3

THE ADMINISTRATION

I remarked at the beginning of this book that many of the best university administrators in the world have been unable to cope with student revolts. In spite of obvious administrative abilities and years of experience, they have been defeated or damaged by fairly ragtag collections of unkempt amateur revolutionaries. Why is that so? What is it about administrations that has made them so vulnerable? It is common to say in each crisis that the administration blundered, and that it "made mistakes." As Louis Benezet, president of the Claremont University Center, put it:

The president has been too lax; he has been too firm and unyielding; he has not listened to his faculty; he has indulged his faculty or his students; he has acted too fast; he has waited too long to act; he has called in the police; he [84] hasn't called in the police. Whatever it is he should have done, he didn't do; whatever he shouldn't have done, he foolishly did do.¹

In fact, though administrations make mistakes, mistakes that cost them heavily, we shall have to inquire elsewhere for the main sources of their weaknesses. I believe that their weaknesses derive from certain structural features of the situation. They are involved in conflicts where the rules of the game make it extremely difficult, sometimes impossible for them to gain unambiguous victories. Often the most they can hope to do is avoid defeat and destruction. It has long been recognized that the responsibilities of the college president exceed his power and authority, but the better ones were able, in the past, to overcome this gap by skillful managerial techniques. For reasons we shall explore in this chapter, these techniques are inadequate to cope with the present crises. These crises have exposed two major structural weaknesses in the position of the college president: he has divided and inconsistent responsibilities, and he lacks any natural constituency. [86]

§1. DIVIDED RESPONSIBILITY AND THE MEDIATOR

Many administrations are unable to perform their assigned task of governing the university because each of several constituencies makes demands on the administration which are irreconcilable, and yet each insists that unless its demands are met it will withdraw the support on which the continued existence of the administration depends. It is not merely that each of several agencies has a veto power on the administration -- that would be bad enough -- but rather that each has a veto on the administration's acceptance of the veto of any of the others. Thus, for example, if the president doesn't call the police on the campus, the trustees will fire him; if he does call the police the faculty will withdraw its support and he cannot effectively govern. In such situations, the opportunities for imaginative leadership are severely limited: you are damned if you do and damned if you don't. In spite of the fact that we live in a period that is crying out for dramatic, decisive university leadership, most college presidents are forced by these structural inconsistencies to adopt an extremely cautious, ambiguous, neutral, low-profile stance, in order to offend as few people as possible. Clark Kerr described the multiversity president as "mostly a mediator,"² but in the present period the mediator often looks, in spite of himself, like a procrastinator and a prevaricator.

The term "mediator" is not entirely accurate, because it suggests that the president has no position of his own. Nevertheless, most of the best college presidents in the United States, over the past two decades, see their role [87] rather on the model of Kerr's mediator than on the model of the great charismatic educational leaders of the past. Their style is managerial, and in some ways their most important task has been to mediate disputes among their various constituencies. However, the task of the mediator presupposes that the competing groups are amenable to mediation. When they refuse to negotiate, when all demands are "non-negotiable," there is no role for the negotiator. "The first task of the mediator," says Kerr, "is peace."³ But when the contending armies refuse to submit to mediation, there can be no peace.

From the point of view of the president, the pattern of events I described in Chapter 1 appears as follows. A radical element among the students makes "non-negotiable demands" which the president feels he cannot grant and which he cannot mediate into some acceptable form. These students (and nonstudents) then create so much violence and disruption that he can no longer perform his basic task of protecting the academic process. So he calls for help from the police. The police outrage the faculty and the rest of the students, who blame the president both for the police presence and their behavior. When the president loses faculty support he can no longer effectively govern and must eventually resign or be fired unless he can soon regain that support (or unless he is willing to abandon the mediator-managerial stance, a point I shall come to later). Meanwhile, the trustees look on and see that the whole place is a mess, and they begin to wonder if they would be better off with someone else as president. In state universities, the legislators and governor and their constituents look on with increasing outrage. They don't mind the mess so much as they mind the fact that the president is not pursuing a hard line. [88] Never mind the fact that a hard line often makes the mess much worse; they believe devoutly in the existence of the famous "small minority of troublemakers" who are responsible for the whole thing, and they can't see why the president doesn't fire those Communists on the faculty and kick those awful long-haired students out of school. The politicians and the outraged public are much more interested in punishment than they are in peace or education. And they have a sympathetic hearing among the trustees, because they control the purse strings. In private universities, rich alumni donors play this role.

In sum, the situation of the president is one of impossibly divided responsibilities. To whom is he really supposed to be answerable? Constitutionally, he is responsible to the trustees; they appoint him, and in theory his task is to administer the university in accordance with policies they set. He is supposed to play the role of the manager of a corporation to their board of directors. But in fact, in the better universities the presidents have, over the past fifty years, come to regard the faculty as the primary constituency on matters of internal policy. Such presidents are usually former faculty members themselves, and their theory of the university is expressed in the view that "the faculty really is the university." On rare occasions they may defy the majority of the faculty, but most such presidents believe that in the long run support of the faculty is the first requirement of effective governance. They accept the principle of ultimate faculty consent.

Historically, the rise of the mediator conception of the college president is closely associated with the rise of the faculty. In the days when the faculty were hired hands, "a proletariat," as Flexner called them, presidents had no need to be mediators, at least not on internal campus matters. Nicholas Murray Butler in his heyday at Columbia and Benjamin Ide Wheeler before the great California [89] faculty revolt of 1920 would not have thought of themselves as mediators.

