(34 b)

7b

favors eliminating them. The student vanguard is powerful precisely because the majority of the students have been politicized in a left direction by the events of the 1960's.

To explain the changes in the predominant student mood as a consequence of specific historical events which have provided them with a different formative set of generational experiences than earlier generations does not account for the intra-generational variations. We have already seen that there is an enormous intra-generational gap between the political and social attitudes of university students and their less privileged age mates at work in factories and offices.

The statistical data presenting the distribution of attitudes and behavior among students conceals other variations which differentiate undergraduates. The eight million not only include a radical minority, *they* contain millions of conservatives; there are still many students who take the Protestant ethic seriously; most female undergraduates are still virgins; as noted, the majority have never experimented with drugs. The many extant surveys of students completed in recent years ignore the culture of the "squares." But a detailed examination of the factors contributing to activism should help our understanding of the general phenomenon of student protest.

The following chapter deals with research on these issues.

(34 a)

76 a

The opinion surveys of American students indicate that the large majority are not sympathetic with radical doctrines and tactics; most of them seemingly are conventional with respect to appearance, use of drugs, and dedication to academic achievement and a "straight" career. Many more still fill the stadiums to cheer on their varsity eleven on fall Saturdays than take part in political rallies or demonstrations of any kind. Yet the fact remains that the anti-Establishment Youth Culture has grown constantly year by year during the 1960's. Though but a small minority are radical, increasing proportions, often majorities are discontented with the way the country is run. Perhaps no other issue has done as much to alienate American students from American society and polity as the Vietnam War. Continued participation in it convinces many that they can have no confidence in the nation's rulers, in the elites of the older generation which permit it to continue. Obviously, many factors other than the war have pointed up to the young the seeming contradiction between the potential of an affluent society and the reality of racial discrimination and poverty. Most students take a liberal to left critical posture as American enters the 1970's.

The fact of predominant liberalism, commitment to egalitarianism in class and racial relations and opposition to war, explains the ability of the extreme left to set the tone in many colleges. For most students support the overt goals of most demonstrations. The majority is against the war, and, therefore, looks with some sympathy on efforts to symbolically oppose it through confrontations directed against R.O.T.C., defense related research, recruiters for defense involved corporations. The vast majority views black inequality as a crime and consequently supports to some extent sit-ins or other demonstrations dedicated to improve the position of the blacks. The majority, though not participant in the drug culture, supports the rights of others to do so. Thus, efforts to restrict the use of marijuana, cooperation with the police in enforcing narcotics laws are met with hostility.

Efforts to mobilize the "moderates" against the extremists usually fail because authority is seen as defying social evils or outmoded forms of authority. This is particularly true when outside force is brought to a campus to suppress a demonstration or maintain order. The resistance by the non-involved students to such efforts is not simply a manifestation of "generational solidarity" or the affirmation of the principle of university autonomy, it is also motivated by the sympathy of the campus majority for the "objectives", if not the "tactics" of the demonstrators. To stress the minority status of the radicals or the habitual drug users does not mean that the majority

34

cations have attacked survey studies of student attitudes as "pig research," an serving the interests of the academic establishment. It is curious, therefore, that some of these surveys would seem to overestimate the membership of SDS. For example, the Yankelovich study suggests that close to 4 per cent of the student sample claimed membership in SDS. Given a total student population of over seven million in 1968-1969, this would mean an SDS membership of around 280,000. SDS, before it split at its 1969 convention, only claimed a national dues-paying membership of some 7,000, with another 30,000 involved in local chapter activities. It would seem that either the sample was drawn from institutions in which SDS is disproportionately strong, or that some sympathetic non-members claim membership. The argument that some who have engaged in formally illicit behavior such as smoking marijuana will not admit it to interviewers, thus resulting in an underestimation of those involved, may have some validity, but the findings of studies using anonymous questionnaires are not very different from those based on personal interviews.

33

marijuana, 88 per cent had not taken barbituates, and 92 per cent had never used LSD. The College Poll found that 62 per cent denied ever taking "drugs such as marijuana or LSD." Although many in the older generation have an image of college students as slovenly, bearded, and long-haired, this stereotype does not jibe with the impression which Gallup interviewers formed of the national sample which they interviewed in April 1969. Only 6 per cent of the men had beards, and 10 per cent were reported to be dressed in sloppy clothes. The interviewers judged that 81 per cent of the male students and 94 per cent of the females had a "generally neat appearances." The Yankelovich survey reported that only 38 per cent of the college youth ver- bally "reject the idea of conforming in dress and grooming." A majority (59 per cent) "would welcome more emphasis on re- spect for authority."

Since the results of these surveys are so much at variance with the conceptions of student attitudes and behavior presented by the media, and held by many students, particularly the more activist among them, and by college administrators, some may question their accuracy. The best argument for their reliability and validity is that five different national sur- vey organizations varying in their method (anonymous question- naire using different questions, or personal interview), and necessarily dealing with different samples of institutions, produce a high degree of consensus. It may be argued that the more left-disposed students are underrepresented, since in the last year or so, SDS and other extreme left groups and publi-

32

done so. The same survey found that only one-third of the college student respondents reported that they had ever had any experience with a drug, marijuana or other. The proportion who are involved with regular use of drugs is, of course, much smaller, just under 10 per cent. 73

This study illustrates the extent to which students, themselves, overestimate the extent to which their fellows have engaged in a form of well-publicized illicit behavior, much as students and others have exaggerated the propensity of others to violate middle-class sexual morality. Given the resistance to acceptance of these data among many interested in the campus scene, it may be worth documenting their credibility by reference to other studies. In an earlier review of the literature on drug use, Kenneth Keniston concluded that such behavior was limited to a small minority of the campus population. Extensive use of drugs is to be found primarily in a small group of schools, generally the elite colleges and universities which admit the brightest students, many from liberal intellectual family backgrounds. Different national surveys completed in 1969 yielded results in line with Keniston and Gilbert. Roper reported that 76 per cent of the college seniors said that they had never tried marijuana, and that 96 per cent had never used LSD. Only 2 per cent said they use it occasionally. The Gallup Survey of students in all classes in November found results very comparable to those of Roper. In response to an anonymous secret ballot, 68 per cent stated they had never tried

31

discontinued students think of the relative merits and sins of the university, there is no other establishment target which can be so easily attacked and affected, giving considerable publicity, and at a minimum risk of arrest and severe punishment. This was Daniel Cohn-Bendit's message, when he stated that as compared to other strata, students had no real excuse to avoid joining in militant actions. ✓72

## The Overestimation of the Dramatic

The evidence presented here from the various national opinion surveys, while documenting the increased opposition to the Vietnam War and the concomitant growth in radical and critical sentiments toward social institutions, generally indicates that the alienated include a relatively small proportion of the student population (10-15 per cent). The state of opinion on campus can't be gunged from observing demonstrations, or even through securing estimates of such opinion from campus leaders, whether these be university administrators, student body officers, or any other set of authorities. Informants have a strong tendency to overestimate the extent of support for highly visible forms of behavior.

The general point may be demonstrated with respect to the proportions involved in drug taking on American campuses. A Gilbert national survey of youth (February 1970), asked respondents to estimate the per cent of their own age group who have tried drugs. Among college students in the sample (1005), close to two-thirds (65 per cent) guessed 50 per cent or more have tried drugs, 34 per cent thought 70 per cent or more have

30

and the political and social characteristics of the faculty and students have remained constant.... It is the change in the level of disaffection that has caused the change in the frequency of campus protests and the decline in the quality of intellectual life.

