 The following program has been provided by the Pacifica Radio Archives Preservation and Access Project. For more information call 1-800-735-0230 or log on to pacificaradiorchives.org. The subject of today's discussion is campus or battleground, a report on the events of Columbia University in late April of 1968. In December of 1965, in my essay on the caching in the student rebellion, which dealt with the first major explosion on a college campus at the University of California at Berkeley, I wrote that the main ideological purpose of the student rebellion was, quote, to condition the country to accept force as the means of settling political controversies. If the universities, the supposed citadels of reason, knowledge, scholarship, civilization can be made to surrender to the rule of brute force, the rest of the country is cooked. Close quote. The rebellion at Columbia University is an eloquent illustration of my contention of the purpose motivating the so-called student activists. To discuss it today, I have invited, as my guest speaker, Mr. Robert Hessen, who is a young instructor in Columbia University's Graduate School of Business and a candidate for a doctorate in the Department of History. His analysis of the student rebellion was published originally in Baron's Magazine in late May and was subsequently reprinted in over 15 newspapers throughout the country. Ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Robert Hessen. A larger-than-life portrait of Karl Marx dominated the entrance of a classroom building. A red flag flew from its rooftop. Chains barred the doors of other buildings and chanting mobs roamed across the campus. The scene might have been the University of Havana or Peking. It wasn't. It took place just a few express stops from Wall Street. At Columbia University, where from April 23rd to 30th, student leftists seized and occupied five university buildings. The siege tactics which disrupted Columbia and brought its normal activities to a halt represent the latest assault by a revolutionary movement which aims to seize first the universities and then the industries of America. The rebels are members of Students for a Democratic Society, SDS, a nationwide organization with chapters on over 250 campuses. Originally, when SDS began as an outgrowth of the Socialist League for Industrial Democracy, it repudiated communism as an authoritarian system and excluded communists from its membership. However, in 1964 and 65, SDS sought to broaden its power base by forming a united front with communist youth groups. Although SDS continued to describe its objectives in such murky phrases as, quote, participatory democracy, close quote, the real tenor of its philosophy can best be seen in its intellectual heroes, Karl Marx and Mao Tse-Tung. In its action hero, Ernesto Che Guevara, and in its slogans, scrawled across the embattled Columbia campus, quote, Lenin I, Castro I, and we will win too, close quote. SDS's hardcore membership at Columbia is fewer than 200 out of 17,800 students. But after it seized campus buildings, barred faculty and students from their offices and classrooms, and held a dean as hostage, its ranks were swelled by several hundred sympathizers, including many outsiders. SDS launched its assault on Columbia after failing peacefully to attain two of its political objectives on campus. The first, the severing of Columbia's connection with the Institute for Defense Analysis, a government-sponsored consortium which performs research and analysis related to national defense and domestic riot control. SDS complained that Columbia's affiliation was aiding America's, quote, imperialist aggression, close quote, in Vietnam, while at home, IDA's studies in riot control were designed to suppress demonstrations by anti-war groups. Second, they demanded a halt to the construction of a new gym in Morningside Park, which adjoins Harlem, on land leased to Columbia by the city of New York. SDS claimed that Columbia was guilty of, quote, institutional racism, close quote, that the university was poaching upon the territory of the adjacent Negro community, and that the separate entrance for the part of the gym set aside for use by the neighborhood children constituted, quote, gym crow, close quote. In fact, the Columbia gymnasium had been warmly endorsed by over 40 Harlem community groups when it was announced eight years ago. It would occupy only two of the 30 acres in Morningside Park. Its presence would create an atmosphere of safety in an area which is now the territory of muggers and addicts. Separate entrances would be necessary because Columbia students would enter from the heights on which the university is located, while Harlem residents would more conveniently reach the gym through the park which lies some 200 feet below. The issue is not one of bigotry, but of geography. SDS spokesman claimed, truthfully, that they had sought to arouse the Columbia community into opposing the gym and IDA. They admit that their campaign was a failure, which they ascribed to student and faculty apathy, and to the administration's refusal to hear and to heed their policy recommendations. SDS rebels then resorted to their ultimate political weapon, the initiation of physical force, believing that they had a moral right to do so because they were, quote, acting in a good cause. In the past, they had released many trial balloons to test this technique. First, they had obstructed NROTC ceremonies. Then, they had staged sit-ins in the offices of university administrators. And most recently, they had