The Zinn Reader (71 page)

The faculty called a strike that same evening. The next morning, the lines were up at twenty-one buildings. By noon, hundreds of picketing faculty were joined by clerical workers and librarians insisting that the administration negotiate with them on their own demands.

The Silber administration had not expected such a reaction. The strike quickly crippled the operations of the university. Of 800 faculty in the bargaining unit, at least 700 were observing the picket lines, and of these about 350 were picketing. It was a rare, perhaps unique event in the history of American higher education—professors and secretaries walking the picket lines together in a common strike.

After nine days, the administration and faculty agreed on a contract providing substantial wage increases and a grievance procedure, but leaving most decisions on tenure and other matters still in the hands of the president and trustees. The clerical workers and librarians were still on the picket lines. With varying degrees of anguish, most of the faculty, feeling bound by a no-sympathy-strike clause in the contact, went back to work, but about seventy refused to cross the picket lines and held their classes out of doors or off campus. In nine more days, with the clerical workers and librarians holding firm, the administration agreed to negotiate, and everyone went back to work.

However, by late summer, the bargaining between the clerical workers and the administration broke down. Faculty and students returning for the fall semester found picket lines in place. It took a week for the strike to be settled by a contract agreement.

A small number of faculty had refused to cross the clerical workers' picket lines and either held their classes elsewhere or had colleagues take their classes. Five of us—political scientist Murray Levin, journalist Caryl Rivers, historian Fritz Ringer (president of the faculty union during the spring strike), psychologist Andrew Dibner, and I—were warned that we had violated the no-sympathy-strike provision. We replied that we had acted as individuals, according to our consciences, in expressing our support for the clerical workers. The Silber administration announced it was proceeding against us under the contract (we were all tenured professors) utilizing a provision for the suspension or dismissal of tenured professors on grounds of "gross neglect of duty or other just cause."

The charges against the B.U. Five, as we came to be known, lent new urgency to the work of the Committee to Save B.U., formed by faculty and students to rid the campus of the Silber machine.

Last December 18, a record number of faculty crowded into the largest auditorium on campus and listened to colleagues detail the charges against the Silber administration—mismanagement, centralization of decision-making, discrimination against women, violations of civil liberties, abusive and insulting behavior towards faculty.

Managers, whether of a government or of an institution, must learn how to gauge the capacity for rebellion so that they can head it off with the proper mix of repressions and concessions. The Silber administration had misjudged, when it reneged on the union contract in the spring of 1979, the faculty's willingness and readiness to strike. It misjudged again when it went after the B.U. Five. The threat to fire tenured faculty for honoring their convictions (Silber was quoted in the press as saying that faculty who signed union contacts had surrendered their right of conscience) aroused immediate protest.

Salvador Luria, Nobel Laureate in biology at MIT and a veteran of the antiwar movement, began circulating a petition among faculty at MIT, Harvard, and other colleges and universities in the Boston area, calling for the charges against the Five to be dropped and for Silber to be fired. Five hundred faculty in the Boston area signed the petition within two weeks. Another petition, signed by Luria, Noam Chomsky, historian John Womack of Harvard, and historian of science Everett Mendelsohn of Harvard, began circulating nationwide. The signatures came pouring in.

Alumni wrote letters to the B.U. trustees and the Boston newspapers. On campus, student groups called for the charges to be dropped and for Silber's removal.

The Massachusetts Community College Council, representing faculty at fifteen colleges, protested. A sociologist withdrew his request to be a visiting professor at B.U., citing the administration's action. The Massachusetts Sociological Association passed a resolution expressing its concern for "freedom of conscience." A visiting linguistics professor from Paris brought word back to France and a telegram came shortly after, signed by fifteen distinguished French academicians, declaring their support for the B.U. Five.

But the slick pro-Silber profile on
60 Minutes
drew letters of support from viewers around the country who saw Silber as the man who would make the dirty college kids clean up their rooms and whip the radical faculty into line.

This spring, Silber still seems to have a firm grasp on his Commonwealth Avenue fiefdom. The trustees have given no overt signs of disaffection. The faculty union is entangled in a hundred grievances in the slow machinery of the contract. B.U. students, just handed an outrageous 16 percent tuition increase, are only beginning to organize. The threat of punishment still keeps many faculty in line. Indeed, the Dean of the College of Liberal Arts has announced he is adding a new factor in determining merit raises: A faculty member's teaching performance and publications, however stellar, may be offset, he says, by "negative merit"— actions designed to "harm the University."

There are some signs, however, that the protests from all over the academic world are having an effect. In February, the administration, through the intercession of a committee appointed by the official Faculty Council, agreed to drop the charges against the B.U. Five, and to negotiate or arbitrate the question of punishment for faculty refusal to cross picket lines.