If the present trends continue, it is hard to see how the mediator conception of the university president can survive. Kerr, describing the task of the president, says, "To make the multiversity work really effectively, the moderates need to be in control of each power center and there needs to be an attitude of tolerance between and among the power centers, with few territorial ambitions." In a sentence which is prophetic in ways he could hardly have expected, he goes on to describe what came to pass: "When the extremists get in control of the students, the faculty, or the trustees with class warfare concepts, the 'delicate balance of interests' becomes an actual war."⁴

If the mediator conception of the presidency should fail to survive the current period of hysteria, what conception would be likely to replace it? One candidate is the conception of the university president as the "representative" of the students and the faculty. In practice this would mean that the president would at all costs avoid getting into an adversary relationship with any sizable group of the most vocal elements within the campus. He would become the mouthpiece of the nonviolent left, thus depriving the violent left of its potential mass constituency; and he would create a public image of himself which would make it difficult for the radicals to identify him with the forces of evil on the Sacred Topics in the classical manner described in Chapter 1. In some respects, Perkins at Cornell fell into this pattern of behavior in 1968, but the most obvious example of this style of administration was that of Kingman Brewster at Yale in 1970 (though I am not suggesting he adopted it as a deliberate stratagem). By avoiding the adversary stance [90] against his own left on the campus, he allowed the nonviolent left to create a sense of community in the entire university. This atmosphere both defused the hostility of the violent left, and enabled the entire activist community to focus its hostilities against outside events and agencies -- in particular the trial of Bobby Seale and other Black Panthers in New Haven -- rather than against the local administration. Brewster's famous remark about the trial, that he was "skeptical about the ability of black revolutionaries to get a fair trial anywhere in the United States," placed him in an adversary relationship with the same adversaries as the student left; and as they have said so often, "the enemy of my enemy is my friend." When he was attacked by Vice-President Agnew, he received official certification as one of US rather than one of THEM, and his prestige on the campus rose enormously. He was, at least in image, a true representative.

Many liberal faculty members like this style of administration. They think that Brewster's behavior was simply wonderful, and they cannot see why all college presidents do not imitate him. After all, did he not keep peace on the campus? There are indeed various freak situations in which maneuvers of the Yale type are useful -- when, for example, the administration needs to stall for time and can do so by deflecting student hostility away from the university and on to the outside community. But I do not believe that the representative conception of the president has much of a future over the long haul. If pursued consistently it would undermine the conception of the university as essentially an intellectual agency in favor of the university as a center of political action. Furthermore, in those universities which are dependent on outside financial support for their continued existence (and which aren't?), the sources of that support will not tolerate a left-wing university or a president [91] who becomes the spokesman of a particular controversial political viewpoint.

Unless the mediator presidents can prove themselves much more effective at governing the universities than they have been in the past half-dozen years, it seems to me likely that the trustees will opt for a style of president altogether different from both the mediator and the representative. The managerial presidents are not likely to be replaced by "representatives" of students and faculty but by representatives of the trustees, by "law and order" hardliners. The death of the mediator is likely to be followed by the rise of the gladiator. A partial model for this style of college president already exists in the career of S. I. Hayakawa at San Francisco State College. Unlike the mediator, the gladiator does not seek to avoid conflict or to mediate his way out of it in ways that are acceptable to as many people as possible. On the contrary, he accepts the confrontation of power groups and seeks to destroy the power of his radical adversaries. Unlike the mediator he does not seek to present a neutral, ambiguous political profile to the general public or to avoid publicity; on the contrary, he seeks publicity and makes deliberately inflammatory statements. He cultivates an image of decisiveness, even of pugnacity. Most important of all, he does not accept the principle of ultimate faculty veto. On the contrary, he is prepared to govern the university without the approval or consent or support of the faculty. Abandoning his claim to govern the faculty on the basis of his personal prestige and their willingness to cooperate, he falls back on his legal authority as president.

This last feature is of crucial importance. In the good universities, the president does not, at present, govern the faculty solely or primarily on the basis of his legal authority to do so. He is not "the boss." Rather, there is an extremely delicate set of working relationships between [92] the administration and the faculty based on the tacit assumption that the faculty will voluntarily cooperate with the administration, and the president will recognize that his tenure of office is subject to the consent of the faculty. Under the present system, in the best universities once the president gets a vote of no confidence from the faculty, or even if a large minority is persistently calling for his resignation, his days are numbered. This tacit assumption of mutual relationships of dependency infects the operation of the university in a thousand small ways. For example, the president may have the final say on appointments and promotions, but in practice he accepts the advice of his faculty advisory committees. They make the recommendation and he normally accepts it. Effective decision-making power in this area is usually theirs, not his. Yet he keeps a residue of final authority, and even in tenure cases he sometimes will reject the advice of his committees. The president accepts the idea that for the most part he will do what they recommend; they accept the idea that occasionally they are going to be overruled. At this level the tacit working assumptions cannot be codified in any set of written rules.

In the crisis, the system breaks down at the point where the president discovers the faculty will no longer support him. If this occurs frequently enough the trustees are likely to seek presidents on the Hayakawa model -- presidents who will ignore the opinion of the faculty, and who will decide what they want to do and go ahead and do it, regardless of faculty sentiment.

If the gladiatorial style of administrative leadership should emerge out of the present period, it will involve a change not only in the personnel and the modus operandi of university governance, but also a change in the whole style of university life. The greatness of the best American universities derives from the assumption of the primacy [93] of the intellect over power. It has seldom been necessary to invoke legal authority because a moral authority system has superseded it. One of the many ironies to emerge from this decade may be that a challenge which was originally posed to administrations by students should end in strengthening the power of the administrations at the expense of the faculty. This is indeed happening. In some cases it is happening without a gladiatorial president through the withdrawal of delegation of authority from the faculty.

§2. THE LACK OF A NATURAL CONSTITUENCY

Another structural source of the weakness of the college president -- equally important though less obvious than the inconsistency of his responsibilities -- is the fact that he has no natural constituency in the community. The elements of the community count on him and hold him responsible, but he cannot count on them. What, after all, is the theory of college administration? It is that an independent centralized agency can provide more efficiency, can release faculty members from various time-devouring chores, can maintain high and uniform intellectual standards in appointments, can play a leadership role in adjudicating disputes and preventing ossification of the university, and can be held responsible for the overall operation of the place. This efficiency and convenience theory provides no reason why any major group of students or faculty should be loyal to the administration, and should recognize its authority even while disagreeing violently with its policies.