prevented recruiters for business firms and from the CIA, from interviewing on campus. In each case, the consequence had been a polite wrap on the knuckles. A verbal reprimand totally devoid of significant penalties, such as expulsion or criminal prosecution. On April 23rd, after trying to block construction at the gym site, SDS demonstrators and their militant Negro allies, members of the Student Afro-American Society, returned to campus. At the urging of their leaders, they marched on Hamilton Hall, the main classroom building of Columbia College. They were determined to barricade themselves in, until the university met their demands. An unexpected fissure occurred within the ranks of the rebels, who claimed to be united in their opposition to racism. The Negro militants ordered the whites to get out. An SDS complied. SDS then proceeded to capture a base of operation of its own. The rebels first seized the administrative offices of President Grayson Kirk in Low Library, and later three more classroom buildings. Most students reacted with bewilderment and outrage. They demanded to know why the campus police had not been called in, and why the rebels were allowed to receive reinforcements of manpower and food. They witnessed caravans of litter-bearers marching across campus with cartons of supplies, as if their destination were a country picnic. Many students also wondered why the administration had not ordered the cutting off of electricity, water and telephone service inside the buildings held by the rebels, since it was known that they were making Xerox copies of President Kirk's letter files, and were formulating their strategy with outside allies by phone. The administration's failure to act, to take prompt action, evidently sprang from a number of motives. First, fear of bad publicity. Second, uncertainty about the morality of using the police to uphold law and order. Third, reluctance to make a decision which might prove unpopular with some of the faculty or students or alumni. Fourth, anxiety that members of the Harlem community might march on Columbia if police were used to clear the buildings. And finally, the delusion that if they took no punitive action, the rebels would recognize them as men of goodwill. An SDS leader later admitted that if President Kirk had responded within the first hour, or even the first day, by sending in the university's own security police, the rebels would have, quote, folded like a house of cards, close quote. However, by its inaction, the administration gave the rebels time to organize their resistance, to bolster their morale, and to mobilize sympathizers and supplies from the outside. While this was going on, members of the senior faculty attempted to mediate between the administration and the rebels. But their efforts were futile, since they were faced with an impossible assignment, to devise a peace formula ambiguous enough to satisfy both sides, which meant that the terms of settlement had to both promise and refuse amnesty for the rebels. The faculty mediators labored under the belief that the rebels would be willing to negotiate for a peaceful solution to the mounting crisis. What they discovered, however, was that every concession made by the administration only produced escalated rebel demands. SDS's ultimate demand was that they be granted total amnesty as a precondition for further negotiation. It grew increasingly obvious that the rebels would not withdraw from the buildings, until they were forced out by the police. The rebels wanted blood to be shed, so they could raise the cry of police brutality, so they could acquire the aura of martyrdom, and thereby win the majority of students and faculty to their side. Regrettably, President Grayson Kirk played right into their hands, by waiting until the sixth day of the siege before calling in the police. The only other alternative open to him at that point would have been total capitulation, a final act of appeasement which would have served as an engraved invitation to renewed rebel demands in the future. The proper time to have acted against the rebels was at the very outset of the siege, when a few dozen campus security officers could have achieved what it later took nearly 1,000 police to do, at a price of over 100 injured rebels, spectators, and policemen. The aftermath of calling in the police was an upsurge of sympathy for the rebels. Their allies on campus called for a general strike by students and faculty to protest the use of the police and to demand the ouster of President Kirk, for having called them in. One mark of the effectiveness of this strike is that Columbia College, the undergraduate division of the university, voted to end all classes for the rest of the semester, which was scheduled to run for another month. The strike was also one support from those who disapproved of both the tactics and the objectives of SDS, but who wished to take advantage of the strike to bring about what they cryptically called, quote, restructuring of the university, close quote. Even those most sympathetic to SDS, however, do not deny that the issues of IDA and the gym were merely pretexts to justify the resort to force. SDS's short range objective is to achieve, quote, student power, close quote, which means total control over the university. They seek student veto power over appointment and tenure of faculty, over the admission of new students, over courses offered by the university, over degree requirements, and the disposition of university funds. They propose in their term to radicalize the