University Centers for Rational Alternatives

The University Centers for Rational Alternatives was set up by Sidney Hook and others in response to the rise of student radicalism in the late 1960s.

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.