Professor of Education & Sociology, Emeritus
Harvard University
Nathan Glazer (b.1924), City College '44; University of Pennsylvania, Columbia University (Ph. D. in sociology), professor emeritus, Graduate School of Education, Harvard University, co-editor The Public Interest. a leading authority on issues of race, immigration, urban development and social policy in the United states. Books include We are all Multiculturalists Now, Beyond The Melting Pot and The Lonely Crowd (with David Riesman).
Former assistant editor Commentary magazine; past professor of sociology at the University of California at Berkeley. He has held Guggenheim Fellowships and Fulbright grants, been granted honorary degrees by a number of colleges and universities, and has served on Presidential task forces on education and urban policy and the National Academy of Science¡¦s committees on urban policy and minority issues. He is a contributing editor of The New Republic. A highly influential sociologist and educator, Glazer defers specific political labels.
QUOTE: "I feel when I read something [by the others] I¡¦m reading something that counts more than when I read other things¡K in part because I know them, I know where they¡¦re coming from, I know where they¡¦re going to , I respect them ¡V all those things are part of it. But ¡K I suppose the answer is ¡V the assumption is ¡V the involvement is a passionate one."
Born in New York City, Glazer was educated in the public schools of the city, graduated from The City College of New York, and received a Master of Arts in linguisitcs at the University of Pennsylvania. He studied sociology at Columbia University, where he received the Ph.D. degree. He served as editor of the magazine "Commentary" and editor at Doubleday Anchor Books and Random House in the 1940's and 1950's. Glazer taught at Bennington and Smith Colleges and became a professor of sociology at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1963. He has been at Harvard both in the Graduate School of Education and the Department of Sociology since 1969. For the past 25 years, he has also been co-editor of the quarterly of public policy, "The Public Interest".
Some of the multitude of articles and books Prof. Glazer has written include:
The Lonely Crowd (1950); Faces in the Crowd (1952); American Judaism (1957); The Social Basis of American Communism (1961); Beyond the Melting Pot, with Daniel P. Moynihan, (1963); Remembering the Answers: Essays on the American Student Revolt (1970); Affirmative Discrimination (1975); Ethnic Dilemmas (1983); The Limits of Social Policy (1987); We Are All Multiculturalists Now (1997).He has been the editor or the co-editor of many other books, among them Studies in Housing and Minority Groups (1960); Ethnicity: Theory and Experience (1975); Clamor at the Gates: The New American Immigration (1985); The Public Face of Architecture (1987); Conflicting Images: India and the United States (1990).
Speech of Nathan Glazer, Sociology
at UC Berkeley
January 9, 1965There have been at least three kinds of issues in the Free Speech Controversy:
First have been the issues as to the proper limits of political activity or the preparation of political activity on a university campus.
Second have been the issues as to the constitution of the university: the questions as to how much control, over what kinds of activities, should be vested in the Regents, the President, the Chancellor, the faculty, the students.
Third have been the issues as to what measures, what kinds of activities, what kinds of pressures, should be used in the dispute over the issues that fall into the first two categories.
I have views on all three sets of issues. But I have felt from the outset, and increasingly as the controversy went on, that the heart of the controversey was really over the question of means, of tactics; and not over the question of ends. I will confess I am less certain over my views on the first two sets of issues¡Xthe limits of political activity on a campus and the constitution of a university¡Xthan I am over the third set of issues¡Xthe legitimacy of the means by which one presses one's views.
My views on this are very simple. In a functioning democracy no one has the right to resort to force to press an argument. On a university campus, on which free speech prevails, no one has the right to resort to force either. I do not think a political democracy and a university are the same thing. I think there are matters in a university which cannot be determined by majority vote of its elements, for the simple reasons that inevitably and necessarily a university involves two classes, at least, with very different rights and privileges. By its very nature, one must assume that in a university one of these classes has greater rights and privileges and authorities than the other.
This is not to say a university is a dictatorship or must be a dictatorship. But it is to say that the mechanisms whereby change comes about cannot be the mechanisms whereby change comes about in a political democracy. There are no elections in which all the elements participate under the rule: one man one vote. Nor do I think universities in general would be improved if they operated under such a system.
Now to specifics:
The leaders of the FSM argued from the beginning that there was only one way in which they could make their voice heard: To introduce such disruption in the workings of the university that it would have no choice, if it wished to continue its work, but to accept their views.
One of their greatest successes was to convince both thousands of students and vast numbers of liberals in the community that we had on the campus of the University of California one of those extreme situations which justifies abandoning the dependence on argument and due process. The only alternative, according to this line, was to resort to the creation of circumstances in which argument and discussion becomes meaningless. In such circumstances, the opposition is left with the alternatives of either giving in or itself resorting to force. (This is, of course, the chief argument against the resort to force in the first place, and the reasons why the grounds that justify such a resort have to be examined very carefully).