The crucial weakness of the system is that although the faculty comprises the primary constituency of the administration, the administration is established as an agency [94] separate from the faculty, and the faculty government is established as independent and separate from the structure of decision-making in the administration. This makes faculty government feeble, though given to much publicized rhetorical excess.

The system works well only as long as the university is not politicized. When the university confines itself to educational tasks, questions of the bases of administrative authority normally do not arise. But when, as now, the university becomes a political arena, when questions of legitimacy, and constituencies, and authority come to the fore, when the authority of the administration is under constant and systematic challenge, the system can no longer function effectively. College administrations were not designed to produce political leadership, and not surprisingly they cannot cope with situations requiring it.

Until recently college presidents tended to assume that the faculty would support their well-intentioned actions in a crisis -- that if forced to choose between the duly constituted authority and a militant student and nonstudent minority challenging that authority, the overwhelming majority of the faculty would support the president. The validity of this assumption is crucial, for the support of the faculty determines who will win the struggle. As I remarked earlier, when the faculty backs the radicals against the administration the radicals have won; without that backing it is impossible for them to win. Repeatedly, all across the country, college presidents have been amazed to find that they have lost the support of their faculties in crisis, that the left and even many of the "moderates" of the faculty support the administration only as long as they agree with its policies. As soon as the authorities do something the professors disapprove of, especially as soon as they do something that the faculty considers outrageous such as calling the cops, the faculty [95] is prepared to withdraw all support. As one university leader has, with some bitterness, remarked:

University faculties all over this country have had occasion to evaluate the performance of all types of men in threading their way through these strong opposing forces that threatened to reduce autonomy. This faculty has had several opportunities of this sort.

By and large, the solution at many universities, including this one, has been to look for someone else, or suggest some self-initiative on the part of the administrator himself. As a contribution to institutional theory, it might be a good idea for some faculty somewhere, at a time of acute crisis, to try the idea of giving an administrator some support, some running room and some protection from coercion.⁵

No system of authority can survive if people insist that they must agree with all the decisions of the authority before they recognize that authority; but that is the situation we have drifted into in many major American universities. And it derives not from some set of administrative mistakes (in a crisis anything the administration does is a mistake to some major constituency or other) but from a structural feature of university organization. There is no constituency, which, because of the very structure of the university organization, identifies its welfare with the success of the administration. The administration, to use the awful current jargon, lacks "legitimacy."

Contrast this situation with that of other agencies in political crises. The President of the United States knows, for example, that he can count on a great deal of support from members of his party, and indeed from the country at large, even though they may have disagreements with this or that policy. They are committed to him. The remarkable thing about Johnson's Administration was not his withdrawal, but the fact that he could and did [96] administer a policy which ran dead counter to the platform on which he was elected by such an overwhelming majority against Goldwater: the promise to de-escalate the war in Vietnam. The ability to betray millions of voters, month after month, with consequences which any child could recognize as disastrous, reveals an institutional stability and a structure of authority which would make any college president's mouth water with envy. The first time the college president makes a major "mistake" he finds that his supposed primary constituency, the faculty, will offer him little or no support. And the decline in his authority is not a mere decline in his personal stature, but in the authority of the institution of the administration itself.

§3. FACULTY ATTITUDES

One might have supposed that the faculty would support the authorities in time of crisis just out of a sense of personal loyalty and an awareness of how much the administration has done over the years to benefit it. Certainly, many presidents have supposed they could count on a large measure of support, since after all, they regarded their primary tasks over the years to be of service to the faculty. They were surprised when, in a crisis, the faculty displayed little institutional loyalty and less personal loyalty.

Part of the explanation for this lack of support derives from the sorts of attitudes characteristic among faculty members. The ideological center of gravity among American faculties is that constellation of opinions and attitudes inadequately described as "liberal." Now liberals, by conviction, are not primarily loyal to men (or even to institutions) but to principles, and to a lesser extent procedures [97] and styles. When issues of principle are raised -- and campus crises are nothing if not issues of principles -- the liberal's loyalties are to his principles and not to his superiors.

Before I did any administrative work it used to puzzle me that the administration relied for support, advice, selection of committee heads, etc., not on the distinguished liberal faculty, but rather on tiresome conservatives and moderates, some of whom had little intellectual distinction. It seemed to me in the administration's best interest to avoid the elderly conservatives and get the first-rate young and middle-aged liberals. They tend to be more distinguished and prestigious in their disciplines and, one would assume, could supply the administration with higher quality of service as well as a better image on campus. After a few months in administrative work the reason for this became quite obvious: most liberals are not loyal. At the first big disagreement, they are ready with denunciations and are threatening resignations. You cannot count on them to support you in times of difficulty; so you are forced to turn to people whom you believe you can trust, even though they may not share your general outlook and may disagree with you on various matters of policy.

Also, where academic liberals are concerned, you do not acquire any credit for your past actions and policies; you never accumulate any backlog of goodwill on which you can draw in time of crisis. You may fight heroic battles month after month for causes they claim to support, but the moment you do something they disagree with they are at your throat, knife in hand. For them, you have to prove your commitment to their values anew each day, and this is quite impossible, since they do not agree among themselves on what counts as a correct expression of their values. In faculties where liberal attitudes tend [98] to predominate -- and these tend to be most of the best faculties in the country -- there is a built-in instability of authority which stems from the congenital inability of many liberals to feel any loyalty to the particular men who happen to be in power (more of this in Chapter 4). Again, the contrast with politics in the real world, even liberal politics, should be obvious. In democratic governments, as well as in trade unions and pressure groups, leaders are at least sometimes judged, even by liberal constituencies, on their overall record; and day to day operations and conflicts are mingled with all sorts of obligations, loyalties, commitments, and compromises which go far beyond the issue of the moment and even beyond the shared ideology.

