1001 Black Power and the Campus

The acceleration in recent months of the conflict between “student power” and administrative response has been accompanied by the phenomenon of “black power” on campuses and elsewhere across the nation. Since the death of Martin Luther King in early April, three interrelated trends have emerged clearly: the first is the growing tie-in between “student power” and “black power”; the second is the obduracy of antagonism within that movement; and the third is the growing disinclination of the adults in the academic and nonacademic (including the political) communities to deal intelligently with the problems at hand. Cases in point have occurred at universities everywhere in America, most notably recently at Columbia University. If we look at the Columbia situation as part of the problem manifested also at Northwestern University in Illinois, and in Boston at Boston University and Northeastern University, the three trends are more easily seen in a clear light. Columbia is surely the most poignant case, but those at the other schools are similarly revealing.

Students rightly feel alienated from their elders; they always have and no doubt always will. The growth of the multiversity has long alarmed conscientious adults and youths, and those of us in academic life who see the university more and more becoming a huge business replete with impersonality, while fatuously mouthing a love of an “academic freedom” which is most honored in the breach, have long been dismayed. It is only natural then that the students will, once made aware of this situation (by their own observations, by their campus leaders, by some of their professors, and also of course by the mass media) become aggressive in their activities to make their schools conform more to their own vision of what a university should be. Simultaneously, Negro students have in force far exceeding their number grown sufficiently agitated by the situations in which they find themselves that their response has been to push vigorously for a redress of their grievances, real and imagined. At Columbia University, the Students for a Democratic Society-Black Power tie-in virtually paralyzed one of America’s greatest institutions of higher learning, demanding a most overwhelming change in the way everything affecting the school is henceforth to be handled.

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David Brudnoy

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The acceleration in recent months of the conflict between “student power” and administrative response has been accompanied by the phenomenon of “black power” on campuses and elsewhere across the nation. Since the death of Martin Luther King in early April, three interrelated trends have emerged clearly: the first is the growing tie-in between “student power” and “black power”; the second is the obduracy of antagonism within that movement; and the third is the growing disinclination of the adults in the academic and nonacademic (including the political) communities to deal intelligently with the problems at hand. Cases in point have occurred at universities everywhere in America, most notably recently at Columbia University. If we look at the Columbia situation as part of the problem manifested also at Northwestern University in Illinois, and in Boston at Boston University and Northeastern University, the three trends are more easily seen in a clear light. Columbia is surely the most poignant case, but those at the other schools are similarly revealing.

Students rightly feel alienated from their elders; they always have and no doubt always will. The growth of the multiversity has long alarmed conscientious adults and youths, and those of us in academic life who see the university more and more becoming a huge business replete with impersonality, while fatuously mouthing a love of an “academic freedom” which is most honored in the breach, have long been dismayed. It is only natural then that the students will, once made aware of this situation (by their own observations, by their campus leaders, by some of their professors, and also of course by the mass media) become aggressive in their activities to make their schools conform more to their own vision of what a university should be. Simultaneously, Negro students have in force far exceeding their number grown sufficiently agitated by the situations in which they find themselves that their response has been to push vigorously for a redress of their grievances, real and imagined. At Columbia University, the Students for a Democratic Society-Black Power tie-in virtually paralyzed one of America’s greatest institutions of higher learning, demanding a most overwhelming change in the way everything affecting the school is henceforth to be handled.