Conclusions of the Cox Commission

Late last spring, the faculty of Columbia created a committee to investigate and evaluate the disturbances on campus during April and May. The committee was chaired by Archibald Cox, Professor of Law at Harvard, and its "General Observations," which conclude its recently released report, are reprinted below.

I.

The April uprising started and grew haphazardly. As it developed to the final academic cataclysm, its entire character was altered.

The long series of turbulent demonstrations beginning in 1965, which were tolerated by most of the University community, leaves a tragic sense of inevitability of the final escalation. Packing the lobby of Hamilton Hall--even the somewhat ambiguous obstruction of Dean Coleman's liberty--was scarcely different from the earlier confrontation in John Jay Hall or the sit-in following the CIA demonstration. SAS's decision to evict the whites and barricade the doors in a demonstration of black student power--one of the key turning points--was a response to an occasion thrust upon the black students. With each successive day the uprising gathered its own physical and emotional momentum.

We reject the view that ascribes the April and May disturbances primarily to a conspiracy of student revolutionaries. That demonology is no less false than the native radical doctrine that attributes all wars, racial injustices, and poverty to the machinations of a capitalist and militarist "Establishment." Student revolutionists within SDS planned turbulent confrontations and revolutionary tactics. They manipulated facts in ways that created distrust and bred unwarranted antagonism. There apparently was occasional talk of wider revolution to overthrow the present political system. A very few revolutionists may have been in dead earnest. More, we suspect, were half in dreamland, feverishly discussing romantic tactics but hardly contemplating realistic execution. Part of the responsibility for the disturbances rests upon the revolutionaries consciously seeking to subvert and destroy the University but their total number was small--much less than the full SDS membership--and their activities were only the catalyst that precipitated a deeper movement. (By the same token our comments concerning the above group should not be applied to the much larger number who seek fundamental change in the established order without embracing doctrinaire revolutionary theory and tactics.)

II.

By its final days the revolt enjoyed both wide and deep support among the students and junior faculty and in lesser degree among the senior professors. The grievances of the rebels were felt equally by a still larger number, probably a majority, of the students. The trauma of the violence that followed police intervention intensified emotions but support for the demonstrators rested upon broad discontent and widespread sympathy for their position.

The record contains ample proof of this conclusion. The very number of students arrested in the buildings--524 Columbia students in the first police action--is convincing. Many more had been in the buildings earlier. Some of the latter were doubtless curiosity seekers. For others in both groups the affair probably had many of the elements of the once-traditional spring riots and subsequent "panty raids." But even after discount is made for those elements, the extent of active participation in violent and unlawful protest is significant.

The existence of broad underlying unrest is also shown by the progress of the seizures. The action of the black students in Hamilton Hall was entirely independent of SDS. The seizure of Avery Hall by architectural students was their own movement. The occupation of Fayerweather Hall, in which a large part of graduate study in the social sciences is centered, was apparently spontaneous; no evidence of an SDS connection has come to our attention.

Outside the buildings the militants enjoyed visible support in the form of the thousands who watched from various points on campus, most conspicuously at the Sundial. A campus poll reportedly boycotted by those in the buildings showed that 74 percent of the participants favored "end gym construction," 66 percent favored severing ties with IDA, and 37 percent even favored amnesty for all students involved in the demonstrations.

The events after the police "bust" point to the same conclusion. The emotions excited by the brutality must have polarized opinion. There would be a tendency to put unjust blame upon those who called for police intervention rather than those--chiefly from SDS--whose deliberate efforts to provoke disruptive turbulence made it almost inevitable that police action would be required. Despite these complex cross-currents, the extent and persistence of the ultimate reaction against the University Administration is adequately explained only by the presence of strong but latent dissatisfaction quickened by the violence of events.

For the future it is equally important to note that the support for the activists has come from the portions of the student body who are most energetically concerned with university and community affairs.

III.

The avowed objectives of the April demonstrations, stripped of their context and symbolism, were inadequate causes for an uprising.

The University's IDA affiliation had little practical importance. It was being reviewed by the Henkin Committee as part of a larger study of Columbia's relations to outside agencies. There was not the slightest reason to doubt that the normal academic procedures could produce a reasoned and fair-minded decision upon the merits. The disruptive potential of the IDA affiliation at Columbia, as at other universities, was that it enabled the large part of the intellectual community, especially students, to transfer to the campus their intense moral indignation against the Vietnam war.

