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STEPHEN DONADIO
at some points the Ad Hoc Faculty Group, but at other points the
Ad Hoc Faculty-Student Group. That was the group that kept meet–
ing at McMillin for another day or two.
INTERVIEWER:
The one that Eric Bentley and Professor [Marvin] Harris
were associated with?
WALLERSTEIN:
Yes. And then there's the other group which was really
organized around and by those members of the steering committee
of the original Ad Hoc Faculty Group who were not named to the
Executive Committee of the Faculty: this group became the Inde–
pendent Faculty Group, which I consider
in
many senses the real
moral successor to the Ad Hoc Faculty Group. Certainly its tone and
its positions are roughly the same.
INTERVIEWER:
How would you define the function of the current Execu–
tive Committee of the Faculty? How far do its powers extend?
WALLERSTEIN:
Well, the Executive Committee of the Faculty is, first of
all, a formal faculty group, unlike all these others. It was created
partly because there was no formal faculty group, partly because there
was a desire on the part of the faculty to continue to play a role in
the immediate crisis. The Executive Committee of the Faculty, for–
mally representing the faculty, was obviously bound to
be
a some–
what more conservative institution than the Ad Hoc Faculty Group.
(If
you look at the biographies of the people who are actually mem–
bers of it, and you look at what they were doing between April 23
and April 30, you will see that some of them were at the Ad Hoc
Faculty Group meetings, some were not. One or two of them were
considered to be reasonably strong supporters of the Administration in
that earlier period.) Nonetheless, the Executive Committee of the
Faculty has in many ways played a mediating role, if somewhat less
overtly. It has attempted to represent the faculty, as distinct from
both the Administration and the students, in the continuing crisis
of the University. It has created a certain direct relationship with the
Trustees. It has received a mandate from the Trustees to playa role
in recommending changes in the basic structure of the University–
and the Executive Committee certainly has made this its primary
concern. There's no question of that.
If
you analyze what they've
done, they have in effect said, "the most important thing now is to
reconstruct the university."
I think they'll play a rather significant role in that respect and
I think that had they not been in existence, it's quite probable that
the confrontations between the Administration and the student body
would have escalated out of all proportion in these last few weeks.
INTERVIEWER:
As
you know, the Joint Committee on Disciplinary
Af–
fairs declared that its recommendations regarding student discipline
were predicated on the assumption that the Administration would
drop criminal trespass charges against the demonstrators. To your
knowledge, has the University Administration made any serious at–
tempt to have criminal trespass proceedings against the student
demonstrators dropped?
WALLERSTEIN:
They have a very clear position. The Administration and
the Trustees have stated that they will not in general seek to drop
these charges, that they will seek to drop the charges only
in
those
