HumanityAn Arena of Critique and CommitmentNo. 25 December, 1964 Published by Humanity, for the National Association of College and University Chaplains and the Association of Campus and University Ministers, Methodist Church, in cooperation with the Association for Coordination of University Religious Affairs and the Student Secretaries Section, Association of Secretaries, YMCA. Berkeley, California |
Staff
- Editorial Committee: Keith Bridson, James Carey, Richard Gelwick, Joseph Gumbiner, Thomas Lindeman, George Morgan.
- Corresponding Editors: Franklin Littell, Robert Parsonage, Robert V. Smith.
- Editor: Charles McCoy
- Managing Editor: Parker Palmer
- Business Manager: Leslie Larsen
Civil Rights and Higher Education
From Fact to Symbol
For wide sectors of the present generation, civil rights has become far more than another cause worthy of passing support. Civil rights offers the possibility of discovering meaning in a confusing world, for taking action of commitment through which to arrive at a sense of selfhood in a world where identity is strangely elusive. It is a challenging frontier in a society where space beyond the fences is disappearing or inaccessible. For those struggling with themselves and their world in an effort to find significant goals, civil rights offers an important and available frontier.
As such, the civil rights struggle emerges as more than "a fact of our time." As mere fact, it might be of interest to politicians and historians. As center of significance, as symbol of what is real and challenging, civil rights commands attention as the major identity crisis of the decade.
From Campus to Mississippi
This identity crisis seems to be particularly critical for academic institutions and their inhabitants. Though civil rights activity has involved virtually all parts of society, students and professors have played an important if not dominant role in the vigorous actions which have characterized the protest movement since 1960.
Campus ministry has an obligation, if it is truly concerned with the health of higher education, to take the identity crisis seriously, to understand it as fully as possible. Faith always deals fundamentally with the question of self-identity, which is also the question of faith in God. Those of Judaeo-Christian faith, ordained or lay, have got to confront this question with the city of intellect and its citizens.
In this issue of Humanity we give attention first to the troubled scene of the Berkeley campus. Mario Savio, leader of the Free Speech Movement and a junior in philosophy, provides an interpretation of what this upheaval on a major university campus is about. Next, Walter Herbert, director of the ministry among graduate students and faculty, Wesley Foundation, Berkeley, chronicles the events of the past few weeks for those who have been more confused and enlightened by sketchy press reports.
Second, we give attention to the participation of college personnel on the civil rights battlefields of the south and the impact for their life within the academic community. Both Robert R. Parsonage, Chaplain at Springfield College, Springfield, Mass., and R. Richard Roe, United Church Campus Minister at Stanford University, California, address themselves these subjects.
An End to History
Mario Savio
(Mr. Savio is a junior in philosophy and a leader of the Free Speech Movement at the University of California, Berkeley. This article was edited from a tape made by Mr. Savio while he was engaged in a sit-in in Sproul Hall on the University Campus. Police hauled him and 800 other demonstrators off to jail a few hours after the tape was completed.)
Last summer I went to Mississippi to join the struggle there for civil rights. This fall I am engaged in another phase of the same struggle, this time in Berkeley. The two battlefields may seem quite different to some observers, but this is not the case. The same rights are at stake in both places—the right to participate as citizens in democratic society and the right to due process of law. Further, it is a struggle against the same enemy. In Mississippi an autocratic and powerful minority rules, through organized violence, to suppress the vast, virtually powerless, majority. In California, the privileged minority manipulates the University bureaucracy to suppress the students' political expression. That "respectable" bureaucracy masks the financial plutocrats; that impersonal bureaucracy is the efficient enemy in a "Brave New World."
In our free speech fight at the University of California, we have come up against what may emerge as the greatest problem of our nation—depersonalized, unresponsive bureaucracy. We have encountered the organized status quo in Mississippi, but it is the same in Berkeley. Here we find it impossible usually to meet with anyone but secretaries. Beyoud that, we find functionaries who cannot make policy but can only hide behind the rules. We have discovered total lack of response on the part of the policy makers. To grasp a situation which is truly Kafkesque, it is necessary to understand the bureaucratic mentality. And we have learned quite a bit about it this fall, more outside the classroom than in.
