Your Guest is as Good as Mine

CALL in the Catholic Church. Call in the National Guard. It's perhaps the most absurd statement by a college administrator in what is undoubtably the most absurd administrative scandal of the decade--Boston University's 11 o'clock parietal rules. When asked how students' sexual activity would be affected by the rules, B.U. Dean of Students Ron Carter said, "Students can have sex before 11:00 p.m. and after that they can play with themselves."

Play with themselves? Carter and B.U. President John Silber are arguing that the new curfew rules will help create a better intellectual climate at the university. Does Carter think that masturbation is somehow more consequent with the academic mission of Boston University than is sexual intercourse? How, exactly? Perhaps he thinks it encourages more independence of thought. But then, the B.U. administration has never encouraged independence of thought in any part of the student body.

What's fascinating about the B.U. case is not the flippant insensitivity of administrators like Carter and Silber. This is to be expected. What's fascinating is the reaction of the B.U. student body to the new dorm policy.

COLLEGE students, and especially B.U. students, should know by now that at the bureaucratized university of the 1980s, they are essentially powerless. The administrators don't care what students think. They don't even want to hear it. Their philosophy--"Je suis I'universite"--is inspired by one of Silber's role models, the late Louis XIV of France.

Silber sends undercover photographers to student protests to take pictures, keeps files on student leaders, and twice during the 1970s called in the Boston Tactical Police Force to supress student protests.

The university president has a longstanding feud with his own faculty since the 1960s. Twice the faculty has voted no confidence in his administration and has attempted to boot him out of office. Some accuse him of refusing pay raises and tenure to professors who disagree with him. Last January, when the professors attempted to form a chapter of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) at B.U., Silber took them to court and prevented the affiliation.

On the student front, Silber arrested and suspended demonstrators as recently as three years ago, when the hapless B.U. eight protested for divestment using the tactics of civil disobedience. In 1986 Silber threatened to expel student Josef Abrahamowitz and three friends who hung a pro-divestment banner out of a dorm window. Abrahamowitz took the case to court and won, arguing that students who hung "Go, Mets" banners out their windows were not met with the same repression. Now, dissatisfied with merely crushing public expression of students' First Amendment rights, Silber is trying to force students to stop having sex and throwing parties.

FACED with the specter of this violent, autocratic Silber, determined to destroy your social life, what would you do? The first thing that popped into my mind was to send thousands of angry students to Silber's house each night at 11 o'clock to make sure he was safe in his room and didn't have any after-hours guests.

In fact, B.U. students had a similar idea. They organized a march on Silber's house two Fridays ago, but called it off under pressure from Dean "go play with yourselves" Carter.

The march, set for September 16, was announced during a rally two days earlier, on Wednesday. It was called off after Carter met with the two students, Steve Ray and Angela Ranieri who were organizing the march and convinced them to cancel the demonstration and resort to more "rational" means of discourse.

It seems that Ray was so sorry about having even thought of organizing a march, that he took out a full-page ad in the B.U. Free Press explaining his position to the student body. In the ad, Ray did not say he had been pressured by the dean, perhaps because the dean paid for the ad. In any case, the march on Silber's house was cancelled, a testimony to the chicken-heartedness of student leaders in the face of a devious administration.

Carter denies having put any pressure on the two activists, saying that he only encouraged them to pursue different means. "If that's pressure, making someone think reasonably, then I'm guilty," Carter said. Surely he is not guilty of making students think reasonably; the cancellation of the march and Ray's complete sell-out were perhaps the most unreasonable actions possible by these so-called "activists."

The real issue is the definition of the word "reasonable." Are President John Silber's new parietal rules reasonable? Virtually no one--students, parents, even other college administrators and police officers--thinks so.

Does the B.U. faculty think Silber is reasonable? Apparently not, given their repeated attempts to oust him. Why then should students try to engage in reasonable discourse with the man or his administration? Silber has proven again and again that he doesn't respect students' right to free speech; faculty members complain that he fires dissenters in their ranks. What could dialogue produce with a man who doesn't want to hear the other side?

The only reasonable way for B.U. students to fight the new parietal rules is with militancy--protests, marches, tuition strikes, organized defiance, or even a student strike. A single protest will not move him, but consistent pressure sustained over a long period of time might. Supposedly, there is a plan afoot in the student government to encourage parents not to pay their bills in protest. Hard-ball tactics like these are the only way to talk to Silber.