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STEPHEN ·
DONADIO
recreating the moral community, that was a moment when I would
have favored amnesty. At still further points I thought the balance
had shifted again. In other words, for me the issue of amnesty was
a pragmatic issue within my own moral context which I was willing
to consider but to which I was largely opposed out of my pragmatic
reading of the situation.
INTERVIEWER:
How important do you think the race issue has been in
this crisis? That is, do you think that the situation would have been
easier to deal with if the black students had not barricaded them–
selves
in
Hamilton Hall after asking the white students to leave?
WALLERSTEIN:
If
you dropped the word "easier," I could answer the
question: that is to say, I think the situation would have been entirely
different. I do not think there would have been a crisis at Columbia
had there not been a race issue. I don't believe for a moment that
the SDS talking about IDA could have escalated the University into
the kind of crisis it found itself in. I think the fact is that when the
black students barricaded Hamilton Hall,
that
transformed the situa–
tion.
That
was the critical issue. That explains why the University
didn't use force that first morning on the 24th.
If
it had just been
Mark Rudd and his friends going into Low Memorial Library, we
would have had the police on campus in thirty minutes. There's no
question about it: it would have been an unpleasant but minor fracas
in the University had there not been black students who barricaded
Hamilton Hall.
I don't mean to say that people weren't genuinely concerned
with what I call the two other issues - our position in the world,
in Vietnam in particular; and the governance of the University. But
I don't
think
people would have been willing to use the kinds of
all-out struggle methods that they did use for those other two issues–
or they wouldn't have had they not known that, simultaneously, the
black students were pushing the other issue.
INTERVIEWER:
In the period preceding the first bust, representatives of
the Ad Hoc Faculty Group were apparently attempting to persuade
some students to come out of some of the occupied buildings. Were
there any indications then that under certain conditions some of the
students would have been willing to leave some of the buildings?
WALLERSTEIN:
I'm not sure what you're referring to. The Ad Hoc
Faculty Group, as a group, was not making separate efforts to per–
suade subgroups of students. Now it is true that among the Strike
Steering Committee there were representatives of four buildings with
nuances of points of view, and many of them were anxious and
willing to speak to various faculty members. But there was no sys–
tematic attempt by the Ad Hoc Faculty Group to negotiate separately
with various groups of students.
There were, of course, the famous Fayerweather proposals, which
accepted the faculty position on amnesty basically, and stayed with
the other positions. I think the Fayerweather proposals came fairly
close to the Ad Hoc Faculty Group's position, because after all, we
did call for a cessation on the gym, and we did call for ultimate
judicial authority to be taken out of the hands of the President and
put in the hands of the Tripartite Commission. But the Fayerweather