The fact remains, of course, that the number of protests, sit-ins, and other demonstrations dedicated to changing the university has steadily increased over the years. This has been documented in various surveys of the issues raised in different situations. University administrations and faculties have been forced to react to demands to change the curriculum, modify the forms of academic governance, reform methods of teaching, and the like. Since the groups which press for such changes usually accompany them with charges that the existing policies are a major source of student discontent, many involved with universities not unnaturally conclude that this is so, that students are being treated badly, and that various changes are made, the discontent will disappear. But if it is true that the increase in complaint about the university has largely been a consequence of the growth in political unrest, then educational reform can not be expected to reduce student unrest. And in fact, a recent survey of over 1200 institutions reports that those which have made major educational adjustments, including increased student participation in governance, have not reduced their proneness to unrest as a result. (See discussion of this and other relevant studies in Chapter 3, pp. 001-001. ) Ironically, therefore, though the university is in many ways considered the best institution by all sectors of student opinion, the growth in political discontent results in more disruption on campus than within any other environment. Whatever

The same pattern is indicated by the results of an elaborate study of the factors related to the sharp escalation of protest on the Santa Barbara campus of the University of California (UCSB), which has come to rival Berkeley in proximity to sustain demonstrations that end in violence. Although many of the demonstrations at UCSB have pressed for institutional changes, Robert Smith concluded that "the findings here indicate that dissatisfaction from the war is a major determinant of student militancy even in protests that are unrelated to the war."

The frequency of campus protests is closely related to disaffection from the Vietnam War. When disaffection is high, campus protests are frequent. This is true even when the protests are not manifestly about the war or war-related issues. These aggregate relationships between disaffection and protest also hold true for individual students. Students who are disaffected are considerably more militant [on other issues]. This relationship is true even when a range of other test variables that independently affect militancy are simultaneously controlled....

At UCSB disaffection from the war provides the most powerful explanation for the change in student militancy and campus protests. This is true because the level of disaffection has increased tremendously over the last three academic years, while the levels of the test variables

forms of anti-war or civil rights work. The combination of a record of activism and leftist attitudes made for a much greater likelihood of involvement in the sit-ins, than either factor alone. Thus, the Columbia demonstrations of 1968 were clearly a result of the prior existence of activist political groups, and the fact that they occurred had little to do with the assets or liabilities of Columbia as an educational institution.

Similar conclusions are suggested about the sit-in in the Harvard University administration building and the consequent student strike which occurred in April 1969. An analysis of the reactions of a sample of Harvard students conducted by Marshall Meyer concluded that the main source of support for the demonstrations, and of antagonism to Harvard, was an underlying commitment to a leftist ideology. Student respondents were classified on a nine point attitude scale from left to right. When interviewed, almost two thirds (65 per cent) of those who were in the two most leftist categories thought that "the takeover of the building was justified," a proportion which declined to one-third (33 per cent) for the next category (moderate left), and to two per cent for those who were in the three most conservative groupings. Meyer

explicitly addressed himself to evaluating the thesis that radical protest is a consequence of the failings of the Harvard faculty.

Some critics and a committee of Harvard's overseers have concluded that loss of intimacy between students and faculty is the major source of tension. Were this the case, our data would reveal the absence of student-faculty contact and a correlation between leftism and the absence of contact. In fact they do not. Seventy-eight per cent of Harvard students say they are friendly with one or more faculty members; three quarters talk with an instructor outside of class at least once a week; and a quarter have these interchanges more than three times a week. Moreover, there is no relationship between a student's acquaintance with faculty members and his political position.... This evidence ... [means] that attempts to promote closer relationships between students and faculty will not diminish the level of unrest though they may have other salutary effects. (69)

Table 9

Relationship Between Political Beliefs and School Dissatisfaction in Affecting Support for the Goals of the Demonstration -
Columbia Students, May 1968
(Figures refer to percent supporting Goals)

<table><caption>Left-Right Political Index *</caption><thead><tr><th>School Disatisfaction Index *</th><th>Right</th><th>Medium Right</th><th>Medium Left</th><th>Left</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><th scope="row">Low</th><td>5</td><td>22</td><td>59</td><td>72</td></tr><tr><th scope="row">Medium Low</th><td>7</td><td>27</td><td>68</td><td>88</td></tr><tr><th scope="row">Medium High</th><td>18</td><td>36</td><td>65</td><td>92</td></tr><tr><th scope="row">High</th><td>10</td><td>41</td><td>79</td><td>95</td></tr></tbody></table>

* The Political Index is composed of a number of items including attitude toward the Vietnam War, Black Power, the Poor People's March, presidential candidates, and party support. The School Dissatisfaction Scale is formed from six items taken from Somers' studies of Berkeley students such as attitudes towards courses, impersonality as a result of size, concern for the educational welfare of the students.

