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an object of resentful CriticIsm. Up to a few years ago, it was pos–
sible to feel that there was a growing popular sentiment in favor
of the universities. The academic life was thought of as having quali–
ties of order and coherence and uncompetitiveness that aroused an af–
fectionate and perhaps condescending admiration. But that was when
universities could still
be
thought of as marginal to the national life.
The change in the status of the universities is leading to their being
thought of as privileged vested interests and to their being regarded
with envious suspicion and hostility. This new attitude is no doubt
the more intense in urban environments.
INTERVIEWER:
From the outset the student demonstrators at Columbia
have demanded amnesty as a precondition to negotiations. What do
you think is involved in the amnesty issue?
TRILLING:
If
I am right in my understanding of what the word "amnesty"
means, it isn't the right word to denote what the students were ask–
ing for. The granting of an amnesty implies that some infraction of
recognized law has been committed and that the authority accepted
as being responsible for the enforcement of the law decides not to
inflict the usual punishment for the infraction. But the students, in
making their demand for amnesty, were saying-I believe they were
explicit about this-that the University was morally so compromised
as to have lost all right to judge them and to discipline them. This
amounted to their saying that there no longer existed a university
polity or community of which they were a part. There were of course
some members of the faculty-ehiefly, I think, of the so-called junior
faculty-who supported the demand of the students for amnesty, but
most of the faculty did not. And this was true, as I was surprised to see,
even of those members of the faculty whose personal sympathy with
the students was strong and overt and whose position was what came
to be called radical. I think that what led them to resist the demand
for amnesty was their sense that granting it would be tantamount to
saying that the students were not in a real relation to the university,
that there was no such entity as the university. Although they did not
explicitly put it so, I think that they felt that to grant amnesty on the
grounds on which the students demanded it would be to abrogate
the relation between the students and themselves, to declare that the
university was in fact not a polity or a community, that there were
no social bonds among its members.
INTERVIEWER:
What do you think has to happen before the University
can
be
restored to a state of equilibrium?
TRILLING:
That is very difficult to answer. Obviously time will have to
pass and emotions will have to cool before equilibrium can be re–
stored. I could prognosticate with more confidence if I believed that
there was a record of manifest injustice at Columbia in relation to
students or to any other part of the University. I don't at all believe
that - on the contrary, my sense of the University's attitudes, I'll even
say my sense of the Administration's attitudes, is that they have been
eminently decent and humane. Representations to the contrary seem to
me to be factitious or perfectionistic. At the same time, it can be
said that the University has been deficient in its sensitivity to cultural
change. Its sense of itself and its function has not been what it should