§4. INTERNAL WEAKNESSES

People who support the administration are often dismayed to find that in the inevitable TV discussions and panel debates in which the administrators confront their radical adversaries, the radicals usually look better, regardless of the merits of the issue. But this is precisely what should be expected, given that the radical leaders one sees on television are selected explicitly for their general charisma and in particular for their television appeal, whereas college presidents are hardly ever selected because of their charisma or television abilities. President Hayakawa is our first television college president (just as Reagan is our first television governor). Hayakawa is extremely effective with the general public; he comes over well in television confrontations, and he devotes an enormous amount of time and energy to public relations efforts. His whole style is quite different from that of the conventional college president.

The most obvious internal structural weakness of college administrations is their lack of staff adequate in size and flexibility to deal with crises. Generally, administrations are staffed by filling a list of specific offices defined in terms of the routine operations of the university. The whole apparatus of flow charts, line and staff relations, job descriptions, and all the rest of it, is designed on the assumption that there is a set of recurring routine tasks that have to be performed. In a time of crisis these jobs still have to be performed -- professors have to be hired and promoted, the students have to get grades and degrees, and so on -- but the crisis, even a routine crisis, can take twelve or eighteen hours a day of the time of the [100] top-level administrative staff. There is no reserve to call on, and more than one administrator has collapsed from sheer exhaustion. Courtney Smith, the president of Swarthmore, died of a heart attack in the midst of a crisis, and Franklin Ford of Harvard suffered a stroke during the events of the spring of 1969.

The single most depressing visual spectacle in my early days as a part-time college administrator in Berkeley was the sight of the assembled chancellor's staff. This, I thought, is the group we may have to take into battle against the largest, best-organized, and most competently led radical student army in the history of the country. This friendly assemblage of self-effacing vice-chancellors, key punch operators, and mild-mannered secretaries -- amateurs all, when it comes to the struggle -- might have to do battle against the veterans of the FSM. What a thought! And while it did inspire us all to tremendous acrobatics of maneuver in an effort to avoid any confrontations, it did not give rise to much optimism.

Furthermore, college administrators and their trustees seem exasperatingly unable to see the magnitude and permanence of the problem. Instead of staffing and budgeting for a long-run series of crises, they persist in regarding each one as the last. They desperately need crisis-oriented staffs, and even more important, a set of crisis procedures that will enable them to respond to assaults in an organized and premeditated way. At present they are rather like the tribe of nomads in the Turkish desert that has not yet figured out the cycle of the seasons. Each year they are amazed at the onset of winter; they had no idea the weather was going to be so bad again.

A single example will illustrate the inability to think in other than traditional categories: in 1965, the first year after the FSM, many faculty members and top-level administrators on the Berkeley campus came to the conclusion [101] that they could not live with the outdoor sound amplifying system in the Sproul Plaza, at the heart of the Berkeley campus. After much politicking, the Campus Rules Committee (a post-FSM innovation composed of five students, four faculty and one administrator) voted 6-4 to remove it to a slightly less central place, effective the following September. The question for the administration was how to go about it. I was not very enthusiastic about the whole project. "First, if you really want to enforce this, you will need a building," I said at the time, "a separate building to house the bureaucracy." "What bureaucracy?" I was asked. "The bureaucracy you will need to fight the coming war. You will also need an immediate budget of at least $250,000 and you had better now retain at least a hundred good lawyers in Oakland and San Francisco to handle disciplinary cases alone." All these warnings were regarded as bits of egregious hyperbole, not to be taken seriously. But when the time came to enforce the Rules Committee recommendation, the administration did not have the resources for enforcement. They backed down in a humiliating fashion, because it was logistically impossible to enforce the recommendation. The microphones stayed in their old place.

A third internal structural weakness of the administration lies in its lack of any forum in which to present its views. This may surprise some people, for part of the effectiveness of the David-Goliath image of university conflict is the misconception that the administration commands great resources and ready access to television and other mass media. In fact, the administration finds that it is confronted with an incredible barrage of speeches, leaflets, meetings, marches, all purveying the most extraordinary lies, and it has very little means of answering this onslaught. The student newspaper, the most obvious medium of campus communication, is, in general, [102] controlled by the radicals. More than one college administration has been forced to buy advertising space in a student newspaper that the administration subsidizes and in theory controls, in order even to state its point of view.

For the administration to engage in leafleting and to participate in public debates with radicals is often to concede in a subtle way the style of radical confrontation as opposed to the style of rational discourse, and the very use of such methods, therefore, is seen as a form of defeat. Indeed, for the president to engage in public debates with radicals is to concede equality of authority status with his adversaries. Here is the president, there is the radical student leader, they come before you to present their views and you make up your own mind. You pays your money and you takes your choice. This is an impossible position for a president to be in, because his continued functioning depends on his being regarded not as one among equals but as the head of the university.

