Urban Confrontation; 7; S.I. Hiyakawa

You know these people at the present time who are now let's say 22 years old are the first generation to have been completely brought up in front of a television set and they listen to commercials all they're liars is an instant remedy for your headache is an instant remedy for your acid stomach. There's an Instagram ready for your social unpopularity use bad news either or you buy of mustangs. Then why isn't there instant remedy for racial injustice. Why isn't there an instant remedy for all the problems that beset society. If there isn't one. Someone is holding out on us so we demand it at once. Urban confrontation and analysis of the continuing crises facing 20th century man in the American city. Today's recorded guest is Dr. as hi hi Yukawa expert on somatics

and president at San Francisco State College. Today's program urban university campus in conflict. Questions I asked in the following program are merely the moderator's method of presenting many sides of today's topic. Here is your host Joseph Harvey Director Department of radio production. Our guest today is Dr SISIA Kahlo of San Francisco State College and one of the most controversial figures in American education today a world famous expert in semantics. The study of language and its effect on men and society. A doctor I call you mention in your book The problem of the person who grows up with a false map of the world in his head. Do you think the American educational system and TV have filled kids minds with a false map of American society I refer to your book language thought and action. Well don't lump education and TV together together on this. They are two educational institutions on the board a sense of crisis is a problem in throughout every case any civilization at any time that we get FOSS maps part of the time from

our environment. In private and schoolteachers in part from the advertising in part from entertainment industries when we are not in part from folklore and rumor and old wives tales. But is it possible that one of the reasons for the students attack on the system as they call it is that well they reject the world because they have been taught that something better exists. What changes are necessary in education and child rearing to prevent children becoming a naive and cynical at the same time almost. Your question takes for Gratton off a lot of things for example you take for granted that a whole generation is discussed discontent with the system and especially here at a place like Northeastern University you have a vast majority who are trying to find places within the system and are not trying to overthrow it in that case and this is the case. And yet we get the impression from the mass media that many many many people the whole generation again are discontent. Well you raise the question the mass media is it not. A question to be

raised at least whether or not the mass media have selected for present Taisha and for dramatic purposes and for. The purpose of an arresting audience attention. Have they not concentrated on playing up the discontent and the disorder. Is this starts with the Berkeley in 1984. There are 30000 students they're proceeding with their study. There are two or three thousand involved in an uproar. And so how about the twenty eighth thousand who are proceeding with their studies working in a biology lab or studying in the lab you know one goes around to take a television picture of them. And this is been going on steadily ever since during this approach San Cisco State College for example of the many hundreds of students studying in the library they never got on televisions but the big the students who got on television were the ones raising hell out in the campus when Picture Asghar been flowing beards in and picture s speech to put it mildly.

And do they get all the attention. Doctor I call when you lecture on college campuses across the country your speeches are often disrupted by this a minority of students which you just described. I'd like to let the audience hear a portion of a speech you gave this evening that was interrupted by student demonstrators. The first go. It is to learn to understand appreciate and take care of the natural world we live in. Current science is the biological sciences are central. Every child should learn how to read the landscape so they can interpret the terrain around him and find out how it came to be what it is. He should know something about the weather. History. Chemistry Physics and geography.

To. Leave environmental status. And they should be introduced early in life. Continued through the years of elementary school and I think if you have the. Time they are very much interested by the current interest in ecology. Now about to call your attention to one thing that we are victims of fads and fashions. I have. One of the very important because the present interest in ecology at best crept back to nothing being said that was not said 30 and 40 years ago go by the great conservationist Otto Leopold of the University of Wisconsin. In other words people are being swept away by a faddish interest in ecology. What

happens whereas it is a very very serious subject and a matter of a lifetime concern for all of us and our living environment. And one of the things that really alarms me is be tremendous similarity. Part of the look to you can in the brownshirts of resemblance of rap to the New Left. There's a similar time in same similar desire not to let anyone speak who disagrees with them. There were. There were scores of brownshirts who went from classroom to classroom in German universities in 1930 telling students the professors and students to close their classes because they were infected with some kind of what they called was a Jewish

ideology. And in a similar way. Scribes of yesteryear students went from classroom to classroom to sepsis goes straight to prevent the process and structure. At the present time from the SBF we see the same incantation as a substitute for thought. And you can hear this kind of incantation going on all around you and if you want. I'm not used to sample text book I'm not sick of techniques of propaganda you can see it right here in this room right now. The old. What about that old iceberg analogy the idea that there's. Well it's probably more of the iceberg good than meets the eye above the water line we would. You see the campus violence but how could it occur. How did these demonstrations occur without a broad underlying base of support among the

students. But there wasn't a broad underlying base of support among the students is clearly shown by the fact that once or white once the violence was stopped students poured back into the classroom we're so happy to be there. You should see the scene in San Cisco state college right now it's a very happy place and people are studying like crazy and know performing their plays in their music and writing their poems and studying their biology. And they're just determined not to let a small minority take over the campus again. And it's a very happy place or is what's assume for the purposes of conversation that it is a small minority as you describe it of. Is there any truth to the idea that even in this case of violence of dissenting groups is not really that bad when you compare it to the alleged destructiveness of the economic and political system in the United States the system that they're trying to change by violence. Well see this is where I disagree with you. I think that the people who are really trying to change the system for the better are the people who are not disrupting the system. I think the people who are trying to change

things by violence are in a way addicted to violence for exams sake and the claim that they're doing is the interests of social justice or social equality or better economic system and so on. I think these are all pretext for the violence that was already pre-determined upon I can give you countless examples from my experience of census cost a college but for example in December 1988 we had the pleasure of announcing on behalf of the faculty and the administration information a black studies program but the white students of the STDs and the black students of the. Black students union refused to accept it because they had compete with 15 other non-negotiable demands some of which were nonsensical and they decide they didn't want a black studies program they just want to go on with the strike. But they liked what the strike was for to get a black studies program. The result of all this is the Black Studies Program which they said they wanted were delayed for another six or eight months. There's a hypocrisy about this that really bothers me. If they really want a black studies program they could have gone right to work in December 1968 and got it going back to February

1969 as it was. They continue the strike and continue to grant the kult college from functioning. Let's talk about the type of people who really want the black studies sitting there right in the faculty. They're right in the student body and they're prepared to proceed with the educational process. Been go on strike. Let's talk about the tactics of the student radicals. Most students don't support violence but they but many see demonstrations and building takeovers as nonviolent and see police action as the real violence now. What tactics do you think are acceptable forms of protest. Well I think that a peaceful demonstration is always an accepted form of protest. But once you start actually interfering with the flow of traffic then you are ready to be used by violence when she prevent people from say studying the law library and conducting their classrooms you've already produced violence whether you only threatened to hit people or not that very thread itself the very physical interference with others constitutes violence this is

the way the law reads in the city of San Francisco this is the way Mayor Alyosha has explained it and I accept that and there to put a stop to that violence. You must you must use the force of the police. Let me put myself in those students shoes for a moment. They feel the system strangles their attempts at change with red tape. The numerous committee studies that never end and results they want less talk and more action. Now what do you say to them in defending the system. Well I would say that there is no system on earth. That exists under law and regulation that does not involve a certain amount a procedure that we call a red tape. If you don't have the procedure you can have arbitrary decisions made by people who come and go. Authoritarian administrators or whoever and the whole public process of so-called red tape is that is that the end result shall be equitable and reasonable and acceptable to all

parties. To cut through the red tape unnecessarily or obviously sometimes red tape proliferates beyond the limits of functionalism but nevertheless to cut through it unnecessarily is to guarantee inequitable and I'm just results. Well where did they ever get the idea that you can do away with red tape. But what makes them so impatient. What about their upbringing. Well I don't know what the upbringing is but you know this is a this hypothesis I submit it's sort of jokingly but it's worth thinking about. You know these people at the present time who are now let's say 22 years old are the first generation to have been completely brought up in front of a television set and they listen to commercials or they're liars is an instant remedy for your headache is an instant remedy for your acid stomach. There's Instagram ready for your social unpopularity use Bam is either there or you buy a Mustang.

Then why isn't there instant remedy for racial injustice. Why isn't there an instant remedy for all the problems that beset society. If there isn't one. Someone's holding out on us. So we demanded at once can we. I wonder if this whole idea that they have put their panaceas available is not a sort of metta message that we pick up from television. Is this like the the quarterback to try to call the long pass play and gain 40 yards on one player and as a result out of intercepted in the pushback they lost 20 yards another was are they trying to get too much and possibly risking losing a great deal they have lost an awful lot. Already as a matter of fact the quality of education innovation and quality of work at many many colleges universities already suffered. See the reason why I really insist that the demand for social change in education is hypocritical is that the places where

