Radical Americans; 4; Who Teaches Them?

ability to your The following program is a presentation of National Educational Television. The fourth in a series on the malcontent political minority, both left and right. There's about two good schools in New York, by any honest standards. One is in Greenwich Village, and the other is Upper East Side, that's close, so stocking

area. And the rest of the schools are manned by teachers who don't give a damn what they teach. Most of our faculty have doctors grades, and I think this is very important because it shows that the people you're studying under have an education. Yeah, I dig things around me, but I can't dig them, I don't believe that I can dig them in any, for any eyes with my own, right, and I want to make sure that my eyes are working right. My sister came here, and I just presumed I was coming here, and I did. I'm not talking about integrating with other people in a bourgeoisie, I'm not talking about integrating with other people in the so-called abstract world, so I'm talking about integrating with other people by way of identifying with a particular political movement that has a perspective that allows you to understand where other perspectives are at. The reason we believe the way we do is because of the knowledge we've come by, whether it's through our relatives, whether it's through our school books, any of our teachers, and also through the experience that we've had.

By design or accident, these students are today on the political left and right. Many conservative students at Harding College in Arkansas support traditional values. There are also the off-beat city kids who are in revolt against these traditions, who are some of these radicals, what do they think, and who teaches them. The free university of New York. Courses include Marxist geography, the search for authentic sexual experience, life in mainland China today, art and communism, poetry and revolution. It is free if you can't afford it, otherwise cost is nominal for the 250 students enrolled. The faculty includes socialists, pacifists, old line communists, director Alan Krebs and his wife. He defied a State Department ban on travel to Cuba, following this he was dismissed by a Delphi University.

Why start a free university? Absolutely. One of the major requirements of any course given here is that it concerns the kinds of things that are not generally broached in a regular establishment university. The essence of the war game is based on the idea that you don't belong to yourself. Just as I propose sex, I mention that your genitals don't belong to you but belong to the government. You also own your whole body, and if they decide that you are going to murder a little brown children and be it mom, it doesn't matter whether you love them or hate them, your wishes are nothing to do with the matter, you don't belong to yourself, you belong to the government. The American university has been emasculated. It's intellectual figure, exuberance and excitement have been destroyed. What remains is a dispassionate and studied domus, a facade of scholarly activity concealing an internal emptiness and cynicism, a dusty dry search for permissible truth which pleases none but the administrator and the ambitious.

Who runs his university, and if it's run by a board of trustees made up of bankers, professionals, businessmen, let's say from AT&T, IBM and so on, they're not going to be interested in new ideas, they're going to be interested in preparing students for the role they're going to have to accept in this society, and that is working for corporations, government, private, military. Politics, art, things concerning sexual activity and sexual behavior, all of these basically fall into a prescribed kind of bag and are not permitted expression. And so what we have attempted to do would be to provide a place where these prescribed ideas can be interchanged, can be expressed and communicated. And naturally the fact that our courses are heavily weighted in a political direction only reflects the fact that in the university establishment, political consideration, social political affairs receive very little attention, almost no attention. I have a PhD in social psychology, I worked in sociology departments for a considerable

length of time, and one of the things that impressed me was a degree to which as a student do sociology. The kinds of ideas, radical ideas circulating during our times, contemporary with a C. Raik Mills for example, were never given any serious consideration whatsoever, they didn't exist. In most American universities, you learn literature as though it were some kind of jewel, or it doesn't matter when it was written or by whom, or in what social context. And that's what we're trying to get at, what I try to get at in my course in Russian literature at the free university. Occasionally one of these universities has a teaching, and for that one night what should have been done 365 days of the year is done in one 12 hour period in the kind of a marathon style, but these really don't get down to the roots of it, they can't get down to the roots of it in 12 hours. I spoke at a teaching on question of academic freedom, and I inserted in my remarks a repetition of Genevieve State, when that is Professor Genevieve State at Rutgers, that I didn't fear