In the face of these obstacles, most administrations simply rely on press releases to get their point of view across. But the public press is an extremely imperfect means of communication, since the newspapers almost never print the release but rather some garbled abbreviation of it which distorts it beyond recognition or even intelligibility. Furthermore, in order to make a "more interesting story" the reporters will give equal or even more space to the various comments on the press release by student radicals, elected politicians, and random bystanders. A press release designed to clarify the university's position on ROTC is likely to produce a headline that reads SDS CALLS PRESIDENT A LIAR. [103]

§5. THE DOUBLE STANDARD

In the famous crisis meeting of the Harvard faculty in the spring of 1969, Franklin Ford, dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, and one of the most able college administrators in the country, was describing the misbehavior of the SDS. Among other things, he said that the radicals were still occupying the top floor of Emerson Hall, the building in Harvard Yard that houses the philosophy department. Rising to his feet, a professor of philosophy promptly gave him the lie. The professor pointed out that the radicals were not "forcibly occupying" the top floor of Emerson Hall; they were, in fact, just using it as a command post. To the outsider this would look like nit-picking on the part of the professor, especially since Ford had been barred from the area. But in the context of the meeting the rebuttal was a terrible blow to Ford. Picture the scene. Ford, the Machiavellian administrator, trying to deceive his faculty. In an emotion-packed moment, the courageous philosophy professor, in righteous anger and without reck for the cost to himself and his family, exposes the truth. Instant heroism. [104]

Such ludicrous scenes have their impact because the college administrator is assumed to be wrong from the start. He is suspect, he is not to be trusted, his every action and utterance must be scrutinized to reveal the sinister motives that lie behind it, and the deception that it veils. Everything he does is wrong. But not just mistaken, it is metaphysically wrong; to the doctrinaire it reveals his commitment to the military-industrial complex; and to the more sophisticated it reveals a failure of sensibility that derives from his bureaucratic mentality and commitments.

The double standard -- the insistence that the administration should comply with impossible standards of rectitude while forgiving its adversaries everything short of murder and arson -- is often manifest in the recurring instances of the fallacy of misplaced concreteness. Here is how it works. In the crisis some relatively unimportant imperfection in the behavior of the administration, real or imagined, is fastened onto and made the focus of the entire moral involvement. Thus, at Harvard it became a question of great magnitude how many deans the president had consulted with before calling the cops. At Berkeley in 1966 much was made of the alleged fact that the administration did not have the permission of the ASUC, the student government, to allow the Navy recruiting table inside the student union (the administration did, in fact, have the permission of the ASUC, but because of the administration's inability to get its position across it was quite commonly believed that it did not -- which also illustrates a point I made earlier). At San Francisco State, literally thousands of people permitted themselves to stop thinking about the hard problems of the institution by reflecting on the fact that Hayakawa had torn the wires off a sound truck. For them, after it was said that he tore [105] the wires off the sound truck, really nothing more needed to be considered.

While the administration finds that it could not describe the weather without being accused of lying, its adversaries and their apologists are able to purvey wildly inaccurate accounts of events and be readily believed. Consider the following passage:

Then, in December, 1966, Berkeley activists tried to set up an antidraft literature table next to a Navy recruiting table in the Student Union. A massive sit-in and student strike ensued as a result of efforts by the administration to eject the protesters from the Student Union and to defend the ejection on the grounds that, as a state university campus, Berkeley had to offer government agencies the special privilege of setting up recruiting tables in areas of the Student Union where students were forbidden to set up their tables.

It is hard to imagine a more inaccurate account of the events in question. Just to mention half a dozen of the most obvious "errors": first, the issue which provoked the confrontation was not about the "antidraft literature table"; the vice-chancellor gave permission for it to be there. Second, no "massive sit-in" ensued; the administration authorized a large all-night meeting in the ballroom of the Student Union. Third, the administration was not interested in "ejecting the protestors from the Student Union"; it was trying to clear away students and nonstudents who were physically interfering with the Navy recruiting table and blocking the entrance to the student book store; fourth, the administration never advanced the argument that government agencies were entitled to a "special privilege" denied to student organizations, but that under certain conditions the agencies could be given the same rights of free speech as student organizations. Fifth, there was no "special privilege" in being in the basement [106] of the Student Union; that location is less desirable than the normal table area on the plaza. The Navy was put there because in a previous incident with military recruiters on the plaza, there had been violence. Sixth, even the date is wrong, it was on November 30.

I cite this passage not only because of its inaccuracies but because of its source. It is not the hysterical outpouring of some undergraduate mimeograph machine. It comes from "The Skolnick Report to the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence,"⁶ written by a professor of sociology with staff, consultants, and advisors numbering no fewer than sixty-four sociologists, criminologists, lawyers, assorted research assistants, etc., and working under a grant at the Center for the Study of Law and Society in Berkeley.

How is one to explain the fact that these dozens of social scientists with all their fancy titles and auspices and with really awesome research resources fail to get the elementary facts right? Notice that the errors are not random. With the exception of the mistake about the date, which is just carelessness, they give a systematically unsympathetic account of the administration. Like the radical publicists, they attribute absurd arguments to the administration; thus they do not have to confront the real arguments. The argument used by the administration was that even the United States Navy was entitled to free speech. My hypothesis to account for the pervasive and systematic inaccuracies in the passage is that the activist mode of sensibility provides such a filter on the author's perceptions as to render it difficult, almost impossible, for many of the facts to get through. The dramatic categories determine the perceptions. [107]

§6. ADMINISTRATIVE STRENGTHS

It should be obvious from the foregoing discussion that administrations face conflicts with enormous disadvantages, regardless of the merits or demerits of their official stance on whatever may be the campus policy in question. In the face of this list of administrative weaknesses, it may seem amazing that the authorities ever win a confrontation at all. But they have certain advantages which come to their rescue time after time. One of their most important advantages over the radicals is that they have a superior theory of social organization. Unlike their adversaries, they have a permanent organizational structure that, however weak and imperfect it is, continues to function whether there is a crisis or not, has a momentum of its own, and will survive truly remarkable assaults. In my two years in the administration after the FSM, the Berkeley campus went through some titanic struggles, but at the end of each crisis, when the dust had settled, there we were in the office, with our secretaries and filing cabinets and budget allocations, exactly as we had been before the crisis. Our adversaries may have controlled the streets and the plaza for a few hours, but at the end of the battle they had absolutely no permanent organization to maintain whatever mileage they might have gained in the struggle for power, and when the next crisis came they had to start all over from the beginning. A second more obvious source of administrative strength is that the administration has, after all, the legal authority, delegated from the trustees, to govern the university. Administrators are often reluctant, because of their commitment to the managerial-mediator style of governance, to fall back on their legal authority and govern even for a crisis period solely on that basis. But if they choose to do [108] so, it is impossible to defeat them, as long as they continue to have the support of the trustees and are willing to defy the principle of ultimate faculty consent. There is almost no form of internal insurrection that they cannot defeat if they have the will to do it. A college president who decides that his policy is best for the university and who is willing to fight for it, unless he makes egregious technical mistakes or alienates his trustees, can defeat any group of internal adversaries whether faculty or students. Indeed, if a president builds enough of an independent power base in the community at large, as Hayakawa did, he could even defy the trustees. I am not recommending this style of political "guerre a outrance," except in rare circumstances where a lot depends on the administration's crushing its adversaries, because it runs counter to my ideal of what a university is; but it is important to note that it is ultimately available. When administrations are defeated and the president resigns, it is usually a result of their demoralization. They see that the situation is so unpleasant that the educational objectives and personal style they hoped to maintain as college administrators are no longer possible, so they leave office. But a president who chooses to stay and fight it out can usually prevail in the long run. Even faculty outrage dies down much sooner than one would suppose, and an issue that produces angry faculty resolutions against the administration is usually forgotten in six months or so.

§7. A MODEST PROPOSAL

All of these are practical reforms, but I wish to present at least one wildly impractical suggestion. Sometimes a "utopian" ideal is useful even in the short run to enable us to understand what is wrong with the existing system: I think the administration as an independent agency should be abolished and responsibility for the performance of most of its present functions should be lodged with the faculty. This is not such a farfetched proposal as it might sound. Most of the present weaknesses of university administrations stem from the fact that they have divided responsibilities, and they have responsibilities without the effective authority to carry them out. One reason they lack this authority is that they are not genuine agencies, in the way that the economics department or the sailing club are genuine agencies, embodying real interests in the university. The two most important interest groups within the university, the basic constituencies as it were, are the faculty and the students, with the faculty having primacy. Now, if responsibility for administering the affairs of the university is lodged with the faculty, either the faculty will have to break major large universities into smaller units -- like, for example, Oxford colleges -- which can be administered by faculty members, or they will have to select agents to administer the present huge institutions. But, notice, if they select agents, then the two chief weaknesses [110] of the present system are eliminated. The administration would be responsible to the faculty, instead of having the impossibly divided sets of responsibilities that it has at present, and more importantly, the faculty would then be committed to the administration, for they would have chosen it as their administration. As far as the nuts-and-bolts routine operations of the university are concerned, it doesn't matter a bit whether the people who perform them think of themselves as working for an independent administration or for the faculty administration. But for major issues and in major crises, it does matter that the faculty should be committed to and should be held responsible for the decisions.

A partial model for faculty administration already exists in the department chairman. He is officially an administrative officer, but in well-run universities he tends, in fact, to be selected by the members of the department and to act as their agent.

It may seem puzzling and paradoxical that I would propose lodging more responsibility with the faculty, since I have argued and will argue further in the next chapter that many of the present difficulties stem from faculty irresponsibility. But this will not seem paradoxical at all when one recognizes that the faculty irresponsibility is a function of the fact that the faculty is not constitutionally responsible for governance, and much of the irresponsibility would be removed if they were held responsible for it. There is some direct evidence to support this. In areas where the faculty have the effective decision-making power such as faculty appointments and curricular changes, their behavior is very cautious and responsible (sometimes too conservative!); their "irresponsibility" emerges when they act in areas which tread on administrative authority. It is on questions where they have no authority that they develop an adversary stance to the [111] administration and take actions which wipe out administrative authority.

Another piece of evidence: in my observation, Oxford and Cambridge dons, who make up the "governing bodies" of their colleges have an attitude to university governance which is quite different from American professors. While they share the same general ideology about the world at large and have much the same professional commitments, when it comes to the governance of the university, the American professor, unlike the Oxford don, is likely to think of the administrative authority as THEM and not US. He does not see himself as responsible for administering the university; quite the contrary, he sees one of his problems as that of defending his rights against the administration. The Oxford don, on the other hand, sees himself as part of the administration; there is no "administration" in the American sense.

It is important to reiterate how peculiar and anomalous the American system is. The faculty is not given the responsibility for governance of the college, yet it has the authority to destroy the administration, which is responsible. An entirely unnecessary and artificial adversay relationship is created by the existence of an independent administration. This is most strikingly obvious to the faculty member who accepts an administrative post. He suddenly discovers that the attitude of his faculty colleagues to him has changed. He may think he is in the administration to defend their shared values, and he may think of himself as primarily a professional scholar, but his colleagues think of him as having "stepped over the line," as one professor once put it to me. The administrator becomes one of them and is no longer one of us. I hardly need emphasize that it is unlikely that this reform will be carried out in the foreseeable future. What is much more likely, given the political situation in the country today, [112] is that faculties will be battered into submission by a mixture of repressive measures -- economic, legal, and disciplinary.

§8. THE TRUSTEES

In American universities, final authority for governance is normally lodged in a lay board of trustees. Legally speaking, the university is the corporation of the trustees. Though this system has existed elsewhere -- e.g., Holland in the sixteenth century -- it is peculiarly American, and as far as I know does not now exist outside the United States and Canada. It is so solidly entrenched in the American academic consciousness that whenever I propose that the system should be abolished the idea is regarded as unthinkable. Whoever heard of a university without a board of trustees? One might as well try to imagine a university without a football team.