As bureaucrat, an administrator believes that nothing new happens. He occupies an a-historical point of view. In September, to get the attention of this bureaucracy which had issued arbitrary edicts suppressing student political expression and refused to discuss its action, we held a sit-in on the campus. We sat around a police car and kept it immobilized for over thirty-two hours. At last, the administrative bureaucracy agreed to negotiate. But instead, on the following Monday, we discovered that a committee had been appointed, in accordance with usual regulations, to resolve the dispute. Our attempt to convince any of the administrators that an event had occurred, that something new had happened, failed. They saw this simply as something to be handled by normal University procedures.
The same is true of all bureaucracies. They begin as tools, means to certain legitimate goals, and they end up feeding their own existence. The conception that bureaucrats have is that history has in fact come to an end. No events can occur now that the Second World War is over which can change American society substantially. We proceed by standard procedures as we are.
The most crucial problems facing the United States today are the problem of automation and the problem of racial injustice. Most people who will be put out of jobs by machines will not accept an end to events, this historical plateau, as the point beyond which no change occurs. Negroes will not accept an end to history here. All of us must refuse to accept history's final judgment that in America there is no place in society for people whose skins are dark. On campus students are not about to accept it as fact that the University has ceased evolving and is in its final state of perfection, that students and faculty are respectively raw material and employees, or that the University is to be autocratically run by unresponsive bureaucrats.
Here is the real contradiction: the bureaucrats hold history as ended. As a result significant parts of the population both on campus and off are dispossessed, and these dispossessed are not about to accept this a-historical point of view. It is out of this that the conflict has occurred with the University bureaucracy and will continue to occur until that bureaucracy becomes responsive or until it is clear the University can not function.
The things we are asking for in our civil rights protests have a deceptively quaint ring. We are asking for the due process of law. We are asking for our actions to be judged by committees of our peers. We are asking that regulations ought to be considered as arrived at legitimately only from the consensus of the governed. These phrases are all pretty old, but they are not being taken seriously in America today, nor are they being taken seriously on the Berkeley campus.
I have just come from a meeting with the Dean of Students. She notified us that she was aware of certain violations of University regulations by certain organizations. University Friends of SNCC, which I represent, was one of these. We tried to draw from her some statement on these great principles, consent of the governed, jury of one's peers, due process. The best she could do was to evade or to present the administration party line. It is very hard to make any contact with the human being who is behind these organizations.
The university is the place where people begin seriously to question the conditions of their existence and raise the issue of whether they can be committed to the society they have been born into. After a long period of apathy during the 50's, students have begun not only to question but, having arrived at answers, to act on those answers. This is part of a growing understanding among many people in America that history has not ended, that a better society is possible, and that it is worth dying for.
This free speech fight points up a fascinating aspect of contemporary campus life. Students are permitted to talk all they want so long as their speech has no consequences.
One conception of the university, suggested by a classical Christian formulation, is that it be in the world but not of the world. The conception of Clark Kerr by contrast is that the university is part and parcel of this particular stage in the history of American society; it stands to serve the need of American industry; it is a factory that turns out a certain product needed by industry or government. Because speech does often have consequences which might alter this perversion of higher education, the university must put itself in a position of censorship. It can permit two kinds of speech, speech which encourages continuation of the status quo, and speech which advocates changes in it so radical as to be irrelevant in the foreseeable future. Someone may advocate radical change in all aspects of American society, and this I am sure he can do with impunity. But if someone advocates sit-ins to bring about changes in discriminatory hiring practices, this can not be permitted because it goes against the status quo of which the university is a part. And that is how the fight began here.
The Administration of the Berkeley campus has admitted that external, extra-legal groups have pressured the university not to permit studetns on campus to organize picket lines, not to permit on campus any speech with consequences. And the bureaucracy went along. Speech with consequences, speech in the area of civil rights, speech which some might regard as illegal, must stop.
Many students here at the university, many people in society, are wandering aimlessly about. Strangers in their own lives, there is no place for them. They are people who have not learned to compromise, who for example have come to the university to learn to question, to grow, to learn—all the standard things that sound like cliches because no one takes them seriously. And they find at one point or other that for them to become part of society, to become lawyers, ministers, business men, people in government, that very often they must compromise those principles which were most dear to them. They must suppress the most creative impulses that they have; this is a prior condition for being part of the system. The university is well structured, well tooled, to turn out people with all the sharp edges worn off, the well-rounded person. The university is well equipped to produce that sort of person, and this means that the best among the people who enter must for four years wander aimlessly much of the time questioning why they are on campus at all, doubting whether there is any point in what they are doing, and looking toward a very bleak existence afterward in a game in which all of the rules have been made up, which one can not really amend.
