Campus Disorders: A Transactional Approach

In all the varied comment on campus disorders little attention has been paid to the group process and the dynamic interactions that create the various factions, on and off campus, and set them into such intransigent, antagonistic, and occasionally violent relations with each other. Especially prominent through its absence has been a consideration of the psychodynamics, both conscious and unconscious, underlying the group conflicts. An examination of this sort might be of interest only to specialists, or even suspect, were it not for the peculiar and unlikely behaviors exhibited on all sides during a campus crisis. Many observers of such incidents have noted, though few have put into print, the number of surprising, illogical actions which disfigure the behavior of previously collaborating groups—and of individuals within such groups—whenever activist students use militant or disruptive techniques to obtain satisfaction of demands for change.

Low-boiling points and trigger-happy responses, frequently based on the imagery of Western films and television programs, occur at the highest levels of administrative responsibility. During his 1966 gubernatorial campaign, Ronald Reagan, now the Governor of California, said that the student leaders of the 1964 Free Speech Movement at the Berkeley campus of the University of California “should have been taken by the scruff of the neck and thrown out of the university.” Testifying in May 1969 before the McClellan Committee hearings on “Riots, Civil and Criminal Disorders,” Eric Hoffer, the longshoreman-philosopher, a student of the fanatical “True Believer,” said about violence: