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through accommodation and compro- emed their own delicate enterprise with said that one-fourth of the complaints el at
mise are now taken into the courtroom. a complicated balance of understand- filed with OCR involved higher educa- ur
The number of civil suits filed in federal ings, intuitions, and subtleties, We ti0n_ ‘ cc
courts doubled between 1960 and 1975, granted our institutions of leaming And headline-producing discrimina- , (if
with the Supreme Court’s caseload al- legal exemptions and immunities. And tion suits are only the tip of the legal ice-
most tripling in ten years. Newsweek, in the rare instances when colleges were burg for academe. With unionism a vc
echoing Holmes in spirit if not intent, brought before the bar, the courts de- growing force on campuses, universities Su
calls the mounting influence of law on ferred to academic judgement as a mat- increasingly find themselves in court SG
American life simply “one of the great, ter of course, asking not whether an ac- over labor practices. Students, aroused •v
unnoticed revolutions in U.S. history." tion taken was wise or correct, but only by the consumerism movement, are
The results of this revolution are now whether it had been taken with due suing because their courses do not meet m
being noticed. They involve in many authority. their expectations. Tax-exemptions are Sli
cases the wholesale re-weaving of what No longer. Beginning with World being challenged. Even playing rock ; Y`
one jurist calls "the intricate web of re- War II, higher education abandoned its songs at a student concert can be d
lationship between people, government, "splendid isolation" and became an ac- perilous, as Harvard discovered when it 1 . (
and institutions." Some see dangers in tive participant in the day-to-day affairs was recently sued for violation of the ln
that. Donald Horowitz, in his book The of society—from conducting research 1976 Copyright Act. m
Courts and Soczlzl Policy, worries about under contract to training special con- EO
the consequences of accepting narrow, stituent groups like the veterans. Col-  
piecemeal judicial solutions to what are leges and universities were declared by a • . la
complex problems of national priorities. series of Congresses and Presidents to be IndIVIdU¤| SU
And he asserts that judges arc gener- a "national resource" and universal sl
alists, not specialists; they cannot fine- higher education became a national udminisfrqfofs qfé E);
tune their decisions to fit the special re- goal. Federal dollars in ever-increasing
quirements of one, specialized area of amounts flowed to the campuses, The novv   personally w'
American life. more deeply colleges and universities Cc
Because of its unique structure and became involved in helping society to   in \\ ‘_  
purpose, American higher education meet specific goals and the more depen- ` _
has been remarkably free over the de- dent on government funds they became,   fu
cades to chart its own course. This free- the less persuasive was their claim to im- some cuses • .  ` ll t
dom grew out Of a notion as old as the munity and apartness. ‘ .. !  aj
first medieval gatherings of teachers Today higher education fares little of E
and students: that the law cannot pre- better than big business in the number (
sume sufficient knowledge to guide and range of lawsuits brought against it. "The range of problems facing us is , m
scholars in their search for truth. High- The provisions of the 1964 Civil Rights absolutely enormous," says Norman L. ` m
er education was a world apart, a re- Act barring race and sex discrimination Epstein, who, when he was vice chancel· wl
public of scholars. Even the word in employment, for example, did not lor and chief counsel for the California  
uruixerszty comes from the Latin Univer- become applicable to higher education State University and College system, di- y ‘
sxtas, which in Roman law denoted a until 1972. But less than two years later, rected a staff of some 14 lawyers. He V ar
self—goveming corporate unit. there were already more than 1,600 says his office’s workload is divided into j CC
Until recently, Americans fully sup- charges of sex discrimination alone about 30 functional areas. "We used to I df
_ ported the idea that universities gov- against colleges and universities on file say, in recruiting new lawyers, that we bz
  with the Equal Employment Opportu- handled just about everything but ad- Ca
nity Commission. This past fall, the di- miralty law. Now we handle admiralty _ gc
rector of the U.S. Office of Civil Rights as well." { YC
Indeed. There is virtually no area of   YC
higher education that is not now vulner- g
able to court intrusion. Consider some  
of the major legal battlezones. i
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