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Show Is Protest The Only Solution? (Editor's note: The following article appeared in slimmer, 1965 issue of the "Moderator," a magazine for leading college students that is circulated nationwide. It appeared as an editorial and was written by "Moderator" Editor William Hamilton Jones.) By WILLIAM HAMILTON JONES Editor, Moderator magazine Everyone, I'm sure, has heard enough about Berkeley to last him a lifetime. The commentators, true to form, have jumped jump-ed on the Berkeley protests, examined them, evaluated them, analyzed them, and have in a few minutes labeled college students stu-dents securely enough to stand commentators in good stead for another decade. That done, they leave the muddied water behind them and turn to the problems of pigeonholing some other pressing press-ing problems. BECAUSE OF THEIR momentary concentration purely on the fireworks provided by demonstrations, rallies, and sit-ins, most of the Grand Interpreters Of The American Student Scene have missed the boat entirely. If you were to combine their remarks re-marks into one big label, you would be convinced that the California Cal-ifornia situation represents a Maoist, beatnik, sexual-lebertine, synthetic-revolution of pseudo-students. Most helpful. If you're as imaginative as Lewis Feuer, you would deduce that Berekley merely manifests another aspect of the rebellion of son against father. (Berkeley's Dean Kathryn Towle becomes a father figure, I suppose.) Other interpreters are equally imaginative. imagin-ative. They attribute the recent unrest to the attraction, of Latin Lat-in American political agitation, to the prospect of a civil rights panty raid, to expressions of Pure Youthful Idealism, or even to an outright Communist plot aimed at capitalizing on traditional tradition-al student insecurity. None of these views gets at the real problems. There is a deeper, more responsible, disenchantment imbedded in the minds of the bright Berkeley students than most people realize. real-ize. Few commentators quoted Mario Savio, leader of the free Speech Movement, when he articulated the real dischantment behind the protest. "Somehow people are being separated off. We have so many bureaucracies; their mechanical functioning makes for splits in peoples' personalities." This is the kind of unrest that has few political overtones; this is the kind of unrest un-rest that finds liberals and conservatives shoulder to shoulder; this is the kind of unrest that the commentators have ignored in favor of the politics of unrest. THE SIMPLE fact for the students, if we must label it, is that they are victims of alienation. The manager-administrator, not the student, has become the most important person in the university. Schools such as the University of California have become too big, too complex, too impersonal, too much involved Kl with the task running themselves, to give much thought to the students. As a result, the "untouchable," a necessary but regrett- D, able concession to the taxpayer. iiu When the entering freshman sees the university catering "", to government, industry, and the community but never to him he is bound to feel alienated. He quickly learns that of all the m functions of the "Multiversity" his own education is the least ... important. So, for him education becomes a "system" to be "beaten" at every opportunity. i i AT BERKELEY, the FSM has been freely criticized for not u channeling its complaints through the ASUC Senate and the student newspaper, the so-called responsible voices of dissent. Y Yet the distance of these groups from the mainstream of student opinion proved that they are not, and probably never were, ad- equate channels for airing student grievances. The administra- b tion itself, in grossly mishandling three months of negotiations, m confirmed student gripes about the lack of communication among I administration, faculty, and students. lb No one can forecast with accuracy how the pent-up emo- R tions fostered by alienation will escape. Berkeley (because if its tradition of radicalism and because the administration played its cards so badly throughout, exploded into revolution. A more common answer for students is apathy "The school pays no D, attention to us, so who gives a damn anyway." This fall at Mich- ijv igan, President Harlan Hatcher held a convocation to hear student stu-dent problems in an open question and answer session. Only 13 200 of Michigan's 30,000 students attended. ,i DEMONSTRATIONS, TO be effective, need a definite object- J ive. Alienation is far too general an objective to support a sus- tained counter effort, as the mellowing situation at Berkeley indicates. Protest can only air the problem. What we need in- fl stead is a new idea of the university. Why can't new formal and direct lines of communication be j! established so students can work with the faculty and admin- j istration instead of against them? s Why can't research institutes be divorced from the uni- versity so there will be less conflict of interest between business and education? Dissent against the American Dream University middle class, affluent, huge, bureaucratized is widespread. No solutions are yet evident. 1 Already the mythology of the student strike is forming. Sproul Hall is immortalized; Mario Savio's scars are on display; Joan Baez is becoming a new madonna; the iconography if :-revolt :-revolt is shifting northward from the bogs of the Mississippi Delta. Unless other steps are taken, this myth will become the only t real solution for alienation, and the only real idea of, or in, the M university. |