REPRISALS AGAINST PROFESSORS
By George Saunders
With signs of growing support from the working class, Polish students have persisted in their campaign of demonstrations for socialist democracy. The Gomulka regime has responded to the sharpening tremors with more punitive measures, such as the dismissal of six leading Warsaw University professors March 25, and with the violence of police clubs and of anti- Semitic vituperation.
In Cracow and Warsaw, students took up the tactic of sit-in strikes after engaging in street demonstrations and boycotts of classes. The sit-in by 5,000 students at the Warsaw Polytechnic School March 24 had the greatest impact, coming as it did after a speech by Gomulka calling for an end to demonstrations.
At the March 20 meeting where the Polytechnic students voted to strike, a message from workers at a rolling-stock plant in Wroclaw was read expressing solidarity with student demands. During the 48-hour strike hundreds of adults came up to the spiked fences of the school campus and passed money and food through to the students.
During the sit-in the facade of the administration building was draped with banners. Some of the slogans were "Warsaw With the Students," "Workers, Your Cause Is Ours," "Democracy and Socialism," "Truth From the Press," "Don't Lie to Our Fathers, Workers and Peasants," and "Higher Wages --— Not Security Police."
Students distributed copies of resolutions demanding "freedom of expression, assembly, mass meeting, and demonstration," and calling for reforms like those in Czechoslovakia. The leaflets referred to "the revolutionary seething in the nation" and said, "Don't lie to the people," alluding to the rallies sponsored by the regime where "Zionists"
have been blamed for the disorders. According to Le Monde, during the strike the students received "many messages of sympathy from various institutions, as well as from the working-class milieu."
Late on the second day of the strike, March 22, some 10,000 people gathered outside the campus. The regime obviously feared that the insurgency of the students might spread. At 7 p.m. a column of riot police took up positions on the street bordering the campus. The crowd dispersed. At 8 p.m. an official ultimatum, broadcast over television, warned that unless the students ended their strike within the hour, they faced expulsion from school.
Apparently stirred by the ultimatum, the crowd of 10,000 reappeared at Workers Unity Square across from the school. At 9 p-m., the crucial hour, a student representative appeared on the balcony of a school building overlooking the square. He announced that, while some were leaving, 4,000 students had voted to defy the ultimatum. Cheers went up from the crowd: "General Strike," "Workers With Us." The crowd outside and the students within joined in singing the Internationale. The students held out for several hours more and then disbanded. The demonstration displayed good discipline and thorough organization on the part of the rebels.
In retaliation for this bold resistance, the regime fired six professors noted for their connections with rebel students. These were the same liberal professors on whom Gomulka blamed the crisis in his speech March 19. (In that speech he also half-heartedly attempted to set a tone of greater subtlety for the anti-Semitic campaign, which was being waged quite crudely by certain elements of the hierarchy.)
The professors who were dismissed were Bronislaw Baczko, Leszek Kolakowski , Stefen Morawski, Zygmunt Bauman, Wlodzimierz Brus, and Maria Hirszowicz. In announcing their dismissal, the Polish press agency said they were “revisionists" who sought to "implant in youth political views contrary to the regime."
Among the youth named by the press agency as having been influenced by these professors were Jacek Kuron, Karol Modzelewski, Adam Michnik, Henryk Szlaifer, and Jozef Dojcgewant.
Kuron and Modzelewski, instructors at Warsaw University, were the authors of a document called "Open Letter to the Party," which advocated establishment of workers democracy with workers councils, and a revolutionary foreign policy. They were jailed in 1965 for circulating the document. Released in 1967, they have been rearrested during the present upsurge as its alleged inspirers.
Michnik and Szlajfer were arrested for leading a student demonstration January 30 to protest the closing of the play "Dziady." (See World Outlook, March 29, p. 270.) Michnik had earlier been expelled from Warsaw University for his activities protesting the expulsion from the party of Prof. Leszek Kolakowski (now fired from his job as well). Kolakowski, at odds with the party leadership since 1956, was expelled in late. 1966 because of a speech criticizing the regime.
The Polish press agency explained the official view of the link between the rebel students and the dissident professors: the student group, it said, "could not have been active long and exerted such influence" had it not been for their "professorial defenders and protectors." The professors, said the press agency, had acted "contrary to the duties that the law on higher education imposes on them," especially since they were teaching subjects of "great ideological significance in close connection with politics.
Far from being cowed by the regime's latest reprisals, the students have been spurred to further resistance. They were reported meeting in secret to plan more protests like last week's sit-ins despite the threat of arrest or of being drafted into military service.
INDIANS IN BRAZIL