The latest flare-up at Berkeley fizzled out last week, smothered by a consensus of confidence in Chancellor Roger W. Heyns. Yet no one was belittling the seriousness of the five-day student strike, even if it had been triggered by nonstudents over the trivial issue of Navy recruiters on campus. Some of these agitators, said Heyns, "are out to destroy the university," while some others "want to control it." "It's a kind of guerrilla warfare," said Governor Pat Brown. "Their whole attitude is conspiratorial. They don't want answers to problems—they just want problems." And in their zeal for "confrontation politics," the young revolutionaries vowed to fight again.
Heyns dealt deftly with the newest problem by conceding trifles but refusing to give on principles. He yielded on the military recruiting issue, decided that recruiters should either seek student sponsorship to operate in the student-run union building or work through the campus placement service like other employers. But he refused to deal with nonstudents at all, shunned any discussions in which Non-Student Mario Savio, who tends bar at a near-campus student hangout when not agitating on campus, would take part, if only as a silent observer.
Town v. Gown. Heyns also refused to seek dismissal of charges against the seven nonstudents and four students arrested in the disorder, insisting: "We have no intention of accepting a pattern of granting general immunity to all violators of student rules merely because the situation gets confused or passions are aroused." And he said he could not promise that police would never again be used on campus, because this "would only serve to escalate every incident into a crisis. Freedom presupposes order, and order presupposes rules and the ability to enforce them."
The key question for Heyns was whether Berkeley's unpredictable faculty, which passed the buck in the campus uproar two years ago, would support him. In a calmly delivered speech, Heyns told 1,000 members of the Academic Senate that the campus was faced with "a chronic condition" in which nonstudent agitators, in "one of the most unusual town-gown antagonisms in history," had made the campus a target for protest. He drew a burst of applause when he said, "There are hundreds of faculty members and thousands of students who are heartily sick of the unrest, turbulence and the tenuous control we have over our community and who yearn for the stability essential for a climate of productive learning." Vowing that he would enforce all campus rules "as long as I am in this position," Heyns—in a clear reference to the rising ire of the university regents over Berkeley's problems—warned that if the faculty did not support him, "no other chancellor will have as much independence as I have been given."