After six members of the Committee to Save B.U. appeared before the trustees, in an unprecedented contact with a board always remote from the faculty, it was learned that there were expressions of disaffection among the trustees, who have been Silber's last stronghold.

The board has welcomed Silber's enthusiasm for the banking and utilities interests they represent, as well as his friendliness toward the military. Silber has been a spokesman for nuclear power and against the evening out of utility rates to favor the small consumer. B.U. has an overseas program in which it services the American military with courses and degrees, and Silber has shown obvious deference to the Government's military needs in ROTC and recruiting.

Nevertheless, as faculty, secretaries, librarians, and buildings-andgrounds workers remain organized and determined to fight back, as students become increasingly resentful at being treated like peons in a banana republic, as protests from alumni and from the national academic community intensify, the trustees may have to reconsider. When risks become too great, the clubs of the Establishment sometimes decide to change to a form of control less crass and more conciliatory. To prevent more drastic upheaval, the board may replace Silber with its own version of a Gerald Ford or Jimmy Carter.

Back in 1976, John Silber wrote on the
op-ed
page of the
New York Times:

As Jefferson recognized, there is a natural aristocracy among men. The grounds of this are virtue and talent...Democracy freed from a counterfeit and ultimately destructive egalitarianism provides a society in which the wisest, the best, and the most dedicated assume positions of leadership.... As long as intelligence is better than stupidity, knowledge than ignorance, and virtue than vice, no university can be run except on an elitist basis.

That makes for a neat fit with the philosophy of Samuel Huntington and the Trilateral Commission as they react to the "excess of democracy" that sprang from the movements of the 1960s. The Establishment's need to reassert control over the universities expresses itself most blatantly in the authoritarianism of John Silber at Boston University, but there is some evidence of a national trend in higher education toward the punishment of dissent and toward more direct intervention by big business in the workings of the universities. Earlier this year, the
New York Times
reported that schools of business around the country—at Dartmouth, Duke, and Cornell, among others—now have "executives-in-residence," to match the more customary university practice of maintaining "artists-in-residence" and "writers-in-residence." And the American Council on Education has been urging colleges to recruit more aggressively and to increase their ties to business. Management and marketing consultants are now common presences on campuses, as are union-busting consultants and "security" advisers.

As the economic situation of the universities becomes more precarious and faculties shrink, it becomes easier to get rid of undesirables, whether political dissidents or just troublesome campus critics. If they are untenured, dismissal is a simple process. If they are tenured, some ingenuity is required. The files of the American Association of University Professors show, according to one member of the AAUP's committee on academic freedom, "a disturbing number of mean little cases this year." He said, "There seem to be many tenth-rate John Silbers around."

The AAUP refers to an increasing number of "indecencies." At Central Washington State University, a tenured professor of political science, Charles Stasny, was recently fired by the trustees for "insubordination" after he missed several classes because he attended a scholarly meeting in Israel. The administration had first approved his departure, then opposed it. At Nichols College, outside Worcester, Massachusetts, a nontenured professor who questioned the leadership of the college president was summarily dismissed. At Philander Smith College in Little Rock, two tenured professors and one non-tenured faculty member were fired last June and told to leave the campus the same day; they had complained to student newspapers and the trustees about the lack of academic freedom on campus.

Whether at universities or an other workplaces, whether in the United States or in other countries, we seem to face the same challenge: The corporations and the military, shaken and frightened by the rebellious movements of recent decades, are trying to reassert their undisputed power. We have a responsibility not only to resist, but to build on the heritage of those movements, and to move toward the ideals of egalitarianism, community, and self-determinarion—whether at work, in the family, or in the schools—which have been the historic unfulfilled promise of the word
democracy.

8

T
HE
M
ARINES AND THE
U
NIVERSITY

In early 1972 the war in Vietnam was going full blast. Boston University's new president, John Silber, invited the Marine Corps to come to the campus to recruit students for the Marines. Anti-war students and faculty decided to block the entrance to the building where the recruiting was to take place, and Silber called the police to arrest them. I was at home that week, sick with the flu, but when I heard from some of the participants what happened, I decided to write about the incident, especially to answer the argument, posed by Silber and others, that to interfere with Marine recruiting on campus was to violate civil liberties. My article was printed in the alternative newspaper,
The Boston Phoenix,
in early April, 1972, entitled "Silber, the University, and the Marines," and then was reprinted as a special supplement to the student newspaper, the
B.U. News,
as well as in several other publications.

What happened at Boston University on Monday, March 27, in front of the Placement Office, was a classic incident of what our textbooks call, without humor, "civilization." There were the young people (and a few older ones) protesting the violence of war, obstructively, nonviolently. There were the police, dispersing, clubbing, arresting them. There was the court intellectual patiently explaining to the world that the actions of the police were necessary to protect "freedom" or the "open" society or "respect for the law." (Our textbooks almost never report such incidents, which recur frequently in the history of civilization; they dwell on more romantic events—the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Bill of Rights, the rise of parliamentary democracy.)