It is a bleak scene, but it is all a lot of us have to look forward to. Society provides no challenge. American society in the standard conception it has of itself is simply no longer exciting. The most exciting things going on in America today are movements to change America. America is becoming ever more the utopia of sterilized, automated contentment. The "futures" and "careers" for which American students now prepare are for the most part intellectual and moral wastelands. This chrome-plated consumers paradise would have us grow up to be well-behaved children. But an important minority of men and women coming to the front today have shown that they will die rather than be standardized, replaceable and irrelevant.
Editorial: "We Shall Overcome"
Whenever people gather to work for civil rights, they sing. Whether in Montgomery or Washington, Jackson or Berkeley, it is a moving experience to participate in the hushed expectancy and loud exultation which accompanies the folk singing. Whatever part they play, folk songs clearly occupy a central place in the entire protest movement now sweeping the nation. Perhaps it would not be inaccurate to say that folk songs move the movement.
What is the basis of this power? Whence the mystical fervor evoked by "We Shall Overcome" and other songs which have merged over the past decade? Clearly the power is there. After listening to Joan Baez lead students in songs of freedom at a recent demonstration, one person told us without shame that he had gone to a quiet place and wept for half an hour.
Part of it undoubtedly is that music enables people to express emotions and aspirations that otherwise remain within. And the expression in a single song together provides the assurance that all are bound together in a common enterprise by feelings so deep that only song can convey it in the public sphere.
Still another source of its power is the commitment of those who sing. The attention commanded by Joan Baez comes not only from a pleasing combination of voice and words and melody; far more it derives from the listeners' knowledge that she has placed herself in jeopardy on behalf of civil rights. She becomes in her singing the embodiment of bonds which bind these persons into community.
There is still another element more elusive even than those already mentioned. The civil rights movement can only be understood as a new awakening, one which is shaking our country as did the awakenings of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. To see this phenomenon as extra-curricular activity is seriously to underestimate the force and depth of what is going on. Indeed, "the times they are a'changing," and the folk song has its place. It is the hymn of this new awakening. Close ties with the Negro spiritual indicate its relation to similar outpourings of commitment in the past. If hymns made the Wesleyan revival, then it may be the case that folk songs will in the same way give depth and unity to this twentieth-century counterpart. Perhaps the outcome, viewed in retrospect, will be as significant for the cause of social justice and reform.
Perspective: Moving Off Dead Center
During the 1920's, student initiative expressed itself in revolt against the authority images whose spiritual nakedness had been exposed by World War II and the "return to normalcy" under Warren G. Harding. The "left bank" was home, Scott Fitzgerald was high priest, and the flag was a raccoon coat. During the 1930's, student idealism went into the fight against war and fascism, to keep peace in our time by a boycott of Japanese silk, by getting the Western governments to embargo oil shipments to Mussolini and loans to Hitler. Some went into the labor movement or cooperatives and a few into the Negro citizens' first abandonment of the docile acceptance of injustice. But Ernest Hemingway, the new hero, left the bistros of Paris for the battle in Spain against Franco's fascists. After the Second World War, there was a brief flurry of excitement over "G. I. bulge" and zeal with which returned veterans picked up their studies and founded their new families. Then we were in the doldrums.
For years, following the founding of the National Association of College and University Chaplains in 1948, members of the campus ministry bemoaned in their annual meetings the docility and lack of initiative among students. Campus clubs were steadily declining in size and influence. The old Student Volunteer Movement was sensecent. World University Service Support was falling off in some places, vanishing in others. The social patterns of fraternities and sororities, commercialized athletics, a raucus neo-conservatism and the spirit of "business as usual" cast their shadow over campuses shocked and frightened by McCarthyism. Had the students no interest in service rather than self-seeking? Were they really happy pigs satisfied rather than dissatisfied? Was the last, best hope of man on earth to go out not with a bang but a whimper?
A reversal of current was in fact occurring, but beneath the surface. We are just beginning to see its force on the campus and in the body politic. Its finest expression has been in the volunteer work of hundreds of students in registering Negro citizens in totalitarian Mississippi, and in the long months of non-violent demonstrations by students which preceded the March on Washington and the passing of the Civil Rights Act. The heroes of this generation are Medgar Evers, Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman, James Chaney—whose murderers still go unpunished in the jungle. Nor should we forget Rabbi Arthur Lelyveld, longtime leader of the Hillel Foundations—brutally beaten on a friendship trip into the Deep South.
