Choosing the Right Analogy: Factory, Prison, or Battlefield

( The author is professor of Economics and fellow of the Center for International Affairs. The following article is from a speech delivered 18 months ago, and is reprinted with permission of the publisher from Cybernetics, Simulation, and Conflict Resolution, edited by Douglas E. Knight. Huntington W. Curtis and Lawrence J. Fogel. Copyright 1971 Spartan Books. )

Like everything else a university is unique, at least to those whose careers are involved in it. But when a unique institution suffers an unfamiliar ailment, the prognosis is up for grabs. The question is not, what is a university, but what is a university like?

Most of us, whatever side we are on, have an image or analogy in mind when thinking about "campus confrontation." Even the title of this session, "confrontation," constrains our image and our vocabulary and, as a result, our thinking.

Students often have strong images. The SDS seems to believe that the 1969 occupation of University Hall at Harvard University was obviously justified-not merely justified, but obviously justified-so long as it is acknowledged that it was a political act. They further believe that to prove a political act it is enough to show that it had political results. The occupation did have political results. I have never understood why the political motives are a good excuse, but I am convinced that some students think so. Somewhere there must be an analogy so obvious to them that they are not aware that it is an analogy, and so obscure to me that I do not know how to refute the point if I am right that their analogy is wrong.

Analogies other than those I chose exist. There is that of a consumer movement, or of a church. I am not sure that mine are the closest analogies to campus violence; they are merely three that I have found suggestive. (Three is better than one because their very plurality insists that we are only exploring.)

A prison, in Erving Goffman's terminology, is a "total institution," like a nunnery or a boot camp or a mental hospital. The bargaining power of prisoners looks pretty small. They cannot recruit help from outside, communications are restricted, and they have no alumni association that looks out for them. There's not much they can withhold from the institution; much of their work is "make-work." They even have poor opportunities for violence because so much of the time they are locked up. But once in awhile they start some.

Often it begins in one of those moments of semi-freedom, like meal time. Once they become violent, there's not much they can do except occupy a building and take hostages. Once you have a building and some hostages, what do you do next? You announce your demands. But suppose you had no plans. You are like the fisherman with an enchanted sturgeon on his line: quick, make three wishes.

Early in the 1950's there had been few prison riots, and prisoners were poor at knowing what to demand once they had a building and some hostages. Gradually, over the first dozen riots, the grapevine worked and experience was shared, culture accumulated, and when prisoners had their buildings and their hostages they knew where to look for typewriters and mimeograph machines, how to draft demands, how to organize. Negotiations became stylized.

Put yourself in their position. What can you demand? Not anything that requires large amounts of money, because there's nobody available to command large amounts of money. You cannot call a legislature into session to change the budget because some cons have some hostages in a building. Demands have to be made on a tight time schedule. You can't stay there long, either working out your demands or making sure that agreements can be enforced.

One thing is easy to think of-amnesty. Once you're in the building and the fun is over, safety is important, and amnesty is attractive, especially to the leaders, who typically formulate the demands. There is something else you may control: whom you negotiate with. You can specify that it be the warden or the governor or the publisher of a newspaper or someone from the Prison Reform Society or the chaplain. They don't have to comply, but you don't have to negotiate. You can often demand publicity. Sometimes you can demand subsequent investigation.

You can probably, in a hurry, think of particular individuals whom you would like fired, demoted, or punished. And often you need one demand-and can think of one-that is related in some way to the original outburst, so that it retroactively identifies the violence with your demands: better food, if it started in the dining hall; more exercise time, if it started in the exercise yard; better working conditions, if it started in a workshop. And there usually has to be at least one demand that dramatizes brutality or injustice, even nominal acceptance of which legitimizes the violence. This may be coupled with the demand that a particular individual be fired.

It is hard to get pledges that the demands will be kopt once the hostages are released and the participants are back in their cells. This is one reason for publicity, for calling in referees.

It does not sound altogether different from occupied buildings on campus. My impression is that students who have occupied campus buildings converged fairly quickly on a standardized set of demands, more efficiently as successive occupations took place though different individuals were involved. Incidentally, the convergence of prisoner demands is strong evidence that "outside agitators" need not be present in order that a pattern become visible in the conduct of successive confrontations.