I do not think this "final resort" argument was valid in this case. I am relatively new on this campus. Yet I am aware that over a period of ten or fifteen years there has been a steady broadening of the kinds of political activities that are legitimate on this campus. I have known some of the former students involved in broadening these activities. They were on the whole leftists. If they found it unnecessary to resort to the tactics of force and disruption, I saw no reason why today's student radicals should find it necessary. Was the regime of President Sproul and Chancellor Kerr I asked myself¡Xand I would ask you to ask yourselves¡Xso much more liberal than that of President Kerr and Chancellor Strong that new tactics of disruption were required to continue the expansion of the limits of political action on the campus? I did not think so.
A second point convinced me of the illegitimacy of the resort to these tactics. This was the fact that they were used again and again prematurely and when alternatives existed.
Let me give you a number of examples from the very beginning. Students had set up tables and collected money in defiance of the new regulations. This to my mind was a reasonable way of continuing the discussion. I did not disapprove of this, and I believe this is not inconsistent with my views as to the means that may be used in conducting a dispute in a university. The university is not a democracy, as I have said. Ingenuity is required in conducting a discussion. To collect money means to be cited. To be cited means to have an argument with the deans, with the faculty committee on student conduct, with the Chancellor and the President and the Regents. To conduct a discussion means to bring forth arguments of such power that in the rational setting of a university some concession is necessary to good arguments. Such concessions had occurred before. They would occur again. But what happened when the students were cited? I read from the report from Chancellor Strong to the faculty¡XI assume the facts are correct:
"At 3 o'clock that afternoon some 300 to 400 students moved into the second floor of Sproul Hall and Mario Savio announced that all of them acknowledged violating University regulations in the same manner as those students who had been instructed to make appointments with the Dean of Students, and they all wanted similar appointments. The Dean of Men declared that he was then concerned only with observed violations, and if students wanted appointments they could leave their names and he would determine if and when such appointments could be made. He...requested that the crowd disperse, since he had scheduled a meeting of the leaders of the student organizations and their advisers to discuss the problem at 4 o'clock. Savio responded that the group would not leave unless they were guaranteed that the same disciplinary action would be meted to all there. Unable to make such guarantees, the Dean of Men again asked the group to leave, and later announced that since, in the opinion of the administration and some of the advisers of the student groups who had come to attend the 4:00 p.m. meeting, the environment was not conducive to reasonable discussion, the meeting was cancelled. He again urged (the students who had been cited) to enter the office to discuss offences noted earlier. The indicated students did not appear for interviews, and the group remained in Sproul Hall until about 2:40 Thursday morning."
Were Savio's actions at that time calculated to conduct a reasonable discussion, or to conclude it with a show of force?
I will give a second example from the action taken after the Regents' statement of November 20th, which asserted that the campus could not be used for illegal action. I think this was a very difficult position to argue against, but leaving this aside, the FSM felt it was a point of critical substance and importance. I have never understood why at that time they did not take opportunity of what to me was a great victory for their movement, a great expansion of the bounds of political activity on campus, and to begin to advocate and mount and organize (all of which was permitted) anything which they wished to advocate and mount and organize. If then the university had stepped in and said, but this is illegal action, then the students would have had a case. If it had been an illegal action that had occurred inadvertently, or an illegal action as defined by the state of Mississippi, or an illegal action which had the support or sympathy of wide sections of the community, why, then they would have had a good case. If it was an action that aroused the antagonism and repugnance of large sections of the community, they would admittedly have had a bad case. But instead of continuing the discussion, continuing it by undertaking the actions they felt necessary or desirable, they again occupied Sproul Hall, this time unsuccessfully and with little support.
Finally, there was the major occupation of Sproul Hall of December. The cause of this new action of disruption was the fact that charges were brought against four students. These students were to appear before the Faculty Committee on Student Conduct. Now I believed this action of the administration was both unwise and unjust. Unwise, obviously, as events showed. Unjust because I believed the pact of October 2, which I and a number of other faculty members had drafted and urged on the Chancellor and the President, was in effect wiping the slate clean of all the actions related to the surrounding of the police car. The question now was: What does one do about it? What after all is happening? One is to be brought up on charges before a faculty committee, of, one assumes, reasonable men to whom the facts will speak as they do to most reasonable men. I also know this is not a star chamber proceeding, because once earlier I had had an experience with such a hearing. The parties can be represented by lawyers. It was inconceivable to me that these four students could not have done an excellent job of demolishing the justice of the proceedings. They were not interested in demolishing the justice of the proceedings through arguments or hearings. Instead, they called upon Joan Baez to help them lead the students to the occupation of Sproul Hall again.
Thus I am unconvinced by the FSM argument that this was the only way to be heard¡Xthe students had made themselves heard before without these tactics; they could make themselves heard again. The night of October 4th and early morning of October 5th, you may know, a substantial body of professors met in Barrows Hall to ward off an impending crisis. I won't go into the details of this crisis, but in the course of that meeting we met with a lawyer who had been active as a student some years before in getting a certain rule modified. He was asked by the Dean of the Law School: "How did you manage to get through such changes without going in for sit-ins and the like?" It was a good question then. It is still a good question.
