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Choosing the Right Analogy: Factory, Prison, or Battlefield

Turn now to the factory. I wondered during our April uprisings what "student power" meant in the university. Is the "university community"-that paternalistic community in which students are junior members-on the way out? One of the first principles at Harvard, one that apparently has quite some appeal throughout the country, is that a student confrontation should in the first instance be treated as a university matter, within the "family," not for the police or the national guard, not for the courts. And when students are accorded "power," the power they are accorded is interwoven in the structure of the university.

This is not what American unions sought. Unions in this country have been pretty clear about two things. They are not to be company unions- not to be part of the family. And they are not after membership on corporate committees; they do not want to be part of the corporate structure.

It will not altogether surprise me if this, something like the role of labor, becomes the role of students in the future. One reason it will not surprise me is that I expect it would be an effective role for them. They may be stronger outside the system, confronting it and negotiating with it, than joining it. Students might discover, as John L. Lewis discovered, that there is strength in industrial unionism, cutting across corporate lines. Do not let the university define the stage of your theater as this particular campus; if you are Harvard, combine with M. I. T., Boston, Northeastern, Tufts, Brandeis. There is strength in power and weakness in the disunity of your adversary. (And you may need money.)

Students may have discovered that added numbers, especially outsiders, provide immunity from disciplinary procedures, as well as experience and skill. At present the outsiders are advertised as "adventurers," veterans of skirmishes elsewhere, career dropouts, peripatetic confronters. Maybe the outsiders are going to be lawyers, researchers, negotiators, people good at formulating demands and negotiating, and immune to seduction by the power structure of any particular university.

Perhaps we should expect the development of appropriate instruments of coercion: nonviolent class boycotts, tuition strikes, the boycotting of ceremonies. Maybe they will discover techniques that beat violence from their point of view, and from ours.

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At some stage the model of the National Labor Relations Act may become pertinent. What is the appropriate bargaining unit at a university: the medical school, the whole university, or all the universities in the metropolitan area? Who votes in the election of officers? Who certifies that the election was honest? What are the campaign rules? Who declares that the university has spoiled the election by providing public-relations assistance to some student candidate for office? When is a student union a company union? Will there be dues checkoff, a closed shop? Can unenrolled youths join the union and vote in the election of officers if they are willing to pay their dues or if they meet certain criteria for being "students"?

Out of all this might come a more conservative student movement than any that we have now. It took a decade or two for tht to come out of industrial unionism, but I would expect it on campus, partly because there would be a career for more conservative students in this kind of campus political activity. (There might even develop some premium for dessing like the lawyer you hire or that you talk with across the table.) At most universities the majority student opinion is far less radical than the activities that hit the headlines. At most universities there's no way now that a silent majority, or even a silent large majority, can organize to express itself, to elect leaders and to bind themselves in negotiations. Evidently the more radical students want to avoid any large student movement that might, after a decade, become as conservative as Harry Bridges' International Longshoremen and Warehousemen's Union.

If this trend develops, there will arise the questions that arose within the CIO. Will a national student union be a political body or concern itself with the bread-and-butter issues of the university? My guess is that it would not end in bread-and-butter unionism, but be more like the CIO's Political Action Committee of the later New Deal days.

I have been talking about the students as "them," and find it harder to talk about the faculty. Who are "we" in this picture? We think of ourselves as clite members of a community that contains deans, lawyers, treasurers, clerks, typists, painters, carpenters and custodians. Maybe we're just part of the hired help, maybe a third party. I can squeeze something out of the analogy when I talk about students, but it leaves me stranded in thinking about the faculty.

So I turn now to the battlefield. I thought, when I contributed the title of this paper some months ago, that I was going to draw most of my insights from the battlefield. I was curious about the limits in war, about truces and how to maintain them, about escalation and de-escalation. I thought Israeli-Jordanian activity might offer an analogy for student-faculty activity. I did not mainly have guerrilla warfare in mind.

The asymmetry of guerrilla warfare is apparent here: almost everything that students do to us we cannot do to them (or it hasn't occurred to us). They can occupy our buildings, but they have no buildings that we care to occupy; they can boycott our classes, but teach no classes that we can boycott. They can interfere with a lot of what we do, but there's little that we can interfere in that they really want to do, especially if they enjoy the theatrics and we have to be careful not to make it easy for them by attempting reprisals in kind. "He who hath wife and child," Francis Bacon pointed out, "hath given hostages to fortune," or even he who hath fragile laboratory equipment, sensitive medical files, or a perishable manuscript. (Thank God for copying machines in the age of incendiarism.)

There is also a lack of organization and discipline on the part of the students, and one thing that may be learned from the history of the battlefield is that it is hard either to win or to lose a war if the other side is not organized. I am reminded of Winfield Scott's approach to Mexico City: he was told to take it easy or there might not be a government there to surrender when he took the place.

There are a few things on campus that are much like Vietnam, or most wars everywhere. One is the enormous importance attached to diplomatic recognition. It used to be said, "We will negotiate with the unions, but not as such." We will negotiate with the NLF, but not as such. We will negotiate with the black student political organization, but not "as such." "Our demands are not negotiable." The fear of legitimizing, dignifying, and recognizing the other side seems to be as much a principle onuniversity campuses as it was in Algeria. Vietnam, or wherever contending factions in a civil war claim legitimacy.

Second is the role imputed to outside intervention. Non-university police come in, and it is like Americans or North Vietnamese coming into the country. In Secretary McNamara's language, it is "a wholly different war." On most university campuses the tradition of "conservatives" on both sides-the non-negotiators on both sides-is that there should not be any alien infiltrators or occupiers. The North Vietnamese must go home, the Americans must go home, the police must stay away, the Berkeley veterans have no business here, the French must stay out, the welfare mothers must stay out, the federal government must stay out, Stokeley Carmichael must stay out.

Third, almost everybody holds a domino theory, whichever side he is on, at Harvard or in Vietnam. The proceedings of faculty meetings are dominated by why we must not do this or that because of what it will lead to next time, the draft today and foreign policy tomorrow, black studies today and biology tomorrow, degree requirements today and tenure appointments tomorrow. It seems to be the same on the other side, the side of the radical students.

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