or regret the impending Bietcong victory in Vietnam, that in fact I welcomed it. President immediately formed a faculty committee to consider the key of the matter, consider my continuance at the university, and two weeks later the Board of Trustees met and announced that my remarks had been totally irresponsible and contrary to everything Drew stands for as a Christian institution, and then announced that I would not be rehired next year, I've been fact be fired at the end of the year. One of the other things I said at that teaching was that I expressed my political viewpoints in classroom every day, and I thought that anybody who didn't was abdicating his responsibilities. What I meant was that I encourage political discussion and debate in my class, and I encourage the students to formulate their own ideas, the only way I can do that is to give them mine, that I have an obligation to give them mine. My students know what I stand for the first day of the class, and the whole semester they are in a process of having to deal with my ideas. Hi, tonight we're going to talk about guerrilla warfare, and we're going to talk about

a largely theoretical vein. Textbook for this course is K. Guevara's book on popular revolutions, a sympathetic treatment of uprisings against established governments. Certain points, certain important points, as we go along, and comment on it, discuss them a little bit. The first point, the natural sympathetic quality of the army, because it's made up of peasants, second, because the guerrillas can use, because of their high mobility and high motivation, they can use areas of the country that are not accessible by the modern weapons, and third, that the peasantry themselves serve as a protective coloration for the rebels. That is, the peasants are sympathetic to the rebels, and they are opposed to the army, and so they can serve to help the rebels or the guerrillas. So there really is three facets to it. Were you going to say something? The thing is that, whenever you think of a battle of skirmish or war, you always think of two forces coming together on a battlefield, but what becomes very important in these wars is the context, is that the army or the mercenaries that are employed have to fight within the context of the guerrillas.

To begin the war, this was also true in China and in Cuba, you begin in territory where the modern weapons are of no use, where tanks have to stay on the road and in the hills in the Syria, masters that that was of no use, and where, you know, planes aren't as helpful as they might be, because they can get hotouts. Popular movements can win out over the army, that they can, in fact, beat these armies even though they're weaker. Now, why is that? The obvious disadvantage that seems so obvious in this nuclear age, disadvantage is down the counter much. The antithesis of the Free University is Harding College in the small town of Circe Arkansas, oriented toward fundamentalist religion. It is widely regarded as a Church of Christ school, although it is not officially so. Of course, it is taught in 21 subjects besides the Bible. Harding is not as far right as the Free University is left.

There are other differences. Harding has a beautiful campus, an ambitious building program underwritten by donors who appreciate its business-oriented philosophy. The President of Harding, Dr. Clifton Gaines. We're a liberal arts Christian co-educational college. We have 1,470 students here on our Circe campus. We have all together 2,380 students counting our graduate program in Memphis and our two academies, one here in Circe and one in Memphis, but 1,470 students in the end of the graduate program represent about 45 states, 6 foreign countries, and the District of Columbia. Most of our students have come from the area of, say, the 4,5 states surrounding Arkansas and including Arkansas. Harding is a conservative institution. We do not, by any means, look upon ourselves as being ultra-right wing extremist, as sometimes people say, but we are a basically conservative, conservative religiously, conservative economically politically, and I think it is by design.

We believe in constitutional government. These two are two of the bedrocks, along with the fundamental belief in God, bedrocks of our American way of life that have helped to make us what we are. A 25 years ago, this was patriotic today, itself, for a right-wing extremism. I think it is true that the Bible itself strongly upholds the basic principles, let's say, of private and a prize economy. For instance, in the question of work, under private enterprise, we say if a man won't work, neither let him eat. Well, now this is an expression of Paul himself. He wrote this, you see, in the Bible, if a man will not work, neither let him eat. So there is a strong correlation. The question of private property is appelled in both the Old Testament and the New Testament. The prophet motive, we speak of, in private enterprise, is also appelled in the teachings of Christ. He used himself rewards and punishments and reward is nothing more than a sense of profit. Heaven itself is a profit or reward for those who abide in his words, so to speak.

