THIS WAS the year that students brought the war back home to the campus. In a swirling mass of identities, we became Vietcong and then blacks and then students again. And it happened all over--not just at Berkeley and Harvard, but at Ohio University and the University of Hawaii. Suddenly, students became activists. They did things. They took over buildings and held deans captive; they shut down universities and they bled.

The issue exploded from the war (which you could criticize from the sidelines) to the whole society (which you couldn't). Suddenly, the target became your home, the place that coddled and sheltered you and encouraged you. Suddenly, the target became the university.

The reasons that the university became the target are not too hard to see. There was a rational progression to it all. The Dow sit-ins of the fall protested first the corporation's manufacture of napalm, and then the university's sanction of it by allowing Dow to use university facilities to recruit future napalm-makers.

From there it was only a short hop to university "complicity" in the war: the university was contributing to the war effort by investing in armaments and by doing war research for the government.

Finally, the university was seen as a mirocosm of society, and there was Columbia. As SDS founder and Columbia Outside Agitator Tom Hayden wrote:

Columbia's problem is the American problem in miniature--the inability to provide answers to widespread social needs and the use of the military to' protect the authorities against the people.

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IT WAS a long road to travel in a year. But the thing called the Establishment has always had a death wish, and it helped out nicely. The big ugly war pervaded all American institutions, including the university. The "institutionalized hypocrisy" that Kenneth Keniston says American youth hates is right here, right in front of us.

Academic freedom, we found, is so much bunk, just as "outside" freedom is so much bunk. The university, with its enormous government and business connections, is part of the whole rotten mess.

The year after American students discovered America, they discovered their own universities. They looked at the university power structure and found out that it was undemocratic. They looked at the policy-making boards of the university and found them loaded with businessmen and corporation lawyers. They looked at their professors and found them doing research for the government. The war caused it, and the recognition was quite a shock.

Now, all of a sudden, right away, students want all this changed. What they are demanding is a new university. Hayden writes:

[Students at Columbia] did not even want to be included in the decision-making circles of the military-industrial complex that runs Columbia: they want to be included only if their inclusion is a step toward transforming the university. They want a new and independent university standing against the mainstream of society, or they want no university at all.

Richard T. Gill, Master of Leverett House, talked about Columbia last month on a WGBH-TV panel. His position is much the same as other academics. He argued that the university should not be the target of student attacks because the university is the American institution most capable of promoting social change.

To the activist, that is the very reason that it should be attacked. If in a time of crisis the university cannot forcefully demand social change, then who can? To the student activist, the university is a wishy-washy, impotent liberal--a despicable character.

Keniston talks in his new book, Young Radicals, about how most radicals have an image of their father that is split into two parts: