Miscalculation Has Become A Bad Habit

As Berkeley's 27,000 students returned from a long Christmas recess last week, administrators, a few faculty members, and student government leaders worked furiously to complete a package of reforms that will, they think, avert any future violence on the campus.

But, even as Chancellor Roger W. Heyns met with student representatives at his home, there were indications that the organizers of last month's five-day strike -- many of them non-students -- will not be satisfied with mere reform.

"There can be a student revolution here," Karen Lieberman, a former graduate student in sociology, told strikers at mass rallies. "What is happening on this campus is happening all over the world: it's student power."

What Mrs. Lieberman (known as the "Madame Nhu" of Berkeley since her suspension last spring) says -- and the way she says it -- tend to arouse genuine rancor among university administrators who have been burned before by brushes with her and other non-students. But even the most bitter administrator acknowledges that, although he would like to ignore her, Mrs. Leibermann knows what she's talking about this time.

The truth of what Mrs. Lieberman says cannot, however, disguise another reality that is emerging slowly from the tangle of McLuhanistic propaganda that emanates from the Berkeley campus. The demands of the students no longer mesh with those of the non-students; there is growing hostility between the two groups, which is likely to make the non-students turn to more destructive forms of protest as the university administration tries to assuage the more moderate student faction.

Students -- even those who refused to go along with the boycott of classes -- are demanding greater participation in the affairs of the university and want to share in at least some of the actual decision-making. The national press may have given more attention to the mass sit-ins, the abortive Filthy Speech Movement, and the famed nude parties in Berkeley, but the real issue on the campus is student (not non-student) power.

Strong faculty and administrative support exists for some of the students' demands, but the students are unlikely to get anywhere until they dissociate themselves from the so-called non-students on campus. The most sympathetic faculty members cannot countenance the presence of these "agitators" in campos organizations; other adult Californians refuse to believe that people like Mrs. Lieberman and Mario Savio, a leader in the 1964 Free Speech Movement, have any right at all to set foot on Sproul Plaza.

The Board of Regents probably exemplify the feelings of most Californians about the non-students. At their emergency meeting on December 5, the Regents announced that they "oppose the participation of outsiders who instigate and direct violations of university rules." They also directed the administration to take immediate action to prevent non-students' "interference with campus activities."

Probably most students, in order to get what they want from the administration, will be willing to junk the demands that have been advanced for giving non-students the same political rights as students. Only a few of the most fervent consider the non-student issue the most important at stake.

Non-Student Purge

The Chancellor, recognizing this division among students, has cagily agreed to talk only with the more moderate faction. Both he and Clark Kerr, the president of the entire University of California, have reassured the Regents that students and faculty, working together, can "purge" the non-student element from the university.

This view is shared to some extent by the leaders of the Associated Students of the University of California -- the student government -- who supported last month's strike and withdrew their endorsement only when the faculty demanded an end to the boycott. Because the ASUC held firm despite repeated overtures from the Chancellor to speak with their representatives alone, the ASUC is more widely respected than in 1964.

Most students, in fact, have forgotten that Savio at that time denounced the student government as "the sandbox" and pointed to the ASUC president as a helpless and forgotten figure on the sidelines. Today, president Dan McIntosh is the chief arbiter between the administration and the strikers.

McIntosh has said publicly that he regards the strikers' demand that off-campus political organizations be given the same kind of treatment accorded government agencies as "irrelevant." What is relevant, McIntosh thinks, is the creation of a student organization -- something more powerful than the ASUC certainly -- that will have the authority to determine policies on political activity.

The faculty, at its emergency meeting, endorsed McIntosh's idea in part and called for the creation of a "joint faculty-student commission to consider new modes of governance and self-regulation appropriate to a modern American university community." This commission, they recommended, should give serious consideration to the "concerns and grievances expressed by so many of our students" during the strike.

Student Membership

Heyns and ASUC representatives, during their Christmas recess meetings, talked mostly about the constitution of this commission. McIntosh was concerned that the proposed commission, to be composed of five faculty members and five students, might be so dominated by the faculty that it would ignore student sentiment. This is precisely what happened to the doomed "Campus Rules Committee," another joint commission set up after FSM which was supposed to establish lines of communication between students and the university.

McIntosh admits that he feels uneasy about the proposed commission. "It really wouldn't give us what we need," he explains. "Savio has a point when he says that they can let us serve on millions of joint committees and it won't mean a thing until we have at least a fragment of autonomy."

What McIntosh thinks Berkeley "really needs" is a student "political activities committee" that would work with a similar faculty committee "to review and rewrite all university rules regarding political activity." As McIntosh sees it, the faculty committee would set up "guiding principles and policies" which would then be worked into more specific rules by the student committee.

"Until there is some student organization on this campus that actually has some status, there's going to be trouble," McIntosh told the faculty last month. "The administration can continue to claim that they discipline justly and that existing rules are not ex cathedra but were actually written by students. But as long as Berkeley students have no access to rule-making, we have a legitimate complaint."

McIntosh and the students he represents hope that the non-student issue, to which the local papers devote a disproportionate amount of attention, will disappear once students are really given some voice in policy-making. With insight that most adult Califorians lack, Page vanLobensenls, another ASUC officer, tried to explain to newsmen why most striking students seemed so unconcerned about the fates of the non-students who led them.

Creating Non-Students

"People like Mario and Karen are so well-liked that most strikers might actually feel guilty if they thought the issue of non-students was really being ignored," vanLobensels said. "Mario, especially, is really a 'living monument,' like the newspapers say. But those of us who've been around Berkeley a long time realize why Mario and Karen are non-students. The reason is that the rules are made by distant and sometimes arbitrary figures in Sproul Hall, and administered by those same people. When a student -- like Karen -- is cited once for breaking a rule, one of the little deans up there will testify that she broke the rule and say she deserves to be thrown out. The Committee on Student Conduct, who hears these cases, believe that without any real proof expect the

The real issue on campus is student (not non - student) power.

"I don't think the non - student types are tuned in any more." dean's word. That's why Karen was suspended."

VanLobensels and McIntosh feel that if the rules were made "visible" and some "clear form" of judicial review for student violators were set up, the non-students who are former students -- like Savio and Mrs. Lieberman -- might actually be pacified. The administration, too, which has refused to readmit both these notorious "non-students" might come to see that "the situation is no longer explosive. They'd see that it would be in their interest to readmit both of them," McIntosh says.

It is becoming apparent to other observers that what McIntosh and vanLobensels talk about so lovingly is never going to come about. Administration spokesmen say that the university is extending itself as far as possible when it offers the 10-member joint commission. No one in the state of California is really willing to grant the students the autonomy they want.

Heyns, who wrote a PhD. thesis on the "Effects of Variations in Leadership on Participation Behavior in Discussion Groups," can explain the turmoil at Berkeley in sociological terms. "I know what they're after," he told a press conference. "Eventually they'll get around to talking about a student court. But I've seen such a thing in operation at other schools and, let me tell you, it can be disastrous. Students can blithely hand down judgments on their peers that even the harshest faculty committee would consider outrageous."

Sharing Blame

Heyns admits that non-students at Berkeley are really not solely responsible for the agitation there, as California newspapers claim and Californians believe. "Unfortunately, they are aided and abetted by some of our own students who share this hostility toward the university," Heyns explains. "It is apparent that we have lost some of the ground we had gained in our efforts over the past two years to build a genuine campus community. I understand that there were some weaknesses in the Campus Rules Committee, but I think this joint commission can discuss all the reasons for this development. All of us, including the administration, through misunderstandings or errors, have doubtlessly contributed."

Heyns makes it clear that he has gone about as far as he can go, or as far as the Regents will let him. "This situation isn't at all like 1964. Since then, our students have enjoyed the 'free forum.' They are free to assemble on campus, invite controversial guest speakers to talk, distribute literature, collect funds, solicit memberships, and support political candidates.

"We have recognized that freedom, while inviolate in principle, must be exercised under regulations assuring that the time, place, and manner of their exercise will not interfere with the University's educational functions. The rules we follow now arose from the very processes of the free forum. They were initiated and formulated by faculty members and students who were closest and most sensitive to the issues of free speech -- those who had been most active in the events of 1964."

This kind of rhetoric, balanced against the legitimate criticisms put forth by the ASUC, gives a clear picture of what really has happened at Berkeley. Students and faculty, although their ideas are miles apart, are at least talking in the same terms -- and about the same thing. Non-students, on the other hand, are increasingly isolated; their appeals -- above and beyond what most students want -- are the most widely heard, however.

Student Control

Non-students on the strike committee (which is still operative) have a vision, and Mrs. Lieberman's predictions of a revolutionary stirring are typical. At the final strike rally, Savio told the strikers that "we're going to give this administration trouble until students really run this university."

In the literature that emanates from Savio's run-down apartment a few blocks from the campus -- toward the seedier part of Berkeley -- there is a real revolutionary tone. One leaflet circulated during the strike demanded that students be given:

* Authority to make social rules for the dormitories;

* A voice in university admissions policies;

* Greater freedom in picking outside speakers to address campus audiences;S-4ROGER W. HEYNS, Chancellor