As I am about to make some criticisms of the trustee concept of university governance, let me at the outset renounce any identification with the usual left-wing or radical criticisms of the trustees. Radicals see the trustees as a gang of rich capitalists out to use the university as a tool to make a profit for their corporations or to train a docile managerial class whom they hope to exploit as salary slaves. The only evidence that the radical publicists present for this view is that trustees are typically rich businessmen and professional people, with an occasional sprinkling of labor leaders and politicians. The radicals [113] argue as if the fact that the trustees are successful capitalists automatically proved that they are using the university for sinister ends. Occasionally one does read that some Texas trustee has made a profit by farming out university construction contracts to a firm he happens to own, but in general it appears that trustees do their work without much hope of personal profit. Normally, for example, they do not receive any pay for their work. Like most of the elements who are making a mess of the university system, they act out of selfless devotion to some ideal of public service and some harebrained set of principles. They work hard, they care deeply about the university and about all these young people, and they are perplexed by all the changes that seem to have come over the place in recent years.

The worst weakness of the trustee system is that final authority for the operation of the university is lodged with people who -- however well intentioned and hard working -- are really quite ignorant of the purposes, mode of operation, underlying principles, or criteria of success of the institution. In the state universities, especially, the trustees look at the university as men standing on the bank of a pool look into the opaque water. They cannot see what is going on beneath surface. They hear stories, ominous and dire, about what is happening within. It is rumored that there is subversion going on in those classrooms, that some of those students are smoking marijuana, even that sex is rampant. Occasionally, a recognizable and terrible object will loom into view: Eldridge Cleaver! a Communist! They then leap into the water and flounder about until they have clutched the offending object to their collective bosom, whereupon they hold it aloft for all the citizenry to see. "Behold we have rescued the university from this Communist." Sometimes in the inevitable courtroom scene that follows these dramatic events the [114] judge will say, as in the early stages of the Angela Davis case, "You can't fish in that pool, put that fish back." Even at its best, the trustee system is an inelegant and undignified way to govern those institutions which are supposed to be the repositories of human culture.

Formally speaking, the worst problem of the trustee system in time of crisis is that when the blowups come, the trustees, as the final authority in the system, feel they must "do something." But as they do not understand what is going on they don't know what to do. Their actions then exhibit uncoordinated repressiveness, as they fire the president, or enact some unenforceable rules. The problem is that although those with final authority want to exercise that authority, they lack the sensitivity and expertise necessary to do it in an intelligent way. Often, what they do just makes things worse.

Lest I be thought to be exaggerating the extent of regental ignorance, let me cite a couple of examples from real life. In 1967 the University of California regents at the behest of regent Catherine Hearst, passed a resolution requiring the chancellors of the various California campuses to dismiss from the university or otherwise discipline any student who smokes marijuana. If this rule were to be strictly enforced, it would require the chancellors to dismiss from the university, at a conservative estimate, some 50,000 students. I make a point of asking the various chancellors when I see them how many students they have dismissed under this rule. Not surprisingly, perhaps, I have yet to find a single case. Such actions by the regents display an ignorance of what the situation in the universities really is. I know of numerous faculty members, various department chairmen and at least one regent who smoke pot. When the regents pass, with great fanfare, unenforceable rules of this sort, they increase contempt for the system of authority they think they are defending. [115]

In 1969, as the chairman of the university-wide Committee on Academic Freedom, I had to appear before a committee of the board of regents dealing with certain procedures concerning faculty appointments and promotions. In the course of the discussion it emerged that the regents -- about half the total board were present -- were quite ignorant of the procedure by which faculty members are hired and promoted. They had never heard about this essential feature of the internal operation of the university, the faculty review system. They listened intently and asked intelligent questions as I explained the rudiments of the system. They were, for example, quite impressed by the fact that the ad hoc committees which recommend faculty members for tenure have a majority from outside the department of the faculty member being considered. Since the regents had recently reasserted their final authority over tenure appointments -- something which previously had been delegated to the chancellors -- I was surprised to find they didn't understand the procedure of which they insisted on being the terminus.

The trustee system has at certain periods worked well. By the 1950's the boards of trustees of many of the best universities had been demoted to largely ceremonial functions. Skillful college presidents could keep them occupied with various forms of more or less harmless group activities, e.g., consulting with the architects about new university buildings, in such a way that they did not interfere with his operation of the place. Also, at the best private universities, the trustees are often an elite group of old alumni, who treat the board rather like a private club and are on close personal terms with the president. He can usually induce them to stay out of mischief.

But even at its best, and especially in the public universities, the system is inherently accident-prone. Some boards have elected state officials as members, and it is difficult [116] for these politicians to resist using the board and the university generally as a device for furthering their political careers. Ronald Reagan is the best known, but not the only, example of this. Members of the board, other than state officials, are usually either themselves elected, or are political appointees. In general, they are incompetent to perform tasks of educational governance; they are subject to considerations of a political, or at any rate nonacademic kind, and often they really don't share, or in some cases even understand, the objectives of the institution.

The two most common arguments one hears in favor of the trustee system are, first, that such boards act as a buffer between the university and potentially hostile forces in the outside community, and, second, that they help to get the money necessary to run the place. The answer to these arguments is that it is often simply not true that the trustees do either of these things, and even when they do, these functions do not require the trustee system for their performance. The premises of the argument are not universally true, and even if they were, they do not entail the conclusion. If we need a group of distinguished citizens to act as public relations men or fund raisers, then let us get a group of distinguished citizens to act as public relations men or fund raisers or both; but this is hardly the same as, nor does it justify, giving them control over the entire university. Indeed, the trustee system would be one of the worst devices for getting these tasks performed, since the system would constantly tempt or invite the member of the board to get involved in governance and take his attention away from his supposed functions of protection and fund raising. In fact, of course, in many universities it is a myth that the trustees are fighting vigorously for more funds and for academic freedom. In the public universities, the trustees are more [117] likely to act as conduits for public pressure into the university than as buffers against it; and the times when they are most needed to act as buffers are precisely the times when they are most likely to act as conduits. As far as fund raising is concerned, this is mostly done by administrators or professionals of one kind or another and rarely involves the board. The big state universities employ full-time lobbyists to handle their relations with the legislature. At budget time top administrators go off to the state capital to campaign for the budget, and at fund-raising time the university hires a professional staff of fund raisers with the president usually directing the operation. None of these fund-raising activities requires handing over control of the university to a group of more or less unqualified laymen.

