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many students were stunned to find that these articles were written by
four prominent Cal faculty members--Lewis Feuer
(New Leader),
Seymour Martin Lipset and Paul Seabury
(Reporter)
and Nathan Glazer
(Commentary).
Since these men are respected as sophisticated spokesmen
of the liberal community, their articles have a wider political significance
-in their political values, and in their style.
American liberalism has traditionally been committed to social refonn
and 'civil liberties, through orderly means and legal institutions. Liberals
have argued that democracy and freedom can be extended through the
accepted channels of American political structure. They regard the use
of disruption-
~
a means of democratization as unnecessary and dangerous.
Yet there are times when events make liberal goals incompatible
with liberal means of,orderly process. What are liberals to do when those
in
power are so resistant to pressure that "nonnal" channels are closed to
any who seek to broaden freedom? What happens when victimized citizens
must choose either to submit abjectly or to use disruptive tactics? The
Negro movement in Mississippi, for example, must resort to civil dis–
obedience. And this was the alternative the University of California
students took in their conflict with a bureaucratic administration which
made important decisions without consulting even the faculty.
But Feuer, Lipset, Seabury and Glazer object to the students' recourse
to civil disobedience. They do not argue that there were other ways of
attaining the students' ends. Their main point is that no matter what the
exigencies were, the students committed some terrible kind
of
crime in
bypassing nonnal processes of change. Unlike the majority of the faculty,
these writers feel that the students who resorted to civil disobedience
are
to be condemned more than the administration that repressed them.
These writers' ioyalty to "order," then, supersedes their commitment
to
democratic goals, and their bias stands out in all the articles. But
almost as significant as their bias is their method of argument. Feuer,
Lipset and Seabury (Glazer to a lesser degree) attack the Free Speech
Movement in a manner that is flagrantly abusive. The polemical style
we expect, but not the shrillness. Professor Lipset, in a University address,
compared the FSM to the Ku Klux Klan and the White Citizens Coun–
cil:
both, after all, promote disorder. Professer Feuer, disregarding the
almost unanimous support of a statement by prominent faculty members
that the FSM was made up of the most intelligent, intellectually serious
students, characterizes the situation at Berkeley in these tenns:
The conglomeration of students acts as a magnet for the morally
corrupt; intellectual lumpen-proletarians, lumpen beatniks and