The philosophies of the school and its teachers become the beliefs of the students. They are mostly the sons and daughters of small businessmen. The Bible is a significant part of their background. Just about a year ago, I got disgusted with the way things were going and with all the way that everybody who's poor and doesn't care about it leels off what I do and what my father does. My dad's in business and he's not getting a federal aid, so why should he have to help somebody else's dad who maybe doesn't put out as much? Do you follow me? This isn't a close mind. It's just kind of a, well, I'll take care of me and you take care of you sort of thing. My interpretation of Americanism, I suppose, I'd always been conservatively fraud-up in a way. My dad is a doctor and he's been involved in politics to a certain extent in the Medicare program. So I guess I'd been brought up to believe in more of a strict interpretation of constitution which Harding does as a policy, I suppose.

I feel that when people have to take care of themselves, they can. But when the government says, well, if you can't, we will. They'll get lazy. How many of the people in the United States want to work? How many of them would rather sit back and draw welfare? That's just human nature. And I don't think the unemployment problem is as bad as a lot of people make it out to be. It's about 4%. Well, what's wrong with that? You have a lot of people who are 18 and drop out of high school and they go into that total. And then people who are just temporarily laid off and get a job back, there's just a few die-hards who won't get a job and they don't really deserve it, have one anyway. I feel that in our American system, in our country today, that a man who really wants to work and find a job, now I'm a college student, I work during summer times and I've never found any difficulty getting a job. Because we can read in the Bible that if a man won't work, he should need. And the pilgrims had a problem with that when they went on a socialist economy and just

letting everybody live off what they needed. A lot of people decided they'd bum off the few who had worked and you saw what happened to it. So they say, from now on, if one won't work, he won't eat and they got better. On the Harding Campus, sharing a Harding Building is the National Education Program. This foundation and the college share facilities, talent and ideas. Recently retired President of Harding, the man largely responsible for Harding's present affluence, the energetic head of NEP, Dr. George C. Benson. Currently NEP had its beginning step by step. For instance, I simply began addressing every audience I could and trying to create appreciation for our American way of life. That as I saw it consisted of personal freedom, constitutional government and private ownership of property, including the tools of production. The foundation proselytizes nationwide with films for theaters, films strips for booster clubs and schools and a monthly newsletter.

After the animated colored cartoon series, the American adventure series, we did also a series on communism. What is communism? What's the relationship between socialism and communism? These two are narrated by Herb Filbrek, who certainly understands communism after having been nine years among the people of the Communist Party. This foundation of Dr. Benson's regularly reaches an estimated 20 million people in this country. We started the Freedom Forums in 1949. This again was by request to set up meetings where business people and educators and preachers could get together and discuss America's future and talk about our problems and the best possible solutions. So each forum, since that time, and we've held them annually, selects what we believe is one of the most important problems facing the nation at the moment. The study of America as it was and should be is a major concern at hiding.

Head of the American Studies Department, Billy Ray Cox, a successful businessman, returned to his alma mater. What we're trying to do is to show these people why we've come as far as we have and to give them a better understanding of course today, you see people burning graph cards and you hardly pick up a paper without a riot somewhere occurring. We've tried to show our students that this is not what has made America what it is now. We try to show them in this what has made them so. It seemed after the Great Depression, we all quit talking about American heritage. Up to that time, nearly every community had a fourth of July picnics and a patriotic speaker. After the Depression, we seemed beyond a defensive within so much about our American way of life. We had plenty of people trying to make us think the American way of life was a failure. Actually, the program, the American studies, the purposes of this twofold, this is to first of all to give students a better understanding, the appreciation for the American way of life. Second, it is to train them for leadership careers and business, government, public affairs

and so forth. And businessmen tell us that they like our students. There's something about them that they like. They don't know what it is, but they like it. They also say that they don't have to undo so much because our students seem to have a better grasp of the business world and how it operates and what our economy really is. They're not just theoreticians, but they're practical people too. And I think I know what it is, it's that spirit of integrity and honor and character and a willingness to give a day's work for a day's pay. It's this that men appreciate. Rampart College in Colorado has the atmosphere of a Rocky Mountain retreat. A non-accredited school, it has graduated about 800 students in its 10-year history. It is geared primarily to one week sessions for business executives who study the philosophies of private property and profits. Robert LaFave, the founder of Rampart College, proposes a brand of pure capitalism and contemplates a world where each man is his own government.