The actors in the Boston University affair could not be better cast. The United States Marine Corps, whose business abroad is mass murder, played a benign employment agency. The Boston Tactical Police, whose business is brutality, played the role of protector of the community. And Boston University's President John Silber, whose business is obfuscation, played the role of educator.

There is not much to say about the Tactical Police Force; they look like and act like what they are. There is a bit more to say about the U.S. Marine Corps, especially because it is presented to us by Silber and the B.U. Public Relations Office (citing the words of a University Council statement of 1970) as one of several "legally constituted organizations from the field of education, government, social services and business" who offer "meaningful and satisfactory employment."

There is a good deal to say about John Silber, doing what some intellectuals have done throughout history—finding a comfortable protected niche which the going order is willing to finance, in return for filling the heads of the younger generation with the most important lessons that the order wants them to learn (never mind the courses on Kant, Spinoza, and Marx; on Tolstoy, Joyce, and Faulkner, on history and politics and sociology; they are out front, but secondary). That lesson, taught crassly in grade school and high school, more sophisticatedly in college, is: respect for authority. The headline in B.U.'s official administration newspaper,
Currents,
reads: "Disruptive Students Must Be Taught Respect For Law, Says Dr. Silber."

It is true that one crucial function of the schools is training people to take the jobs that society has to offer—in business, government, or the military—so that the assembly lines of profit and death, whether blue-collar or intellectual, may be manned and the society kept going as is. But the much more important function of organized education is to teach the new generation that rule without which the leaders could not possibly carry on wars, ravage the country's wealth, keep down rebels and dissenters: the rule of obedience to legal authority. And no one can do that more skillfully, more convincingly, than the professional intellectual. A philosopher turned university president is best of all. If his arguments don't work on the ignorant students—who sometimes prefer to look at the world around them than to read Kant—then he can call in the police, and after that momentary interruption (the billy club serving as exclamation point to the rational argument) the discussion can continue, in a more subdued atmosphere.

But let us spend a little time on the United States Marine Corps. The rest of our discussion depends very much on who they are and what they do. John Silber would rather not bring up the Marines; this is understandable because they are an embarrassing burden for anyone to bear.

Of all the branches of the military, the Marines are the purest specialists in invading and occupying other countries; they have been called on again and again to do the dirty work of the American Empire. All through the twentieth century, they have been the storm troops of United States intervention in Latin America. It was under Woodrow Wilson, an intellectual and university president, who entered the White House in 1913, that the Marines did some of their most ruthless work. In 1915, they invaded Haiti to put down a rebellion against the brutal military dictatorship of Vilbrun Sam, and incidentally to do a favor for the National City Bank of New York and other banking interests. The Haitians resisted, and the Marines killed 2,000 of them as part of a "pacification" program, after which Haiti came under American military and economic control. The following year, Marines invaded the Dominican Republic to help put down an insurrection there, and remained as an occupying force.

By 1924, the economic activities of half of the twenty Latin American countries were being directed by the United States. "Law and order" were necessary to allow the normal financial operations to continue without interruption. When rebellion broke out in 1926 in Nicaragua (where from 1912 to 1925 a legation guard of American Marines had stood watch in the Nicaraguan capital) "American fruit and lumber companies sent daily protests to the State Department," according to the Council on Foreign Relations. The following year, President Coolidge sent 5,000 Marines to put down the rebels.

More recently, in 1958, President Eisenhower sent 14,000 Marines into Lebanon (twice the size of the Lebanese army), and it must be said that oil was somewhere on his mind. And when a rebellion broke out in the Dominican Republic in 1965 against the military regime there, Lyndon Johnson sent the Marines. (On television one evening, the American public watched a Marine sergeant shooting in the back a man in Santo Domingo who was kicking garbage into the street). The dispatch of Marines had been urged several years before by Senator George Smathers, a close friend of the Kennedy-Johnson administrations and of business interests in Latin America, who said at the time: "Many Americans, having invested $250 million in the Dominican Republic, believe that Generalissimo Trujillo was the best guarantee of American interests in the country...open intervention must now be considered to protect their property and to prevent a communist coup."

In Vietnam, the Marines have participated in the general destruction of that country. They have shot civilians, burned villages, and contributed heavily to this country's shame. A dispatch to the
Washington Evening Star
(August 4, 1965) reported:

This week Marines teamed with South Vietnamese troops to overrun the Viet Cong-dominated village of Chan Son, 10 miles south of Da Nang. Among 25 persons they killed were a woman and four children.

"Two of the children died at the hands of a young Marine who tossed a grenade into a village air raid shelter.

