Senate Committee Attacks Universities

A Senate committee, following a study of nine colleges, including Harvard, has called the nation's campuses "focal points for groups whose clear motive is to create chaos and anarchy."

The Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations of the Senate Committee on Governmental Operations, which released its report yesterday on hearings held almost two years ago, is the same one from which Senator Joseph R. McCarthy (D-Wise.) terrorized the nation in the early fifties.

But yesterday's charges are considerably more temperate. While attacking SDS, the Black Panthers and "others of similar philosophy" for inciting disruptions, the report also chides college administrators for failing to provide "easy communication of grievances to persons competent to act on these grievances."

And a staff member of a Senator on the committee said that the report- coming as it does after more complete treatment of the subject by groups such as the President's Commission on Campus Unrest- is likely to have "no effect at all."

Three committee members filed additional views calling the report outdated, and two- Jacob K. Javits (R-N.Y.) and Charles Percy (R-III.)- urged that it not be released at all.

The committee said of groups such as SDS and the Panthers, "They do not want the issues- the controversy- resolved. They seek to agitate strong emotions and resulting violence as vehicles for rebellion, revolution and eventual destruction of the 'system.'"

The report added that many disorders were led and instigated by non-students and students from other schools- "traveling organizers and fomenters of disruption and rebellion." It noted that "the aims and tactics of local groups often are patterned upon and are basically identical with those of nationally known militant and revolutionary organizations."

Administrators came under more criticism. "To students who have attempted to find traditional solutions and who have not engaged in disorders," the committee said, "it frequently appears that their college administrators have succumbed to the effects of disruptions generated by extremists... They have in too many instances observed that the revolutionary tactics of intimidation and violence produce results."

Nonetheless, the report's recommendations contain nothing stronger than a suggestion that universities take pictures of riots and obtain court injunctions against obstructive demonstrations. The court injunction- unused by Harvard, Columbia and other universities with disruptions before the committee's hearing in July 1969- has become almost standard operating procedure since then.

Harvard has obtained two injunctions against building occupations in the past year-and-a-half- one against members of the Organization for Black Unity who took over University Hall in December 1969, and one against the women who occupied 888 Memorial Drive earlier this month.

For its 1969 hearings, the committee subpoenaed several university presidents, including President Pusey. S. I. Hayakawa, president of San Francisco State Sollege, told the committee his secret for handling disruptions: "When they said their demands were non-negotiable, I took their word for it and didn't negotiate," President Morris Abram of Brandeis and Andrew W. Cordier of Columbia both urged vehemently that the universities be permittedto resolve their own difficulties free of government stricture.

Pusey, who had told the committee the same thing 18 years ago when McCarthy was chairman, was never given a chance to testify because J. C. Von Helms '62, then a tutor in Lowell House and now a speechwriter for Vice President Spiro T. Agnew, spent too long on the stand criticizing Pusey's actions during the crisis of the previous Spring. Helms had written committee chairman John L. McClellan (D-Ark.) requesting the opportunity to testify.

In May 1969, the committee also subpoenaed the records of 175 Harvard students who had been recorded in the newspapers as having participated in the takeover of University Hall that April. Harvard supplied them with the names of 32 on their list who were receiving federal financial aid, but refused to supply any more information.

In a "minority view" filed with yesterday's report, Percy said that it "is clearly out of date, has been over-taken both by events and superior treatment of the subject, and might well make a negative rather than a positive contribution. It could well be charged that the Senate, by issuing this report, simply does not understand the issues involved."

In an "individual view," Javitz criticized the hearings and the recommendations as being too limited, as well as having been made obsolete by the events of the past two years.

And in an "additional view," Sen, Abraham Ribicoff (D-Conn.), who did not vote against releasing the report, chastised it for failing to see the problem in a larger focus.

"Universities are not the only institutions under attack," Ribicoff said. "The family is fragmenting, churches are said to be irrelevant, and the government is stagnating."

But Ribicoff added later, "Student dissent today merely reflects the suspicion among the general populace that headless horsemen are in the saddle leading us through times of trouble and turmoil."

The schools investigated by the committee were the University of California at Berkeley, Stanford, Harvard, Columbia, City College of New York, Brooklyn College, Vorhees Junior College, North Carolina Agriculture and Technical State University, and Howard University.

Chairman McClelland blamed the holdup in releasing the report on members who delayed in making their comments after its initial distribution in January 1970. But a Senate aide said yesterday, "that subcommittee has a track record of holding hearings then years later releasing a report."