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208  How Can Random Rampages Alter Course in Vietnam?
     The Washington Post  May 9, 1970

     Rehovoth, Israel -- Despite the dateline, this column concerns
Stanford University in California.  I am for the formal inauguration
of Dr. Albert Sabin, developer of the oral polio vaccine now used 
throughout the world, as the new president of the Weizmann Institute.
But my thoughts returned to the battleground of the university and
the incredible question whether it can survive as an institution of
free inquiry.

     The sit-ins that led to desegregation in the South were a direct
confrontation with a particular law to test its moral and constitutional
foundations.  Such confrontations are not merely tolerable;  they are
an almost indispensable part of a legal system that depends on test
cases for the evolution of timely law.

     The rampages we have seen in California, however, are almost 
random in their choice of targets.  Can anyone rationally believe that
they will force the Nixon administration to alter its program for
disengagement in Vietnam?  Will they not rather reinforce a powerful
right in invoking its traditional penal approaches for the quieting of
dissent?

     It is beyond any doubt that they will extract ourselves from
Southeast Asia.  Today's overriding threat to our liberties is in the
style with which we accommodate and settle our differences.

     Every voluntary act of violence is a threat to my personal
freedom, no matter where it is directed, for it pushes our society
closer to the point where my liberty will depend on the size of my own
gun.  I have no illusions about the area of personal freedom today,
but it is vastly greater than any citizen can carve out of the jungle
by his own devices.

     University campuses have so little direct authority over crucial
national decisions that none of our eruptions can have a sensible
relationship to concrete policy decisions.  We are the frontier where
the life of the past meets the future.

     Much of the ferment comes from an understandable anger at the
legacy that is transmitted, but is also amplified and criticized
there.  We also care about our students much as parents do, while
having even less authority, and suffer similar rebuffs and reactions.

     This year's violence is taking a new turn.  Many younger students
are heavily involved.  Instead of ideology leading to action, we now 
observe action leading to ideology in order to justify it.

     Some of the events are doubtless random.  Others are shrewdly
organized as a method of recruitment into a revolutionary life style--a
method which uses the police as involuntary conspirators.

     Idealistic students are persuaded to join in peaceful 
demonstrations and wooed in "affinity groups" that generate a novel  
sense of community among homesick youngsters. They can then sometimes be
maneuvered onto a scene of violent or illegal action.  It is then easy
for an innocent bystander to be radicalized for life by the police
doing their job in the only way they know how.  

     Students pride themselves on being able to separate the radicals'
laudable major ends from their unacceptable local means.  But when you
happen to have thrown a rock or burned down a bank in a moment of 
passion, your ideology is likely to change to match the event: whatever
was burned must have been evil enough to justify the arson.  Let him
who has never deluded himself throw the next stone.

     What do liberals have to offer to match such fun and excitement?
Not much besides hard work and much discouragement, enough to make
anyone "cop out" who is unsure of his own commitment to social reform.
But our rare and hard-won successes may still bear some relationship
to the ideals we started from.
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