Source - From a survey based on a random sample of 2,000 Columbia students completed by the Bureau of Applied Social Research. I am very grateful to Alan Barton for permission to use these and other unpublished data from his study.

It is clear from the above table that political orientations were much more important than educational grievances in determining the reactions of Columbia students toward the 1968 protests. In analyzing the factors related to participation in the sit-ins, Alan Barton found, that as in Berkeley in 1964, previous involvement in protest groups was most important. The overwhelming majority of those who took part, (83 percent) had been active in earlier

23

This is shown conclusively both in Yankelovich and Gallup 1969 national student surveys. Demonstrators are much more disposed to think that students should have "a greater say concerning the academic side of colleges," than others.⁶⁷ The more liberal to left students are more likely to say that universities need fundamental reform than the more moderate or conservative ones.⁶⁸

These findings, of course, do not indicate anything about the predominant direction of the relationship; that is, it is possible that growing discontent with education led many students to become political protesters. While this undoubtedly occurred in some cases, a large number of studies of the social background of student activists, and of the campus population generally, indicate that there is strong inter-generational continuity in political orientations. These researches, to be discussed in the following chapter, agree with Kenneth Keniston's insightful descriptive phrase that many of the student radicals of the 1960s are "red-diaper babies," the offspring of leftists of an earlier generation. The liberals also tend to come from liberal backgrounds. Given such evidence, it seems highly probable that the correlations between political and educational discontent reported in the various surveys are a result of political criticism producing a generalized anti-system point of view which includes the university. Hence, the increase in negative responses about the university, the growth in demands for major structural changes, have reflected the escalation of political protest, the growing radicalization of the student body, not the worsening of the educational experience.⁶⁹

Eomingly, therefore, students from liberal to left more intellectual cultural and political backgrounds attend schools where such orientations and values are reinforced by their teachers. Thus, a sufficiently large enrollment to provide a critical mass for impressive demonstrations and the appropriate type of student body should result in a politicized campus under present conditions, almost without regard to the administrative policies pursued. This conclusion has been sustained statistically by Alexander Astin in a study based on a sample of 35,000 students in 246 schools. His analyses were designed to estimate the relative importance of student and institutional variables. He concluded:

> The proportion of students who participate in demonstrations against either the war in Vietnam or racial discrimination can be predicted with substantial accuracy solely from a knowledge of the characteristics of the students who enter the institution... Environmental factors seem to be somewhat more important with respect to protests against the administrative policies of the college, although student input characteristics still appear to carry much more weight than environmental characteristics in determining whether or not such protests will occur. (24)

Similar conclusions have been reached in more recent studies by Harold Mims, Astin and Bayer report that given the same type of student body, large universities are more likely to have demonstrations than smaller ones. (25) Hodgkinson analyzed reports for 1230 institutions secured in 1968-1969, which dealt with whether they "had experienced an increase in student protest and demonstrations during the last ten years." (26) He also found that the more scholarly committed schools, as indicated by the highest degree awarded and research involvements of faculty, were most inclined to have had an increase. Size also was closely associated with tendency to sustain protests. The range of difference ran from 88 per cent for those with more than 25,000 students to 14 per cent for schools with less than 1,000 enrolled. (27)

13

policy making" did not appear to reduce the rate of protests; if anything, the "reverse would seem to be more likely." He reached a conclusion which is also clearly implicit in Astin's research, "that tinkering with structures may not be any long-term solution to problems of student protest...[since] There are quite clearly protest-prone students and protest-prone faculty." (28)

There can be little doubt that some universities appear to play a role as centers of activism beyond what may be explained by the characteristics of their students. It may be suggested that the political traditions and images of certain institutions help to determine the orientation of their students and faculty.

