An article in The Saturday Evening Post (May 8, 1965), discussing the various youth groups on the left, quotes a leader of Students for a Democratic Society:
“We began by rejecting the old sectarian left and its ancient quarrels, and with a contempt for American society, which we saw as depraved. We are interested in direct action and. specific issues. We do not spend endless hours debating the nature of Soviet Russia or whether Yugoslavia is a degenerate workers’ state.” [And]: “With sit-ins we saw for the first time the chance for direct participation in meaningful social revolution.”
In their off-picket-line hours, [states the same article] the P.L. [Progressive Labor] youngsters hang out at the experimental theaters and coffee shops of Manhattan’s East Village. Their taste in reading runs more to Sartre than to Marx.
With an interesting touch of unanimity, a survey in Newsweek (March 22, 1965) quotes a young man on the other side of the continent: ” “These students don’t read Marx,’ said one Berkeley Free Student Movement leader. They read Camus.'”
“If they are rebels,” the survey continues, “they are rebels without an ideology, and without long-range revolutionary programs. They rally over issues, not philosophies, and seem unable to formulate or sustain a systematized political theory of society, either from the left or right.”
“Today’s student seeks to find himself through what he does, not what he thinks,” the survey declares explicitly—and quotes some adult authorities in sympathetic confirmation. ” ‘What you have now, as in the 30’s,’ says New York Post editor James A. Wechsler, ‘are groups of activists who really want to function in life.’ But not ideologically. ‘We used to sit around and debate Marxism, but students now are working for civil-rights and peace.'” Richard Unsworth, chaplain at Dartmouth, is quoted as saying: “In the world of today’s campus ‘the avenue now is doing and then reflecting on your doing, instead of reflecting, then deciding, and then doing, the way it was a few years ago.'” Paul Goodman, described as writer, educator and “one of the students’ current heroes,” is quoted as hailing the Berkeley movement because: “The leaders of the insurrection, he says, ‘didn’t play it cool, they took risks, they were willing to be confused, they didn’t know whether it all would be a success or a failure. Now they don’t want to be cool any more, they want to take over.'” [Italics mine. The same tribute could be paid to any drunken driver.]
The theme of “taking over” is repeated again and again. The immediate target, apparently, is the take-over of the universities. The New York Times Magazine article quotes one of the F.S.M. leaders: “Our idea is that the university is composed of faculty, students, books, and ideas. In a literal sense, the administration is merely there to make sure the sidewalks are kept clean. It should be the servant of the faculty and the students.”
The climax of this particular line was a news story in The New York Times (March 29, 1965) under the heading: “Collegians Adopt a ‘Bill of Rights.'”
A group of Eastern college students declared here [in Philadelphia] this weekend that college administrators should be no more than housekeepers in the educational community.
“The modern college or university,” they said, “should be run by the students and the professors; administrators would be maintenance, clerical and safety personnel whose purpose is to enforce the will of faculty and students.”
A manifesto to this effect was adopted at a meeting held at the University of Pennsylvania and attended by two hundred youths
from 39 colleges in the Philadelphia and New York areas, Harvard, Yale, the University of California at
Berkeley, and from schools in the Midwest.
A recurring theme in the meeting was that colleges and universities had become servants of the “financial, industrial, and military establishment,” and that students and faculty were being “sold down the river” by administrators.
Among the provisions of the manifesto were declarations of freedom to join, organize or hold meetings of any organization . . . abolition of tuition fees; control of law enforcement by the students and faculty; an end to the Reserve Officer Training Corps; abolition of loyalty oaths; student-faculty control over curriculum….
The method used to adopt that manifesto is illuminating: “About 200 students attended the meeting, 45 remaining until the end when the ‘Student Bill of Rights’ was adopted.” So much for “democratic procedures” and for the activists’ right to the title of spokesmen for American youth.
What significance is ascribed to the student rebellion by all these reports and by the authorities they choose to quote? Moral courage is not a characteristic of today’s culture, but in no other contemporary issue has moral cowardice been revealed to such a naked, ugly extent. Not only do most of the commentators lack an independent evaluation of the events, not only do they take their cue from the rebels, but of all the rebels’ complaints, it is the most superficial, irrelevant and, therefore, the safest, that they choose to support and to accept as the cause of the rebellion: the complaint that the universities have grown “too big.”
As if they had mushroomed overnight, the “bigness” of the universities is suddenly decried by the consensus as a national problem and blamed for the “unrest” of the students, whose motives are hailed as youthful “idealism.” In today’s culture, it has always been safe to attack “bigness.” And since the meaningless issue of mere size has long served as a means of evading real issues, on all sides of all political fences, a new catch-phrase has been added to the list of “Big Business,” “Big Labor,” “Big Government,” etc.: “Big University.”
For a more sophisticated audience, the socialist magazine The New Leader (December 21, 1964) offers a Marxist-Freudian appraisal, ascribing the rebellion primarily to “alienation” (quoting Savio: “Somehow people are being separated off from something”) and to “generational revolt” (“Spontaneously the natural idiom of the student political protest was that of sexual protest against the forbidding university administrator who ruled in loco parentis”).
But the prize for expressing the moral-intellectual essence of today’s culture should go to Governor Brown of California. Remember that the University of California is a state institution, that its Regents are appointed by the Governor and that he, therefore, was the ultimate target of the revolt, including all its manifestations, from physical violence to filthy language.
Have we made our society safe for students with ideas? [said Governor Brown at a campus dinner] We have not. Students have changed but the structure of the university and its attitudes towards its students have not kept pace with that change.
Therefore, some students felt they had the right to go outside the law to force the change. But in so doing, they displayed the height of idealistic hypocrisy. [Italics mine.] On the one hand, they held up the Federal Constitution, demanding their rights of political advocacy. But at the same time, they threw away the principle of due process in favor of direct action.
In doing so, they were as wrong as the university. This, then, is the great challenge that faces us, the challenge of change.1
Consider the fact that Governor Brown is generally regarded as a powerful chief executive and, by California Republicans, as a formidable opponent. Consider the fact that “according to the California Public Opinion Poll, 74 percent of the people disapprove of the student protest movement in Berkeley.”2 Then observe that Governor Brown did not dare denounce a movement led or manipulated by a group of forty-five students—and that he felt obliged to qualify the term “hypocrisy” by the adjective “idealistic,” thus creating one of the weirdest combinations in today’s vocabulary of evasion.
Now observe that in all that mass of comments, appraisals, and interpretations (including the ponderous survey in Newsweek which offered statistics on every imaginable aspect of college life), not one word was said about the content of modern education, about the nature of the ideas that are being inculcated by today’s universities. Every possible question was raised and considered, except: What are the students taught to think? This, apparently, was what no one dared discuss.
This is what we shall now proceed to discuss.
If a dramatist had the power to convert philosophical ideas into real, flesh-and-blood people, and attempted to create the walking embodiments of modern philosophy—the result would be the Berkeley rebels.
These “activists” are so fully, literally, loyally, devastating-ly the products of modern philosophy that someone should cry to all the university administrations and faculties: “Brothers, you asked for it!”
Mankind could not expect to remain unscathed after decades of exposure to the radiation of intellectual fission-debris, such as: “Reason is impotent to know things as they are—reality is unknowable—certainty is impossible—knowledge is mere probability—truth is that which works—mind is a superstition —logic is a social convention—ethics is a matter of subjective commitment to an arbitrary postulate.” And the consequent mutations are those contorted young creatures who scream, in chronic terror, that they know nothing and want to rule everything.