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Like all visionaries, the student rebels believe that ultimately their ideas will become infectious. The cops at Berkeley, for example, roll up with their loudspeakers and say: "You are ordered, in the name of the people of California, to disperse." The students often reply with chants: "We are the people." They mean that they are fighting for the things people want: racial justice, peace in Viet Nam, economic equality.
Toward Human Scale
In the face of such cosmic complaints, specific university reforms at times seem almost minor and beside the point. And yet they are necessary, just as is the reform of other American institutions. Universities are in for trouble until they mobilize a moderate majority that respects institutions as much as individuals. The way out is to restore democratic governance on campuses across the country, chiefly by creating coalitions of moderate students and the all-too-aloof faculty. Indeed, students are being added to faculty and administrative committees and presidential selection boards at a rapid rate, admittedly in response to their demands. At some colleges, students have gained seats in academic senates, and there are proposals to place them on boards of trustees. At the University of Kansas, where there has been no disruptive protest movement, students have a majority on the disciplinary committee and equal representation on a screening committee that recently selected the next chancellor.
Beyond governance is the problem of reducing huge, impersonal universities to human scale. One approach is the "cluster" college patterned after Oxbridge colleges—autonomous units linked for services but with their own special areas of study. At the University of California in Santa Cruz, four cluster colleges, with an average of 600 undergraduates each, have been opened on a rolling site dotted with redwoods and overlooking the distant Pacific. Each college takes a differing approach to the liberal arts, and the students mingle easily with their professors in the lounges and the dining halls, to their intellectual profit. So far, Santa Cruz has five applicants for every place available. The University of Nebraska will open an experimental college next fall aimed at interdepartmental teaching. Students will also teach one another. "It will be a thinkin, live-in, learnin situation," says English Professor Robert Knoll, who will head the college. "Everybody knows we've got to do it over," he says. "Within the past generation, a new kind of student, a new kind of faculty, and a new kind of university have developed in response to a demanding world."