Fourth, and this happens too in military wars, the personal careers of leaders are involved in the policies they can accept and the decisions they can make. It may be that many, many more university presidents are going to discover what Lyndon Johnson did, that governments cannot reverse themselves. Governments resign, and let successor governments reverse themselves.

I was late arriving and walked into the middle of a talk, and the words that hit me were, "there can be no compromise on academic freedom with ...." I did not hear what it was that couldn't be compromised with. I am sure there are some things that cannot. The other side feels, too, that there can be no compromise. What makes it hardest for either side to get out of a campus confrontation, is that issues in conflict are elevated-escalated-into moral principles. The trouble with moral principles is that they are hard to compromise, especially without personal admissions of turpitude. One of the troubles with saying that anything is a matter of high moral principle, that concessions would be unworthy of our traditions and unmanly in our behavior, is that if we yield and make the concession it is hard to recover. Life can go on, but it is less easy if we construe concession in advance as an admission of depravity and not of error. Ho Chi Minh and Lyndon Johnson converted what might have been a war over part of Southeast Asia into a test of mettle, of honor, of the future of two competing systems; and it is doubly difficult to disconfront.

A little less principle and a little more pragmatism, even less belief in a rigid domino theory, would be helpful. "No compromise" is a great battle cry but usually a poor strategy; "non-negotiable demands" are the stock-in-trade of negotiators, but a dangerous faith.

I have tried to illustrate the "domino theory" with wooden dominoes. I lined them up and struck the first one down; six fell and the seventh stood. I lined them up and tried again, and after a few tries I could make them all fall. It takes some care.

Not all dominoes fall when one goes down. Not with wooden dominoes, probably not in Southeast Asia, probably not in university departments, nor even in a student movement. The weak version of the domino theory is incontestable; the absolute version is discredited on the living room floor.