Not for many decades have student volunteers in such number and with such devotion to duty and personal risk responded to the call of highgrade religion and patriotism. And in doing so they have chosen between those who chose duty and those who chose personal profit in the generation which preceded them: their advisors are not like William F. Buckley, the well-financed darling of the Radical Right, but men of courage and dedication and self-abnegation like James Farmer, James Lawson, our late martyred President and Martin Luther King, Jr. They have detected the "phonies" and rejected them. They have chosen far better than any of us expected a few years ago, and their generation will have a far higher place in Church History and in American History than any of the last century—perhaps excepting only the great generation of Dwight L. Moody, Robert E. Speer, Samuel M. Zwemer and John R. Mott, which made missions and ecumenics and the world map realities for the local campus.
By Franklin H. Littell
University in Crisis
T. Walter Herbert, Jr.
On Monday, December 7, the huge Greek Theatre on the Berkeley Campus of the University of California was the scene of an intense and remarkable outdoor drama. The head of the University academic departments, acting outside regular authority, had called an "extraordinary" convocation in an effort to resolve the controversy over political rights which had rocked the campus for eleven weeks and brought academic processes to a virtual halt.
The convocation was attended by an estimated 18,000 faculty and students. Eight hundred of the students had come directly from court where they had been arraigned for their part in the campus sit-in December 2-3.
Dr. Robert Scalapino, chairman of the political science department and spokesman for the department heads, presented a proposal for a compromise settlement of the controversy. The proposal called for law and order, negotiation toward broadening the already-liberalized policies regarding student political rights, and a return to normal academic life. After Scalapino, Dr. Clark Kerr, President of the University, spoke, accepting the proposal and calling for peace on behalf of the University. The convocation was then adjourned, but the drama had not ended.
As Kerr and Scalapino left the platform, Mario Savio, undergraduate philosophy student and leader of the campus Free Speech Movement, approached the rostrum. Several policemen leapt forward and dragged him off stage. After a moment of stunned silence, pandemonium broke out.
"We want Mario," a substantial portion of the crowd chanted. A riot seemed imminent. In a few minutes, Dr. Scalapino returned, sought to calm the crowd, and announced that Mr. Savio would be allowed to make two brief announcements. Savio said that he had asked for permission to speak briefly to the convocation and had been refused. He then announced that a Free Speech rally would be held in front of Sproul Hall, campus administration building. Order returned and the crowd moved out of the theatre, many of them toward Sproul Plaza, next scene of the unfolding drama.
The events behind the happenings in the Greek Theatre go back to September. In a reversal of long-established custom, the Berkeley Administration ordered that the edge of the campus near Sather Gate could no longer be used by political activists for the recruitment of members, the collection of funds, and the advocacy of off-campus political action. This edict met vigorous resistance which touched off the demonstrations of September 30-October 2 reported by Richard Gelwick in a previous issue of Humanity. It also led to the formation of the Free Speech Movement, of which Mario Savio became the able and articulate leader.
Since October 2 the sequence of events in Berkeley has been intricate and hard to follow, even for those close to the events. The following chronicle may help to clarify the situation.
On Friday, November 20, the Regents of the University issued a directive modifying the September edict. This new ruling permitted the advocacy on campus of political activity which was legal off-campus but not what was illegal. This ruling was declared unacceptable by the Free Speech Movement, on the ground that it reserved to the University the right to decide what sort of advocacy is permissible. The FSM has declared that only the courts should decide what is legal. Actually, the leaders of the FSM felt the Regents' action did not come to the grips with the serious and complex issues raised and that no genuine hearing had been given to student views.
Regents' action also left to the Chancellor of the Berkeley Campus, Edward Strong, responsibility for issuing specific regulations consistent with the Regents' rulings and for instituting disciplinary action against individuals and group for infractions of University regulations occurring since the initial phases of the student protest. On the Monday following the Regents' meeting, there was a sit-in in Sproul Hall which lasted only until the afternoon closing time.
