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STEPHEN DONADIO
sure the Trustees on this point. On the other hand, they haven't come
out and said flatly that they agree with the Trustees that the charges
should not be dropped: if they had done that I think they would
have got into a rather unpleasant situation with the faculty. But al–
though the faculty did, at a very late stage, reiterate its view on the
matter (through a Columbia College Faculty Resolution), it did so
with the feeling that this was only a gesture. In effect, then, the ob–
fuscation by" the Administration on this point was a successful maneu–
ver to prevent what might otherwise have been a confrontation be–
tween the faculty and the Trustees on the question.
There's a long history of administrative secrecy at Columbia
which causes it to
be
distrusted even when it's being reasonable, but
on matters other than this criminal charges one, I'm hesitant to say
what the extent of the Administration's bad faith has been.
INTERVIEWER:
What function do you think was served by the original
Ad Hoc Faculty Group?
PARSONS:
Well, there are two ways of taking that question. First, "What
was it trying to do?" And second, "What was the effect of what it
did?" I think what it was trying to do essentially was to stave off a
resolution of the sit-ins by force, and to work for a reasonable nego–
tiated settlement. I
think
the efforts made by the Group in this re–
gard were intelligent and involved a very impressive - even heroic -
outpouring of energy. The form which this effort took was twofold.
It involved mediation, first of all; and it also involved more direct
action about the twin questions of policing the campus and how to
act when and if police were actually called. The Group was started
by the people who signed the founding document of [Thursday] April
25, which contained the provision that "until this crisis is settled, we
will stand before the occupied buildings to prevent forcible entry
by police or others." People signed that document on Thursday after–
noon, and that evening and night members of the Group acted in a
rather courageous and forceful way in the spirit of that statement,
first by staving off a threatened rush on Fayerweather by counter–
demonstrators, and second, by their intervention at Low Library after
Truman had come in and announced that police were being called.
(After that, of course, the Group took over the patrolling function on
a twenty-four hour basis.)
It's not clear that the consequences of this intervention were in
the end good.
It
was an action which I fully sympathized with at
the time, and which I would still defend as an action taken according
to the best lights that were available at the time. However, there is
a retrospective shadow cast on it by the failure of the mediation ef–
fort that was undertaken afterward. It seems to me that if it was in–
evitable that a large-scale police raid of the sort which did take place
[on April 30] was going to take place, then the radicalization of the
students, the effect of the communal atmosphere inside the buildings,
was certainly intensified by the delay. Furthermore, my understanding
of the situation is that because the police were called off the first time
[April 25] it was more difficult to control their actions the second
time [April 30], (although I think that on April 30 the Administra–
tion did not do everything it could have to control them). Conse-
