(5 of 5)
But there is an all-important difference between student advice and student control. If students could dictate the hiring and firing of professors, they would tend to select those with whom they agree—and fall into an echo chamber. Latin American students have considerable control over many universities, and the consequence is chaos and inferior education. A university is not a democracy and cannot become one without degenerating into anarchy. At a conference on "Students and Society" at California's Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions last year, the president of the student body of St. Louis' Washington University put it aptly: "Were Washington University to be turned over to the students and faculty, it would fold in about six months because nobody would know how to run it."
Both the students and the elders have some other lessons to be learned. What is needed most of all is more mutual respect. The student activists are more critical than constructive. They often have no immediate, practical answers for the problems that they expose—but older people should not lightly dismiss them for that. Sometimes it is enough just to ask the right questions. Student protests have stirred authorities in Spain, Germany and other countries to some fitful steps toward modernization. And students have begun to move U.S. universities in some desirable directions—toward a more involved role in the local community, toward a rethinking of the relevance of education.
For their part, the students might recognize that they do not have a monopoly on idealism. After all, the drives against poverty and racism in the U.S. were energized not by them but by their elders. It would also profit the students to recognize the temporary nature of their power and the severe limits on it. Theirs is primarily the power to disrupt. They can interfere with the established authority, but they cannot change it without help from other powerful groups in the population—as Czech students learned in their successful protest and Polish students learned in their unsuccessful one. With that in mind, activist students might do more to court allies not only among their more moderate contemporaries but also among older people. In this, they are not helped at all by some of the retrogressive tendencies of the extremists: they are often intolerant of anyone who disagrees with them, all too willing to interfere with the rights of others, and sometimes ready to stoop to hoodlumism and fascist methods.
Student power can be beneficial; student tyranny never is. Student involvement in politics should be encouraged, but student abuse of the democratic process must always be resisted. Students might well bear in mind the fine distinctions between reasoned dissent and raw intolerance, between knowledge and wisdom, between compromise and copping out. Already 1968 has produced one supreme lesson: students have much more to gain by working actively for change within the existing system than by dropping out of it.