On Tuesday the Chancellor of the Berkeley Campus discharged the first responsibility given him by the Regents by issuing new regulations regarding political activity on campus, still regarded by many as inadequate. And, during Thanksgiving vacation Mario Savio and Art Goldberg, FSM leaders, received letters from the Chancellor informing them of disciplinary action to be taken against them for their violation of regulations. While the accused were clearly guilty, the issuance of these charges was extremely repugnant to the FSM. The FSM leadership are convinced that the Berkeley Administration had virtually forced them to take direct action by misusing the channels designed to transmit student criticism. These channels, according to the FSM, had been used to stifle the very criticism they should transmit.
On Tuesday, December 1, the FSM issued an "ultimatum" which demanded that charges against student violators of the political regulations be dropped. This ultimatum was ignored, and on Wednesday, with Joan Baez on the scene, a massive rally was held climaxed by Mario Savio's charge that the University was a machine which had no regard for human rights. To stop the machine, a sit-in was initiated in Sproul Hall in which an estimated 1500 people took part. This time the demonstrators did not leave at closing time.
This sit-in had features which must surely be unique. In one area of the building there were classes, in another Charlie Chaplin movies; there was also group singing and a Chanukkah service.
Official response to this sit-in was prompt and determined. Chancellor Strong read to the students a statement that they were in violation of the law and urged them to go home. Some left. Then, under orders from California's Governor "Pat" Brown, police were brought and began to arrest the demonstrators at 3:30 a.m. on December 3. President Clark Kerr, issued a statement condemning the action of the students as "Anarchism."
There were roughly eight hundred persons arrested. The process of arresting and taking them to prison went on through most of the day. The spectacle which this operation produced—police vans hauling away the arrested students, bursts of screaming from within the locked building, reports of police brutality, the very presence of so large a number of police on campus—this scene evoked wide sympathy for the FSM and raised the level of active commitment for the FSM cause. A strike was organized, picket lines were created, and in general a state of tremendous concern on the part of everyone involved emerged. The next day this elevated level of concern and commitment was dramatized by the willingness of labor leaders, religious spokesmen, and several elected officials to speak at an FSM rally.
Faculty concern and involvement escalated. Following the mass arrests an emergency faculty meeting called for amnesty and negotiation. The heads of the academic departments met secretly to try to resolve the crisis and draft compromise proposals. Some two hundred members of the faculty who appear to have the confidence of the FSM also met to draft proposals. These groups worked steadily throughout the weekend of December 4-6.
The first major outcome was the convocation in the Greek Theatre which ended in catastrophe.
At a meeting of the Berkeley Division of the Academic Senate on Tuesday, December 8, propositions were overwhelmingly passed proposing amnesty to that date, no restriction of speech or advocacy on campus, "subject to reasonable regulation" as to time, place, and manner, and that "future disciplinary measures in the area of political activity" be handled by a committee of the Academic Senate.
It would appear no exaggeration to say that the University is in serious crisis. The proposals of the Academic Senate have the backing of the faculty. The Free Speech Movement has indicated approval. If the University Regents will agree to such a settlement, then a solution may be in sight which will permit a return to academic pursuits.
The Classroom and Civil Rights
Robert R. Parsonage
"Those sidewalks led us to people with human concerns, cares and needs for whom voting can become one of the most powerful means toward the realization of their aims."
"I feel it's one way I can contribute a little to the fight against racial injustice."
"I'm sorry I missed your class, but, you know, I think I learned more about myself in one hour tutoring those kids than I do in a whole week around here."
Concern for and involvement in civil rights demonstrations, projects, and organizations by American college students is both a thrilling and noticeable fact of our era. Why students have responded seems apparent enough when one rehearses the tragic history of injustice toward the Negro in our land and the pressing need for men of conscience and commitment to accept a personal responsibility for ending the horrible nightmare. But what it suggests about the nature and purpose of higher education and the student's understanding of his vocation as a student is another problem which is not so easily comprehended or answered.
I. The history of the current protest started with Southern Negro students who began the freedom-rides and sit-ins because they were disgruntled with the slow progress toward desegregation which their leaders were making and because, in their indignation and impatience, they were no longer willing to accept second-class citizenship. Convinced of the justice of their cause and strengthened by their faith, they made protests, here and there, accepting the consequences and violence and humiliation. Negro leaders and organizations were swift to come to their aid, and, in 1960, the Southern Non-violent Co-ordinating Committee was founded as a student committee to co-ordinate growing protests. Student action was not long limited to the South nor to Negroes alone, and by 1961, The Northern Student Movement was formed by predominately white student civil rights organizations in the Northeast. Soon, young men and women in colleges across the nation were involved in sit-ins, freedom-rides, and picketing—not only in the South, but in Northern cities as well. Where early support had largely been from campus religious groups, the student organizations became increasingly secular and added voter registration and tutorial projects to the growing program of action. The names of such student civil rights leaders as Countryman and Forman became as familiar on campuses as those of King and Wilkins, and undergraduates at many colleges gained respect and acclaim as "rights workers."
