University of Virginia Library

Last Tuesday evening, graduate
students in the Department of
Government and Foreign Affairs
learned the meaning of the "politics
of confrontation."

The meeting with Mr. Jordan
proved to be a distressing and
offensive affair as those students
with hardened hearts and attitudes
went far to destroy the manly
bonds of affection, sentiment, and
mutual respect for their teachers
and among themselves.

One felt that the issues of
support and understanding for Mr.
Ritter were of little importance to
those who would rather have no
meeting if it would not be wholly
on their own terms. The hydras of
Power and Polarization raised their
ugly heads and threatened to
devour the magic spirit of respectful
discourse that had entered the
room with the students. The
strident tones of the students and
the unseemly disrespect shown to
Mr. Jordan demonstrated, perhaps,
that the real issue was a kind of
combat, a vicarious guerrilla, a
bull-headed resistance against men
who came with hopes of hearing
the students' grievances. Perhaps
the root of the problem lies in a
Mithranistic view of student-faculty
relations; students are the forces of
light, teachers the powers of evil.
How far is this view from that
which sees all men caught up in
common weakness and a common
suffering.

One can only hope that the
baser appetites in that group were
sated. For the kind of unholy
juices generated by such scenes too
often ferment into the stronger
liquor of mutual hate and absolute
alienation.

Finally, we conclude with a note
of sadness for those graduate
students who were pure of motive
but short on good sense. They did
not see, as all the timid but
well-meaning do not, that the
masses of men are, in our own time,
seldom led to causes by their own
volition. Rather, to borrow a phrase
from the language of revolutionary
warfare, they are "maneuvered."
This in no way is meant to discredit
the very fine, modest and good
efforts of our student-faculty liaison,
Mr. Brian Hampton, and other
like-minded students.