Having seen many references to John Searle’s 1971 book The Campus War, I got a copy from the Gardner and couldn’t put it down. It’s a fascinating, polemical, and often riotous internal-liberal critique of student movements and university governance.
What struck me most is how clearly Searle explains the institutional logic of campus responses to activism. Reading it, I kept recognizing assumptions and strategies that still seem to animate how campus leaders think and act today. The book is also full of great anecdotes—Searle describes being blocked by the administration from commenting on a film about the HUAC, regents trying to obtain his governance notes, and even radical students stealing his notes at one point.
The through-line is this:
- Activists identify an issue that is treated as morally absolute
- “No one can understand contemporary student unrest who fails to perceive the extent to which it is a religious movement.”
- “The second common feature of the various issues is that they relate to what I shall call some Sacred Topic. That is, they connect campus or university phenomena with some major issue off the campus which students are deeply concerned about.
- “It is absolutely essential to understand this point: student revolts are not produced by any generalized sense of injustice but by concern over a limited set of Sacred Topics.”
- Students make demands on the university that it cannot realistically grant
- “It is also essential to understand that the formal structure of a well-managed Stage One requires that (a) the demand must be regarded by the administration as ungrantable; (b) the demand must relate a campus issue to a national or international issue. It must particularize some larger anxiety. (c) The larger issue must concern a Sacred Topic.”
- The activists must sublimate the Sacred Topic such that the university itself becomes somehow responsible for it
- “The most striking tactical device of this generation of student activists is the conversion of student anxieties and aspirations on national and international moral questions into hostility against universities and university authorities. A student is worried about the war in Vietnam or the continuation of racial discrimination. What can he do about it? Not much, or so it would fust appear. But suppose you can convince him that the enemy is here at home on the campus, that the president of Columbia is the local repository of racism, or that the Harvard administration is actively supporting the napalming of Vietnamese peasants. And suppose, further, that as “proof’ of this you can offer the fact that the university refused a demand that was designed to fight racism or militarism, and worse yet that it is expelling from the university the most effecive fighters against racism and militarism. Then the indignation is not only further aroused but is particularized against a visible and vulnerable enemy. Large numbers of students who will not demonstrate illegally against the war in Vietnam will demonstrate illegally if they can demonstrate against someone’s being disciplined for demonstrating illegally against the war in Vietnam. The original issue is made more personal and “relevant” to their life as students, and above all easier to act on by being redefined with the university authorities as the main enemy. The war in Vietnam is a long way off, and racism in the abstract is an elusive target, but the dean’s office is just across the campus.
- The resulting refusal to meet whatever demand is made enables the university itself to be cast as the enemy
- “…the identification of the university as a source of evil is part of a holistic ideology that goes as follows: the structure of power in America is a seamless fabric. Within this fabric the tentacles (mixed metaphors are common in radical rhetoric) of the military-industrial-educational complex spread from the Pentagon through the White House and right down to the dean of students’ office. The university is not just an adjunct or assistant to the forces of evil, but is part of the very fabric of the power structure that governs America and is responsible for the evils we are fighting against…I honestly wish I were exaggerating or parodying this style of argument, but if anything, I have not fully exposed its intellectual poverty.”
- Disruption becomes morally justified
- Enforcement escalates conflict
- The institution comes to be seen as the primary evil
- Governance begins to break down.
One of Searle’s more sobering insights is that enforcement often produces the very kind of symbolic or performative violence that the institution is structurally unable to “win,” which helps explain the deep reluctance to enforce rules at all.
The book concludes with a plea for rigor and a retreat from the “narcissism” of identity, which he sees as perverse, creating fragility and rage:
“Paradoxically the unwillingness to impose standards defeats rather than helps on of the aims for which the relaxation of standard has b been asked in the first place, the self-realization of the student. The search for identity by the student is a perfectly legitimate—indeed unavoidable—quest. What is illegitimate is that we should encourage the illusion that self-realization is a natural product of narcissism. The best way for young people to find themselves is to get outside themselves, and the best way for universities to help them is to insist on the highest standards of intellectual performance that their students are capable of meeting.”