Why are students so actively involved? Because their struggle with the meaning of the Christian faith has led them to such action. Because their study of history and sociology and political science has introduced them to a human problem which they cannot ignore. Because they are convinced they cannot live in a society which is half slave and half free. Because white students want to respond to the plight of their fellow Negro students. But other motivations are often at least as significant and important as these.
II. Student involvement in civil rights is, in part, a reaction against what a student civil rights leader has called the sterility of the academic world.
American higher education has made noises recently which sound as if it intends to keep up with the fast-changing, rapidly moving world. Education to meet the needs of an expanding population and emerging nations, education for freedom as well as for wisdom, for action and not simply reaction, for creativity as well as for information have all been suggested as new goals. But the mills of the gods and of state legislatures, boards of trustees, and faculties grind slowly. As yet the philosophy and concern for change has had little noticeable effect on most American campuses, and the only ones who seem impatient about it are the students.
Across the land college students have become discontented with the content of education and restive about their life as collegians. Bombarded by political crises within and without, troubled by racial unrest at home and abroad, plagued by threats to personal security and world survival, some students have been shaken out of the sin of apathy. With new anxieties laid bare and questions about personal identity festering under the surface, these students have discovered few classroom answers which seem to meet their needs. Traditional approaches to history are frustrating when so much history is being made all around and students feel they are not allowed to be a part of it. Critical, objective observation becomes a burden to students who feel it keeps them from involvement in the social and political revolutions of our time. For these students the answer, increasingly, to a system they feel they can neither change nor fight, is to seek the identity and the meaning for which they yearn outside of the college altogether, often through involvement in the struggle for human and civil rights.
In a recent article in the New York Times, Miss Rosemary Park, president of Barnard College, is reported as saying that, "undergraduates have, in increasing numbers, brushed aside the campus Establishment." She added: "the current generation does not even honor the old campus authorities by rebelling against them; it just ignores them. Moreover, the students even turn their backs on their own organization—student government and undergraduate publications." She further contended that, "the power of the old college spirit was evaporating, while the students' preoccupation with 'outside' extra-curricular action (rather than campus activities) had grown. Clubs gave way to Freedom Rides or tutoring slum children."
Although Miss Park has described graphically a response of some students to a crisis in higher education, she has not commented adequately on the problem. Higher education is acutely aware of the challenges which face our society and has commented prophetically on the changes which it and the rest of society must make to meet adequately those challenges. Students have listened to convocation speakers' pleas that they come down out of the ivory tower and get involved in the world. Some have taken to heart preachers' exhortations inviting commitment and action. Yet these same students, who have caught the "vision," find little chance to express it and demonstrate it in their lives as students. The philosophy of higher education seems inconsistent with the practices of learning. Faculty preoccupation with status and professionalism is remote from student concerns. The majority of campus student life is trivial and inconsequential when such pressing problems are so real and vital. And the increasingly active response by
An additional frustration is evident. Faculty and administrators are willing to allow, and in some cases to encourage, other institutions and organizations to be the loci of the most vital educational experience for its students. Disinterested in these concerns or not wishing to get "mixed up" in controversial matters, college and universities take a variety of evasive steps to keep civil rights beyond the campus gates.
III. The search for a vocational purpose and a personal identity which students feel they cannot realize in their lives on campus is another cause for student involvement in civil rights. Recently, a student wearied by what he termed "an oppressive campus culture" asked, almost frantically, if there was not a different approach to life, another interpretation of manhood and maturity than that which his college celebrated and held up to him as the ideal. To talk about conformity is not old-fashioned—except if one feels stifled by the demand to conform. In that case open honest, and frequent contact between students, faculty, and administrators is necessary on an informal as well as a formal basis, so that questions students raise about their own identity and purpose can be explored.
