Education: Tame Spring, Troubled Stanford

One year ago this week, the killings at Kent State University fueled mass student protest across the U.S. Now the nation’s campuses are encountering the tamest spring offensive by radical students in several years.

Still, assaults persist, notably at Stanford University. One recent attack, in Stanford eyes, came from local police. Armed with a search warrant, cops raided the offices of the Stanford Daily seeking reporters’ notes and photographs that supposedly implicated some participants in a demonstration at the university hospital. While strongly critical of the police, campus officials were equally aghast at a series of violent acts that seemed to be largely the work of nonstudents.

Six weeks ago, unknown radicals apparently decided to protest the suspension of a Maoist library worker sympathetic to suspended Professor H. Bruce Franklin (TIME, March 15). They sabotaged the library by removing or damaging 11,000 catalogue cards, pulling books from shelves and pouring honey on them. Since then, a different, previously unheard-of radical group has claimed credit for the fire-bombing of an empty patrol car belonging to university police. No group has yet admitted vandalizing a campus drugstore, firing armor-piercing bullets at an electric power transfer station on campus, or setting fires in the car of a law student who is defending radical demonstrators and in several dormitories, including one housing black students.

Two weeks ago, a plastic bomb exploded near Stanford President Richard Lyman’s office, causing an estimated $25,000 worth of damage. So far, local police, the university’s campus cops and the FBI have not made a single arrest. To Lyman, the incidents were a relic of the past rather than a harbinger of the future. “Terrorism,” he said, “tends to be the tactic of a protest movement that has no mass following.” The Stanford Daily seemed to agree. Though past editorials have occasionally taken radical stands, the paper condemned the new violence: “It is chilling to realize that human life is held in as little regard by these revolutionaries as it is by the men who shape our policies in Indochina.”