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(Digression on discipline)

THIS artificial situation reflects on university discipline. In effect, the university has no punishments for specific offenses. Severance is not a punishment, it is a decision that here and now a student is not a valuable member of this community; probation is a statement that a student's status is unclear. Neither presupposes guilt, neither is truly a punishment. They are merely statements of the Faculty's dissatisfaction with a student; presumably a student could be severed even if he had committed no offense whatsoever. And different students could be placed in different categories as a result of the same action.

But here and now, severance is a heinous punishment. The university should grant amnesty at this time because its function never was to punish. And these are extraordinary times, when we cannot reject members of our community. We will just have to get along with one another.

The only punishment available is civil law, and here the university must remember with the romantics --you can't go home again.

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WHEN used honestly, "to liberate" is a reflective verb.

Under normal circumstances, one liberates oneself through quiet thought or tremendous internal crises. Loud acid rock may help some people, it may hinder others.

It is true that an intense, emotional atmosphere can push people strongly in the direction of what a radical romantic believes to be the right decisions. This raisse a fierce moral problem: there is a question of individual conscience, the right to remain constricted, one might say. I hear my heroes laughing at my very rhetoric, so I will switch to a tactical argument; stable liberation, whatever it might mean, must be reaction to internal needs, not to external circumstances. It is mere intellectual arrogance to point out to a Harvard student that the life is being squeezed out of him; if it's true for him he should know that on his own. The arrogance involved in believing that one is qualified to set up external conditions which will allow another man to humanize himself is even greater. To justify disruption, the romantic must subscribe to the unlikely argument that undergraduates have been in some psychological sense blind, and that once a strike ends, they will emerge greatly changed.

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OF COURSE, the strike doesn't have to end. Maybe we should create the campus equivalent of perpetual revolution, a third act to "Marat/Sade" as it were. My own guess is that even the most devoted romantic found the past two weeks taxing, even boring. You get nervous, you can't be alone when you walk the streets, you hear someone mention "confrontation" or "sincerity" and you want to put your hands on your ears and run and run and run. I believe it was George Orwell who said that the problem with socialism is that is takes up too many weekday nights. Well, the problem with campus disorder is that it takes up twenty four hours a day. After a certain point, it's not enjoyable.

Revolution, because it requires that concerted action of large numbers of people concentrated in ways that affect other people, is necessarily an institution, one which can be as stifling as a corporation.

My guess is also that most people voted to return to classes because they were tired of striking. I would guess, too, that the first stadium meeting might have voted to suspend the strike if God hadn't sent us such a beautiful spring day. And I would guess that every strike at Harvard--unless its purpose in the eyes of almost ever participant is to rectify outstanding political grievances--will run into a gloomy day on which it will end.

So the only romantic argument for real disruption--one which, as I have said, I cannot accept--must be that the disruption will give a non-illusory opportunity for extraordinary communication and, ultimately, real changes of life style.

Anything else is self-indulgence, which is difficult to glorify in any case and particularly difficult to justify when the hero's grievances are temporary and external to the university. Society needs places for sensitization and places for serious academic study. But they can be separate places.

So this, ultimately, is the reason I left my romantc comrades in University Hall. They were enjoying themselves too much. Had they been in pain, I might have been able to stay, as an existential being crying out against an oppressive world I did not really hope to change. And then I would have been justified in quoting Camus. True, one must imagine Sisyphus happy, but only while he experiences "boundless grief" which is "too heavy to bear."

Something there was in me that was disturbed by the happiness which came before the bust. I wanted to stay; I wanted that clean feeling of opposing cops.

I might very well have left for another reason; I left for another reason; I left for this one.

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"It is not rebellion itself which is noble but the demands it makes upon us,"  ALBERT CAMUS, La Peste.