Students stand at the mid-point of history, wondering who they are and what life is all about. The attempts to deal with their frustrations in counselling and to channel their energies into on-campus student activities may only add to their anxieties if the one fits them primarily to understand themselves apart from the world and the other equips them for the purpose of living as "politicians" or "junior leaguers" in another world beyond the student world. Such students have no choice but to seek identity and vocation in action and involvement and in personal relationships beyond the campus, often in civil rights activity. While self-realization, and personal fulfillment may proceed normally from commitment to civil rights causes, a gross misuse of those movements results when their central function becomes one of giving college students self-identity and a sense of vocation.
IV. Let there be no mistake. This is not plea to dissuade students from involvement in civil rights. Nor is it an attempt to minimize the heroic actions and demonstrations of self-giving love which students have offered and must continue to offer if an end to racial inequality and injustice is to be achieved. It is, rather, a plea to colleges and universities to be about the business of education and learning in such a relevant, contemporary, and creative way that civil rights will not be a concern apart from higher education and some students' needs for identity and vocation will not only or primarily be accomplished in their off-campus life.
V. Colleges and Universities must decide for themselves how these concerns can be accomplished, but they will undoubtedly center on some of the following needs for change. Colleges must revise curricula to serve the contemporary needs of the world and students. More equal opportunities for education, a greater concern for rooting out prejudice on campus, educational opportunities for culturally deprived potential-students in summer tutorial and cultural enrichment programs, encouragement of student, faculty, and administrative involvement in civil rights causes, and a greater concern for students' development as responsible citizens are areas to which higher education needs to turn its attention. Colleges and universities may also need to be more explicit in their attempts to convince students that many of the disciplines of learning and demands of the classroom have a validation in terms other than action and are necessary to a liberal and educated perspective for effective living.
In student activities and informal college life there are also new challenges. Encouragement of dialogue and criticism among students and faculty on the purpose and nature of education might give student civil rights leaders renewed hope for relating their concerns to campus culture. Recognition that all is not well in the traditional campus student activities might give students the incentive to be more critical of their own programs and strengthen them in their desire to move in new directions.
Educators must realize that the pursuit of truth and an educational philosophy of action may necessarily lead colleges and universities into the life and struggle of the human community along with their students. Higher education will not fulfill its purpose by encouraging more students to take part in civil rights as long as such involvement is unrelated to higher education, but it will fulfill its purpose only when it takes the responsibility for relating civil rights to the intimate life of higher learning.
"Why Mississippi?"
By R. Richard Roe
The "long hot summer" in Mississippi is past, but the Mississippi Project continues. What was begun in the muggy heat and hostile tension of last summer could not be completed in two short months. So a number of volunteers are staying to continue the work during the year and next summer they will be joined by additional hundreds of persons enlisting in the struggle for freedom in that tormented state.
But why do they go? What are the inner motivations that lead persons to volunteer for this kind of activity? And what can be said from the standpoint of the Christian faith and that of higher education about involvement in such a project? It is important for us to consider these questions because many people on our campuses will be struggling with them in the months to come. As this is being written the news is dominated by stories of the arrest of twenty-one men for involvement in the murder of three project members last June, providing a grim and poignant reminder of the risks involved in this decision and the urgency of its careful consideration.
The reasons for going to Mississippi probably are as many as the number of persons involved. Often the reasons are not fully understood or well articulated, just powerfully felt. But they can be identified and discussed, at least in some general groupings.
One group of reasons has to do with concern for the well being of others. The Mississippi Project has grown out of the deplorable condition of Negroes in that state. Negroes are systematically and viciously denied the rights and opportunities that belong to citizens of the United States. Slavery as a system may be a thing of the past, but in Mississippi slavery is still the frame of reference for ordering relationships within society.
Racial injustice is not unique to Mississippi, of course, but there it is given its most profound expression. The state is dominated by the myth of white supremacy. Oppression and violence are condoned as appropriate means for maintaining the status quo and they are allowed almost unfettered reign by the terrifying blindness and silence of what normally would be the moderate forces in a society. It is this condition that has led Prof. Silver of Ole Miss to call Mississippi "the closed society," a society which does not allow differences of opinion and which has not within it the resources for constructive change. It is this condition, also, that led the small group of persons working valiantly, but frustratingly, for change in the state to issue a call for massive help in the task.
