University of Virginia Library

Leftist Campus Confrontation
Threatened By Student Activism

By Phillip Abbot Luce

Phillip Abbott Luce, who spoke
at the University last year, is the
author of The New Left, Road to
Revolution, and The Intelligent
Student's Guide to Survival. A former
"New Left" Communist revolutionary,
Phillip Luce addresses
himself to the problems of confronting
the campus Left in this
column.

This school year is bound to see
any number of cases of the utilization
of the process of "confrontation."
In the past few years
we have seen this process in action
at Berkeley, Columbia and most
recently (and most effectively) in
Chicago. The theory of confrontation
is easy to understand,
but difficult to deal with effectively.
It is especially dangerous
when it pits the ultra-left wing
against the Liberal Establishment.
The confrontation process works to
its best advantage when utilized
against a Liberal administration
which, unwilling to take any timely
action, finds itself resorting to
drastic (and usually illogical) responses
to Leftist provocations.

Before proposing counters to
the process of confrontation it is
important to understand exactly
how confrontation works and what
its goals are. The theory of confrontation,
as utilized by the Left,
operates something like this: first,
the Left finds a broad based issue
(or issues) which will appeal to a
number of idealistic students.
Second, the Left demands that the
created (i.e., manufactured) issue
be solved by drastic surrender on
the part of the administration; the
Left's demands are usually too outrageous
to be accepted. Once the
administration refuses to cater to
the Left's whims, the Left's next
step is to state that all forms of
democratic appeal have been
thwarted by the administration and
it is now necessary to utilize "extra-legal"
means to gain the purported
goal. These "extra-legal"
means will probably include an
attempt to take over some type of
physical plant or else create mob
action on the campus. It should be
remembered, that the Left is only
utilizing a particular issue to gain
the proper atmosphere for the confrontation
and will do most anything
to make its demands too
outrageous to be considered even
by a Liberal administration.

The hope of the Left in this
situation is to force the administration
to begin to internally erode,
and to ultimately realize that things
are out of hand. This will usually
take place once the administration
awakens to the seriousness of the
Leftist threat and realizes that a
possible total disruption of the university
is imminent. Once the administration
begins to ponder its
plight it usually panics and calls the
police. As the police come onto the
scene the final ace of the confrontation
process is at hand.

Super Energized Idealists

The police will normally demand
the demonstrators leave the
area where they are assembled or
else face arrest. Most of the people
in the immediate area are probably
not ultra-Leftists but are super energized
idealists inclined to be
thinking with their adrenaline
rather than their brains. Anyhow,
once the police begin to move into
the crowd to either disperse or
arrest the participants, the Left is in
a position to activate violence.

As an example, let us say that
most of the people demonstrating
in a specific area are nonviolent and
have already registered through a
vote their determination to be arrested
peacefully. The ultra-left-wing,
however, is non-nonviolent
and only awaiting the police
in order to create a riot situation.

The police arrive and, while
trying to perform their duty, are
met with aggravated assaults on
their persons. In other words, some
demonstrator punches a cop in the
mouth. The police, being human,
are prone to resist and to retaliate
to violence with a sudden swat on
the aggressor's head. A club on the
head generally produces an "unreal"
quantity of blood which,
when seen by the other demonstrators,
often provokes them into
violence. And so the violence acts
upon still other violence until there
is a riot.

'Police Brutality'

At this point, people standing
on the outside of the area are
usually incapable of knowing what
precipitated the trouble. All they
see are their fellow students being
dragged from the area and hoisted
into police vans. In the midst of all
this, come the shouts of obscenity
intermingled with cries of "police
brutality." This whole scene can be
most unnerving to the average
young person having his first encounter
with the police. Many
young people are drawn to the side
of the student demonstrators because
of the generation gap
syndrome and also because we
naturally side with the underdog.
The police find themselves having
to arrest many demonstrators and
using force to subdue many of
them. This police use of force in
turn causes outsiders to join the
fracas and further the potential for
additional rioting.

The Only Winner

In such a case, the ultra-Left is
the only winner. It succeeded in
forcing the university administration
to lose its cool and call the
police. The police, in turn, are
forced to resort to violence in
controlling the demonstrators. This
then often catapults the violence
into maximum proportions. Not
only has the administration been
shown up as inept, but to many
people the police have been portrayed
as craven animals. Of course,
it must be evident to most that
some police are brutal (anyone who
contends otherwise has never been
arrested in a melee or seriously
contemplated what was evidenced
in Chicago during the so-called
Democratic Convention), but this is
not usually the case. It is often only
after the police are seriously provoked
that they in turn retaliate
with full force. This force is necessarily
more "brutal" because of the
police gear and operating procedure.

Within this scene, the Left has
discredited the administration and
the police. It has also enlisted the
support of people who would not
normally agree with them. The Left
has also achieved the other goal it
desired: it has gotten a number of
young activists beaten and jailed.
Jail is a good place to organize
students.

Incarceration

Incarceration can be a sobering
experience. It is also one of the few
places where the Left has a "captive-audience."
Some of the best
organizing goes on in those hours
spent in jail after a serious confrontation.
Here is one place the
system can be shown at its worst
and even much of the left-wing
rhetoric seems to make real sense in
a cell. If you can imagine yourself
suddenly confronted by a mass of
police, and then having seen your
"friends" beaten and yourself jailed
(all over a "good cause"), then you
might also begin to doubt the sincerity
of the democratic system.

The process of confrontation
does work, but it is usually the
Liberal administrations that help it
to work. If it were not for Mayor
Daley, there would have been no
Chicago confrontation; without
Grayson Kirk there could have been
no Columbia closing.

It is possible for a campus or
city administration to make it difficult
for a confrontation to develop.
Daley, for instance, had
several alternatives to reduce the
probability of a confrontation (including
allowing the demonstrators
to sleep in Lincoln Park, and in
calling in the National Guard as
opposed to the city police in the
first instance). Most Liberal administrations,
however, are simply not
going to do anything with campus
left-wind demonstrators until the
matter is almost out-of-hand.

Far too many campus administrations
can be trusted to fall into
the confrontation trap. In reality,
handling the left-wing threat of
campus anarchy is not the job of
the campus administration or the
state legislators. It is a student job
to handle student problems. It is a
student problem when the left-wing
keeps students from registering, attending
classes or keeping an interview
appointment with Dow
Chemical. It is a student problem
that should be handled by the
students themselves.

Naturally, once it is implied that
students are capable of handling the
campus left-wing, the Liberal administrations
will have a fit. Administrators
will cajole, pressure and
probably scream that students
should not attempt to deal with
other students. They will call you
all kinds of names and fear for their
lives (and/or their jobs), but it will
not alleviate the problem or stop
the left-wing from its actions.

The process of confrontation
can be stopped by student activism.