University of Virginia Library

Should It?

It was all bound to end up this way. At
least it was since the strike from the beginning
lacked both leadership and reason. The
movement which was sparked by President
Nixon's inexcusable decision to escalate the
war in Indochina had many important
substantive issues, but at the University it has
become polluted with ineffectual and irresponsible
leaders and numbers of people from
outside the University community who would
just as soon see the Grounds burned as left
intact.

What we have witnessed in the past few
days is the arrival on the Grounds of the very
evils against which the strikers preach.
Totalitarianism and repression now characterize
the activities of this strike as witnessed by
the marches on Carr's Hill and Maury Hall.
Speakers have derided the leadership in the
federal government for their unwillingness to
listen to reason and logic, yet many of the
strikers here have themselves become both
unreasonable and illogical.

The radicals and their unthinking followers
now chant to "shut it down" and to "burn it"
losing all perspective of the conditions in this
country which started all of the sensible and
indeed necessary activities of the beginning of
this week. The issues need to be discussed
reasonably and objectively, not in an arena
filled with passionate cries and melodramatic,
emotional outbursts.

This whole strike has suffered from a
serious vacuum of leadership which has
resulted in unproductive and clearly avoidable
confrontation. What began as a movement by
the whole University has become a strike
against the University which ultimately will
serve no purpose and has already resulted in
foolish violence.

The actions taken by numbers of University
students and outsiders at Maury Hall
demonstrates the potentialities of danger and
destruction that the strike can bring to the
University community. We call for the end of
this strike of violence and a return to the
libertarian which fostered the original indignation
and protest that we all felt when
troops moved into Cambodia and the students
fell at Kent State.

At the present time it will serve no useful
purpose to indict any one or a number of
individuals for their parts in the Maury Hall
incidents. We do urge a return to sanity. We
do call for restraint. We do call for an end to
mindless chaos and acts of violence.