In the United States, Madison and Berkeley have maintained a record as centers of radicalism. The University of Wisconsin image goes back to before World War I; the strength of progressive and Socialist politics in the state contributed to its political aura. Berkeley is a particularly interesting case in point. The San Francisco Bay area has a history dating back to the turn of the century as being among the most liberal-left communities in the nation. Various data pertaining to the Berkeley campus since the end of World War II point up the continuity of that university as a center of leftism. Berkeley was the only major institution in the country to sustain a major faculty revolt against restrictive anti-Communist personnel policies in the form of the loyalty oath controversy of 1949-50. (29) The data collected by Paul Lazarsfeld in a national opinion survey of the attitudes of social scientists, conducted in 1954 to evaluate the effect of McCarthyism on universities, indicated in an unpublished analysis that the Berkeley faculty members were the most liberal of any of the schools sampled in this study, a pattern which subsequent studies suggest continued into the sixties.

14

In 1963-64, the year before the celebrated Berkeley student revolt, San Francisco Bay area students received national publicity for a series of massive successful sit-in demonstrations at various business firms designed to secure jobs for Negroes. Prior to the emergence of the FSM protest, the Berkeley campus probably had more different left-wing and activist groups with more members than any other school in the country. The vigor and effectiveness of the Free Speech Movement must in some part be credited to the prior existence of a well-organized and politically experienced group of activist students. A study of the 600 students who held a police car captive in the first major confrontation of the affair in October 1964, reported that over half of them had taken part in at least one previous demonstration, and that 17 percent indicated they had taken part in seven or more. (30) Since the Berkeley Revolt, Bay Area activists have continued their leading role, by major efforts to disrupt the operation of the Selective Service, by conducting two of the four most publicized student demonstrations of 1967-68, and in six major confrontations during 1968-69. During the protests against the Cambodian incursion in 1970, large segments of the Berkeley faculty and students again took the lead in efforts to "reconstitute" the University in classroom-based efforts to end the war and "the social conditions which made the war possible," which involved giving regular grade credit for participation in election campaigns and other political activities.

It is interesting to note that in analyzing the factors which explain why the Free University of Berlin that "is the Berkeley of West Germany," is the leading center of militant student activism, Jürgen Habermas, a leading sociologist who also happens to be a strong supporter of left-wing politics, points to causal factors in the background

of Berlin, which strongly resemble those present in
Berkeley in 1964. First, the Free University has been the
most liberal one in the country, that is students have had
more "extensive rights and powers" than elsewhere. "Second,
the composition of the student body, as shown by empirical
studies, favors politicization owing to selective immigration
from West Germany." Those students who seek to escape West
German conscription, more likely on that score to be leftist,
can do so by moving to West Berlin. "Third, the proportion
of politically conscious and liberal-minded professors at some
of the Berlin faculties is, in my estimation, considerably
higher than at universities in the Federal Republic. Hence,
students in Berlin have always been able to count on the
solidarity of a group of their professors." Thus, as
Professor Habermas indicates the basic reasons for a
heightened level of political disturbances and violence
at the Free University are clearly not a consequence of its
relative educational deficiencies, but rather than as
Berkeley, it attracted many more radically disposed students
and professors than other universities.

In stressing that involvement in leftist student activism is a function
of the general political orientation which students bring to the university,
it is not being argued that changes in attitude do not occur, or even that
conversions do not take place. Universities clearly do have a liberalizing
effect so that there is a gradual shift to the left. This even occurred during

15

the "Silent Fifties." A significant number of students in the late 1960s have been much more radical in their actions and opinions than earlier postwar generations of American students, or than their parents. The larger events which created a basis for a renewed visible radical movement have influenced many students to the left of the orientation in which they were reared. Many students of liberal parents have felt impelled to act out the moral imperatives implicit in the seemingly "academic" liberalism of the older generation. Political events combined with various elements in the situation of students pressed a number of liberal students to become active radicals.

