Richard Heffner Talks With; 3; Dr. Buell Gallagher, 1965-04-15

You Dr. Gallagher in a recent issue of Life Magazine, the April 2, 1965 issue, they said this in an editorial, Buil Gallagher, president of the City College, New York, detects a, quote, takeover mentality, end quote, in some student groups that he fears may signal, again, they quote, the end of academic freedom in the beginning of the reign of unreason, end quote. Now, is this a fair statement of the Gallagher point of view on the recent rebellion on the

campus? It's a fair statement on one very minute aspect of a much larger and more inclusive view. One is always a, please, as you know, Dick, one is always pleased to be cited in a reputable magazine. One wishes, however, that the editors of Life had had the full text of my speech before them. Well, why did you elaborate for our audience? First of all, you notice I said some student groups. This was a speech delivered on the morning in which the news broke of the so-called filthy speech movement on the Berkeley campus. The effort on the part of a very small group of students, probably half a dozen at the most, to parade four letter words and to shout them over loudspeakers on the campus. This particular thing was associated also with the declaration of intent to resign by Chancellor Kerr, President Kerr. And the two together led me to remark that this might, if it became a general thing, lead to the kind of eristic confrontation,

eristic being defined as an arguer who searches, who works for victory rather than truth. The kind of eristic confrontation, which if it were to capture the student mentality or the faculty mentality or the administration mentality, would mean the end of academic freedom. But suppose we forget about the filthy speech movement, I can't pretend that the President Kerr can forget about it, and possibly even on your own campus, there may be signs of the same kind of eristic point of view. But set aside the filthy speech movement for a moment, and without it, do you detect a, quote, takeover mentality? Yes, and it's been there for as long as there have been colleges and universities. And you know, we'll continue so to be, and needs continually, therefore, to be a point against which we are on guard. Well, what do you mean, it takeover mentality? Do I really need to define it? Well, please do elaborate a little.

Yeah, now as a group of people who decide what they know is the one doctrine that everyone else must subscribe to, and to insist that they will now dictate to all others their points of view. Among the students? Students, faculty, administrators, anybody. They are the ones who are in sole possession of the truth. They will tell everybody else what to do. Well, now, as I understand it, Dr. Gallagher, a good many of the students feel not that they are indeed possesses of the sole truth, but rather that they want to participate with the administration and with the faculty in decision-making, and that they haven't been permitted to participate in the past. Yes, well, this is a different matter. And you have probably here a continuum of attitudes, where in some instances it is an earnest and a reasonable and honest desire to share in determining the, let us say, the way in which the institution operates. This probably is the way in which the Berkeley Free Speech Movement, as it is called, began with reasonable student desires.

One doesn't need to assess blame or to trace the controversy in detail to arrive at one of the end results of this process, not only not all of them, but one of them, namely the point at which Mario Savio, the student leader, shouted, we shall see who runs this university. It had become at its beginnings what had been a reasonable effort that arriving at student insights and desires had now become an eristic effort to take over and run the university by these student leaders. To what extent do you think students should participate in the running of a university? This will vary a great deal. First of all, I think it's useful here to have not merely an American perspective, but a world perspective on the question of student participation in the running of the university. And a little bit of history may be useful. If you take the two great patterns

of a European university life, one of these is a pattern which the students themselves hired lecturers and fired them at will. And this was the one type of university. The other was the university in which the faculty, having themselves come together either as monks or in other ways, brought students in and taught them. Now, in a modern day, one might say that most of the universities in Latin America follow the former pattern of activity, namely the students are the one continuing full-time group on the campus. Almost no Latin American university has a full-time faculty. It's medical faculty, for example, is made up of doctors who practice and come and give

occasional lectures in the medical school. Lawyers in that full-time practice give occasional lectures in the law school. There is possibly one full-time function area registrar or rector or something of that sort, although the rector usually is a rotating officer in an office for one year and then out. The one full-time body of the students and the classic example of it comes out of place like the University of Caracas where they use the campus as the place to mount the trucks and fill them with the students and go out and shoot the government and take over. Now, that kind of a thing is more or less the frame of mind and the pattern of life of the Latin American university. There's only one group in addition to the students that has any real power in the university and that's the alumni. The faculty, the administration are believed to be and usually are tools of the government and by definition students and alumni are opposed to them just as they will be as soon as