A third development convinced me of the illegitimacy of these "last resort" tactics: the rapid shift in the movement from one representing all political groups to one representing the far left, and the revolutionary left, alone. Think of the power and force of a movement that included Young Democrats, Young Republicans, Conservatives! The resort to tactics of disruption made it impossible for those who opposed them on principled grounds to continue. The tactics then justified themselves. How can a leadership group composed in large part of revolutionary socialists make a good argument to public opinion, legislators, and the like? The only way is by tactics attuned to their small numbers¡Xnamely, the tactics of disruption. But then the conditions that would have made the tactics of reason possible were rejected by the FSM leaders themselves, by driving away the support they would have received from moderate and conservative elements in fighting for the restoration and expansion of political rights.
I am impressed too by the way in which the regular student organization was pushed aside. This too took the same position in favor of expanded rights of political activity that the moderate and right wing groups had. This too was a resource in the struggle. It was a resource the leaders of FSM did not wish to use. They were more enamored of their tactics than they were of the end¡Xexpanded rights to political activity on campus.
Finally, there was another ally that was not mobilized. Again and again in those early days, I was asked by students: where is the faculty? Many faculty members were concerned with the question. The faculty would have acted. The students disdained the hard work of discussing and arguing with the faculty. They presented it with faits accomplis that threatened the work of the university. Time is needed to organize the sentiment and actions of a thousand men. I have no doubt that if this sentiment and action would have been organized, the administration action would have changed.
Now we are told however that, after all, the faculty was mobilized, it did support the FSM position. Were not the FSM tactics the most efficient and expeditious way of organizing and mobilizing it? Could anything have worked better than confronting it with a strike of teaching assistants and the arrest of 800 students? How can one argue with success? And were not these tactics successful?
A university campus is the last place in the world I would think where one brings up the argument of success, or the crude argument that means have been justified by their effectiveness. Lenin too was successful and so was Stalin, and even Hitler, for a while, and this as you all know does not settle the argument.
The success of these methods is to my mind one of the most depressing things that has come out of the entire dispute. Any organized society is a very fragile thing. It is amazing that it works at all. But it works on the basis of the acceptance of rules and norms of behavior, which determine the kind of society it can be. Success in a way is an easy thing. Think how successful Oswald was. Think how easy it would be to kill most of the leaders of the world's states. Or to move to a smaller sphere, the leaders of the FSM are perfectly aware how easy it would be to disrupt the university. I need not add to the armory of disruption that has been discussed publicly and privately. You all know that one proposal has been to sabotage the registration procedure for the Spring Semester.
And for what ends have we seen this childish and dangerous discussion of ways of messing up the registration procedure? For the ends of achieving free speech? I have not been convinced. For the end of the building of a movement and committing people to it by action? That, certainly. For the end of inducing in as great a number of people as possible the conviction that society and all its institutions, and in particular this university, are rotten? Certainly that. And if people are convinced that an institution is rotten then they become unrestrained in their actions, indifferent to the implications of what they do and even to the larger truth that a society is kept together by agreement on the rules and on the mechanisms by which it runs.
I have been told: perhaps these other means of changing the rules¡Xworking with the right and the center, with the student organization, with the faculty, developing support in the community and legislature, etc.¡Xmaybe all this would have worked, but look at how much time it would have taken. This again strikes me as a peculiar argument to raise on a university campus. The issue of time is critical in warfare, it is critical in political action. But a university one would think is the one place in the world in which you can take a good deal of time to settle matters. No one after all was up for hanging.
Let me now say something briefly about the relationship between this university and political action. The university does not exist to make students effective in political combat. If they learn something about it, well and good. Nor is its prime function, as so many of the student political groups and leaders seem to think, to offer them opportunities for the most effective conduct of their work. For many of them political activity has become full-time work, and their major emphasis is the recruitment of students to play a part in the community. The university, to my mind, should take the position that this purpose is relatively low in the order of priorities. It is obvious that the conduct of the classes comes before it. The conduct of research comes before it. The preservation of conditions that permit classes and research to continue comes before it. This order was reversed by the FSM. It took the position that let everything stop, but its position as to the proper role of political activities in the university must prevail.
The politicization of institutions that should not be political is to my mind a very dangerous thing¡Xit is indeed, the mark of totalitarianism. A free society respects the rights of people to erect special institutions, religious, cultural, academic, or what one will. It respects the rights of those institutions to determine the conditions that are best suited for the realization of their aims. Neither the right of the university to determine its nature or to determine the conditions that foster it were respected by the FSM. It had decided what was important. And it had decided to impose its views as to what was important on the university, and accept no limit as to the means it would use to compel the university to accept its views. Such an approach to dispute can destroy a university. It has been used in one dispute. There is no indication in the philosophy of the FSM that it will not be used in a second. Will it be used to determine which faculty members shall be hired, and which shall be let go? Will it be used to determine what is taught in courses? Will it be used to realize the legitimate student interest in the academic conduct of the university. If it is, then the victory in this specific matter of political action on campus will mean very little. The university as we know it and as I think most of us would want it to be will then be gone.
