The Students for a Democratic Society, declared Columbia Provost David B. Truman last week, were deliberately "seeking a confrontation with the university." Thus Truman seemed to support the widespread notion that the wave of recent demonstrations and strikes at Columbia were all part of a conscious conspiracy. That is unlikely. S.D.S., which has played an active role in most of the U.S. campus uprisings, certainly believes in all sorts of radical confrontation, but conspiracy is not really its game. If anything, it is an organization whose members shy away from organization.
A loosely formed amalgam of some 35,000 young peoplebarely...