the new group takes over opposed to them. Now, one puts this pattern in contrast with the classical pattern of the faculty-controlled institution, which is the general pattern in much of Europe, but there it is overlaid by an additional factor, namely that in not a few instances, notably France and Russia and Germany, the final control is in the hands of the government. The minister of education in Paris makes all assignments to professorial rank and assignment in all of the universities of the whole of France. And their students are regarded as a person who may come to the university through a very strict process of admissions. When they are there, they are under university discipline and as for example in both France and Russia at the present time, they receive very liberal subsistence and support, paying no tuition and getting room and board along with it

in most cases and in France at the moment are demanding also that they receive a salary while studying. And I gather you're suggesting that we follow more the European pattern. I'm saying we follow neither. Well, tell me more. If you take another variant, if you go to Great Britain, there the general pattern is that the faculty runs it with the financial controls now being largely taken over by the university grants commission, which is an arm of the government, but which is functioned in an amazingly good fashion in terms of the defense and maintenance of the integrity and individuality of the institutions. Now in the United States, we have a pattern that differs from all of these. Here, so far as I know without exception, the legal control of higher education rests not with the government, not with the students, not with the faculty, but with a lay board of control, a board of trustees or in some cases is called a board of regents as in California. That's just another name

for board of trustees as we know it here. And this lay board has the legal authority, the power, the responsibility for operating and controlling the institution. Now in some cases, as for example, here in the City University of New York, the board of higher education, which is our board of trustees, has delegated to the faculties, the control of all student activities, and the initiation of all the curricular matters. But nevertheless, the final power authority lies with the lay board of trustees. Now in this situation, then you ask yourself, what and how and to what extent under what conditions do students participate in the operating of the university? And the answer would seem to be a rather short one contrasted, let's say, not just with the with the description that you offered of the situation in Latin America, but with the presumption

that we generally make, that we participate in our own government. Well, it's a short one, yes, and it's also a very long one, and it's a very highly varied one. Under these conditions in which a lay board of trustees is the governing authority, it is not impossible to define areas in which student control of affairs is almost complete. Subject to course, to general regulations and conditions laid down in the law, and by the resolutions of the board of trustees. These will usually be the areas of so-called student activities, students life. In some institutions, that'll mean the right to run the junior prom without interference, and similar kinds of social activities. In other institutions, it'll mean that in addition to the substantial control over the whole of the social life of the

campus, students will have control over such matters as the student press. They will run a wide variety of student organizations. For example, the City College, there are about 200 such student organizations, and they are all self-governing and self-running. They must be chartered by the college, and here the chartering agency is the student council, and the requirement is that the organization begin with a minimum of, I think, it's a dozen members. Secondly, that they have a faculty advisor. Thirdly, that they clearly state all of their purposes and objectives, including any possible connection with any agency or organization off campus. Now, any student group that fulfills these requirements is chartered, and then carries on its work. This is a very large degree of student organization and student control and student autonomy.

Of its own seemingly extra-curricular activities, what about student involvement in the choice of their own curriculum, and the choice, too, of their faculty people? Now, you take this in successive stages, and here one has to ask, what is the right of the faculty also to participate in the things that you've just mentioned? And possibly, even to indicate that in some cases, administrators may be parts of faculties. By definition, the president of the college is supposed to be chairman of the faculty, and in most instances is. And at our place at City College, for example, it has been one of my continuing and interesting efforts not only to defend the right of academic freedom and free speech on the part of the students and of the faculty, but also to make sure that the president had the same right. And this has not always been easily understood or easily granted. It has been presumed that, by definition, if the faculty and the students are to be free,

the president has to keep his mouth shut. If the president attempts to participate in the discussion, and at any point differs with any one of the students or faculty, this is sometimes interpreted as being interference with freedom. The part of the president, therefore, in participating in the discussion, has over the period of years been, I think, by this time clearly established, principally because when there is a difference of opinion, the president does not use the presidential power then to back up his side of the issue. I don't know what you mean there. Well, I mean simply this, that if you're going to have a free discussion, it's got to be mutual insult with impunity. Is that what you have on the campus? I believe so. This is another way of saying a very high degree of mutual respect. Yes, but now you're talking about dialogue and dialogue is important, but what about power? What about authority? Power and authority are there wherever they are, and the only decent and intelligent, and in the end, the only, finally, effective way to

attack the seats of power is through the continuing open dialogue. Yes, but the student who may on your campus or on the campus at Berkeley or in many other universities, particularly the large universities in this country, who may participate in the dialogue and still find that he has no real authority, that he has no real power or access to power, that he may talk, he may debate, he may have this dialogue, but ultimately it is the administration, it is the faculty, it is the labor of trustees that you've mentioned that has the ultimate authority, and though he may have free speech, he cannot literally have in the final analysis free action. Is this a fair statement because that action is limited? It's partly fair, and certainly as far as you've gone with it, I would agree with it. Then I would say that this is not different in kind, or possibly only a different little bit in degree from the status of the citizen

under the federal government, or under the state government, or the city government. Why? Citizen votes, and his vote counts, and if they're 50 plus percent of the voter is saying, yes, or no, it's yes or no, this is not true, I gather, on the faculty, in the university. Ah, I slept. That was an important Freudian slip, and a good one, because it precisely points out that when a majority of the faculty is convinced of a point of view, with reference to the curriculum, this is the definitively controlling point. Students therefore have a direct line of conversation and continuing dialogue, and if you will, point of attack. If a student has a point of view about a given course, or about a total curriculum, and can, through his own persuasive powers and intelligence, convince others that he is right, it is not very long before this matter becomes a matter that is felt by faculty members as well, and in the typical American college or university,

when that decision is reached in the part of the faculty, there is a change in the curriculum. There can be a change in the curriculum. There is. Well, you say there is, but the fact remains that the students can remain in the position of being petitioners, they can petition all they want, they can converse all they want. If the faculty in its wisdom, and I put quotation, I throw them around the world, if the faculty and the administration do not seek, do not decide to accept the petition. Yes. Oh, this introduces then the second dimension that you have to consider when you're talking about the power and place of students. They are students, not citizens. No, no, in this sense that they are learners, the whole notion of a college or university is based on the supposition, not always true, but generally true, that faculty members know more than students do. Students are there primarily to learn. Unfortunately, very often they are there to be taught, but they are there primarily to

learn. And the assumption is that faculty members by and large and on the whole know more than students do about what they ought to learn. Even Paul Goodman has insisted that in the final analysis, even though students may choose at what rate they are to learn and when their learning readiness is apparent, that it is the faculty and only the faculty that is to determine what they shall learn. Then again, the student can merely be in the position, can only be in the position of petitioner. Is that a fear? No, he can also be participant, but Paul, if you will, participant hyphen petitioner. His status is the one of being primarily a learner, and in the process of learning, he can react and indicate that he doesn't like what he's learning or the way he's learning it, or he'd like to learn something else. But if he can't convince the faculty that his likes or dislikes are not only new views, but true views, they remain what they have been. And the fact that he stands pat.

And what it does then for for is to rest itself back primarily upon the whole process of intelligence. Now, this is the point at which the method becomes a primary importance. If the student or the faculty member assumes a position of intransigence, either on either side, if this position of intransigence be assumed, then you do not have the atmosphere in which free discussion can lead to any fruitful conclusions. You have only the nastiest kind of charge, countercharge, and public debate. But Dr. Gallagher, you use the word intransigence. How do we characterize the faculty that says you have enrolled somewhat that of the citizen? Nevertheless, however you vote, if the faculty in its wisdom decides otherwise, your votes literally do not count. Now, isn't this in its own way a kind of intransigence?

If the faculty assumes that it is going to take this position willy-nilly, and pay no attention to student points of view, then you have complete intransigence. I think it's fair to say that the situation itself poses a whole set of problems that are not totally different from those of parent and child. Indeed, the law insists that the college or university stands in local parentis, under the law. Thus, for example, some years ago at Berea College in Kentucky, they had a court case in which the students insisted that they could not be compelled to eat in the college dining halls. They didn't like the food. They wanted to eat in town. That sounds very familiar. They went to court with the case, and the court ruled that the college stood in local parentis and could therefore compel the students to eat whatever kind of food they wanted to serve. Now, is this a doctrine that you can easily accept? I'm not saying whether it

can be easily accept. I'm saying it is the legal framework within which we operate. Can we may we? Because we can set that aside for a moment, the legal framework. Let me ask you, in terms of the American Campus 1965, whether in local parentis, or someone who said crazy like a parent, whether this doctrine has real meaning today in a university, in a college that has 20, 25, 27, 30,000 students. It has very great meaning from one point of view, namely that the college is held legally responsible for what it permits and what happens to the student. The college can be wholly responsible, and damaged suits are a continually recurring fact of life in American higher education. For what happens off the campus? No, for what happens on campus. On the campus now, under the law, however, the college can, if it wishes, extend its parental relationship to the student off campus. This is also a legal option, but it's not compulsory. The college is

compelled to take full responsibility for what happens on campus. It may, if it wishes, assume a wider survey and send a hold of the student responsible by holding itself responsible, or vice versa, hold itself responsible by holding the student responsible for what happens off campus. In what he does, if he gets into jail or commits a crime of some sort off campus, the college can, if it wishes, add to the penalty of the law its own academic penalties. And we call this double jeopardy, it isn't that strictly, but that's what it was called at Berkeley. And the Berkeley free speech movement was aimed primarily at in the later stages, at making sure that the students were not subjected to double jeopardy. Interestingly enough, at the City College, we had the reverse of that. Students were asking not only for a complete immunity on campus, as they now have, but also that when they went off campus and got in trouble with the law, that then the college should intercede and

make sure that the legal penalties were not invoked. They want a double immunity. Isn't this just being a good parent? You keep your child out of jail presumably. This is being a good parent, isn't it? I don't think so. Not when you're talking about a student, a person who is a between 17 and 22. He is in the process now of becoming a full-fledged adult. Off the campus, but not on the campus. Both. I said in process, in process. But you say both? Yes, both often on campus. And when, therefore, he is with his eyes open, intentionally breaking the law, he then assumes the responsibility for that act. I know that in the eyes of the law, he is still an infant. Anybody under 18 is an infant in the law. I also know that when he takes his action of civil disobedience or whatever it may be, that he does so with full knowledge that

the law is to be invoked to punish him. Now to step in and to soften that and to say no, we won't punish him. Is to transform the crusader for human rights, the martyr for the cause into something like a little child who is now crying at his mother's apron strings and doesn't want to be punished for what he knew he did intentionally. Now, unless I be misunderstood, let me point out that there are differing conditions under which civil disobedience is undertaken. There are, for example, instances in which one deliberately disobeys a given local law with the full knowledge and intention of carrying that forward to an appeal to the Supreme Court to invalidate the local law and hundreds of city and cases in the south have thus been carried out and they have been vindicated in their intent with out the use of force or violence and hopefully without hatred deliberately so to violate

a local law that is known to be in contravention of the United States Constitution. To incur the penalty of it, but at the same time to appeal for the change in the local law, this is quite different from deciding that it's now time to loot the local drugstore or steal a bus and ride around in it and then expect that the law will not be invoked as a result of such action. Now, this must pose for you a very, very, very long series of difficult problems because what is the line that can be drawn? Will you define it? Actions in the part of the community that really run counter to the law of the land, perhaps the Supreme law, perhaps then to a higher law? Where does it stop? At the law of the land or at a higher law? Luckily, I don't have to decide that. This is a matter for the courts.

Will you say a matter for the courts, but then what about your participation in helping students who run foul of the law in pursuit of what you would as an individual consider, a higher good, a greater good, the good of the country? Would you not participate in their defense? I would not participate in some kinds of interference with the law, which is sometimes called defense. Let me be explicit. Recently, a small group of students known as the Progressive Labor Club. This is the campus unit of the Progressive Labor Movement, which, according to their own declaration, support the Peaking point of view. They regard the Moscow communists as being reactionary revisionists. They were being subpoenaed by the grand jury, which was investigating the Harlem riots of last summer. And particularly, they were being asked questions that had to do with Mr. Epton, who was the Harlem organizer of the Progressive Labor Movement. Refusing to answer

these questions, the first one of the membership was thrown in jail for 30 days and fined $250. At this point, the Progressive Labor Club asked me to intercede with the district attorney, and to get the processes of the grand jury stopped. Now, the whole cornerstone of a due process, an American law starts with the grand jury. Any kind of tampering with or interference with the processes of the grand jury is a fundamental attack upon the whole concept of due process. But there's a far cry. There's a great difference between tampering in the usual legal or illegal sense of the word, and attempt to appear, shall I say, as a friend of the court or a friend of the defendant, in which you are not by threat or in any other way, stopping an action. You are offering whatever intercession you may. Well, evidently, you've never been called by a grand jury.

OK. Grand jury, appearance in New York's date at any rate, as far as I know throughout the country, is one in which the individual appears before the grand jury without counsel. He may, if he wishes, have his counsel waiting outside, and at any moment, he can go out and ask whether he should respond to a particular question, but he appears before the grand jury without counsel. There is no way to intercede or intervene with a grand jury without appearing to conduct and in fact conducting a star chamber proceeding of behind the scenes attempting to influence the point of view of those who are making a preliminary inquiry into what later becomes a court case. All right. If that's the case, I certainly understand that, but before when I talked about being a good parent, I wasn't talking about jury tampering. I was talking about participating to the extent that a parent can, you know, providing legal counsel, not in attempting to stop or stop

the processes of the law, but attempting to participate in the process on the side of the students so that he at least receives the best possible kind of counsel. Well, in this instance, such an intersection was not necessary. The students had counsel wherever they wanted it. But the particular question addressed to me then was whether I would not intercede with the district attorney and attempt to influence the process of the inquiry. And my answer was that this was a new idea as far as the college was concerned. The students were asking the college to extend its guardianship relationship to off-campus involvements and activities. Up to the present time, the faculty in charge of these matters had assumed that faculty jurisdiction stopped at the edge of the campus. If the students wished me to take it to the faculty for new insights and new study, I would be glad to do so. Well, the next day, and the students are not by any means to be discarded

in terms of their intellectual insights and their abilities to understand. They got that point. They got the point. In the next day, there was a flyer out. Who needs Gallagher for a guardian? And this, I think, is of the essence of the matter. They were insisting that off-campus, they be treated as adults. And we were insisting that off-campus, we would so treat them. Now you're saying, why don't we do it on-campus? And the answer is, we do. Right down the line, and whenever a student assumes a responsible position and appears as an adult, he is so treated with respect as an adult. You're a hedging. No, I'm not. I'm saying when he's immature and his consideration is judgment, is immature, his actions are immature, or even childish, then once again the college has to stand by and help pick up the pieces. Dr. Gallagher, this is what a parent does.

You know, I began teaching back in 1946 when most of my students were returned veterans. Most of them older than I was. And I rather find it kind of hard to think that these men would have, could have, should have been subjected to the same point of view that you're expressing. Now, what? No, you're right there. And I'll give you a story that goes along with it. Lewis The Damage came to this country some years ago, and he went to one of our better universities at Upper New York State. And as a mature man of somewhere in his late 20s, he resented the fact that he was going to be asked to take freshman Jim. So he went to the dean, and the dean put his fingers together and looked on his nose in the way the deans do and said, well, this was a matter for the president. So he went to see the president. And the president put his fingers together, and they looked on his nose in the way president's doing. He said, well, this is a matter for the dean. Or upon a damage hit the ceiling. He said, that's the way it is in this country. You go to the

dictionary and you look up donkey and he says, see jackass, you look up jackass, he says, see donkey. Well, now, your returning veterans were in precisely this position. They were mature adults and had so to be treated on the campus. And the presence of that wave of returning veterans after the war has had a profound effect upon campus to clear across the nation. But all right, now let's take the present undergraduate. Do you put an age limit? If he's under 21, he comes. No, chronological age has very little to do with it. Adolescence has been defined as something that starts about age 12 and sometimes ends. Now, it can end long before one is out of his teens or it can pursue him to the grave is adolescence. Maturity is a quality of mind and of temper. It is not necessarily a function of chronological growth. All right, let me just for a moment go back to the off the campus

activities and then come to these on campus activities again. The student, this minor who is on your campus off the campus, I gather you're saying the two sides of the coin. You don't protect him in terms of his scrapes with the law or with society beyond the the limits of convent avenue or where the campus. You don't control it. All right, you don't control it. You're not concerned. No, that's not a fair word. You're very much concerned. All right, it's not a fair word. You don't become involved with disciplinary action in terms of what the student does off the campus. Is that correct? That's correct. All right, but you are concerned. And how do you express this concern? It's very difficult to express concern to an individual who does not wish you to be concerned about him or for him. But here again is the ambivalence of the person who is in the process of maturing as shown in the instance I cited a moment ago. As long as there is no trouble, then the attitude is leave me alone. But when one gets into trouble, then they come and

and say, please help me. And though this ambivalence has to be dealt with in a part of the process of growing up and becoming mature. The student who commits awesome rape murder off the campus doesn't he present a kind of threat to the university, to the college community himself, even though his activities take place off the campus? Well, luckily we've not had such at the city college. As far as I can recall, I don't recall any recent cases of murder or rape or arson. I raise my eyebrows as this is ready. So fortunately the audience can't. I don't recall any recent cases. But serious offences off the campus. When you give your degree to a student at the end of four years, are you saying merely you have achieved a certain grade in a certain number of courses carrying a certain number of academic points? Our concern is not with you as a mature individual, as a citizen. We give you this degree. We don't really care what you hit. No, care again. We are not going to discipline you. We are not

going to deny you that degree for what you have done off the campus. Doesn't the degree carry greater meaning than that one has achieved a certain amount of academic life? And this is symbolized by the fact that each June night when we gather under the stars in the Lewis and Stadium, and every senior stands and takes the Ephibic oath, which was written by the late President John Finley, modeled after the oath taken by the youths of Athens at the time of becoming mature men and assuming the responsibilities of citizens. Is this catharsis or what? No, this is a symbol of the fact that the student is now entering into the life beyond the college and that the college shares with him this solemn act of becoming a full citizen. And he assumes the responsibilities of that oath. That he has not fully assumed responsibilities before this date. Doesn't prevent you from giving him the degree, I gather.

On the contrary, I think probably what I'd better do here is to try to illustrate with a single incident the continuing effort on the part of the college. There is, as you know, at the city college and at many other places, a tremendous concern over keeping the free tuition status of the institution. This concern following the recent veto of Governor Rockefeller of a bill that was passed in the state legislature that would have restored the mandatory character of our free tuition. The students at the college became very much concerned and some of them thought that what ought to be done was to have a boycott of all classes. Well, it was pointed out to the student leadership that this was cutting off your nose despite your face, that to boycott one's classes had no relationship to the principle of free tuition. And in the student council itself, the debate was vigorous, prolonged, and sharp. And by a narrow margin, it would decided not to have

the boycott of classes. But instead, to have a rally of the entire college, students, faculty, and administration. They let you attend? They did not only let me but invited me and so on a given day, the deans and the president of the college and the president of the student council led the march and 6,000 people gathered at one end of the campus and march six blocks to the other end and held a great rally. Now, we did this together and it was addressed to one single common issue on which we were united, namely the maintaining of free tuition and no one could miss the point. Now, the change in the student mind from the first idea, let's pick it our classes, let's boycott our classes and have a picket line. The change from that to an intelligent and massive, impressive movement on the part of the whole college was I think a step toward mature action and

mature responsibility. Which could take place only when there is consensus and we can so easily talk about matters on which there is consensus. But one indeed a group on the campus is concerned that let's say that communist China is outshining communist Russia, the illustration given before, has a political point of view. Then we don't find that kind of consensus and we're not going to have the joint student, faculty, administration, march or demonstration. Now, but you get another kind of thing. Now, this program is being taped on a given morning so that what I'll say at the moment will not necessarily be historically in context, but tonight at the college there will be held a so-called sit-in. I mean teaching, this is a teaching that starts at 10 o'clock and goes on. I don't know how long it will last. I have seen the provisional roster of speakers. The program is sparked by one of the more progressive clubs, the WEB DeBoys Club, which in general defines its attitudes as

similar to those of the Progressive Labor Club I spoke of earlier. On the other hand, it is also being joined in terms of sponsorship by a wide variety of student clubs and organizations. And the speakers will include every, speakers representing positions from the far right to the far left. Now, you say there is no consensus on the issue. The issue under discussion will be the war in Vietnam. Certainly, there is no consensus. But there is, on the other hand, a clear-cut effort to expose widely differing points of view in a single forum. This, I believe, is mature. Which, in a sense, takes us back to the words that you were using before. And I, you know, this speech you gave a couple of months ago before the City College chapter of the AAUP, the American Association of University Professors, when you talked about eristic and heuristic approaches to the controversial issues in our life, I presume that you feel that the traditional academic

university approach is eristic, in which one has, shall I call it, an open mind? It ought to be, it ought to be, but to all too frequently is not. On the campus? Take, for example, the man who has written a book and become an authority in one particular aspect of science or of sociology or something else. He now has a vested interest in the point of view he has expressed. And from there on in becomes the defender of that point of view. It sounds as though you're talking about human nature. Yes. Then how do you come to call for this heuristic approach, which is indeed the use of the open mind technique? Because this is the process of becoming an educated person to be able to move from the eristic to the heuristic is of the essence of education. And it's a seesaw battle. But what I'm saying is that a teacher gets a vested interest in the point of view and becomes eristic about it. He now is out to win his arguments not to defend the truth.

You know, I love this sentence at the end of that speech. It is clear that no demagogue wears a halo merely because he is not yet graduated or because he is. And I suspect that that must have raised the hackles on a number of people. Well, it did raise the hackles in the audience when the first part of it was said. And then a sigh, a relief, accompanied by a different reaction from those who now suddenly found themselves included as well. Well, a human nature is widely distributed amongst mankind. And the whole process, therefore, of education is one of continually trying to move from the eristic to the heuristic, from the attitude in which one knows the truth and defensive against all commerce to the attitude where one is led to discover the truth for himself. Well, you know, you, this, this follows, of course, your, your discussion within the context of, of this particular speech of the Berkeley situation. And you quoted something that

professors Lipsit and Seabury had said that the indifference to legality shown by Sirius and dedicated students. Threatens now, these weren't irresponsible students, but Sirius by Sirius and dedicated students threatens the foundations of democratic order. And I wonder going back again to a discussion of what one does when the community itself does violence to what we think our good or great society should stand for, stand for. What it is that we do when you come across this matter of Sirius and dedicated students threatening the foundations of democracy, of democratic order, being indifferent, seemingly indifferent to legality. One of the charges was made, of course, in Berkeley that pressure was being put on the university because the campus itself was being used as the starting point for activities that were indeed illegal, though perhaps we might agree that they were moral. What do we do? What do you do on the, on the campus at City College?

