Word: maye
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Rather than making such quick classifications of "good" and "bad" activities, one may envisage a court of continuum, with fine gradations from activities largely incompatible with a university's humanist nature to activities compatible with that nature though disagreeable to some individuals. Even the Seven Demands of the NAC, for example. though advanced as a minimum program, cover a wide range of this continuum...
...that it is impossible to make distinctions along the continuum, that in order to protect essential university activities, academic freedom must be extended to cover the entire continuum including even such projects as MIRV. Yet human beings spend much of their lives making just such fine distinctions: though it may be difficult, it is not impossible to decide what a university should and should not do. The distinctions thus made can be upheld-and the essential activities of a university protected-only if they are made rationally, through a continuing debate striving for a wide agreement by all concerned groups...
Besides preserving the integrity of the university, peaceful demonstration and persuasion will best serve the radical cause. The NAC procest will never "stop" research on MIRV. though it may-if it gains enough power and exacts the necessary price from the university-stop MIRV research at M.I.T. The same individuals who are doing research on MIRV at M.I.T., however, can do so equally well at other institutions-ones similar to say. the Rand Corporation-where they will be free from interference from protesting students...
There is a good reason to seek a separation between the university and the government. A society is more likely to reform itself if it has several centers of influence and an intellectual community which is not committed to an official policy which it may have played a part in concocting. However, this is not to say that the university's refusal to service certain outside groups would deprive them of any essential output. Action against the university may lighten the burden of the soul, but it will have only a limited effect in achieving wider change...
...most dispossessed element in the country. While student activism has contributed to public disaffection with the war, it has not done much to change the domestic situation. Despite the efforts of Progressive Labor, little headway has been made in securing support for radical causes among workers. This may change and, if it does, student potential for initiating effective action on domestic issues will greatly improve. However, as things now stand, those who participate in violent action against the university do not directly suffer from its undesirable consequences...