Campus Freedom and Order

ALTHOUGH the groves of academ6 have never been as quiet in I fact as in fancy, prior to 1964 it is doubtful that anybody would have given a second thought to the prospect of "Legal Aspects of Student-Institutional Relationships" as a topic for a national conference.In mid-1968, just four years later, we find ourselves confronting it as a lively educational concern.For our opening session, I was first asked to give an overview on "The Nature of Law and Its Involvement in the Educational Process."Not being a jurist, I decided that a more meaningful exercise would be to discuss campus problems of freedom and order.I have lost credibility in some circles, of course, by being too long past 30, but there may be an antiquarian interest in hearing from one whose campus experience includes more than a dozen different colleges and universities, from Austin to Boston, and whose academic career span equals that of about ten successive generations of undergraduates.That experience includes, incidentally, being relieved in person as a student editor during my early years, and being hanged in effigy as a university president during my later years toward the end of a football season when the home team chalked up eight losses and one win!From my present perspective in the nation's capital I still regard many of our campuses as the choicest of all possible places to be, but I am deeply troubled by what is happening on and to some of them.For this reason, I have chosen to discuss campus freedom and order.Let me begin with the year 1964.Well do I remember the Council's annual meeting that October in San Francisco.Clark Kerr was to address us on the question, "Toward a Nationwide System of Higher Education?"This he did, but events at Berkeley were so much on his own mind and everybody else's that he gave two talks instead of one, and his impromptu comments received rapt attention.None of us realized at the time, of course, that Kerr's performance was merely one of the first instances of deflected attention from the main business of higher education to a spreading institutional concern with problems of law and order.Since 1965, dozens of American campuses have been torn by student disquiet, dissension, protest, and even violence.While actual occurrences have often been distorted in television and press report-