An important difference between the prison and the campus is that there is not much future in a prolonged confrontation in prison. If negotiations break down, or don't start, you've had it. It is hard to make a career out of failure there. There may be those on campus who have an interest in prolonging the violence or the occupation or the confrontation, who can look forward to careers built on the social disruption they have caused; there is no comparable career in prison martyrdom, yet.

Apparently in the prison situation, as in many campus situations, it is not the demands that motivate the violence, but the other way around. Confrontation generates demands. Violence was frequently unexpected by those who took part in it, even by its leaders. Afterwards the act has to be legitimized by being incorporated into the demands; the domands must project the image backwards, so that, whatever the violence was about, it is part of a movement and not an impromptu act.

Turn now to the factory. I wondered during our April uprisings what "student power" meant in the university. Is the "university community"-that paternalistic community in which students are junior members-on the way out? One of the first principles at Harvard, one that apparently has quite some appeal throughout the country, is that a student confrontation should in the first instance be treated as a university matter, within the "family," not for the police or the national guard, not for the courts. And when students are accorded "power," the power they are accorded is interwoven in the structure of the university.

This is not what American unions sought. Unions in this country have been pretty clear about two things. They are not to be company unions- not to be part of the family. And they are not after membership on corporate committees; they do not want to be part of the corporate structure.

It will not altogether surprise me if this, something like the role of labor, becomes the role of students in the future. One reason it will not surprise me is that I expect it would be an effective role for them. They may be stronger outside the system, confronting it and negotiating with it, than joining it. Students might discover, as John L. Lewis discovered, that there is strength in industrial unionism, cutting across corporate lines. Do not let the university define the stage of your theater as this particular campus; if you are Harvard, combine with M. I. T., Boston, Northeastern, Tufts, Brandeis. There is strength in power and weakness in the disunity of your adversary. (And you may need money.)

Students may have discovered that added numbers, especially outsiders, provide immunity from disciplinary procedures, as well as experience and skill. At present the outsiders are advertised as "adventurers," veterans of skirmishes elsewhere, career dropouts, peripatetic confronters. Maybe the outsiders are going to be lawyers, researchers, negotiators, people good at formulating demands and negotiating, and immune to seduction by the power structure of any particular university.

Perhaps we should expect the development of appropriate instruments of coercion: nonviolent class boycotts, tuition strikes, the boycotting of ceremonies. Maybe they will discover techniques that beat violence from their point of view, and from ours.

At some stage the model of the National Labor Relations Act may become pertinent. What is the appropriate bargaining unit at a university: the medical school, the whole university, or all the universities in the metropolitan area? Who votes in the election of officers? Who certifies that the election was honest? What are the campaign rules? Who declares that the university has spoiled the election by providing public-relations assistance to some student candidate for office? When is a student union a company union? Will there be dues checkoff, a closed shop? Can unenrolled youths join the union and vote in the election of officers if they are willing to pay their dues or if they meet certain criteria for being "students"?

Out of all this might come a more conservative student movement than any that we have now. It took a decade or two for tht to come out of industrial unionism, but I would expect it on campus, partly because there would be a career for more conservative students in this kind of campus political activity. (There might even develop some premium for dessing like the lawyer you hire or that you talk with across the table.) At most universities the majority student opinion is far less radical than the activities that hit the headlines. At most universities there's no way now that a silent majority, or even a silent large majority, can organize to express itself, to elect leaders and to bind themselves in negotiations. Evidently the more radical students want to avoid any large student movement that might, after a decade, become as conservative as Harry Bridges' International Longshoremen and Warehousemen's Union.

If this trend develops, there will arise the questions that arose within the CIO. Will a national student union be a political body or concern itself with the bread-and-butter issues of the university? My guess is that it would not end in bread-and-butter unionism, but be more like the CIO's Political Action Committee of the later New Deal days.

I have been talking about the students as "them," and find it harder to talk about the faculty. Who are "we" in this picture? We think of ourselves as clite members of a community that contains deans, lawyers, treasurers, clerks, typists, painters, carpenters and custodians. Maybe we're just part of the hired help, maybe a third party. I can squeeze something out of the analogy when I talk about students, but it leaves me stranded in thinking about the faculty.

