Article Says Colleges Must Lead Resistance

An article in the November, 1970 issue of the Harvard Educational Review has called on American universities to reformulate themselves as communities of active resistance to governmental policies.

The article, written by Antony Mullaney, a staff member of the Warwick House in Roxbury and a former community representative to the Massachusetts Youth Services Board, challenges the traditional role of the university as an objective observer which cannot involve itself in partisan issues.

"The most critical business of education today is to become a center of dissent and resistance in itself, and an interpreter of such behavior to the public," Mullaney says in the article.

Mullaney says that the university must abandon its role of passive neutrality in political events. "In its attempts to be 'neutral,' the university has sided with those who resist change in power relationships," his article says.

"Our is a society characterized by non-responsiveness to well-documented and recognized major problems," Mullaney said yesterday. "If none of the formal units of American life join the resistance movement, then polarization will increase and there'll be more chaotic violence in this country."

"The university could become the one major institution in the United State that opposes this country's present power relationships," Mullaney concluded. "If it doesn't, then it becomes like all other American institutions- a part of the problem."