Many who respond, therefore, are responding out of concern for the well-being of Negroes in Mississippi. But there are broader dimensions to this concern for the well-being of persons, also. The Mississippi Project volunteer usually has concern for victims of oppression and deprivation wherever they may be. He has a strong sense of social conscience. The Mississippi Project offers to him an opportunity for a well-defined and concerted attack upon injustice with a degree of total involvement unlike most other opportunities. Mississippi can become the focus of his concern for social justice.
A second group of reasons for participating in the Mississippi Project has to do with awareness of one's own involvement in racial injustice. As James Baldwin has pointed out so strongly, we who are white are caught in living a lie which imprisons us as seriously as we imprison the Negro. We proclaim that American is the land of freedom and opportunity for all men, a land in which a person is judged on his individual merits; and, yet, we ignore that this is not true for a significant number of our citizens. We proclaim religious convictions that all men are brothers, because we are all children of the one Creator God, and that we are to serve and love one another, even as we have been served and loved; and, yet, we exclude more than one-tenth of our people from this circle of concern by reason of their birth. The damage we do by this deceit is not just to those whom we exclude from our concern, it is to ourselves, as well. We refuse to acknowledge what we do and we live a lie which destroys us from within. The problem never will be solved until we who are white are able to face ourselves, confess our guilt, and accept our responsibility for the conditions that exist. Until that time neither the Negro nor the white man will be free.
Most of those who volunteer to go to Mississippi recognize this. They can stand to live this lie no longer and they go to Mississippi to free themselves as much as to free the Negroes.
A third group of reasons for going to Mississippi has to do with a personal search for the meaning of life. Many of the volunteers recognize that their most important beliefs about the significance of life are greatly intellectual in nature because they have never been required to risk much to support them. It is one thing to affirm belief in the equality and rights of all men in the comparative safety of a northern, liberal, middle-class community. It is another thing to express these beliefs in action that involves the risk of even one's life. The deepest meanings of life find their validity not in shelter, but in living expression, in involvement, and in risk. Many of the volunteers go to Mississippi in search of this kind of validation of their deepest convictions.
While all of the reasons for participation in the Mississippi Project set down above have their merit, it must be admitted, also, that they have their dangers. In identifying with the oppressed there is the danger of becoming bitter and hostile to the oppressors, thereby losing sight of their humanness and need and removing the possibility of reconciliation. There is, also, the danger of assuming the mantle of the crusader with the blindness of certainty and pride which that may entail. In focusing concern on Mississippi there is the danger of losing sight of social injustice elsewhere. In confessing the guilt of ourselves and our society there is the danger of becoming cynical and condemning much that is worthy. In searching for the meaning of life in an intense crusade there is the danger of losing the meaning of life in the ordinary day to day events in which we normally live.
The contemporary struggle for freedom and equal rights for all people is eminently right. It has been too long delayed because of our negligence. The Mississippi Project is an important part of this battle. However, participation in the project is not appropriate for everyone who may be interested. For those who have some understanding of their motives, who are capable of exposing themselves to risk, who have the capacity to give themselves in involvement it
While each person who is interested in the project must decide whether or not he should participate, the Church has no such choice. We must be involved in the struggle, for God is at work in this movement in our midst. We must be there in the battle for human freedom and dignity. We must be with those persons who seek to find their role in the battle. And we must be with them when they have made their decisions, right or wrong.
Ecumenical Conferences, 1965
Ten ecumenical regional conferences are being held under sponsorship of the National Student Christian Federation in 1965. These conferences will replace almost all national and regional study conferences of member and related movements in NSCF. Eight will be held in late August or early September, and the other two are scheduled for the Christmas holidays of 1965. It is hoped that there will be ecumenical study groups on each campus using Harvey Cox, The Secular City, in preparation for these conferences. Program information and registration details will be mailed out by the member movements in January.
For Discussion on Morality
Uncommonly good sense about sexual morality emerges in Robert Elliott Fitch's "A Common Sense Sex Code," The Cristian Century, October 7, 1964. It will make a good starting point for campus discussion on the subject.
MSM Quadrennial
The Eighth Quadrennial Conference of the Methodist Student Movement will take place in Lincoln, Nebraska, on the campus of the University, December 28, 1964 to January 2, 1965.
Pacific School of Religion Invites applications for the Shedd Fellowship
This grant of $2,200 to $3,000 will be awarded to a person in other than a church-related profession for a year of theological study. Any man or woman presently a member of the faculty, staff, or administration of a college or university is eligible. Application due by March 15, 1965.
Title: Humanity, an Arena of Critique and Commitment
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