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STEPHEN DONADIO
demanded amnesty as a precondition to negotiations. This particular
demand has confused many people who are familiar with-and com–
fortable with-the kinds of protest employed by Gandhi, for instance,
or by Martin Luther King, who always seemed willing to subject
themselves to the punishments meted out by the same authorities that
they were questioning.
RUDD:
Now let's go very slowly.
INTERVIEWER:
OK. First: do you consider the occupation of the Uni–
versity buildings an act of civil disobedience?
RUDD:
No.
It
was not an act of civil disobedience; it was a straight
political act to gain power-to gain
some
power.
INTERVIEWER:
In view of the fact that amnesty is a fairly common and
widely accepted procedure in various forms of negotiations-labor
negotiations, for instance-why do you think there has been so much
resistance to it in this case? Even on the part, and significantly on the
part, of liberals?
COLE:
For the same reason that there was a lot of resistance to it when
labor was first demanding the right to organize: because granting
amnesty would be recognizing the right of the students to have en–
gaged in this form of protest and would recognize them as the kind
of power on the campus which they haven't been recognized as before.
INTERVIEWER:
That brings me to the next question. Much of the langu–
age we have heard during the past few weeks, and the existence of
the student "strike" itself, seems to suggest that the Columbia situa–
tion is being conceived in terms of a labor-management model. Are
you satisfied that this model is entirely applicable to the situation?
RUDD:
It's not entirely applicable, for a number of reasons. It is, how–
ever, consistent with our view of the university as knowledge factory
and as manpower factory. That is, students withholding their labor–
in the sense of being students-will stop production in the factory.
COLE:
The production of themselves.
RUDD:
However, what we have here at Columbia now is not a strike.
It's a symbolic strike, where a few of us remove ourselves from the
production line. A strike would mean all students not registering at
Columbia University.
COLE:
Even more than that, to have a really serious social impact, it
would have to be all students not registering throughout New York,
or something like that. And because what you're producing (that is,
the students) takes a very long time to produce, you would have to
have a very long-range strike-at least a year and probably much
longer-to achieve the same kind of social effect that you can achieve
much faster in industries that produce material goods.
RUDD:
That's one reason why this has only been a symbolic strike.
Secondly, this is not like a labor-management strike where latJorers
walk off and
know
that they're stopping production. The question
of self-consciousness as producers is important to a strike, and stu–
dents here don't have that self-consciousness; so what they're really
doing is removing themselves from this ideal situation called the
"university community" in an attempt to gain more leverage within
that community.
COLE:
Remember that the idea of the strike was always stated in terms