Another argument in favor of the system of lay government that one sometimes hears -- and it is a peculiar argument -- is that since the trustees have delegated almost all of their authority to the faculty and the administration, and confined themselves mostly to budgetary questions and very broad policy matters, they are really quite harmless. Arguments from harmlessness constitute rather feeble encomia. However, if one could indeed guarantee that trustees would remain harmless there would, tautologically speaking, be no harm in their continued functioning. The problems arise when they are tempted or pressured into throwing their weight around; and crises of authority almost always force them to throw their weight around, since they regard themselves, quite correctly, as the final source and ultimate repository of all legal authority within the system.

When one hears of the supposed advantages of the lay system, it is well to remind oneself of the fact that the whole thing was started in 1636 with the creation of the Harvard Board of Overseers, a group of six ministers and [118] six magistrates, designed to ensure religious orthodoxy, financial responsibility, and general respectability in the as yet unchosen Harvard faculty.

Perhaps there is some deep Burkean wisdom to be discovered in the survival of these institutions, and in the corollary development of administrations independent of the faculty, over the past three hundred years, but if so I have yet to discover it. The history of the struggle for academic freedom in the United States has been in large measure the history of a struggle against lay trustees and administrations dependent on them.

I see no justification for the present system, and I believe that unless the trustees can be confined to ceremonial and advisory functions -- as they have been confined when the system works well -- unless, that is, they can be made to play the role of constitutional monarchs, the system should be abolished. The useful functions (e.g., managing the university's investments) that trustees now perform should be farmed out to professionally qualified people.

In this chapter, then, I have abolished the board of trustees and the independent administration. It must sound like a professor's dream -- but in practice I think it would produce more responsibility (and work) for the faculty and more powerful executive authority. What would the constitution of the university then look like? I propose an American variety of faculty sovereignty in Chapter 7, but it is important to point out here that the system of faculty sovereignty is nothing new. It is as old as the medieval university, and it is still in effect at several great universities, most notably Oxford and Cambridge.

§9. WHAT IT IS REALLY LIKE

In the crisis the first feeling that the top-level administrator has is a sense of isolation, of aloneness. In the American Council of Education survey, one of the college executives put it in these terms.

No one was in sight when it came time for support. Everyone faded away into the background. It was like a gigantic live replay of the movie High Noon. All the so-called friends had reason to be absent on the day of the showdown.⁷

A second feature of the college executive in crisis is anxiety, sometimes physical fear. William McGill, while chancellor at San Diego, put it in these terms. [120]

Here [in San Diego], I will be forced to go out into the middle of a situation involving physical threat because there's a crowd throwing rocks or there's a group of people who have someone who is being sought on an arrest warrant and they want to turn him over to me to force me to arrest him to create a violent situation. When I first went out into the middle of that kind of problem I was scared. I really was.. . .

When you live in the midst of violent anger a great deal you must reflect on the possibility that somewhere, sometime, somebody may take a shot at you or hit you over the head with a dub, and you just live with that expectation. The point is that I'm not particularly afraid of that. I do believe that I'm the safest person on campus. To damage me would mean the end of whatever cause is being pursued. On the other hand, not everybody in a crowd is sane. There are psychotics and some psychotics cannot understand these essentially rational considerations.⁸

A third feature of the life of the college executive is its persistent unpleasantness. As he walks about the campus, people shout obscene insults at him; his office is haunted both by hysterical radicals and irate citizens, he is portrayed in the newspapers both on and off the campus as a fool or a knave or both. Not the lightest of the crosses he has to bear is the monthly regents' meeting.

The students the professor deals with in his classes are, for the most part, a joy to be with. They are bright, lively, intelligent, and often eager to learn. The students the top-level combat administrator deals with tend to be a different breed altogether. Many of them are in a frenzy [121] of hatred, and normally the college authorities are the targets of the hatred. A sizable percentage of the revolutionary extremists I have dealt with have been clinically ill, and this is not my lay judgment but is based on discussions I have had about them with university psychiatrists, and on the medical histories of some of them. In situations of social instability, people who are themselves messed up psychologically can attain positions of great prestige and prominence. It helps in dealing with extreme radicals to have a therapeutic attitude.

Considering that college presidents are not prepared for such conditions of anxiety, isolation, and hostility, the remarkable thing about the American presidents as a class is not that some have cracked under the strain but that most have borne up so well. My observation is that the real point of breakdown is likely to be among the wives. Many of the wives of top college executives simply cannot bear the assassination threats, the mysterious late-night phone calls, the arson attempts, the smashed windows, and the bomb explosions that make up such a significant portion of the life of the combat college executive. They cannot understand the hostility to their husbands and themselves of some of the faculty, and the total indifference of almost all the rest of the faculty. They are unnerved by the mobs of chanting, screaming, rock-throwing students outside official presidential residences. And in the end, the more sensitive among them are likely to urge their husbands to seek a less strenuous life, the present one being not what they had in mind at all.

Notes

1 U.S. News and World Report, August 3, 1970, p. 32.

2 Clark Kerr, The Uses of the University (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1963), p. 36.

3 Ibid.

4 Clark Kerr, op. cit., p. 39.

5 Roger W. Heyns, speech to the Academic Senate, May 23, 1969.

6 Jerome Skolnick, Report to the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence, The Politics of Protest (New York: Ballantine Books, Inc., 1969), p. 98.

7 Special Committee on Campus Tensions, Campus Tensions: Analysis and Recommendations (American Council on Education, 1970), pp. 27-28.

8 New York Times, August 23, 1970, Magazine Section, p. 79.