So I turn now to the battlefield. I thought, when I contributed the title of this paper some months ago, that I was going to draw most of my insights from the battlefield. I was curious about the limits in war, about truces and how to maintain them, about escalation and de-escalation. I thought Israeli-Jordanian activity might offer an analogy for student-faculty activity. I did not mainly have guerrilla warfare in mind.

The asymmetry of guerrilla warfare is apparent here: almost everything that students do to us we cannot do to them (or it hasn't occurred to us). They can occupy our buildings, but they have no buildings that we care to occupy; they can boycott our classes, but teach no classes that we can boycott. They can interfere with a lot of what we do, but there's little that we can interfere in that they really want to do, especially if they enjoy the theatrics and we have to be careful not to make it easy for them by attempting reprisals in kind. "He who hath wife and child," Francis Bacon pointed out, "hath given hostages to fortune," or even he who hath fragile laboratory equipment, sensitive medical files, or a perishable manuscript. (Thank God for copying machines in the age of incendiarism.)

There is also a lack of organization and discipline on the part of the students, and one thing that may be learned from the history of the battlefield is that it is hard either to win or to lose a war if the other side is not organized. I am reminded of Winfield Scott's approach to Mexico City: he was told to take it easy or there might not be a government there to surrender when he took the place.

There are a few things on campus that are much like Vietnam, or most wars everywhere. One is the enormous importance attached to diplomatic recognition. It used to be said, "We will negotiate with the unions, but not as such." We will negotiate with the NLF, but not as such. We will negotiate with the black student political organization, but not "as such." "Our demands are not negotiable." The fear of legitimizing, dignifying, and recognizing the other side seems to be as much a principle onuniversity campuses as it was in Algeria. Vietnam, or wherever contending factions in a civil war claim legitimacy.

Second is the role imputed to outside intervention. Non-university police come in, and it is like Americans or North Vietnamese coming into the country. In Secretary McNamara's language, it is "a wholly different war." On most university campuses the tradition of "conservatives" on both sides-the non-negotiators on both sides-is that there should not be any alien infiltrators or occupiers. The North Vietnamese must go home, the Americans must go home, the police must stay away, the Berkeley veterans have no business here, the French must stay out, the welfare mothers must stay out, the federal government must stay out, Stokeley Carmichael must stay out.

Third, almost everybody holds a domino theory, whichever side he is on, at Harvard or in Vietnam. The proceedings of faculty meetings are dominated by why we must not do this or that because of what it will lead to next time, the draft today and foreign policy tomorrow, black studies today and biology tomorrow, degree requirements today and tenure appointments tomorrow. It seems to be the same on the other side, the side of the radical students.

Fourth, and this happens too in military wars, the personal careers of leaders are involved in the policies they can accept and the decisions they can make. It may be that many, many more university presidents are going to discover what Lyndon Johnson did, that governments cannot reverse themselves. Governments resign, and let successor governments reverse themselves.

I was late arriving and walked into the middle of a talk, and the words that hit me were, "there can be no compromise on academic freedom with ...." I did not hear what it was that couldn't be compromised with. I am sure there are some things that cannot. The other side feels, too, that there can be no compromise. What makes it hardest for either side to get out of a campus confrontation, is that issues in conflict are elevated-escalated-into moral principles. The trouble with moral principles is that they are hard to compromise, especially without personal admissions of turpitude. One of the troubles with saying that anything is a matter of high moral principle, that concessions would be unworthy of our traditions and unmanly in our behavior, is that if we yield and make the concession it is hard to recover. Life can go on, but it is less easy if we construe concession in advance as an admission of depravity and not of error. Ho Chi Minh and Lyndon Johnson converted what might have been a war over part of Southeast Asia into a test of mettle, of honor, of the future of two competing systems; and it is doubly difficult to disconfront.

A little less principle and a little more pragmatism, even less belief in a rigid domino theory, would be helpful. "No compromise" is a great battle cry but usually a poor strategy; "non-negotiable demands" are the stock-in-trade of negotiators, but a dangerous faith.

I have tried to illustrate the "domino theory" with wooden dominoes. I lined them up and struck the first one down; six fell and the seventh stood. I lined them up and tried again, and after a few tries I could make them all fall. It takes some care.

Not all dominoes fall when one goes down. Not with wooden dominoes, probably not in Southeast Asia, probably not in university departments, nor even in a student movement. The weak version of the domino theory is incontestable; the absolute version is discredited on the living room floor.