University of Virginia Library

Before Trouble Starts

It's a good thing that Ronald Reagan and
Spiro Agnew haven't heard about the
Government and Foreign Affairs Department's
recent decision to do away with
comprehensive examinations. If they had, the
champions of Middle America might well have
favored us with another statement about
gutless college administrators, bleeding hearts
on the faculty and pampered students. They
would say that those in authority knuckled
under to student pressure, teaching the
students that militant action is an effective
way to coerce an academic community.
Partially, at least, they would be voicing a
valid interpretation.

There can be no question but that the
Department's action to jettison comprehensive
exams came about not through some sort
of sudden enlightenment, but because pressure
had been applied, students had refused to
continue being seen and not heard, and the
Department faculty had been rudely shocked
into the realization that the blank faces in
their classes hid some disenchanted intellects.
No one can ascertain the specific personality
and motivation factors which led to last
week's conclusion, but the foregoing determinants
seem overridingly obvious.

Ironically enough, a group of scholars
whose collective purpose is ostensibly the
analysis of political functions and the manner
in which the governed influence their
governors had made few effective provisions
for such interchange within their own domain.
The faculty members were quite often cavalier
in their treatment of student opinion. If they
listened at all seriously, their reaction was
generally, "You have a valid point, but there
are more important things that the Department
has to do first." For their part, students
failed to take advantage of the opportunities
the Department did extend - meetings were
poorly attended, and elections of representatives
to the graduate and undergraduate
committees were characterized by apathy
bordering on criminal neglect. The first axiom
of political science, that 60 per cent of a given
constituency doesn't know what's going on
and doesn't give a damn about it anyway,
certainly held true in the case of the G&FA
students.

But still there was a simmering measure of
discontent under the veneer of academic
routine. So when some students decided that
they didn't like the Department's decision to
deny promotion to Assistant Professor Alan
Ritter, they found a lot of support for a
petition calling for the Department to
reconsider. The question of Mr. Ritter's
promotion was not really the primary gripe;
there is no power that the faculty guards more
jealously than that which it exercises over
promotions and hiring and the students knew
it. The real issues were contained in the
subsidiary articles of the petition statement:
charges that the faculty never listened to its
students; that the participatory structure
which existed was a farce; that the decision to
retain comps was unfair; that the quality
instruction was in many cases being sacrificed
to research and publications; and that the
Department's repressive policies were severely
crippling its ability to attract and hold onto
top-flight graduate students.

Faced with this incipient revolt, the
faculty did exactly what Agnew and Reagan
would regard as a tragic mistake: they
acquiesced to some of the students' wishes.
Reagan and Agnew would say that to do so
was to encourage such actions in the future.
But the facts of the matter seem to be that
the faculty of Government and Foreign
Affairs had to be shocked into the realization
that students' requests were not something
that could be legitimately put off until the
Utopian day when everyone can have
everything they want; they had to be shocked
into serious consideration of the students'
ideas. When they were, they acted favorably
upon some, hoping, no doubt, that by doing
so they would take some of the heat of the
paramount issue of exclusive faculty control
of promotions.

Still, if the need to shock faculty members
into serious consideration remains, we may
expect more unpleasantness such as happened
on the second floor of Cabell Hall in the past
several weeks. Students and faculty members
ought to realize that by the time a
confrontation comes, appealing alternatives
are generally precluded and everyone has to
muddle through. The rational policy is to
open and maintain efficient channels of
communication before the trouble starts.