Kenneth Keniston and William Cowdry indicate students "most likely to hold radical beliefs and act on them" are those whose fathers have similar social and political values to their own. Those who hold radical beliefs, but are not active politically, are more likely to report that their fathers are unlike themselves. (33) The principle predisposing factors which determined who among the students would become activists, therefore, existed before they entered the university.

However, if we hold pre-university orientation constant, it obviously will make a difference which university a student attends, what major he chooses, who his friends are on the campus, what his relations are with his teachers of varying political persuasions, what particular extra-curricular activities he happens to get involved in, and the like. The relationships between the orientations which students form before university and the choices they make after entering which help maintain their general political stances are only correlations; many students necessarily behave differently from the way those relationships would predict.

Clearly, conversions, drastic changes in belief, in political identity,

16

do occur among university students, as among other groups. During a period in which events shift the larger political climate to the left or right, young people, with fewer ties to the past, are undoubtedly more likely to change than older ones. There is also a special aspect of university life which enhances the changes that certain groups of students will be more likely to find satisfaction in intense political experience. Various studies suggest that mobility, particularly geographic mobility, where one becomes a stranger in an unfamiliar social context, is conducive to making individuals available for causes which invoke intense commitment.

Thus new students, or recent transfers, are more likely to be politically active than those who have been in the social system for longer periods. (32) Local students, or those relatively close to home, are less likely to be active than those who are a considerable distance from their home communities. In Berkeley, Madison and other university centers, the activists have come disproportionately from the ranks of the migrants, and of recently arrived new students.

## Psychological Research

Some of the research by psychologists seeks to go beyond the analysis of factors which seem to have a direct impact on political choice. They have also sought to account for varying orientations and degrees of involvement by personality traits. Thus they have looked at such factors as variations in the way different groups of students have been roared by their parents, i.e., in a permissive or authoritarian atmosphere, as well as investigating family relationships, student intelligence, sociability and the like. Such studies have reported interesting and

17

relatively consistent differences between the minority of student activists and the rest of the student population. Those widely heralded findings are unconvincing, in large part because few of the extant studies hold constant the sociological and politically relevant factors in the backgrounds of the students. For example, Richard Flacks, and Westby and Braungart, report that loftist activists tend to be the offspring of permissive families as judged by child-rearing practices, and of families characterized by a strong mother who dominates family life and decisions. (35)

Conversely, conservative activists tend to come from families with more strict relationships between parents and children, and in which the father plays a dominant controlling role. To a considerable extent these differences correspond to the variations reported in studies of Jewish and Protestant families. Childhood rearing practices tend to be linked to socio-cultural political outlooks. To prove that such factors play an independent role in determining the political choices of students, it would first be necessary to compare students within similar ethnic, religious and political cultural environments. Efforts to do this by Lamar Thomas, dealing with the children of politically active parents from both ends of the political spectrum, found no relationship between activism and permissiveness among students, when parental "cause-orientation" was held constant. (36)

Jeanne Block and Norma Haan, while agreeing that the extent of parental permissiveness is not associated with activism, did find that activists are likely to come from families in which parents stressed training for independence. They attempted to control for the effect of religion to test a suggestion of mine that some of the differences in child-rearing backgrounds between activists and conservatives may reflect ethnic-cultural

18

variations. Although Block and his colleagues concluded that their results "undermined" this hypothesis, they appear very inconclusive since they report on extremely small percentage differences between a group of 38 "conventionals" and 35 "activists," who are non-Jewish. (37) It is, therefore, still difficult to conclude that socialization experiences, as such, have an independent causal effect, that is independent of family values which bore relatively directly on politics. Thus Kenneth Keniston, in summing up the recent evidence bearing on the earlier critique of mine which raised this question, concluded:

> "...the issue cannot be settled with only the evidence at hand. In all probability, several interacting factors are involved. On the one hand, it seems clear that if children are brought up in upper-middle-class professional families with humanitarian, expressive and intellectual values, and if the techniques of discipline emphasize independence and reasoning, and if the parents are themselves politically liberal and politically active, then the chances of the child's being an activist are greatly increased, regardless of factors like religion. But it is also clear that these conditions are fulfilled most often in Jewish families. And there may be still other factors associated with social class and religion that independently promote activism; for example, being in a Jewish minority group that has preserved its culture in the face of opposing community pressures for centuries may in some way prepare or permit the individual to take controversial positions as a student." (38)

