Word: strikes
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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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...
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...
What counted with the board of trustees, where the final counting is done, was the fact that Hayakawa stopped the strike. The cost included 731 arrests, 120 casualties, numerous fires and fights. Outside politics had been injected into a supposedly apolitical institution, and many students and faculty members had gone over to the opposition; but a degree of order had been restored, and the college was functioning once again. As for public opinion, as opposed to campus opinion, a recent poll showed that Hayakawa is now second only to Ronald Reagan as the most popular man in California...
...what purpose? More to come of this. First however, a DIGRESSION ON IRONY, on the striking--or fortuitous--juxtapositions which brings the easy laugh or the satisfied and satisfying smirk, on the most promiscuously overtaxed on present literary and theatrical modes. There is no smidgen of irony in this production of Jesus, though certain of its devices, described here outside their stage context, will inevitably suggest the reverse. The hundreds of vivid and contemporary visual references with which Mr. Mayer has leavened this text--derived exclusively (excepting the interpolated songs) from the King James Version, Gospels and Apocrypha...