In 1969, when John Hannah, after twenty-eight years as MSU’s president, left to head the U.S. Agency for International Development, the trustees, taken by surprise by his abrupt departure, asked Walter Adams to grasp the helm while they searched for a permanent successor.

Their choice of Adams was itself a surprise—not least to the nominee. Adams, who had been at MSU since 1947, was steeped in the land-grant philosophy, regarded by students as an outstanding teacher, highly respected in Washington, D.C. (where he regularly testified on economic policy in congressional hearings), and known internationally as a tireless if quixotic...

When John A. Hannah announced his retirement as president of Michigan State University to become Director of the U.S. Agency for International Development, it marked the end of an era. For twenty-eight years, he had done all the things which Clark Kerr says a university president must do; he was a “friend of the students, a colleague to the faculty, a good fellow with the alumni, a sound administrator with the trustees, a good speaker with the public, an astute bargainer with the foundations and the federal agencies, a politician with the state legislature, a friend of industry, labor, and...

By the spring of 1968, the pattern of student radicalism, both in the United States and in Western Europe, should have been abundantly clear. Mark Rudd had had his confrontation at Columbia, Daniel Cohn-Bendit had staged hiscontestationat Nanterre, and Rudi Dutschke had organized hisAuseinandersetzungat Berlin. The ideological objectives and the underlying strategy of “the movement” were no longer a mystery.

In a manifesto published six months before the fateful events of April 1968, the Columbia Students for a Democratic Society stated its goals with explicit candor—and even revealed a timetable for their realization (the final...

In march 1968, the President’s Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders reported that the United States was moving toward “two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal.” The Commission concluded that the seminal cause of civil disorder was white racism: “What white Americans have never fully understood—but what the Negro can never forget—is that white society is deeply implicated in the ghetto. White institutions created it, white institutions maintain it, and white society condones it.” Race prejudice, said the Commission, has decisively shaped American history. It has created pervasive discrimination in employment, housing, and education, destroying opportunity and...

Campus unrest and student disturbances. Bombings, vandalism, acts of terror. A growing cult of violence, practiced by some and condoned by others. Why do these things happen in this most affluent of societies? What do our young people want? How are we to deal with them?

Finding a solution requires launching the right type of inquiry, because the form of the inquiry tends to dictate the questions asked and guide the answers received. Self-pleasing sophistry is an invitation to failure. Faulty diagnosis means applying the wrong remedies, and the wrong remedies aggravate the disease instead of curing it. A correct...

On a whistlestop during the electoral campaign of 1968, candidate Richard Nixon spotted a hand-made sign, held aloft by a little girl. “Bring us together” was the plea. The candidate promised a sympathetic response.

In his inaugural address, President Nixon returned to this theme. He deplored the “angry rhetoric that fans discontents into hatreds” and urged his fellow citizens to lower their voices and “stop shouting at one another.” He advocated negotiation instead of confrontation, conciliation instead of polarization. He seemed to be offering that statesmanlike leadership that seeks to transcend partisan bitterness.

Nixon’s era of good feelings, we now...

Twelve years before I became president, Michigan State University accepted a sizable grant from the Carnegie Corporation to do a worldwide survey of American university programs overseas. The central assignment was to investigate the new programs undertaken by American universities, under the aegis of the U.S. International Cooperation Administration (now AID) and the philanthropic foundations. These programs, which required not only the release of individual specialists on ad hoc assignments, but the assumption by the universities of a continuinginstitutionalresponsibility for program planning and execution, had made American universities subcontractors in the dispensing of technical assistance: reforming business education...

Another dimension of the institutional neutrality debate revolves around admissions. Who shall be allowed to go to college? What kind of college? How are the applicant’s credentials to be judged? Shall such extraneous variables as race be given any consideration? Is it proper for universities to set quotas to accommodate minorities, or go even further to a policy of “open admissions”?

Again, the debate basically turns on the conception of the university, and the role it plays in society. To the “classicist,” the university has three primary obligations: first, a commitment to transmit high culture—to shape students’ mind and...

“The strongest man,” wrote Rousseau inThe Social Contract, “is never strong enough to be always master unless he transforms his power into right and obedience into duty….”

“To govern is to exercise authority,” modern political theorists agree. “No institution can live free of the daily shadow of coercion without the freely given consent of its members. A university cannot rule by power. In fact, it has no power…. The lack of power makes the problem of winning assent much more a question of agreement than of vote, for if a minority finds a situation immoral, or intolerable, a majority...