change was easiest to arrive at by most changes being introduced. Places like Berkeley and sciences because take the high road and Swarthmore Antioch and Oberlin is the place that they hit hardest. They didn't hit the colleges where curriculums are conservative and and old fashioned They hit the real modern far out advance places like San Cisco's state we had a reputation for greater innovation impact anywhere else in the country. Well does this apply they try to so they try to close us down because we don't innovate. You know does this surprise you though I mean what we know about the evolution of anticipations you know it well it is in a sense it doesn't surprise me but I'm a bit but I just want to reject the argument that the reason Sanchez goes to college or places like that encounter these difficulties is because we are resistant to change. Is the the actual reason is that we are we are less resistant to change anywhere else and therefore in a sense where a pushover for this kind of tactic. Let's move toward a sort of a prediction or prognostication section of our conversation. How do you

think the majority of Americans will react to the problems of the cities of the students the universities of the upper Americans will backlash be the reaction backlash is too strong a term to use an unfortunate metaphor anyway. What I said I say the backlash has the implication that in response to a radicalism of the Left you want to get radicalism with the right thing. Actually what this country has in a surprise to a surprising degree is a way of continuing to go find the center again and after you have let us say the extreme radical or the radical rightist persecution of let's say communists or alleged communists in the McCarthy period you go back to the center again to the center of Truman and Eisenhower and then after the extreme radicalism of the extreme left you see will go back to the center again here as represented by people like Humphrey and Nixon who are the leading candidates for the presidency in 1988. I wonder if we can talk about moving from that. The consensus interpretation of American history which you obviously endorse the idea we have more in common more uniting us than

dividing us. Throughout our history. What if we could move to a recent program in this series of programs that you're participating in Bruno Bettelheim spoke recently on our series suggesting that part of the reason for student unrest is that students have been denied real participation in life in so much of their lives I mean having a family having a career there deny this until they finish at least 12 and sometimes 20 years of education. I'm going to agree with DR BATTERHAM on that that one of my real problems throughout the colleges is the prolongation of adolescence that. There are social expectations the middle class compels students to go to college where they want to or not. If you have graduate from high school when you're 18 19 you're old and you're not going to college. People whispering say well what's wrong with the boy etc.. And I believe that people have been forced to go to school first too darned long at one stretch from nursery school at three or four right through to their 22 and get their

bachelor's degrees. Now this is an awful stretch of education and at the same time as this is going on I notice that physical and biological maturation is coming earlier in the lives of people today because of increased health nutritional standards. Now I think that one very important solution to our problems which better time I'm sure would agree with is that we ought to. Where we ought to reduce the pressure for everyone to go to college. I don't think that college education is that essential I don't think it's important for everybody. I think all sorts of honorable careers are possible without a college education first and secondly even if we must go to college it seems to me that we would all profit a great deal by taking a. Two or three year moratorium on education between high school and college. BI You travel where you work and explore the world and most of all you explore the self in a situation outside the classroom. What about the idea of a moratorium from class work fitted right into the college

calendar here at Northeastern University we are the only cooperative play. Out of work and study and alternating periods of the year that I believe in very much I think it's a very fine system that that combines the best of two ideas that could we moved on to call it to a discussion of the use of police in campus riots if the police are not called in to stop these riots. Do you think we will see or see a period when right wing old sort of vigilante committees might even take the law into their own hands and invade the campuses and confront the leftwing rioters. The students themselves know there's not much danger of that. There really isn't. That's just the rhetoric of impatient people who like an American he's opposed by might say we'll go in there and clean up the place ourselves it's as if they don't levy ever mean it because. We do believe most of us that the ultimate civil power of the police is an essential thing and once we get the point across that that a college campus is much intact the police

protection as a motel or a bowling alley there will stop hesitating about it and when the places will be torn up then we call the police. You know it's interesting that you say that because this kind of a vigilante takes a lot of one's own hands approach by the right wing would be an obviously similar to what's going on and on and on the left wing Exactly and it would be one remark equally disastrous. Yes it would be equally disastrous. Can we call it a form of actually I'll call the left wing to take over upon fascism to let's call them both by the same names as we describe the same phenomena and yet you feel that a right wing form of fascism is probably not going to work or not in response to the present one and that the temper of our times the temper of our people is such that they approve of the kind of. The moderate defense of academic freedom with no repression of academic freedom but only the repression of violent behavior such as the. Administration stood for.

