The potential gains from violent action are not large; the cost, the destruction of the university as a potential critic of the society, is significant. Furthermore, white students are not likely to suffer the brunt of any penalties which society may impose because of disruption on the campus.

There is a good reason to seek a separation between the university and the government. A society is more likely to reform itself if it has several centers of influence and an intellectual community which is not committed to an official policy which it may have played a part in concocting. However, this is not to say that the university's refusal to service certain outside groups would deprive them of any essential output. Action against the university may lighten the burden of the soul, but it will have only a limited effect in achieving wider change.

Purifying the university will not purify the society. The potential payoffs of changes secured through violence are small. The costs are high in terms of both the physical destruction of university facilities such as computers (Sir George Williams), card catalogues (Illinois), and buildings (Berkeley, etc.), and the weakening of the administrative and faculty structures which provide some degree of insulation from the antipathy of the surrounding society.

The university performs many undesirable services for the society in which it operates. However, these activities could easily be administratively and physically removed from the university. The military could replace the ROTC program with little difficulty even if it was completely eliminated from all college campuses. The radical argument that stopping ROTC will stop the war, an argument which relies primarily on the very large percentage of junior officers trained in ROTC programs, is fallacious. The Defense Department has numerous options to replace ROTC such as summer camps, or an expanded O.C.S. program. ROTC is not alter all much of a learning experience.

Similarly, government research carried on at universities could easily be physically relocated. Private industry has already gone far in establishing quasi-academic institutions which directly service their needs. RAND is only the most well-known of a large number of R and D firms which secure contracts from the government of large corporations. Research is performed by men who use equipment which is largely paid for by the government. At some, but certainly not at prohibitive, expense, the government could set up its equipment in a place further removed from Harvard Yard than Mallinkrodt Hall. There are more congenial settings. The men who perform objectionable work now would continue to perform it outside a university setting.

THE university is accused by radicals of providing a rationale for the immoral policies of the present political system. However, the university is not itself the source of government action. It is an easy task for a politician to choose a course of action and then to find an academic argument or even a live academic to rationalize it. The rationalization need not be extremely persuasive nor come from a Harvard professor. The ranks of American academe are legion. Even if all those with supposedly obnoxious views were driven from the campus, the government would still have access to them.

To view the university professors as the authors of national policies is to credit them with far more power than they actually possess. The role of intellectuals has been more to justify actions after the fact than to make a critical difference in fundamental decisions.

A FURTHER consideration which makes the use of violence questionable is that white students are not likely to suffer great harm from any frenzied reactions to violence at the university. A cracked head, a fine, and a short jail sentence are not pleasant but they are not disastrous. Those radicals who have in fact gone into the community are subject to potentially severe penalties although the country has not yet demonstrated a sustained desire to deal with white radicals in the way in which it has dealt with the Black Panthers.

At any rate, few of those who occupied University Hall and only a miniscule percentage of those that struck will take direct action in the outside community which would subject them to long jail terms.

However, the public reaction to university disruption leads to attitudes and policies which do make more difficult the lives of the most dispossessed element in the country. While student activism has contributed to public disaffection with the war, it has not done much to change the domestic situation. Despite the efforts of Progressive Labor, little headway has been made in securing support for radical causes among workers. This may change and, if it does, student potential for initiating effective action on domestic issues will greatly improve. However, as things now stand, those who participate in violent action against the university do not directly suffer from its undesirable consequences.

Students can only achieve their objectives indirectly by influencing policy makers or the groups to which policy makers respond. If activism alienates these groups, students have improved nothing but the state of their own psyches. One of the sources of strength of the radical movement is its appeal to unblemished goodness based on pure intentions. "I put my body on the line" they shouted at Memorial Church on the day after the bust, and there were few who did not feel a twinge of shame for not having done the same. However laudable objectives are not enough.

Actions must be efficacious as well as good. In America in 1969, violence against the university is counterproductive. Changes within the university can be secured without violence: changes in the society cannot be achieved by student violence alone.