faculty, which means to purge it of conservative and law and order liberals, who oppose the initiation of force to achieve political ends. As befits socialists, the rebels regard the university as just another natural resource awaiting their expropriation. But the long range objective of SDS is even more sinister, as the sympathetic article in the New Republic of May 11th, 1968 states, quote, The name of the game was power, and in the broadest sense to the most radical members of the SDS steering committee, Columbia itself was not the issue. The issue was revolution, and if it could be shown that a great university could literally be taken over in a matter of days by a well organized group of students, then no university was safe. Everywhere the purpose was to destroy the institutions of the American establishment, in the hope that out of the chaos, a better America would emerge. Close quote. The rebels have no patience for any slow process of change. They're tired of just talk. They want action now. They will tolerate no opposition. They're indifferent to the fact that their tactics will destroy Columbia by driving out the best minds, just as nausea terror tactics drove the Jewish intellectuals out of the universities of Germany. But there's a crucial difference now. While men like Einstein could escape to England or America during the 30s, SDS will try to close all avenues of escape. The use of intimidation and force will spread until there will be no sanctuary for men of reason within the academic world, or ultimately within the nation. One need only considered the fate of conservatives and liberals alike in countries which have been overrun by SDS's intellectual mentors, that is, Mao's China and Castro's Cuba. Whatever the final outcome of the Columbia strike, one thing is certain. The methods used at Columbia will be embraced by other student leftists on campuses throughout the country. Those who resort to force will justify their tactics by the same arguments advanced by the Columbia rebels and their apologists. If this national menace is to be checked, it is imperative that one know how to answer them. First, some rebels claim that none of their tactics involve the use of force. Now, this is true only in the narrow sense that they did not shed blood, but force was inextricably involved in every act they perpetrated. They held the associate dean as hostage against his will. That was force. They barricaded faculty and students from their offices and classrooms. That was force. They seized property which was not rightfully theirs and refused to release it until their demands were met. That was force. Each of these is punished as an act of force under the civil laws of our society. They are the crimes known as false imprisonment, criminal trespass, and extortion. If these acts were perpetrated by a lone individual, their criminal character would be obvious. If a single felon held the dean hostage or seized the office of President Kirk, rivaled his desk and copied his files, no one would have confused him with being an idealistic, committed crusader. On an individual basis, if someone demands that you grant him wealth or power that he has not earned, and which he can only obtain by threats of violence, one does not doubt for a moment that he is an extortionist. The act of a lone thug does not become legitimatized when he teams up with other hoodlums. As Iron Rand noted in Capitalism, the Unknown Ideal, no individual can acquire rights by joining a gang, quoting Ms. Rand, quote, rights are not a matter of numbers, and there can be no such thing in law or in morality as actions forbidden to an individual but permitted to a group, close quote. A second claim of the rebels. They admit they used force, but they claim that force was justified when peaceful tactics fail. The fundamental political principle that all men must respect is that no individual or group may initiate the use of force for any purpose whatsoever. To accept SDS's alternative amounts to carte blanche for violence, and invites the complete breakdown of the rule of law. To understand the grotesque irrationality of SDS's argument, consider the following. Imagine that there was a student chapter at Columbia of the Ku Klux Klan, which was protesting the proposed use of the new gym by Negroes. Say that the Klan tried through campus rallies and petitions to arouse the students, faculty, and administration to support their demands, but that their peaceful tactics failed. If this group then proceeded to seize university buildings and hold members of the administration as hostages, would anyone have condoned their use of force or have called for negotiations or compromise? The principle you see is the same. The initiation of force to achieve one's political objectives is both immoral and illegal, regardless of whether the initials of the aggressors are KKK or SDS. Third, the rebels claim that they were justified in using force because the administration had refused to give them a hearing on their demands for change. A university like a well-run business should be interested in knowing whether it is satisfying its customers. If it provides students with incompetent faculty, or poor laboratories or libraries, or supports political policies which the students oppose, it is in the university's self-interest to maintain open channels of communication so that grievances can be expressed and remedial actions considered. Students who are dissatisfied with any aspect of a university's policies have a right to peacefully protest and petition, and even