I claim no novelty for the following reflections on violence and coercion. Certainly there is no new data presented here. I offer, rather, simply a discussion of values and how to value certain things, and even in this sense I doubt that newness will appear. This, however, is no apology. For regarding value and how to value, I am increasingly convinced that much of our responsibility consists in rediscovery rather than discovery.

The attention of the Western world has been concentrated very forcibly in recent years on the meaning and the place of the university in contemporary society. Student unrest and political “activisim” have gained widespread publicity in all communications media and in every legislature. In France, Mexico, Czechoslovakia, Japan, Germany, Spain, Italy, and the United States, the university confrontation has occasioned grave civil crises that have shaken the very stability of government itself. The origin and nature of this phenomenon is rooted in the intellectual history of the modern world which has sought to effect a humanism totally subject to man's intellectual and technological control. What we are now seeing is how this control is passing from thought and technique to political and messianic action, to movements which profess to “re-create” man in the midst of his most pressing crises of poverty, race, war, and equality.