Word: hayakawas
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Until last year, Hayakawa seemed quite unlikely to turn into a campus warrior. The Canadian-born son of a Japanese immigrant importer, he came to the U.S. for graduate study and taught college English in Chicago, where he also wrote a jazz column for a Negro newspaper. In 1941, he became a famous popularizer of semantics with his bestseller Language in Action. At S.F. State, which he joined in 1955, he was a part-time professor with no administrative experience...
Obvious Leader. What transformed Hayakawa was his gut reaction to one of the worst campus situations in U.S. history. By last November, S.F. State had run through six presidents in seven years. A student strike had been called by the supermilitant Black Students Union to enforce ten "nonnegotiable" demands. Among them: an autonomous black studies department, full professor rank for the department head (who had been on the faculty less than one year), the firing of a white administrator and admission of all black students who applied for the next year. The militants enforced the strike with violent terrorist tactics...
...Hayakawa urged the faculty to fight back-showing himself to be an obvious leader whom the trustees soon picked as acting president. When he took over, the campus had shut down -a battleground of arson, bombings and police raids. How would Hayakawa handle...
Unlike other college presidents, Hayakawa-devised a hard-line strategy of keeping police power on the campus at all times. His predecessors had called in the police on occasion, but during the height of the strike Hayakawa deployed as many as 600 police on campus or on call nearby. "The revolutionaries said they would destroy the college," he explained in testimony before a Senate subcommittee. "I said they would not. We had police available before trouble started, instead of waiting for the situation to get out of hand...
...that point, most students deplored the extremists' tactics and were interested only in continuing their education. But soon Hayakawa's tactics were also being questioned. Dealing firmly with all opposition, he invalidated a student election when candidates unfavorable to him won, called the strike leaders a "gang of goons and neo-Nazis," suspended the student newspaper for printing anti-Hayakawa editorials. When four of the college's five black administrators, who had wide student support, resigned, he said, "I am glad to see them go; we can do without them." These moves, together with his massive...