Troubles at Ohio U.

Tranquillity has returned to most U.S. campuses, but Ohio University at Athens stands out as a troubled exception. In the past month alone, the campus has been rocked by a strike of student workers, two successive nights of rioting, and demands that University President Claude R. Sowle resign. Last week the progressive young president decided that he had had enough. In a terse statement of resignation, he declared that he could "no longer ask myself or my family to serve the university under such insane conditions."

The troubles first broke into the open when about 700 students with on-campus jobs went out on strike last month. Reason: they had been denied admittance to the university employees' union because it regarded them as competitors for jobs, and demanded the right to form their own union. During four days of turmoil, officials hired scab workers to take the students' places and broke up picket lines with university security police before finally agreeing to allow the students to vote on the issue. Last week they did so and lost.

Tension rose again this month when a weekend music festival climaxed in clashes between students and police. Rioting started when a gasoline fire was set in the middle of the city's main street. Police moving in to douse the flames were pelted with bottles and bricks. Windows were smashed, and before the weekend was out, 39 persons had been arrested and 38 injured.

Then came a confrontation between Sowle and 200 black students demanding increased financial support for the Center of Afro-American Studies.* As he left the meeting, Sowle said, he was given some "pretty healthy shoves." Shortly after, a student coalition presented the president with a list of 51 demands, including elimination of the ROTC as well as campus-wide referendums on all university issues, to be acted upon within 24 hours.

It was not the first time that Sowle, 46, had had to deal with student disturbances. In the wake of the 1970 Cambodian invasion and the deaths of four students at Kent State, he had successfully steered Ohio U. through the chaotic aftermath with a minimum of violence. But the recent events, he said last week, were "the straw that broke the camel's back."

Cost Squeeze. In fact, the troubles at Ohio U. go far deeper than the disturbances suggest. Like more and more schools across the U.S., the university has been caught in the squeeze between rising costs and declining enrollment, which since 1971 has dropped from 18,722 to an expected 14,000 next fall. The decline meant a $2.8 million cut in this year's $42.2 million budget, requiring a drastic reduction in activities and programs. The university has also announced that five teaching positions will be eliminated next year and an additional 60, including those of 13 tenured professors, in 1975-76.

Last week Sowle conceded that his own commitment to an open administration might have caused Ohio U.'s problems to surface sooner than those at other schools; he had initiated student-faculty participation in policy decisions, public budget hearings, weekly press conferences and even hosted a radio call-in show called Open Line. These innovations gave widespread publicity to Ohio U.'s problems, and may have helped to agitate the student body, which Sowle says contains a high percentage of "activists."

A combination of "openness and activists can be destructive," he says, "or it can make this the best institution in the country. I still believe openness is a key virtue." Would he withdraw his resignation as the faculty senate and the board of trustees have asked? Said Sowle: "The chances are very, very remote."

*Funding for the program has dropped from $250,000 when it was started five years ago to $234,000 for 1974.

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