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 people—barely 6,000 of whom pay national dues—the far-left S.D.S. boasts chapters on at least 250 campuses. Opposed to "imperialism" (whatever that means these days), racism and oppression, S.D.S. finds the American university guilty of all three. The organization got its start at the University of Michigan as a student offshoot of the League for Industrial Democracy, a socialist trade-unionist group. In 1962, following S.D.S.'s first national convention at Port Huron, Mich., Tom Hayden, a former editor of the Michigan Daily, drafted the 30,000-word "Port Huron statement" that was to become a basic manifesto of the New Left. Concluding that it was possible to "change circumstances in the school, the work places, the bureaucracies, the government," Hayden advocated a participatory democracy in which the individual could "share in those social decisions determining the quality and direction of his life."
Against the Framework. S.D.S. concentrated at first on civil rights issues. It organized Northern ghetto dwellers in such projects as Chicago's Jobs Or Income—Now (JOIN) and fought to get Mississippi's "Freedom delegation" seated at the 1964 Democratic Convention. The Viet Nam war, however, led to a change of tactics. By 1966, S.D.S. had broken with the L.I.D. and decided against working within the existing political framework. Since then, the group has been trying to be what National Secretary Michael Spiegel, 21, a onetime Harvard student, calls "an independent radical force."
That independence extends to individual S.D.S. chapters, which plan their own programs, ranging from attacks on residence rules at Princeton to a campaign to haul down a Confederate flag at the University of Texas. There is remarkably little guidance from the
S.D.S. national office, run by a triumvirate consisting of Spiegel and two other national secretaries, Penn State Graduate Carl Davidson, 24, and University of Texas Graduate Robert Pardun, 26. Headquarters is a pair of drab rooms above the Chicken House restaurant on Chicago's sleazy West Madison Street. No two chapters are alike. At Harvard, the 200-member S.D.S. is a thriving, cohesive force. At Ohio's Oberlin College, where no national officer has paid a visit in more than two years, the local chapter is a dispirited band of 35 students. The group has all but melded into the Oberlin Resistance, a broader-based organization whose protests recently prevented Navy recruiters from interviewing on campus.