COLUMBIA
361
GAY:
Well, I disagree on this point with a great many people whom
I respect. I did not think so from the beginning. I spoke privately to
a good many people who were leaders among the mediators and my
impression from the very beginning was that they were attempting
to set up an unreal situation - that is, they were treating it as though
it were, let's say, a labor dispute between equals: union on one side,
management on the other. In fact, the situation never even remotely
resembled this. There were students illegally occupying buildings; it
was understood that sooner or later they would have to get out. And
on the other side there was the Administration which, however un–
just or unpopular it might be, was nevertheless the legitimate power.
Under these circumstances, it seemed to me, for the faculty to put
itself in the middle, as though the students and Administration were
two equals confronting one another, was really a tactical and I think
in the long run a strategic mistake.
With all due respect to the leaders of the Ad Hoc Group (many
of whom were certainly people of great good will motivated by gen–
uine humanitarian concern for the welfare of the students) I think that
in the process of their attempt to set up the kind of situation I've just
described, two things happened. The first was that the actual legal
and I think even the moral situation was distorted; and second, in
consequence of this, a number of students who were not in any way
political but considered themselves allied to SDS for the moment were
really hardened in their determination to stay in the buildings. I
talked to a number of the students afterward and they themselves said
that a number of these faculty of good will had really misled them.
And so I think that a number of the Ad Hoc Group, even though
they tried to make their own position clear, did not manage to con–
vey the real situation to the students: first of all, as to the extent
of the sympathy for the students among the faculty; and secondly, as
to the amount of power the sympathetic faculty might actually have
to prevent the police from taking over. Now it is true of course that
the faculty did develop a fair amount of power in the course of
events: when, Thursday night - early Friday morning - the police
were actually first called, it was a group of angry faculty members
that compelled or persuaded the Administration to change its mind
and to rescind the order. So it is certainly true that they had some
power. But they appeared to have more power and more sympathy
than in fact they had and they seemed able to deliver something they
never could deliver. And so, without wishing to denigrate their ef–
forts, I would have to say that it does seem to me that the Ad Hoc
Group hardened the lines of division and stiffened resistance.
INTERVIEWER.:
How do you feel about the distinction people have made
between the demands of the demonstrators and their tactics?
GAY:
I think the distinction has to be made; it is in fact essential to
any discussion of the political consequences of such events as these. As
one of my colleagues, Richard Hofstadter, put it in one of his talks
before students, democracy is essentially procedural and what matters
is not so much (important though it may be) what a given policy is
as how it is arrived at, because certain other consequences will always
follow from methods used.