The gymnasium issue was more complex, but it too was a symbolic issue. At least some black students freely acknowledge not only that the issue was oversimplified but that the public gymnasium to be built by Columbia would be more beneficial to the community than the 2.1 acres of rocky parkland, if the project could be judged upon that aspect alone. But the project could not be judged out of the context of Columbia's relations with its poorer neighbors and society's treatment of racial ghettos.

The third issue, the discipline of the six IDA demonstrators, had somewhat greater substance. Although most students would probably have agreed that the disruptive manner of conducting SDS demonstrations was becoming intolerable, many students were antagonized by the manner in which the "no indoor demonstration," rule was promulgated and the discipline was administered.

Since the rule came close to the area of free expression staunchly guarded by Columbia's liberal tradition, it was of intense concern to the entire University community. Nevertheless, the prohibition was promulgated by President Kirk without consultation with students, and apparently without prior discussion with faculty members. In fact, the rule ran contrary to the unanimous recommendation of a tripartite committee whose report the President withheld.

The rule, which was an obvious target for militants, was formulated in terms that hampered consistent administration and invited provocation.

Out of the 100 students who engaged in the March IDA demonstration, six SDS leaders were selected for punishment. It was difficult to persuade students that this was not a discriminatory selection even though the Dean's office explained that these six and no others were recognized.

The six IDA demonstrators were refused a public hearing and preemptorily punished. Although the older paternalistic procedures probably gave much greater protection to most student offenders, there is wide and justified campus support for the principles (1) that a student is no less entitled to due process of law than one charged with a public offense and (2) that students should share in disciplinary procedures as part of the right of participation in decisions affecting their interests.

IV.

Three among the purely internal causes of unrest especially impressed us.

1. At a time when the spirit of self-determination is running strongly, the administration of Columbia's affairs too often conveyed an attitude of authoritarianism and invited distrust. In part, the appearance resulted from style: for example, it gave affront to read that an influential University official was no more interested in student opinion on matters of intense concern to students than he was in their taste for strawberries. In part, the appearance reflected the true state of affairs. The machinery of student government had been allowed to deteriorate to a point where Columbia College had no student government. The Report on Student Life was not released for seven months until CUSC members threatened publication. The President was unwilling to surrender absolute disciplinary powers. In addition, government by improvisation seems to have been not an exception, but the rule.

2. The quality of student life was inferior in living conditions and personal association.

3. Columbia, like other universities, has scarcely faced the extraordinary difficulties that face black students in the transition from a society permeated by racial injustice to one of true equality of opportunity. We recognize, of course, the difficulty of immediately remedying such deficiencies as the paucity of black teaching and administrative personnel and of appropriate courses and counseling for all students, but the indisputable fact of alienation of our black students, with all that that fact entails, makes a more active and creative search for solutions particularly urgent.

V.

The fabric of Columbia was twisted and torn by the forces of political and social revolution outside the University. Columbia's geographic situation symbolzes the relation between white and black, affluence and poverty, youthful reform and established order. The University's need for physical expansion in an urban center creates inescapable tensions but its relations with the community had further deteriorated because of its apparent indifference to the needs and aspirations of its poorer neighbors. The handling of the gymnasium controversy thus came, even somewhat unfairly, to epitomize the conflict between the spirit of the civil rights movement and the attack on poverty, on the one hand, and, on the other, the ways of an ancien regime. Energetic and idealistic students, alienated from the older generation by an extraordinarily wide gulf in manners and interests and offended by the plethora of human suffering, were drawn to the side of change. Where they were frustrated by the massive anonymity of the government and the unmanageability of the social system, they could strike out at the more vulnerable University.

In like fashion, the University became the surrogate for all the tensions and frustrations of United States policy in Vietnam.

The desire for student power, while scarcely articulated as a cause for seizing the campus buildings, was a powerful element of the explosion. Discussion since the uprising has focused upon the methods by which students may exert more influence upon the government of an institution of which they are vital and integral parts. Participation in self-government is a natural human desire that today's students feel with greater urgency, particularly at institutions with highly selective admissions policies because they are much better educated than their predecessors, more sophisticated, in many respects more mature, and more interested in social problems than seeking out conventional careers. (Unfortunately, they are also much less disciplined.)

VI.

The hurricane of social unrest struck Columbia at a time when the University was deficient in the cement that binds an institution into a cohesive unit.

Again, geography is a factor. The competing attractions of the exciting metropolitan area, coupled with the housing problems that induce a majority of the faculty to live outside Manhattan, operate as centrifugal forces. Yet the dispirited quality of student life outside the classroom is not beyond the University's power of influence.