Thus far student protesters have been discussed as if they were a relatively coherent group of activists who, though varying in their ideas as to how to reconstruct society, agree in rejecting the polity and culture. They should, however, be differentiated into two groups, the radicals and the renouncers, segments which are often confused with each other because, on the surface, their behavior, their anti-establishment beliefs, their total rejection of the system, often seem the same. Yet in a real sense, the radicals are closer to other protostors such as the Wall Street white youth or the black militants, since all three are basically concerned with *owning* Western industrial society. The renouncers are essentially interested in *disowning*

19

Western society. The terms "pronuncer" or "renunciation" tendency are clearly inadequate, yet they are useful, for it would be a definite mistake to justify this tendency as "radical" or "revolutionary." In fact, in its rejection of much of the modern world, including the use of, and products of, large-scale technology and urbanization, it is much closer in outlook to many classic conservative or reactionary doctrines. One reason why it has been difficult to analyze the renunciatory tendency apart from the other forms of militant student protest is that there is, in fact, considerable overlap between the radicals and the renunciators. Many students move back and forth between them. Many radicals engage in renunciatory styles of dress and personal behavior. Most renunciators agree with the specific anti-system activities of the radicals.

The distinction between the radical and renunciatory tendencies among youth, or in society generally, is, of course, related to comparable distinctions drawn in other analyses. The sociologist, David Matza, has suggested that deviant behavior among youth may take one of three forms, delinquent, Bohemian, and radical. All three are "specifically anti-bourgeois," i.e., reject private property relations. Delinquency, however, "seems most pronounced among that section of youth which terminates its education during or at the end of high school. Radicalism and Bohemianism, particularly in the United States, are apparently enmeshed within the system of higher education." The Bohomians, as Matza uses the term, those who are "opposed to the mechanized, organized, centralized, and increasingly collectivized nature of modern capitalism," come close to the concept of the renouncers.³⁹ The psychologist, Kenneth Keniston, has similarly differentiated student deviants between the "alienated" who are apolitical, romantic and aesthetic in their orientation, and the

"activists" who are political, humanitarian and universalistic. (38)

More recently, another sociologist, Alvin Gouldner, has pointed to the emergence within the protest movement of the "Psychedelic Culture," which "differs profoundly from the protest movements and 'causes' of the 1930's, however, politically radical, for Psychedelic Culture rejects the central values to which all variants of industrial society are committed... [It] resists routine economic roles whether high or low, inhibition of expression, repression of impulse, and all the other personal and social requisites of a society organized around the optimization of utility. Psychedelic Culture rejects the value of conforming usefulness, counterposing to it, as a standard, that each must 'do his thing.' In short, many, particularly among the young, are now orienting themselves increasingly to expressive rather than utilitarian standards, to expressive rather than instrumental politics." (39)

The distinction between the politically radical and the culturally renunciatory protesters suggested here has not been made in most of the sociological research literature on student activism. Some psychologists, however, have attempted to isolate differences between "hippies," "nihilists," and habitual drug users, and political radicals, which are somewhat close to differentiating between and tendencies. These indicate that the renunciatory group is involved in some sort of generational conflict, of rejection of traditional or conservative views of their parents, while the political radicals come from the liberal-left family backgrounds. Both groups, of course, share a radical rejection of the conventional society. As Kenneth Keniston has described the difference,

[the political radical tends to follow] the pathway of identification. Both father and son are described as expressive, humanitarian, and idealistic. The son identified with his father, although the son is usually more radical. Such sons are very likely to be radicals in action as well as in beliefs. There is, however, clearly a second pathway to radical beliefs, though

