Advertisement

President Pusey Meets the Press

I don't agree with their analysis or their estimate of it. Yet I do sympathize with it. And I think a lot of the general unrest on campuses springs from valid concerns.

And insofar as people show these concerns, we as a nation ought to think of them as the source of future strength.

It's just the impatience that insists on correcting the situation "right now" that is a little hard to live with.

JOHNSON: Speaking of correcting the situation "right now"--there are many remedies being talked about, some saying "Get tough"--from the President on down, talking about putting more backbone in college administrators.

The attorney general is talking about a "tyranny of a minority" and new laws.

Advertisement

Do you think that's the way to go?

PUSEY: No, I don't.

Many of us, I think, are terribly afraid of that kind of reaction from outside the campus communities.

It is something we ought rightly to be frightened by.

I think the answer to this has to come from within the university community itself. I think it has to come from the students and faculty primarily.

And it will come only as these groups themselves come to see that this kind of disrupting activity is something that can't be tolerated.

They'll have to withhold, I think, their sympathy with this small group of revolutionaries who don't care about the university--if we're going to come through this period.

WINSHIP: Dr. Pusey, what do you see as the future of the student protest? How much of it will dissipate when the war closes?

A lot of people say 90 per cent of the steam will go out of it when the war is over. Do you think that's so?

PUSEY: Well, that would be a tragedy if that were true.

Advertisement