WHEN S. I. Hayakawa stormed into San Francisco State last fall, he certainly appeared to be a harbinger of the long-awaited crackdown on student protestors. Hayakawa jumped fearlessly into the violent strike that had devoured two S.F. State presidents before him. He captured the national conservative imagination as he struck his tough stance. Without wasting any time mumbling about the strikers' demands for black studies deparments, Hayakawa said that order was his goal. He was going to keep that college open. He would break the strike. And he was not about to let a "violence-minded gang of anarchists, terrorists, and Communist-inspired conspirators" keep his school from operating.

Four months later, it has become clear that much of Hayakawa's tough talk was bluff. On his own campus, Hayakawa simply could not muster the strength to break the strike. The only glimmers of hope came when Hayakawa--through his face-saving negotiating committee--gave in to some of the student demands about black studies. And by the time the formal truce came last week, Hayakawa had dropped his most adamant previous stand--that all the student strikers be expelled.

It would, of course, be glib and ridiculously optimistic to say that all of S.F. State's problems have vanished. The truce ignored many basic tensions and devised makeshift solutions for others. Hayakawa still has to decide whether the strike leaders "deserve" amnesty. And the leaders themselves say that the administration has violated agreements before. The Black Students Union still demands that S.F. State rehire Nathan Hare and George Murray--the two Black Panthers whose firings triggered the strike last fall--while Hayakawa still refuses to bring them back.

But despite the snarl of potential troubles, it seems certain that no one at S.F. State wants another strike. There may be mini-confrontations over amnesty, Hare, and Murray, but neither Hayakawa nor the students is willing to take the kind of hard line that will embroil that campus in another six months of horror. And President Nixon's relatively light-handed statement on student protests last week showed Hayakawa that the rest of the country isn't ready for the crackdown either--at least not as a result of S.F. State's example.

BUT BEFORE campus liberals get too cocky, they should listen to the alarming noises coming from the other side of San Francisco Bay. The inevitable showdown looming at Berkeley and the other University of California campuses poses a far more fundamental threat to university liberty than Hayakawa and his policemen ever made. At worst, Hayakawa threatened to clamp down on students' right to dissent; at best, Ronald Reagan and his Board of Regents are trying to destroy basic rights of academic and intellectual independence.

The vehicle for these harrowing threats is a proposal now before the Board of Regents. The proposal would change the appointment procedure throughout the UC system by denying the chancellors of the nine UC campuses the right to appoint their own professors. Instead, Ronald Reagan and his 24-man Board of Regents would be able to hire, fire, select, and reject all faculty members in the nine colleges.

In one way, the proposal is the logical and unavoidable climax of the last three years of California politics. When Ronald Reagan ran for governor in 1966, he wedged a strong anti-riot plank into his campaign platform. The lurid scenes from the '66 Berkeley riots were still in the voters' minds, and Reagan made tidy political gains by emitting harsh formulas for stopping the student rioters. Reagan seemed to have overestimated the California conservatism, however; a poll taken two days after his election showed that some 65 per cent of California adults--the middle class, conservative, socially-concerned adults who had elected Reagan--were afraid that their new governor might go too far in restricting the colleges.

Two and a half years later, however, the people are no longer so scared. After what has seemed to many Californians to be a constant succession of campus explosions, more and more voters are itching for Reaganesque reprisals against the students. And when a poll was taken late last month, some 75 per cent of those same California voters said they thought the time had come for the governor to get really tough with the students who were wrecking the schools.

At the same time, the practical political power that Reagan can wield has been growing. When Reagan took over, the Board of Regents was still dominated by Pat Brown-appointed liberals. Still angry about the '66 campaign defeat, the liberals smacked down several Reagan proposals in early 1967. But natural turnover has taken its toll since then. And this fall, when Republican victories in the state legislature gave Reagan men a few more ex officio seats on the Board of Regents, Reagan finally had a firm majority.

