Administrative Pressures and Student
Political Activity
(Preface 1998)
This document was the
introduction to the FSM's historical brief.
Ten days after the
police-car sit-in dispersed, a spontaneous committee began preparing a background report
for FSM's representatives to submit to the Committee on Campus Political Activity. In
seventeen feverish days, a group of 100 students formed to research the history of the
administration's interference with political activity, wrote forty reports on different
aspects, and published twenty in a limited edition -- 135 pages of small, single-spaced
text in faint ditto ink -- shortly before the CCPA was dissolved and active conflict
resumed.
Administrative
Pressures... was the
cover-essay to this group report. Five thousand copies were printed by offset press. Its
wide distribution helped to solidify understanding of the conflict's historical context
and functional issues, among students and perhaps among faculty.
At the end, an index of
the published reports appears. We plan to put these and the unpublished ones online, when
resources avail.