Since I became president sensical state and yet a colleague of yours Father has Burge in the president of Notre Dame University wrote in a letter to the his student body of the real possibility as he saw and he truly believed quote unquote that fascism could be the response to the rioting in our cities and on our campuses there. You're an optimist occupier. I'm much more of an optimist in that I think. Do you think that the universities should be closely involved in government research for military purposes or closely linked with big business with corporations This is one of the issues that vitally concerns and activists students. OK now we take a very activist sitting then right now ugh. Oh no. We worked up about ecology. They're going to if they are going to take that ecology business at all series they're going to get involved with the government in a big way because government is going to help the research it's going to subsidize that research and then we darned grateful for it. And so in a sense the question of whether or not we can involve the government

depends on the subject matter at hand is it not. Now it has two little items on this. I think that the university and especially a state university or State College does have obligations to the government that sets it up. I don't think I think that the relationship between let's say the University of California Davis and the entire agricultural infant industry of the state of California has a very real and very important and necessary one. And the Davis campus cannot turn its back on all the agriculture of care of Californians that would have nothing to do with it. So we're involved with government and with state necessarily but I do not believe it's because we are universities. I do not believe we should engage in secret research because whatever we find as scientists or scholars I think should be made available to the entire public. How can a society deal with the violent tactics of the student love. How can. Police be used without causing the reaction that it increases the problem.

Well it hasn't increased the profit so far as my own experience is concerned. We used the police and not only that. We used police in large numbers but we also because we use them in large numbers and with adequate training. We had the police behave better there. In the handling of large disturbances than I've known them to behave in any other college or university. So it's partly a matter of adequate police training and partly a matter of having adequate numbers. See a small bunch of police been faced with thousands of student riders get nervous they get panicky like anybody else. Whereas if you have enough police present and they behave with a cool and aplomb of real professionals. I saw him and I was once a part of training. Goodness me at the San Cisco police department of which I've been to for which I have the highest respect when it would offer a lot of very serious training on how to handle their their nightsticks how to handle their weapons and so on in such a way as to take care of what is basically a civil commotion in a civil way.

It's interesting that you talk about the importance of police training Northeastern University is heavily involved in professional training of law enforcement officers we have a polymath for that here I'm glad to hear that and I do something very important which is increasingly occurring across the country. And yet you read in the newspapers you see pictures the mass media gives you the impression that your particular institution it and so many institutions there were a lot of bloody heads people watching television they see the bloody heads is an isolated violence on behalf on behalf of the police or is this the pattern or what is the story. Well there are all sorts of stories both before my administration and after. But there were times certainly before I my mistakes and with the police panic and selves they weren't well enough trained. I think that's clearly the case. I know that during the first week of my administration there was some violence on the part of the police for which the police themselves were much reprimanded later by the by their own officers I know about this. I also know that they were confronted with a

level of violence that. It is fact she used to say that the day when hundreds of students marched in and with bombs and loaded revolvers on our campus you you had to expect some kind of firm acts done by the police. Many weight training training as I say improved the most spectacular event of all the police activity it senses because they caught a few eyes on January 23rd Nineteen sixty nine thousand four hundred fifty four students who were placed under arrest for illegal assembly in a number of other things. Now what is very important about that is that whole operation took place without a single blow being struck and this was the triumph of our police training. I believe it's possible anywhere in the past year listeners to this series I have heard Bruno Bettelheim Adam Clayton Powell Art Buchwald and Margaret meet all give their criticism and approval voiced their opinions on American youth. And his last third of the 20th century and now we've heard one of the most outspoken educators in America

today Dr. as I call it. Thank you doctor I thought. The views and opinions expressed on the preceding program do not necessarily represent those of the program host. Joseph Baylor Northeastern University for this station. Questions I asked were merely the moderators method of presenting many sides of today's topic. Northeastern University has brought to you Dr S.I. Hayakawa expert on somatics and president at San Francisco State College. Today's program urban university. Campus in conflict. Your program host has been Joseph R. Bader Director Department of radio production. Urban confrontation is produced for the division of instructional communications of the nation's largest private university. Northeastern University. Commons on this program or requests for a recorded copy of any program in this series may be addressed to

urban confrontation. Northeastern University Boston Massachusetts 0 2 1 1 5. This week's program was produced by Carolyn Gartrell and Peter Lyons directed by Jeffrey Feldman technical supervision by John by. The executive producer for urban confrontation is Steve freedom. Your announcer Dave Hammond. This is the national educational radio network.