If Dean Ford really intends to draw the line against such liberals, my task as a radical will be clearer; the radical analysis of the university in terms of power and interest groups will then be fully true. Dean Ford's loyalty to the existing procedures of the Harvard community would, in that case, be a loyalty not to the university community as such, but merely a private loyalty to his own privileged conception of the university, supported not by reason but by power. His condition for allowing us to remain in the university would then be that radicals and dissident liberals give up all possibility of effecting our values. In that context, his demand for non-disruption is politically repressive, not because it is impossible in principle to have a peaceful revolution in the university--though that may turn out to be true--but because Dean Ford and others have already decided that no fundamental change -- peaceful or otherwise -- is acceptable.

Whether or not Dean Ford holds these views without reservation, most radicals think he does. It is therefore hardly surprising that we on the left should begin to view all parliamentary procedures and all respect for the civil rights of Dow recruiters and under-graduate drill teams as hypocritical to begin with, and in the end reactionary. For in fact you have told me precious little if you tell me you are for the right to recruit and the right to "prepare for the military" and also against the Vietnamese war.

It is quite simple to show your loyalty to the liberal version of civil rights: all you have do is to declare your opposition to SDS--or its tactics. But how do you propose to demonstrate you are against the war? Did you sign a petition? March for a SANE nuclear policy? Support McCarthy? I don't pretend to have complete answers for these dilemmas, nor do I claim that it is impossible to care simultaneously for the rights of Dow Chemical and the rights of burned babies. I do claim it is damned difficult.

Furthermore, if you don't believe it is difficult--indeed if you don't care enough to show that it is difficult for you--there will be a price to pay. For nothing nourishes nihilism on the left more than the faithlessness of liberals to their own values. If those worn inflexible responses are all you have to back up your values, if that is your liberal university, then we may as well tear the place down. For in that case your language is the valueless language of S.I. Hayakawa (lately active at San Francisco State), and your future is a barrenness masquerading as "the intellectual approach" to "any" topic, which Dean Ford called "the business of colleges and universities."

At one point in his article, Dean Ford seems to cut himself off not merely from student radicalism -- which, after all, was not the whole scope of his article--but from the problems of growing up in America, in what he calls "the particular malaise of the 1960's." For he seems to feel that there is no legitimate connection between "growing pains" and revolution. But in fact, it is no accident that the young are now distrustful and rebellious, and that some of us would like a revolution. For this society provides very few decent ways of growing up, and that is a very good sign that this is not a decent society. And as students on the left get older in America, I doubt very much if most of us will accept Dean Ford's definitions of maturity, especially if he bases it on something like "making the grade." Perhaps Dean Ford will then choose to call us immature. I for one am willing to take that risk.

It is not clear, however, that our supposed childishness is anything more than our response to a debased liberalism. Dean Ford finds the source of our "destructiveness" in the tradition of Voltaire's "ecrasez l'infame." I think he would be more accurate to recognize our debt to Rousseau's refusal to accept the false culture Voltaire proposed--through D'Alembert--to introduce into Geneva. For I detect in Dean Ford's article an unwillingness to consider seriously the possibility that much of bourgeois culture and much of the culture of the university is fraudulent. I find such a stance as blind and unacceptable as he finds our refusal to bend our values to the prevailing university winds. If he takes such a stand he is cut off not merely from radicalism, but from the best thinkers and artists of the last two hundred years (including Rousseau and Voltaire).

I have been trying to suggest that there are important historical and ideological sources of the rigidity that Jay Cantor pointed to in the CRIMSON as both parent and offspring of the politics of confrontation. But there are still possibilities open to all of us, in which we need not give up an ounce of conviction, and might possibly be able to live together, however, temporarily, however uneasily. For one thing, liberals have not explored their marvelously traditional device for dealing with radicalism, the method now known as co-optation. For instance, the New Deal (including its latest incarnation, however degraded, as the Great Society) dealt with Norman Thomas by taking some of the content of his proposals, most of the moral rhetoric, and leaving behind only the impulse to socialism, which is what he shared with those further left. This move is still open to liberals.

In fact, Galbraith has recently called for the "constitutional reform" of Harvard on at least partly the ground that the university will then be better able to deal with student radicals. (One wonders what Gailbraith thinks of Dean Ford's idea that "we need not surrender the very concept of differentiation of roles as among governing boards, faculty members, and students" for that is precisely what Galbraith wants to surrender, although as a radical I'm a bit suspicious of people who want to "deal" with me.

The proposed conference to restructure Harvard--called by the Harvard Policy Committee--is also open to just such co-optation. The reasons I'm not too afraid of the success of that maneuver are complex. But for openers, I'm convinced of the correctness of our analysis and our ability to demonstrate this correctness to the non-aligned. And like the Protestant revolutionaries, we work harder than our adversaries, and care more passionately about the outcome of our faith. Perhaps it is our childishness.

I have addressed myself at length to Dean Ford's article. I fervently hope that my analysis of his position is wrong, and that if I am right, his position is not widely shared by the Liberals in the university. If such feelings and misconceptions are widespread, then all sense of what Dean Ford calls "shared responsibility" (that is, to preserve the university) becomes pointless. The kind of university that would develop out of such an ideology is not "worth more than any riot"--to me, it is worth nothing. If Harvard develops further in that direction, I would soon be ready to say, "All right, we are two universities.