COLUMBIA
369
might have been possible. The real obstacle was the Administration;
which is perhaps in the nature of the case. The Columbia faculty has
no power. According to the book of rules, it may only recommend. It
is the privilege of the President to turn its recommendations down.
So far as I can see, doing just that may be the only visceral pleasure
in a Columbia President's by no means Dionysian existence ... My
student friends tell me Kirk isn't important because his successor will
be just like him. I can't accept that. It's like saying DeGaulle was
just like Petain in 1940: the two belonged to the same class, etc. I
think new leadership is essential because Kirk is committed to his
erroneous ways and would regard any degree of self-correction as a
concession to the enemy. A new man, however undistinguished,
wouldn't labor under this particular handicap....
INTERVIEWER:
Do you think that the ramifications of what has happened
at Columbia will be positive in the long run?
BENTLEY:
I think they
can
be positive in the long run. Whether they
will
be isn't yet determined: it depends on what we all do - and on
what we all don't do. I would think of it as of revolutionary situa–
tions generally. A whole community is bust wide open. That's dan–
gerous, that's terrible. It's also wonderful, inspiring, challenging, load–
ed with opportunities. Everything depends on people's responses to
it. In my view the most inadequate response is that of a sort of
1815 Restoration, forgiving nothing and forgetting everything. Sure,
it's terrible to a Robespierre, but who wants to be a Metternich? For
my part, yes, I
fear
some of our little Robespierres. As Noam
Chomsky told them, "you'd rather Karl Marx had burned the British
Museum down than worked on
Das Kapital
in it." I have never
regarded the University as my enemy, at worst as one employer among
others - and even at that I hoped to give value for money.
If
a few
minutes ago I presented the .academic class as a pretty sinister one
(which it is ) I should certainly add before finishing that it also–
and not accidentally - contains Chomsky and Marcuse. And where
would they be able to go if the academy turned them down or if
they agreed with their more unruly pupils and turned the academy
down? As Lenin said, left-wing communism is an infantile disorder.
INTERVIEWER :
Some people seem to think that the implications of the
events at Columbia are extremely troubling. Why do you think they
might think so?
BENTLEY:
Because they consider SDS and the sympathizing strikers
(and people like Chomsky and Marcuse and me) to be enemies of
law and order. But the law and order talk is in bad faith. Naturally,
if I have everything and you have nothing, my ideology is going to
have some pretty strong clauses in it about the wickedness of theft;
but these clauses are in bad faith. I find the whole philosophy im–
plied in the news releases of the Columbia Administration to be, in
this sense, in thoroughly bad faith . As for their unphilosophical lan–
guage, it's doubletalk. They are against violence, they say. It sounds
like a concrete enough statement, and continues to seem so when
a picture of a broken lamp
in
the President's office is submitted in
evidence. But we all know
that
the important violence is violence
against human beings - and much more of this was used by the
