University Centers for Rational Alternatives

The University Centers for Rational Alternatives was set up in 1968 by Sidney Hook, Miro Todorovich and others in response to the rise of student radicalism in the late 1960s. In April 1969 the group's executive committee adopted resolutions urging University faculties to adopt 'in advance guidelines of action' in order to prevent the occupation of University premises.

History

A report in Time Magazine in August 1970 described the context:

Student radicals anxious to make college "relevant" will not be the only ones concerned with the future of the university this fall. On campuses across the country, small groups of professors are gathering to make sure that the old-fashioned pursuit of learning does not get lost in the shuffle.

Prominent among these groups is a loosely organized enterprise, University Centers for Rational Alternatives, which got started after the Columbia University student disorders of 1968 and is now gaining new support in the wake of Kent and Jackson State. It does not aim for a mass membership. But, says Washington's Catholic University Politics Professor James Dornan, "It's amazing what a few can accomplish—as the leftists have certainly proved."

The main business of the university is education, argues UCRA President Sidney Hook, professor of philosophy at New York University. "Intellectual unrest is not a problem but a virtue," he says, "and no university can have too much of it. The problem, and the threat, is not academic unrest but academic disruption and violence, which flow from substituting for the academic goals of learning the political goals of action. The university," he adds, "is not responsible for the existence of war, poverty and other evils."

According to the Time report the group was engaged in the following activities:

The group's present plans call for a flexible response to new threats and for amplifying some of last year's unorganized response to campus violence. One goal will be opposition to the so-called "Princeton Plan," which would close campuses for two weeks in the fall so students can work in political campaigns. Another is the prevention of student "strikes" similar to those that closed hundreds of colleges last spring.

The group also has some ideas about the control of campus violence. A school's students and faculty, Hook suggests, should meet at the beginning of each year to spell out guidelines for legitimate protest. After that, he argues, the rules should be strictly applied.

UCRA's members are not without experience. At Catholic University and Northeastern University in Boston, they were instrumental in defeating Princeton Plan resolutions. On other campuses they worked to keep colleges open and to establish democratic means of deciding when classes should be suspended. At St. Louis' Washington University, UCRA Director Gray Dorsey, a law professor, filed suit on behalf of four students kept from classes by a student strike. The suit is pending and UCRA members are considering the same strategy elsewhere.

Educational Reform

UCRA held a conference on 21-22 of September 1973 entitled 'Philosophy of Curriculum' at Rockefeller University. The conference was designed to discuss the extent to which 'relevance, values and career training should permeate the higher educucation curriculums'. Sidney Hook questioned whether students were being taught to be 'probing and incisive', arguing that the student of the day were 'gullible,' 'superstitious' and vulnerable to 'demagogic appeal', and 'empty show and eloquence'.

Criticism of Affirmative Action

In 1981 Miro Todorovich testified to a senate committee on behalf of UCRA arguing that affirmative action in universities was tantamount to the 'systematic vandalism' of higher education by federal regulators. Todorovich argued that 'With a growing sense or horror, many of us in the academy watched what can only be called systematic educational vandalism against the universities,'. Supporters of affirmative action at the committee denied the charges that the practice was 'a system of inflexible quotas that give preference to minorities or women requardless of merit'.

Sidney Hook also criticised the practice in a 1986 letter to the New York Times. He argued:

Granted that society in the past has been guilty of immoral discrimination against minorities - blacks, Orientals, Jews, women and others. But it is illiberal and unjust to try to redress the effects of past discrimination by punishing innocent parties in the present whose ancestors had no part in imposing the patterns of discrimination in the past. If society in the past has been guilty of discrimination, then the costs of reparations should be borne by society as a whole to the extent that there can ever be adequate reparation rather than by innocent persons in the present.

In my own field of occupational interest, I know of young white males who have even been denied interviews by gutless chairmen, eager to fill numerical goals for minorities and women. These young men were compelled to abandon their disciplines to earn a living. In other disciplines where minimally qualified American blacks are not available, blacks from some African countries, who have never suffered discrimination at the hands of Americans, have been hired to fulfill the numerical goal for minorities.

When the bars against racial discrimination were dropped in the area of professional sports after the Jackie Robinson case, the rule of selection became merit or excellence. No one counts the proportions of blacks, whites or yellows on any team in relation to the numerical distribution of races in the general population. By all means, let us have remedial efforts to bring everyone willing and able up to the starting line.

But after that, one principle of merit, one standard of excellence, should be fairly applied to every-one regardless of their race, religion, sex or national origin. Anyone who denies this has a right to call himself anything he pleases except a liberal.

People

Sidney Hook | Miro Todorovich