The formal organization of both the administrative offices and the faculties apparently tends to discourage the cohesiveness that comes from shared responsibility in matters of university concern. We were struck by the constant recital of an apposition between the Administration and the faculty as rival bodies with separate interests, for it would seem to us that on educational questions the two should be essentially one. The lack of a University Senate and the division of the professors and other teachers into three or four faculties--quite apart from the professional schools--where other universities have a single Faculty of Arts and Sciences, apparently discourages faculty participation in the formulation of University policy and the improvement of student life. The central Administration to which the full burden of the quality of student life is left is not equipped for the duty. Far too few members of the University family are closely involved, outside the classroom, in the constant informal enterprises and discussions by which the values of an academic community are constantly reexamined and those which stand the test are passed on to the next generation.

Institutional coherence is also affected by the presence or lack of a spirit of institutional self-confidence. Unhappily, despite her inherent strengths, the spring crisis struck Columbia when her self-confidence was shaken by the decline in relative position in AAUP rankings of graduate departments, the exclusion from a Ford Foundation grant for improvement of graduate studies, the resignations of a number of senior professors, and the Strickman filter incident.

VII.

The scale of the disturbances was greatly enlarged in numbers, intensity and violence by the delay in calling the police--from Thursday night until Monday night--which the Ad Hoc Faculty Group forced upon the University officials. Although perhaps the effort had to be made, there was never a significant chance that the Group could negotiate a peaceful withdrawal from the buildings. Forcing a delay, by threats of physical interposition, increased the likelihood of violence and magnified the reaction by lending an air of legitimacy to use of the tactics of physical disruption as means of forcing one view of policy upon those who held another.

VIII.

Our next five observations must be taken as a unit. Language requires stating them one at a time, but none can survive unless joined with the others.

A.

A unviersity is essentially a free community of scholars dedicated to the pursuit of truth and knowledge solely through reason and civility.

A privately-endowed university depends upon the experienced guidance of wise counselors and managers both inside and outside academic ranks, and also upon the financial and moral support of a large, organized body of alumni and friends. But their vital contribution must never obscure the essential quality of the institution: the university is a community of scholars, both teachers and students. Any tendency to treat a university as business enterprise with faculty as employees and students as customers diminishes its vitality and communal cohesion.

B.

Resort to violence or physical harrassment or obstruction is never an acceptable tactic for influencing decisions in a university. This principle does not require notions of property or legality to sustain it. It derives from three considerations.

First, force, harassment, and physical obstruction contradict the essential postulate that the university is dedicated to the search for truth by reason and civility.

Second, resort to such pyhsical coercion tends to set in motion an uncontrollable escalation of violence. This is the plainest lesson of the rising cycle of violence that began at Columbia with the Naval ROTC demonstration in 1965 and culminated in the brutality of April 30 and May 22. The sequence of steps was not inevitable but each was the readily predictable consequence of those that went before.

Third, the survival--literally the survival--of the free university depends upon the entire community's active rejection of disruptive demonstrations. Any sizeable group, left to pursue such tactics, can destroy either the university by repeatedly disrupting its normal activities or the university's freedom by compelling the authorities to invoke overwhelming force in order that its activities may continue. The only alternative is for the entire community to reject the tactics of physical disruption with such overwhelming moral disapproval as to make them self-defeating.

This vital decision rests with the liberal and reform-minded students. They can save or destroy the institution.

C.

The acceptability of the foregoing principle depends upon organization of the scholarly community in ways that produce both loyalty and the relief of grievances. The government of a university depends, even more than that of a political community, upon the consent of all the governed to accept decisions reached by its constitutional processes. The consent of the dissenters depends partly upon their knowing that their views effectively entered into the process of consensus, even though they did not prevail. They must also be convinced that the opportunities for change are open and the goals and stance of the enterprise are sufficiently right for it to deserve their loytlty despite specific points of disagreement. Administrative intractability and resistance to change contribute to the breakdown of law and order.

D.

The student body is a mature and esesntial part of the community of scholars. This principle has more validity today than ever before in history. It is felt more keenly by a wider number of students, perhaps because of the increasing democratization of human institutions. As with all human activities, the wise division of functions and responsibilities must take into account the special skills or limitations of particular groups, as well as efficiency of operation. The process of drawing students into more vital participation in the governance of the university is infinitely complex. It cannot be resolved by either abstractions or tables of organization. It does not mean that issues must be settled by referenda. We are convinced, however, that ways must be found, beginning now, by which students can meaningfully influence the education afforded them and other aspects of the university activities.

The activist supporters of reform who voiced the grievances pressed by the rebels included many of the natural leaders among students--both political and intellectual leaders. They were deeply hurt by statements treat-