William R. Corson, a Marine colonel in Vietnam, has written about the Marines' search-and-destroy missions:

There have been many thousands of search-and-destroy missions in Vietnam since the spring of 1965. Each of these operations has its own sad story to tell in terms of the almost total disregard for their effect on the Vietnamese people. Search-and-destroy tactics against VC-controlled areas have degenerated into savagery...

Corson wrote of Marine and ARVN units forcing 13,000 Vietnamese, almost all old men, women, and children, from Trung Luong, "Without a shot being fired, we had conspired with the ARVN to literally destroy the hopes, aspirations, and emotional stability of 13,000 human beings. This was not and is not war—it is genocide."

John Silber would like to avoid discussing the Marines. Philosophers are sometimes annoyed by the intrusion of facts into comfortably vague generalizations. He says "We're going to operate a free campus here, so that students who are interested in acquiring information on a variety of jobs may find that information available on this campus...I feel obligated to defend the open campus policy." One would think from the statement by Silber after the Placement Office events that students were protesting the recruitment of Fuller Brush salesmen, instead of men to burn huts, kill peasants, invade other countries. Silber wants us to forget that, and so he talks abstractly about the "open campus." But it is part of rational inquiry to examine the empirical content of concepts. Let's look at the "open campus":

The campus is not and never has been open, so the term is fraudulent. Not all organizations are given space to recruit; the very language of the University Council statement sets standards for recruiting—"legally constituted organizations" from certain fields; that provides a basis for exclusion. ("SDS has lost its privilege to schedule facilities on the Boston University campus." Dean Staton Curtis.) Not every professor is allowed to teach a course at Boston University; there are standards (academic and other kinds). Not all students are allowed to register; there are requirements (academic and financial). Not all courses are allowed to get credit; there are criteria set by the Academic Policy Committee. Not even all cars are allowed on the parking lot; there are fees and qualifications.

It is nonsense for the administration to pretend that we must let all organizations recruit or none; what is human intelligence for if not to make distinctions? Would the Placement Office schedule interviews for a company that announced its jobs open to "whites only"? Would the Housing Office list apartments by landlords who discriminated by race or religion? Indeed, the University does make distinctions, in dozens of ways, some justifiable, others not. But to speak blithely of an "open campus" is to distort the truth and to substitute slogans for rational thought.

There is enough historical experience with such slogans to make us suspicious. The term "free enterprise" used by the National Association of Manufacturers meant freedom for corporations at the expense of consumers. The term "freedom of contract" used by the Supreme Court in the early part of this century meant freedom for employers at the expense of women and children working sixty hours a week. The term "Open Door" used by President McKinley meant freedom for the United States to despoil China just as the other powers had done. And the term "open campus" used by John Silber means freedom for the Marines and Dow Chemical and Lockheed Aircraft (all "legally constituted organizations") to find the personnel to keep the war and the military-industrial machine going.

Here is Silber:

We have made it perfectly clear that there is no immunity on this campus from the common and statutory law of the United States or the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. These laws are in effect, and Boston University will cooperate in enforcing these laws.

Is not respect for human life more important than respect for law? Why did not Silber say instead (telling the Marines to go elsewhere): "We have made it perfectly clear that there is no immunity on this campus from the laws of humanity, which say Thou Shall Not Kill." It is sad that a university president, presumably committed to rational inquiry, should make "respect for the law" his supreme value. It is a standard which shows ethical impoverishment and intellectual laziness.

The truth is that John Silber does not believe in an open campus. It is just that he wants to be the doorkeeper; he wants to set the standards for who may use the University. The pretense of an open campus is to avoid having to reveal his standards, because they are not easily defensible. They are not moral ones—not standards based on a concern for human beings—not when he opens the campus to the Marines. His standards are legal ones ("legally constituted organizations"). If you are lethal but legal, you will be welcome at Boston University; if you are nonviolent but illegal, the police will be called out to disperse you (violently). Silber's standard of legality is appropriate, not for the independent thinker in a democracy, but for the obsequious servant of the overbearing state.

Thus, the apparently absolute and attractive principle of the "open campus" is not what it seems. We cannot accept abstract principles without examining their specific content, without asking: what standards are being used, what distinctions are being made? Would we accept the principle of "open skies" without asking if this includes being open to planes carrying hydrogen bombs over populated cities? Would we accept "open riverways" without asking if this means being open to radioactive wastes, or "open streets" without asking if this means being open to cars driving sixty miles an hour past children playing?

The problem, which Silber either does not see or does not want to see, is that any valid principle (like "openness," or "freedom," or "security") when made an absolute, clashes with other principles equally valid. Somebody's liberty may clash with another person's security. Somebody's right to recruit personnel may clash with another person's right to live. As Zechariah Chafee put it, "Your right to swing your fist stops where my nose begins." To hold to any one principle like the "open campus" ignoring other values, is simplistic thinking; it also contains the seeds of fanaticism. John Silber, in the current B.U. situation, has shown elements of both.