Nick, what you're not doing is posing the continuing problem for the educational administrator and teacher and student. There's no easy answer, no quick answer, and it's always an ad hoc answer. And the continuing problem that'll be with us from here on in for a long time to come, and I'm glad because to have this kind of problem posed is to say that you have a chance now to conduct an educational institution. The student is learning, the faculty member is learning, the administrator is learning, and only as all of them assume the learning posture, only then do you have real education. Well it's so interesting that you say ad hoc solutions. I gather you feel that it is the ad hoc approach that brings into play men's minds, that really challenges them, to see the wisdom or the lack of wisdom in one point of view at a particular time and another point of view at another time. But what about the student who needs

some lines set down and I don't mean lines of discipline. I mean guidelines for what he can or cannot do. How does he learn them? He doesn't learn them by listening to a lecture about them. He learns them by participating in a process in which the lines themselves are defined and he is a participant in the defining of them. Then he has learned something. May the campus at City College be used as the rallying ground, the meeting point for those who will go out and challenge your law which they maintain denies the essential fabric of American life? Not only May but it has been. Even though such action is illegal. They must then know that it is illegal. Our effort is so to tell them in any case that we have a chance to intercede and when a student or a professor or administrator takes a point of view that leads him to an action which is illegal, he must then know that he was running a foul of the law. We've been over this point a little earlier.

Yes, but now the question is, comes up that out in Berkeley there were those who said, if you adopt this point of view, then you are saying that just about anything, not just about, that anything goes on the campus and the student who is inciting a group of other students to a Ku Klux Klan action is also immune from the restrictions of the university. You agree with that? No, you're not saying that anything goes on campus, first of all. And secondly, you're not saying that anything goes from the campus off campus. Where do you stop? You don't stop. Intelligent people stop. And when intelligent people who disagree with you don't stop, what do you do? Well, if, for example, the discussion on campus does not really do any broken furniture or any arms and legs flying around to lose their straw hats caved in. In other words, if it's conducted in a semi-decent fashion without violence and without profanity and undue

offense to public taste, the discussion proceeds. It's a discussion. And it's the old statement of the right to cry of, cry of fire and crowded theater when the time comes that that happens, then you have to have a means of containing the results of the erroneous discussion. But if the discussion is conducted on a deckerous basis, if indeed there is no violence done on the campus and there is no violation of the principles of good sense, etc. But what is being organized is an activity that is considered illegal off the campus. This again is not considered a matter for the administration of the faculty to be involved. Well, it needs to be carried out so that it does not interfere with the classes, the normal processes of education. And then it's precisely like a thing that I saw in a high park corner in London. A man on the

pitch was advocating the assassination of the king. This is before the present queen. And I was standing next to a policeman and I remarked to the policeman, aren't you going to do anything? And he said he isn't hurting anybody. But if the man, I dare say, if the man had been armed and it had 40 of his associates armed, and they'd been marching on Buckingham Palace to assassinate the king, that they probably would have been arrested. All right, I think that this point has been clearly illumined. Let me ask you another point that I gather has a great deal of meaning today. And that's the question of the feelings of the students themselves in relationship to their place in the university. And I don't mean here in terms of discipline, but so much was heard in Berkeley about identity, identification. What's the meaning of this word today? Who knows? It's the sense of being wanted and known. At the same time, the desire to be left alone and these two curiously come together.

Very often you will find that the large institution attracts to it the student who wants to be lost in the crowd and who then wants to complain that he is lost in the crowd. One of the cheap aphorisms at the moment is that we ought to enlarge and expand all of the small colleges so that everybody could have the benefit of a small college experience. But this sense of identification or need for self-identification is not a new thing. It's as old as man himself, the effort to know oneself. But the new environment is such that the effort to know oneself may be made possible, but the effort to be known. You use that phrase before to be known. And it is a handsome phrase, if I may say, because this is what seems to be totally impossible in the new university. Not totally impossible at all, but very difficult. I have in my career been present of a college

with 320 students and now I had one with 33,000 students a hundred times as large. The problems of self-identification are the same in both instances. They're more difficult in the larger institution. And here we work continually to devise the many small groups in which one does get known and try to have these groups so far as we can involve not only students but members of the faculty as well. We do not covet the day and hope it will never come, in which a student arriving at graduation says more and fully that there is nobody in the faculty who knows him well enough to write a letter to graduate school for him. Indeed, we have many efforts in all of the departments on the part of dedicated faculty members working at this particular issue to make sure that the thing of this kind does not happen.

