Tommy's Travels (Contd.)

Can a college be prosecuted when violent students on its campus force public officials to grant their demands? Last week New York's upstate Hobart College, the first U.S. college indicted for a criminal offense in the recent wave of campus disruption, stood trial for being "reckless" in just such a situation. The result may set a new legal limit on how far town can punish gown.

The charges grew out of a messy night last June, when Ontario County Sheriff Ray O. Morrow arrested three suspected drug users on the Hobart campus in Geneva, N.Y. About 500 angry students blocked the paths of two police cruisers, deflating tires and ripping off an aerial. What irked them was the presence of the sheriff's tipster, Thomas ("Tommy the Traveler") Tongyai. Masquerading as a radical, Tongyai had supposedly encouraged violence at several campuses before the raid blew his cover as Sheriff Morrow's agent (TIME, June 22).

Unable to disperse the crowd and fearing bloodshed, campus officials, cops and a local district attorney gave in to the students: the drug suspects were freed and granted immunity from prosecution.

Fear and Coercion. The campus was outraged by Tongyai's apparent provocations, the town by the students' unruly behavior. The furor persuaded Governor Nelson Rockefeller to appoint a special grand jury. It heard testimony that Tongyai had been involved in a fire-bombing of Hobart's ROTC headquarters several weeks before the drug arrests. Skipping all that, the grand jury declared that Hobart officials "recklessly tolerated" student coercion of the law officers, who were thereby forced to "violate" their duties and give up their prisoners.

Last week State Supreme Court Justice Frederick M. Marshall saw no merit in the grand jury's charges. After listening to four days' testimony, including the sheriff's statement that campus officials had tried to calm the crowd, the judge found insufficient evidence to convict Hobart and directed the jury to acquit the college. A professor and seven students will be tried later on charges ranging from drug possession to riot. Tongyai, now a police-science student at a nearby junior college, faces another problem. He has been charged with collecting $700 in state unemployment benefits while on the sheriff's payroll.

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