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essence of the recent crisis. Let's concede that there had been peaceful,
verbal, "democratic" attempts to stop the building of the gymnasium
on that site. That, it seems to me, you not only
can
concede but
must-because
it's provable. The second concession I'll propose is a
value judgment, namely, that this move against the building of the
gymnasium was
right.
However, there is now what you might call a
consensus that it was right, meaning that only a minority disagree,
apparently quite a small minority. So, if we have a wise move that's
been taken, and we wanted that move taken, then we have to ask,
"Was there any way it could have been taken at that point other
than the so-called 'illegal' way" or whatever you'd call it?
It
certainly
wasn't violence against persons: it was violence against a fence. A
piece of a fence was broken: that was the only violence on the gym
site, when it was "liberated." ...
If
these concessions are made, then
it seems to me impossible to turn around and say that Grayson Kirk's
very personal, vindictive attempt to destroy Mark Rudd is right. Even
short of that, if you don't agree that Kirk was vindictive, the attempt
by Columbia University to punish the people to whom they owe
something good is ludicrous. It's a contradiction that one may not
accept in honor. And if that is conceded, many consequences follow:
amnesty and a lot of other things . . . There are a lot of people who
now want the reform of Columbia. Most of them didn't until a
month ago. I never heard Alan Westin say he wanted Columbia re–
structured, and yet now he picks himself as the spokesman for this
idea. What pushed him in this direction? Not the voice of God but
the voice of Mark Rudd. That is very important and discredits every
attempt that is made by the University to destroy Mark Rudd and
the people like him; they're destroying the very men to whom they
owe the greatest debt. So I think one has to go along with the
student action, though my saying so has produced a lot of hate mail
telling me I'm in favor of arson, slaughter and every kind of violence.
INTERVIEWER:
I'd like to ask you something about the faculty. I'd like
to ask you first what role you feel the faculty has played during the
crisis, and then if you would to go on and talk about whether or not
you feel they should have played a different role.
BENTLEY:
Well, let me start by stating a presupposition of mine. I con–
sider professors deeply conservative as a class, more so than many
business people even, and less flexible. This is partly due to their ex–
cessive involvement in ideology. Some businessmen couldn' t care less
about ideology either way. Professors always care. One must not ex–
pect much from them in the way of social change. Getting down to
cases, the Columbia faculty divided three ways, the three
political
ways: conservative, radical, and center. "Conservative"
in
this con–
text meant seeing the issue as one of discipline. For the conservatives
the question always was, "Shouldn't people like Kirk discipline people
like Rudd?" And it was a rhetorical question. The answer could only
be yes. "Radical," of course, meant the opposite: "Rudd must be
right; Kirk must be wrong." And Center meant - as Center usually
means in revolutionary situations - "We're all terribly nervous and
hope there won't be violence." That was how I saw our faculty di–
vide, and the division was definite enough and unchanging enough