In other words, it seemed to me that businessmen, professional men, and the public at large were turning more and more to the state to get their problem solved. And this seemed to me to be contrary to the American heritage, the idea of personal liberty, options, choices that we must make. And it seemed to me that to have a school that would examine this area in terms of human liberty, the personal freedom and choice-making ability of the individual would be a very desirable thing in the face of a parent dearth in this area. I think the government is an instrument of compulsion, and of course an instrument whereby human energy can be organized to arrive at a specific result. I'm not questioning this, but I also note that human beings are able to organize the energies in other systems than government. To whip, human beings can work together to create corporations, industries, vast, productive enterprises from which human well-being improves.

And so students who study this point of view include junior executives of corporations like Deering Millican, textile manufacturers. LaFave's background includes radio newscasting and editorial writing for Hoyle's publications. But I'm not an anarchist. And please understand if I were, I'd admit it, but I'm not. You see the word anarchy means no ruler, no government. That's not what I'm talking about. I'm an autarchist. And an autarchist is a person who believes in government, in self-government, self-control. You see for years we've held the view that you either had one thing or the other, that is you had chaos, disorder, riot, anarchy on the one hand. Or on the other hand, you had some kind of an imposed force that would in time and inevitably did turn into tyranny. And that man is on the horns of this dilemma, he either must go anarchistic, which is impossible or he must go tyrannous, which perhaps you can endure for a while until it gets too

bad and then you have to throw it off and start again. But now we know a little more than this. We know that there is a way between these two. And this way is the way of autarchy, the way of self-government. It is the way that we understand by defining the market and understanding the meaning of property and property ownership and the actual nature of man. Now, I'm not trying to suggest you that we know all the answers, not at all. We have opened a door, a slight crack. And we're in process of trying to explore this and expand it. But certainly, here is what I believe. I believe that you are the best manager of your affairs in the world. And I sure would appreciate a return favor if you'd sort of think that way about me. I won't impose my will on you at all. Wouldn't it be nice if you didn't impose yours on me, and then we could sure get along? At the other end of the scale is the radical left.

Attempts to found other new left schools have met stiff community opposition. Ed Richard was fired by the University of Florida in Gainesville, warned by the university against participating in civil rights demonstrations. He was sacked when he openly opposed compulsory ROTC on campus. He then tried to form a free university. One of the slogans of the school was to bring the student into the city and into the classroom. So we wanted city people to participate. We wanted John Birchers to participate. We wanted racist to participate. We wanted all levels of the community to participate in the free university. We wanted a completely open-ended institution, unlike many of the other free universities, which see themselves as compensatory institutions against the way the universities are run now. We wanted a community-making project whereby we would bring all kinds of different people into the classroom and start from that basis. Through a way to field, I think it was 13 courses and about 18 teachers, something like that. And they had quite a range.

We had what would promise to be a very interesting course. The young Christian conscience and its problems that was going to be taught by a director of Lutheran Student Center, a youth director of Lutheran Student Center, along with two student pastors from campus side religious foundations. But ranging from that to my own course, for example, on how to read the daily newspaper. I eventually did rent one place, two office suites. I gave a guy $300, we were able to pay $150 a month rent. And I gave him two checks on a six months understanding, one check for October, one check for March. And three days later, he called me up and told me I had to pick up the checks. The word had gotten around that we were going to go into this building and it was impossible. And I said, why? And he gave me some song and dance at first. And I said, well, you must have explained that we would be all there. And we wouldn't make lots of noise and so forth and so on. And I realized what was going on. I just wanted to talk.

