Colleges: A Plea for Student Freedom

“Colleges are not churches, clinics, or even parents. Whether or not a student burns a draft card, participates in a civil rights march, engages in premarital or extramarital sexual activity, becomes pregnant, attends church, sleeps all day or drinks all night, is not really the concern of an educational institution.”

The speaker was neither Nanterre’s Danny the Red nor Columbia’s Mark Rudd, but the president of the uncontroversial American Association for Higher Education, Lewis B. Mayhew. University administrators who assume such concern, added Mayhew, are really to blame for much of the current student unrest. A professor of education at Stanford University, Mayhew told some 125 association members in Dallas last week that too many college officials ignore student rights, and that “behind every successful student outbreak stands some administrator who exercised discretion without legitimacy.” Part of the problem, he said, lies in the attempt of college authorities to enforce discipline in noneducational matters under procedures that arebecoming ever more arguable in the contemporary world.

Mayhew urged administrators to confine their discipline to clearly codified academic offenses: cheating, plagiarism, misuse of equipment, damage to college property, interference with the right of others to use campus facilities. “Students,” Mayhew concluded, “should have the power of self-determination over their private lives and the conduct of their own group-living.”