COLUMBIA
355
WALLERSTEIN:
If
you are asking me whether the chances were ever
particularly high that faculty mediation would have succeeded, I
would say, in retrospect, no. That is to say, for various reasons the
positions of the Administration and of the Strike Steering Committee,
as well as that of the black students in Hamilton Hall, were rela–
tively intransigent on certain fundamental issues. That became quite
clear to the Ad Hoc Faculty Group and we stated it publicly. It
was very hard to compromise on those issues.
But in retrospect I also think that the whole situation would
have been far worse had there not been an attempt at mediation.
The attempt at mediation - even though it failed - is one of the
things that kept the university from collapsing even more than it did.
INTERVIEWER:
Given the intransigence you spoke of, do you now think
that it would have been possible or proper at any particular point
for the faculty to resolve the conflict one way or another by aligning
itself decisively with one side or the other?
WALLERSTEIN:
If
you're really asking me if the Ad Hoc Faculty Group
should have done things differently - in gross, not in minor detail–
I would say no. I think it acted properly. I think that the resolution
of the Ad Hoc Faculty Group, which it proposed to all parties, was
a sound, workable resolution of the conflict which met the demands
of substantive justice of the students while meeting some of the
demands of respect for the norms of the institution which the Ad–
ministration was putting forward. I think these were sound proposals.
I'm sorry they weren't accepted and I would still stand by them.
INTERVIEWER:
From the outset, the student demonstrators at Columbia
have demanded amnesty as a precondition to negotiations. What do
you think is involved in the amnesty issue? And have your feelings
about this issue changed at all during the course of events?
WALLERSTEIN:
I originally thought that the amnesty demand was a
very curious demand since if the students were challenging the legi–
timacy of the institution then it was very curious for them to turn
around and ask that institution to accord them amnesty, which is a
process of forgiveness and which assumes the legitimacy of the insti–
tution granting it. I thought that position was incredibly inconsistent
politically.
Nevertheless, amnesty spoke to a theme to which I, for one, was
interested in giving some primacy but to which neither the students
nor the Administration gave primacy, and that is the theme of the
university as a community, as a
Gemeinschaft,
as something to which
people belong despite many other kinds of political differences. Given
my position that the university is a moral community, I myself wouldn't
have ruled out amnesty as a possibility. But I had to take into ac–
count what would, under the circumstances, maximize the possibility
of recreating the moral community of the university and I thought,
given everything, given the passions on all sides, that amnesty was
not wise and not desirable.
At various points I changed my mind: for example, immediately
following the April 30th police action, I felt that the balance of hurts
had shifted in the University. And in the light of the same concept of