Finally, he admitted that he said to me, well, he says, you know why. He says they know about you. And they think that you're some kind of a communist and so forth and so on. In a very elementary way, I guess we were red baited to death. But it was more than red baiting, too. There was oddly enough, we were called the, I get the, it wasn't until October of this. In other words, I started the school in June. It wasn't until October that it began to dawn on me to show you how really segregated we were from the main currents of the local community. It wasn't until October that began to dawn on me how hostile and how rigid and how tough this power structure was and how it was going to shut us out. I didn't realize how disliked we were. In New York City, a newspaper attacked the Free University. And then Crabbs says harassment by the city building department began. The Journal of American Indicator draft dodging school flourished here. The very next day and the subsequent day, teams of fire department and building department officials combed this building from the basement to the roof looking for trouble.

The building inspectors indicated particularly. At other tenants didn't have anything to fear from them. They were out to get that draft dodging school. That school teaches people how to burn their draft cards downstairs. This was followed by a statement saying that they would criminally prosecute us unless we quit immediately, unless we ceased operations at once. Well, subsequently we consulted with lawyers and began to mount some sort of effective protest action. And on Monday evening, the day in which the summons was to have been served Judy Griffitt's Building Commissioner of the City of New York called our attorney Bill Constler in his 42nd Street office and indicated that why the buildings department has thought things through and would certainly not proceed against us anymore swiftly than would proceed against any other organization in the city. No criminal prosecutions will be begun. There will be no summons issued, so that for the moment at least that crisis passed.

Meaningful communities. Outside San Francisco, a new left school isolated itself from a hostile community and died from lack of direction. Mark Goldis. And the community reaction on the Monterey Peninsula where the school existed was so overwhelming that it was very obvious that all kinds of very deep social nerve endings had been touched. And the pressure was so extreme that the college drew it on itself and for quite a long while became a place in which there was largely an epicurean retreat operating. Free universities are often not well organized. Carolyn Craven, the member of the new left group students for a democratic society. The new school, which is now known as the Students for Democratic Society new school, was founded actually in about 1963 by a group of young radical adults in San Francisco. And it was named then the San Francisco new school.

The school existed for about a year with courses ranging from everything from Greek politics to radical art and radical theater. But after about a year they decided that in spite of the fact that they had had 100 students who loved the school and who found the classes at least exciting, that one it was too much work for them to do and two they weren't really sure where they were going. They weren't really sure what it was they hoped the school would accomplish. So we decided in the spring of 1965 to close the school. Last summer it's all found out from me from Students for Democratic Society, which is a national student organization, at the convention and asked me to come out to see if I could reopen the new school. Well the students that now attend the classes of which are three are from all over. They come from SDS, they come from other organizations, but they're primarily activists from the student movement. And what we're trying to do is just try to theoretically and analytically solve some problems. The thing that the new school is that I'm most interested in and a lot of people around the new school are interested in though

is not only the classes, but to see whether it's possible to establish a research institute here in the Bay Area. What I'd like to do and what we're going to attempt to do if we can get some money and people really interested is to establish a research institute in which people could come to write papers, to do research, to conduct seminars, to be published and distributed across the country to the entire movement, not just to SDS, discussing these problems and trying to really establish some type of radical, theoretical and intellectual dialogue across the country. There is a radical dialogue on both the left and the right. The new left schools have a saucy freewheeling atmosphere. They challenge accepted political, economic and moral solutions of our time. Because of community hostility and lack of money, their influence is limited. The radical right on the other hand has the solid backing of people with money. People attracted to the tried and true in economics and religion.

Harding College has grown impressively in 30 years. Rampart College hopes to be a four-year college soon. For students on both the right and left, these schools teach some radical answers and some not-so-radical answers to the problems of our time. Next week on the radical Americans, I look at some radical Negroes. Next week on the radical Americans, I look at some radical Negroes. This is NET, the National Educational Television Network.