Student Revolution
W. Carl Ketcherside
[Page 91] |
It was my fortune, good or bad, to be at Harvard University during the inception of the student revolt and strike. On April 9 a group of activists almost two hundred strong, led by members of the Students for a Democratic Society, occupied University Hall and ejected the deans and other administrators. A list of grievances and demands was drawn up and sent to Dr. Nathan Pusey, president of the venerable ivy league institution.
The charge was made later that the occupation forces sacked the private files and some of the confiscated secret documents began to appear in Old Mole, the student newspaper of the campus revolutionaries. In any event, before dawn on the following morning several hundred police assaulted the bastion and ejected the trespassers. A few were injured in the melee and many were arrested and hauled away in buses which had been converted into oversize paddy-wagons. This served to electrify the campus and in the afternoon a capacity crowd gathered in the famous Memorial Church auditorium and called a strike.
I was especially concerned with the Divinity School, which voted on Thursday evening to support the strike. The next morning I sat in on a meeting of faculty and students called to determine
[Page 92] |
The student president is an avowed revolutionary, thoroughly committed to overthrow of the existing order. The proposal was made to seize the Divinity School building, Andover Hall and the World Religion Center. When the conservatives carried through and defeated the motion, confusion resulted, and the meeting was like a deflated balloon. It adjourned without reaching a consensus and we went to Harvard Yard.
Several thousand people were milling about, some putting up signs and others tearing them down. Two hundred of the more raucous were marching in a parade up one street and down the other, shouting in a rhythmic but monotonous chant, "On Strike! Join Us!" They did not attract too much of a following.
Every conceivable kind of bizarre dress was manifest. Some Harvard men were as seedy as tramps, and a convocation of these looked like delegates to the National Hobo Association. Others were neatly attired. Women from Radcliffe were present in force, many of them wearing micro-mini-skirts, and some of them looking like accidents going somewhere to happen.
The Communists had moved in to take advantage of the unrest and these were passing out some of the rankest and rawest propaganda to be found this side of Cuba. The brand in predominance seemed to look at Chairman Mao as the epitome of all wisdom, and were lauding Fidel Castro on the sly. One could not help but believe that the strategy for conquest originated in Cuba.
A rock band, The Albatross, set up for business on the steps of Memorial Church, and the electrical amplifiers drowned out everything else for a block. We have come a long way since the poet wrote, "Music hath power to charm the savage breast." The frenzied players with thatches of long hair like unruly stacks of hay dumped precariously upon their heads, blew and pounded out the beat. They gave the impression that Harvard had discovered some of the missing links in the evolutionary chain and had placed them on public exhibition.
Everything seemed to hinge on an afternoon faculty meeting. The president was jeered as he walked through the milling mass to the place, but never lost his cool. Photographers from the news media were everywhere. Inside the hall the various angles of the revolt were recalled and discussed. Witnesses were heard. When a vote finally came after several hours of tension, the faculty decided by a big majority that the act of occupying University Hall was a serious error and breach of trust. But they also censured the action of calling in the police.
When I flew out of Boston the ferment was still seething. A school probably never fully recovers from the effect of such an action. The students were protesting against ROTC and other military installations on campus, the expansion of the campus through wreckage of a subhousing area occupied by poor blacks, and the authoritarian power structure of the school which is alleged to be aloof and unapproachable.
I have been asked several times recently to voice an opinion as to our current travail. I am reluctant to respond because most of us are still living in the dreamy past, in an era of the easy answer philosophy. We still want to stroll down the violet-bordered lanes of childhood, in a world where everything was either black or white. In spite of our longing for "the good old days," we cannot go back. And if we did we would find only a filmy illusion.
And so we have revolution! We plaintively ask why people cannot be satisfied with the good life of ease and comfort. We have worked hard for what we have and now why can we not enjoy it? We point to our gleaming automobiles, our sparkling appliances, and our shiny gadgets. But we have reared a generation which sees these things as symbols to hide sham, pretence and hypocrisy. They do
[Page 93] |
They are not unaware that there are millions on earth who are starving, nor do they forget that often our foreign policy is quite selfish, carried out either to purchase favors or freedom from attack, or to increase our trade abroad and further enrich our coffers. There is sometimes the feeling that the government uses education as a means of enslavement and even of exploitation. There is also a feeling that the church is sometimes concerned only with its institutional image rather than with the basic needs of suffering humanity.
On the huge sprawling campuses of our day, students feel they are part of a faceless mass. The professors whom they see only at a distance, often seem to regard them as cogs in the machinery. Disillusionment frequently sets in and the result is that more college students die of suicide each year than by any other means.
I do not think most of us condone the principle of civil disobedience as a legitimate means for attainment of goals in our society, but we are faced with the fact that there are those who do. And they are not all ignorant rabble-rousers and hell-raisers. So we must enter into dialogue and discussion with those whom we would like to ignore, hoping they will disappear as a mere symbol of our times. They will not!
I think it is important that we keep our lines of communication in repair. There's no use of talking into the telephone if no one is on the other end of the line. And a good conversation requires that both listen occasionally. I beg parents in times like these to listen to their young people. We must not be "bugged" by lengthy sideburns, moustaches and long hair, until we forget the humanity of our sons. These young people are saying some vital things. They are impulsive it is true, but they have proven their willingness to suffer for their ideals. They are not apathetic. They are not coldly indifferent to the needs of the world.
I trust, too, that the family of God will not drive out our young people or set them adrift. All of us need a shelter from the storms of life. If we are unwelcome in one we must construct another. If the community of saints is to provide the shadow of a rock in a weary land it must not exclude from the shade those who most need a haven. The status quo is not perfect. We can stand correction in many of our attitudes. Let us hold on tenaciously to our value judgments, but let us not turn a deaf ear to others.
We can have a very great impact upon our contemporary world if we can work together in compassion and understanding. If we fight among ourselves and divide into rival camps on the basis of age and youth, we will lose one group and perhaps lose them both. We must prove that there is room in Christ for all of God's precious children.