THE NEW-LOOK Board of Regents first flexed its conservative muscles last November, during the Cleaver affair. In the wake of the '66 Berkeley riots, the Regents had set up special student-faculty committees to design and select new courses. Last fall, the Berkeley committee came up with a number of new courses--including one on U.S. racism. The lecturer was to be Eldridge Cleaver, who was then a U.S. resident and available for such duties.

The Regents' meagre enthusiasm for the course-creating committees vanished as soon as they heard about Cleaver. In a swift purge, the Regents banned the Cleaver course, crippled the student-faculty committees, and touched off immediate student protests. A series of abortive moves by both sides followed. But the issue of student and faculty power to create their own courses was never resolved. The Regents re-opened negotiations to decide just how much autonomy the individual campuses should have in designing curricula, but no clear statement emerged.

The next step on the road to this week's proposal came last month. Going through their regular list of UC faculty appointments, the Regents came across the name of Herbert Marcuse. Now there was a name that Reagan recognized. If there was any person more offensive to Reagan's concept of orderly campuses than Eldridge Cleaver, it would have to be Marcuse. For several months Reagan had fumed about Marcuse's role in fanning protest flames that the Regents' fire brigade was trying to put out. How can we ever stop these riots, Reagan would say, when we have that man Marcuse on one of our own campuses?

As a realistic step towards stopping riots, ousting Marcuse was obviously absurd. In the sunny San Diego campus of the UC system, Marcuse did little but walk the beaches with his crowd of devotees. Clumps of five or six Marcusians would discuss revolution as they strolled from the UCSD campus to their beach houses in affluent La Jolla, but there was little real revolution brewing at UCSD. Marcuse's books, of course, exerted an enormous international impact. But even in their grandest moments of self-congratulation, the Regents wouldn't have imagined that it was Marcuse's post at UCSD that gave him his reputation.

Well-directed or not, the move against Marcuse failed. A long-standing UC rule gave each chancellor the right to name his own faculty members. The UCSD chancellor--knowing what his campus' biggest drawing card was--stood by Marcuse, and the Regents could not break him.

The Regents soon moved to get rid of that irritating limitation. A few weeks after the Marcuse debate, Edwin Pauley, an oil tycoon and Reagan appointee, came up with a proposal. Instead of letting the meddling chancellors control the faculty, the Regents could appoint the teachers themselves and save a lot of needless anxiety about men like Marcuse.

When Pauley's plan appeared on the Regents' docket, the chancellors' outcry was immediate. The residual liberals on the Regents joined them, as did students demonstrators at all the UC campuses. All denounced the Regents' blatant attempt to impose political limitations on the faculty.

A more surprising source of opposition, however, came from Charles Hitch, the president of the UC system. Even though he had backed some of Reagan's moves during the Cleaver turmoil, Hitch came out flatly against Pauley and gave a list of practical objections. Long before the New York Times pointed out the trend last month, Hitch and his chancellors had watched with anguish as professors fled the increasingly-restrictive UC climate for Harvard and the East. If Pauley's plan were adopted, Hitch said, the University would have a hard time holding any of its faculty. Another administrator said that the Eastern colleges would chortle with perverse delight when they read of the plan.

But Hitch realized that political threats were the real danger in the Regents' plan. And Reagan's reply to Hitch's practical appeal showed the political threats in their most venomous form. Hitch might have hoped that Reagan would argue on the same administrative-efficiency terms. Not a chance. Reagan bluntly admitted that the plan was a political tool. The Regents thought that the chancellors had appointed too many liberals, he said. It was time for the Regents to "intervene and put a little balance back into the picture."

Pauley and Reagan didn't manage to ram the plan through at the Regents' last meeting in Los Angeles. Pressure from the chancellors delayed any conclusive decisions. But the plan is still poisonously healthy, and the Regents will have a chance at it again soon. Perhaps the chancellors' squawking will convince the Californians that the backlash at Sacramento has gotten out of hand. Reagan has gone over the brink, and he might drag the whole UC system down with him.