in extreme situations, to boycott classes or to organize a student's strike. But they have no right to compel anyone else to listen to their demands, nor a right to force other people to go on strike with them by prohibiting access to classrooms or by creating a general climate of terror to intimidate those who would oppose them. Fourth, the rebels claim that since force is justified when peaceful tactics fail, therefore they should be granted full amnesty. The best single answer to this argument is provided by Professor Leonard Peacock in his forthcoming book, Nazism and Contemporary America, The Arminous Parallels. Dr. Peacock writes, quote, The demand for amnesty on principle is the demand for the abdication on principle of all legal authority. It is demand for the formal sanction in advance of all future acts of force and violence, for the promise that such acts may be perpetrated hereafter with total impunity. It is a demand to institutionalize the appeasement of brute force as a principle of civil policy in our country, close quote. Fifth, the rebels claim that the police represent violence and therefore should not be used on a college campus, which is a citadel of reason and persuasion. Here the rebels evade the fact that they were the ones who first resorted to violence. They obliterate the distinction between criminals who initiate the use of force and the police whose proper function it is to retaliate with force, to restore peace and to protect the rights of the victims. Sixth, the rebels claim that their quarrel with the administration was purely an internal dispute. Therefore the introduction of police represents meddlesome interference by outsiders. But, by the same reasoning, one could just as well conclude that if workers seize a factory, customers seize a store, or tenants seize an apartment building, these two are internal disputes and do not justify calling in the police. However, in reason there cannot be any such concept as an internal dispute which allows someone to be victimized and prevented from calling the police. Those who violate property rights are scarcely in a position to claim that their conquered territory is private property upon which the police may not enter. Seventh, the rebels say they shouldn't be criminally prosecuted. After all, they say they're only students, not criminals. One need only remember that it was nausea students who set fire to university libraries and terrorized professors. Being the student does not grant anyone an exemption from the laws which prohibit attacks on human life and property. When the rebels acted like criminals, they deserved to be punished as such. Eighth, we are told as impractical to suspend or expel the student rebels because there are so many of them. This amounts to saying that if sufficiently large mob breaks the law or violates individual rights, it will be immune from prosecution. If this principle is accepted, then every law break will be safe from prosecution if he can find enough members for his gang. This will provide the leader with absolutely irresistible recruitment device and invite the outbreak of a reign of terror. Finally, the ninth argument given by the rebels, they say admittedly we violated property rights, but calling in the police could result in injury or loss of life, which is more important than loss of property. But this argument amounts to saying that the lives of the aggressors are more important than the property of victims. In action, this would mean that the police should not restrain rioting mobs from looting stores or interfere with the KKK when it uses fire bombs on Negro churches. On this principle, any victim of theft or expropriation would be advised to surrender his property, his wallet or his warehouse, without resistance, lest the thief be hurt in the struggle. Acceptance of this principle would make every individual the defenseless target for any vandal or socialist. The Columbia crisis vitally affects the life of every American. No one's life or property can be secure in a society which tolerates the use of force by any group to achieve its goals. And no one will be safe as long as college and civil authorities persist in their policy of answering aggression with appeasement. Now is the time for intelligent counteraction. One means is to withhold financial support from colleges which condone violence or compromise with student terror tactics. A second is to write to the president and trustees and deans of colleges, urging that they endorse the following position, that their institution offers no sanctuary to any group which advocates the initiation of physical force, and that they will act immediately and without hesitation to expel and criminally prosecute any student guilty of such tactics. Men need to live by the guidance of rational principles and to resolve their disputes peacefully. It is both immoral and impractical to abandon principles in a time of crisis and then hope to survive on the basis of pragmatic expediency and cowardly compromise. Each time that a violation of individual rights is tolerated, it serves as an invitation to future violations. A free society cannot survive unless men of reason rally to its defense. Thank you, Mr. Hessen. This was a discussion on the subject of campus or battleground by my guest speaker, Mr. Robert Hessen, who is an instructor in Columbia University's Graduate School of Business. Those who want to obtain copies of Mr. Hessen's discussion may obtain them by writing to the editor of Barron's Magazine at 30 Broad Street, New York, New York.