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like "the University will not be able to function normally," not "the
goods will not be produced." So in a sense the other meaning of the
word-as in a
military
"strike"-comes closer to what we mean.
INTERVIEWER:
What in your view is the proper relation of the uni–
versity to the society at large?
COLE:
Well, we've all heard the argument that the university is a value–
free institution. Our position on that is that that's nonsense, that in
terms of the way it operates in New York, for instance, the university
operates as a racist institution, and in terms of the way it operates
for the society at large, it helps racist imperialism. Our demands were
related to these different policies and functions. But one of the que–
tions that has been raised against us is this:
If
the university is so
interconnected with American society, how could you possibly change
its nature unless you changed the nature of the society itself? The
answer is that you cannot; but I think perhaps you can have such a
thing as a neutral university-that is, a university which, though it
doesn't help liberation movements throughout the world, at least does
not help counter-insurgency movements.
RUDD:
I don't think that's possible, really. Even if you did away with
things like IDA and support for governmental policy, you would still
have to look further into the question of funding in the university.
Look at Columbia. Columbia makes its money off real estate. That
isn't government money, that's private capital, but it raises the ques–
tion of Columbia's racism, for instance. I think it's almost inevitable,
given the fact that Columbia owns much of New York, that it's got
to maintain substandard housing. It has to maintain ghettos; it has
to keep expanding in the way it expands, which is the most economi–
cal way. I can't see any means of funding in this country without
either real estate or capital investment in corporations, and that
raises other problems which we haven't even dealt with here-for
example, a university's investment policies in South Africa, or its
American imperialist investments.
COLE:
Then it becomes a question of how divided the university is in
itself between the kinds of things you were just talking about and
the mass production of students. I remember when we were thinking
about what else students could do besides going on strike that would
make the University give in, we couldn't think of anything: and
what that seemed to my mind to represent was that the university
maybe really
was
divided, that what it gets its money from, the re–
search that it does, etc., has actually nothing to do with the produc–
tion of students, that even if the students weren't produced the uni–
versity could continue. We haven't stopped the computer center from
working, for instance. We haven't stopped any of the labs that IDA
uses or any of that-so how much have we actually affected the
University by having an eighty percent effective strike?
RUDD:
When we started this, we we e talking about changing a few
small things: the gym, IDA, etc. But then people began to talk about
student power and a free University and everything else, and it got
completely away from us. Our original goals took those things into
consideration, but they also had the purpose of raising consciousness
concerning the structure of American capitalism. That, really, is the