Then in addition, the many processes of guidance and counseling that are available and are extensively used. In a continuing effort to give to the student a chance to find himself and to find others who know him, you know, out of the University of Chicago recently, they conducted an extensive experiment into the learning processes of the small child. This has not applied the same way to the college student, but a certain degree. And they've came to the conclusion that the small child learns best under the conditions which they described as the Yiddish Imamah. The loving mother who knows what the child is, where he is, and mothers him all the time. Now, to a certain extent, this is one of the earnest desires of the maturing student at the same time, and the very same breath will insist that he wants to be left alone. And this is part of the ambivalence of the problem, and part of its complexity, its difficulty, and its excitement. And of course, it is so much like the normal child

parent relationship. Yes. You want the warmth and you want the independence. But quite seriously, I do think I understand what it is you're saying and what your objectives are at the city college. But on a smaller campus at Rutgers and at other campuses where I've been, I have had students who have come in and said just exactly what you never want a student to say that I've been here four years and I have never come to know. And I couldn't really within the context of classes that have at a minimum, a hundred or two hundred students. I've never come to know a faculty member who could write to a graduate school for me. And I've had students say this to me. Now, this isn't the distant future. And indeed, it is the claim of the charge that was made by students at Berkeley. I remember when I taught at Berkeley as a teaching assistant, and we had in room 2000 LSB, the life science building, we used to call it 2000 livestock building because we could get something like 1,500 students in there. But hasn't the day come when many students at the public institutions

in particular, the large universities, can say must say, I don't know a faculty person who knows me and can legitimately recommend me? Well, one hopes that this day will not come at very many institutions. There need to be, in some instances, the large lecture sections, although I'm not sure that 1,500 is the proper size, you might just as well use close circuit television as many institutions do for that purpose. But in addition, if you do this kind of thing in its proper sphere, it then becomes possible and indeed obligatory to have very many small sections as well, in which the intimate give and take is part of the process. Yes, but out in Berkeley again, the small sections were conducted by graduate students teaching assistants who had just come out of college and who didn't have, not because of a lack of native intelligence, but because of a lack of years of maturity themselves, the capacity to give to these young people what it is they

were seeking to sit on the lap of, as you say, the Yiddish Imamah. Yes, this is one reason why you have to have the continuing policy of using and indeed insisting on using your distinguished and good professors, your big men, in the introductory courses and in the small sections of the undergraduate life. But, well, I mean, forgive me. These are nice ideas. Are they realistic when matched up against the question of burgeoning population, against the 5 million kids in college this year? Of course they are. The administration has to insist that teaching is a legitimate basis for assessment in terms of promotion just as much as publication is. Just as much or more so. You have to insist that both are legitimate things to be weighed. And then it isn't publish or perish. It ought never to be publish or perish. If a man is being assigned and being hired and assigned and promoted because of his research qualities, then he'd better publish. If he's being hired and promoted and assigned because

of his excellence as a teacher, he'd better teach. And you need both your teaching scholar and your research scholar. Then you need to assess each in his own terms. I gathered Berkeley one of the problems was that, again, people very much involved in research had given very little time to teaching. Is this a trend? It's reported to be a danger all over the country. And therefore it takes a very alert faculty and a very alert administration to make sure that this danger is offset by the careful policy of hiring and promoting and cultivating good teachers. You think that students should themselves be involved in evaluating the faculty in terms of who is a good teacher? Under certain conditions, it might be a good thing. If the faculty wanted it, it would be good, yes. If the faculty doesn't want it, it probably is not very effective. It's probably a good thing that we just have a minute left when we come to a touchy and issue. Do you see this happening? Do you see the faculty giving the students this participation? In some institutions, in other's not. It depends largely on the atmosphere of the college. As you've said, the head of a college is a

presiding officer of the faculty. Would you as a faculty person suggest that this would be a good thing? No, I would suggest that the faculty ought to decide whether or not they want it. If, as a member of the faculty, would you vote for letting students participate? I never vote. Oh, Dr. Gallagher, you are beating around the bush. No, I'm stating a particular point of view, a conscious attitude. As administrator of the college, it's my job not to tell the college what to do, but to help it arrive at its own insights. When you become president of Meredith and go back as just a member of the faculty, I'm going to put that question to you, but we have 40 or 50 years to go, but no more time now. Thank you very much for joining me today, Dr. Gallagher. Thank you, Mr. Heffner. You

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