Universities can’t withstand mobs, as countless assaults have proven. I’ve lived through two: at Washington University in St. Louis, in 1968, and then about a decade later at the University of Rome. In the summer of ’68 I saw a good deal of the French “Revolution,†which took over most of Paris for a week or so. Its headquarters were at the Sorbonne.
It’s in the nature of campus revolts that the leaders aren’t going to be satisfied with limited reforms to the school; they are inspired by inflated rhetoric, and they see themselves at the center of a great moment in world history. They have, after all, been told that they are the Next Big Thing, the new elite, those destined to govern. Or rule, as the case may be. So they must constantly demonstrate their power versus the hated “Establishment.†That the Establishment gave them these misguided notions is beside the point, it’s part and parcel of the phenomenon, as several professors are being reminded.
So the purge is on, and my guess is that it will get a lot worse before the inevitable reaction sets in. When I was at Rome U, it was routine for “fascist†professors to be beaten, or locked in elevators, or worse. One morning a law professor who sat on Italy’s Supreme Court was gunned down in the middle of the campus. Thereafter, on exam days, the sidewalks were lined with armed police, and rightly so: some of the student “activists†were real terrorists, they were in the Red Brigades or Potere Operaio or some such.
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