Colleges: Somber Warning

San Francisco State once ranked among the top public colleges in the U.S. It is now a sad symbol of the American campus destroying itself. All sides can share the blame: the minority-group students who made extravagant “nonnegotiable” demands, the divided faculty, the administrators who temporized, the hard-line trustees, the police who broke S.F.’s bloody student strike last winter at a cost of 120 casualties and more than 730 arrests. The past, though, is less important than the future: Is the violence finally under control?

In a report on the traumatic events at the college, a study group of the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence warned last week that “the story of San Francisco State is an unfinished story.” Though an uneasy peace prevails, said the group, the deeply rooted problems underlying the crisis at S.F. State and many other colleges remain unsolved. Those problems include “longstanding social and economic injustices and inequities” and the reluctance of those in authority “to respond rapidly to the need for change.”

The study group is pessimistic about S.F. State—and any other U.S. college headed for the same vortex. The group urges California officials to launch “a thorough review of the whole spectrum of present educational policy, especially as to admission qualifications and content of curriculum.” Better communication among the different elements of the college is also vital: “Steps must be taken to bring president, faculty and students truly together in critical periods.” Without such reforms, said the group, the future is bleak: “An overriding public opinion may force the conversion of San Francisco State and other colleges into screened and guarded camps, institutions of learning in name only and in reality isolated from the mainstream of American life.”