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This settlement cannot be effective until approved by the university's board of regents; the only clue to their probable attitude is Chairman Edward Carters concerned reference to "extraordinary problems created by recent incidents." But to turn it down now means risking more than further protest from Savio and F.S.M.: the Berkeley faculty which voted 824 to 115 for its proposed solution, cannot lightly be overridden. Moreover, the proposal is not out of line with practice at other U.S. universities which have come a long way greater freedom of expression since day in 1952 when Senator Robert Taft had to stand outside the gates at the University of Illinois to speak to students.
A Spectrum of Freedom. By and large, restrictions are the mark of small, church-affiliated colleges colleges intent on serving in loco parentis, while freedom for students defined roughly as the the rights and curbs of ordinary civil law, is the goal at big, old, and scholastically high-ranking state and private universities.
At Harvard, students choose speakers freely and collect funds on school property for political causes. To avoid excesses, the university relies on a strong tradition that an undergraduate will "conduct himself in a way becoming to a Harvard student," says Dean of Students Robert Watson. Other Ivy League schools have similar attitudes. "If a student gets arrested, that's his problem."says Cornell Dean of Students Stanley W. Davis. Columbia's President Grayson Kirk has the right of veto over campus speakers but never uses it; last year students there chartered a Sexual Freedom Forum.
Yale was deeply embarrassed a year ago when Kingman Brewster, then acting president, persuaded students to cancel a speaking invitation to Alabama's Governor George Wallace; and now "the administration suffers in agonizing silence rather than tamper with free speech and action" says Yale Daily News Chairman Alexander Sharp. When Princeton undergraduates invited Alger Hiss to the campus in 1956, prompting hundreds of irate letters from alumni, then-President Harold Willis Dodds refused to intervene. "We have sought to resolve this problem not in terms of academic freedom, but in the deeper terms of human freedom," he said. "To learn the personal significance of fire, the child must burn himself."
Occasionally a tolerant school will use persuasion to prevent a scorching. During the Cuban missile crisis two years ago, Brandeis University urged students to behave with "good taste" and cancel an invitation to Communist Party Chairman Gus Hall.