannot play games any more."

Above all, Wisconsin's essential sense of common goals has given way to a wasteful preoccupation with small details of due process. Since no one believes anyone else, even minor disputes between faculty members, students and administrators are adjudicated by complicated legal procedures, with accompanying attorneys and evidence.

How far this regression will go is difficult to assess. It seems safe to conclude that more law-and-order will not bring peace to the Madison campus.

Alarmist Reports. Wisconsin is by no means typical of all universities or colleges in the country. It is larger and has more deeply engaged students than most. Nixon Administration officials who have been keeping watch on the campuses expect a considerably calmer fall this year than last, and some university presidents agree. In his first press conference as president of Columbia University, William McGill observed that "alarmist reports in the newspapers about expected major upheavals and massive security preparations seem to me overblown."

Night Lights. Like many administrators, Stanford University's Acting President Richard W. Lyman is counting on a new sophistication among the moderate majority. All the radicals have been able to do, he says, "is to assist the election of persons most removed from the desires of the campus revolutionaries." Most students realize that "if there is a revolution, it is not going to be on the campus. If it is going to be on the campus, it is not going to be a revolution. That is not where the country is run."

Still, says Lyman, whose institution has installed $100,000 worth of new lighting to make nighttime less safe for rock throwers and arsonists, "I don't see any reason to believe that any campus in the country is going to have a quiet and peaceful year." If the conflicts turn violent, officials are increasingly hoping to meet the trouble with newly firm attitudes and tactics. In a fall letter to students and staff, New York University President James Hester warned that "to countenance the potential destruction of the free environment of the university because 'students are outraged' or 'all American institutions must share the blame' is to accept a suicidal sophistry."

Predicts Albert Bowker, chancellor of the massive City University of New York: "This society won't topple with a few bombs; it will go after the bomb throwers." The trouble is that desperate men are almost impossible to deflect without repressing innocent activity. The shadow of Wisconsin will not recede easily. Says E. Laurence Chalmers, chancellor of the University of Kansas: "We cannot lull ourselves into believing there won't be arsonists and guerrillas. No university can ignore them."

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