396
LEO BERSANI
while ago for whom such
books
as
Confrontation
and
Students in
Revolt
are put together. Now they are obviously not for the general
public: the tables, the professional jargon, the sheer boredom of the
prose
will
keep them forever off the best-seller lists. They are cer–
tainly not addressed
to
the students they set out to study:
if
our
young radical is anything like the portrait made by
his
social
science
professors in these essays, he
will
be too irresponsible, too impolite
(Nathan Tarcov petulandy notes that the New Left had become "so
convinced of the immorality of the war" in Vietnam that it even
came to have contempt for "simple politeness"), too damned will–
fully ignorant to appreciate these enlightening studies of
this
origins
and behavior. I see two possible audiences for these
books.
First of
all, the sociologists will be read by themselves - a harmless enough
pseudodialogue with which I'm familiar enough in the field of literary
studies. It struck me, however, that the sociologists have the edge
over us in audience appeal, since they would make very useful (if
somewhat tough-going) reading for politicians in power. What could
be handier than some reliable "laws" and statistics about the groups
of students from whom revolt can be expected, the conditions under
which revolt is likely to break out, the measures that have been most
or least effective in keeping revolts under control?
True, the content of these sociologists' conclusions is often too
idiotically vague to be of use even to the most zealous officer of the
law (in his fourth Proposition concerning "conflict processes in uni–
versities," Frank
A.
Pinner discovers: "Students exhibit a special
sensitivity and tendency toward conflict when issues of truth are in–
volved"), but the procedural norms are ideally suitable for a passion–
less charting of the data indispensable for an operation of control.
Pinner's other propositions condense observations about where pro–
tests are likely to take place and for how long; Richard E. Peterson
gives "A Typology of American College Students for the Early 1970's"
with, as he says, a "useful" chart which projects "how the types might
be arranged on a continuum of degree of acceptance-rejection of
prevailing American institutions." Peterson might also suggest the
idea - to whom? - of breaking up our universities into small, polit–
ically ineffectual educational units. "The larger the student body is,
the greater is the likelihood of there being some student who wishes
to start something...."
