B.U. Morass

"I DON'T know how it looks to you, but it looks to me like they're biting the hand that feeds." That it looks that way to Robert Gordon is one of the predictable ironies of last week's SDS demonstration at Boston University. The protest tried to raise the large question of moral priorities and University neutrality but became snagged on the commonplace frustration and anger of SDS's targets, the Gordons.

When Maurice Gordon announced March 12 that he was withdrawing a $500,000 gift from the B.U. School of Nursing, SDS quickly hailed the event "a very real victory." In a year when radicals have been sowing plenty but not doing much reaping, the elation was understandable. The protestors clearly had done something--but just what was not so clear.

The protest began back in January when a B.U. press release announced the $500,000 gift by "philanthropist" Maurice Gordon. SDS and B.U. would have preferred the epithet "slumlord" for the wealthy Boston real estate man. The News printed a story documenting Gordon's conviction for violation of the building code and pointing to his apartment holdings in Roxbury. SDS called on the University to refuse Gordon's "blood money."

Last Tuesday when a new School of Nursing was to be dedicated and named for Gordon and his wife, no one doubted that SDS would be picketing the event. But midway through the morning, Gordon's son says, the family got a call from B.U. President Arland F. Christ-Janer's office warning that there would be "outsiders picketing and that violence was possible if the family attended. The sinister "outsiders," according to SDS, were a small group from CORE who had no plans for violence, but these explanations came after the fact: Gordon cancelled the gift at noon Tuesday.

In the day's sudden excitement, Boston University was spared a decision on the questions SDS had posed. Christ-Janer went ahead with the dedication ceremonies, apologizing for the "harrassment" of Gordon and sympathetically calling his withdrawal "understandable." The President has been out of town since, but both his office and Gordon's talk of friendly relations in the future.

THOUGH in one sense the protest got through to the Gordons, the protestors' message probably was not listened to. The money won't, as SDS asked, go to improving living conditions for Mr. Gordon's tenants; Gordon's son indicated Friday that his family would try to find another way to give the funds to B.U. He serenely dismisses the SDS "allegations" ("people took it upon themselves to say things without any basis, to act as both judge and jury. We're not even an owner in most of those areas any more . . ."). Gordon's son doesn't sound repentent, merely perplexed and a bit hurt that the family's attempt to be socially relevant ("The School of Nursing appealed to my father--a gift of the type that would benefit the community in general") was so hostilely received.

The shock of last Tuesday's events fell hardest on the student protestors themselves. What to do next? First came a burst of penitence--a movement to raise the $500,000 from other sources, kicked off Thursday by a $500 pledge by the B.U. student government. SDS skeptics have resisted though--wouldn't it be more consistent to try to raise money to help Gordon's tenants?

THIS morass can be traced back to the original rationale of the protest. The demonstration was naturally tied to the demand that the University invest its assets with a social conscience. Like their counterparts at Harvard, the B.U. SDS attacked their University for its holding in Middle South Utilities, arguing that under the cover of "neutrality" the University was supporting repressive institutions. But the specific attack on Gordon involved a second, more radical premise--that the University couldn't accept a bad man's money, even for uses of its own. The reasoning leads down a path to nihilism. Is Rockefeller Foundation money, considering how it was originally made, clean or tainted? Could the universities exist at all if they accepted funds with a strict eye to moral purity?

Drawing the line at Gordon's gift was a tactical rather than a rigidly logical decision then. And tactically it did make sense. SDS got Gordon's name and its charges against him onto the front pages of Boston papers. Administrators--at B.U. and elsewhere--may ponder the event as evidence of just how intensely students can care about the social implications of the University's financial policy, and how effectively they can obstruct a business transaction. The broad outlines of the affair might even inspire some of the reexamination of University neutrality SDS aims for.

But the temporary paralysis Gordon's withdrawal has caused in the B.U. movement and the vacuums it exposed in the SDS thinking lend an uneasy credence to the popular moderate axiom on radical protestors--the worst thing that can happen to them is to get what they ask for.