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STEPHEN DONADIO
Throughout that first week we heard a good deal of talk about
the possible takeover of buildings by, say, right-wing students who
might wish to enforce demands such as who knows what? - athletic
scholarships or other demands of that kind. Now this example, which
became a cliche, was designed to show that these methods could be
used by anyone, and to function as a warning against the amoral if
not immoral conclusion that if one liked the aims, one must support
these unfortunate tactics. This is something that I was certainly never
willing to accept.
On
the other hand, the complexity involved in dividing tactics
from aims in this case is suggested by the rebuttal that's been made by
a good number of students and some of my colleagues: namely, that
all other tactics had in fact failed. This is a very difficult argument to
answer, really, and I am very uncomfortable about it myself, because
after all, if all peaceful methods are demonstrably failures, what then
are you going to do? Are you going to say, "We give up whatever
demands we have; we will leave this university or we will let this
university do what it likes?" Or, will you then say, "Well, in this
case we will use means that
are
effective"? This of course is the tra–
gedy of the liberal in any case: he always does get stuck on this
dilemma. And I envy those who have simple answers to it, I must
say. I myself still think that the students had to be got out of the
buildings one way or another. Another method would obviously have
been much preferable to the one that was finally used, but I think
the students had to be got out.
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?
GAY:
Like everything else, this is a hard question; but I said publicly
that it did seem to me that the behavior of the student leaders, and
of those faculty members, for that matter, who insisted on amnesty
(and that was never, by the way, a very large group), was, technically
speaking, infantile. That is to say, it attempted to effect a certain
result and not in any way to pay for it. It attempted to offend
authority and perhaps even overthrow it - at least for the time
being - without ever being punished for it.
And it seems to me that this along with iome other manifesta–
tions of collective behavior was really childish : the inability, for ex–
ample, to wait, to postpone gratification. These matters seem to me
to
be
more open to psychoanalytical than to sociological or political
investigation. From that point of view the demand for amnesty struck
me as inherently self-contradictory. It was an attempt to admit on the
one hand that some wrong had been done and, for that matter, against
an authority that was either despised or continually called illegitimate,
and on the other hand to be told by that authority which was either
bad or illegitimate that really it was a forgiving kind of authority.
I think that civil disobedience is an adult activity and not an
infantile activity and it should take upon itself whatever consequences
it may have. (This was certainly true in the case of Gandhi or of
Martin Luther King.) No organized society can operate without this
principle; no political theorist I know, not even the most pluralistic