21

less often to radical actions: the pathway of rejection of identification. Such students describe themselves as expressive, idealistic, and humanitarian, but describe their fathers as distinctly not any of these things. They are rather less likely to be politically active, more likely to adopt an apolitical or "hippie" style of dissent, and, if they become involved in political action, more likely to fall within the "activist" group. (14A)

Jeanne Block and her colleagues have pursued similar differentiations between "Activists" (those disillusioned with the status quo, involved in anti-establishment protest and supporting programs and policies designed to do something about "pain and poverty and injustice") and those "Dissenters" who are also involved in anti-establishment protests, but who do not seek to change the policies and institutions they object to through positive action. Activists differ from Dissenters in evaluating their relationships with their parents more positively. The Dissenters tend to describe a "conflicted, unsatisfying parental relationship," one which presumably precipitated or justified a break with family social values. (14B)

Studies of committed drug users among students also indicate that they differ from those who express their antagonisms to society more through organized political activities than through expressive forms of personal deviance in similar ways to those reported above. Richard Elum concluded that "families with greater divergency of opinion, more distant relationships to the children, and more unresolved parent-child interpersonal crises seem to be those which generate the drug explorers." (14Z)

Blum

But if the psychological research does suggest that those engaged in renunciatory activities are disproportionately recruited from the ranks of individuals with histories of family conflict and personal difficulties, a number of analysts of left-wing political activists have reported that "the findings on activists are reasonably consistent in showing

22

that on the average, they are good students, are psychologically 'healthy'....)
They can also be close to their families rather than rebellious and can
reflect intellectual, humanistic, and democratic ideals fostered in the
home." (45) As one study summed up its findings, "few college students in
general can match the positive development of these personality characteristics
that distinguish student activists from their college contemporaries." (46)
Many writers and researchers dealing with the background and values of student
activists have continued up until 1970, at least, to elaborate on these
supposedly positive traits of the active protesters.

These reports on the psychological "health" of left-wing militants pose
an interesting problem in the sociology of knowledge, for a number of other
studies and evaluations of the research literature have pointed for many years
to the fact that almost all the analyses of student activism which conclude that
the left-wing militants exhibit "superior" attributes are based on comparisons
with the student body as a whole, rather than with activists of other ideological
persuasions. A 1966 review of the extant studies pointed to the evidence that
conservative activists, as well as those involved in student government affairs,
possessed some of the psychologically healthy traits assigned to the campus
militants. (47)
More recent efforts to systematically compare various groups of involved

militants. (45)
More recent efforts to systematically compare various groups of involved
students refute the thesis that leftist activists are the noblemen of the
campus. The psychologist Larry Kerpeelman explicitly set out to analyze the
psychological traits of different groups of students on a number of campuses:
"left activists, left non-activists, middle-of-the-road non-activists, and right
non-activists." He concluded that "characteristics that have been identified
with left activists...characterize the involved generally...all student activists,

23

no matter what their ideology, are less needful of support and nurturance,
value leadership more, are more socially ascendant and assertive, and are more
sociable than students who are not politically active." (48)
(46)

A somewhat different study designed to test the assumption that "militant
radicals" were psychologically healthier than moderates and non-militant con-
servatives also found it necessary to reject the assumption that radical
"students are psychologically healthier."

There were statistically significant differences between the student types on four of the six personality measures: Authoritarianism, Dogmatism, Paranoia and Personal Efficacy. Militant radicals were the least authoritarian and the least dogmatic while non-militant conservatives were the most authoritarian and the most dogmatic. These findings supported the view of student radicals as "healthy" personalities. On the other hand, militant radicals were most paranoid and least efficacious. Clearly, if one assumes that it is more desirable to be lower on paranoia and higher on efficacy, these findings do not fit the "healthy" personality thesis. (49)

Similar conclusions with respect to consistency of political action and
ideology were reported by Cowdry and Keniston in their study of a random
sample of 1968 Yale seniors. They found when comparing the characteristics
of students who were for or against the Vietnam War that those whose actions
(signing or refusing to sign an anti-war petition) were consistent with their
beliefs about the war were more like each other than either resembled the
"inconsistent" group. (50)

Various early surveys suggested that left-wing activists were superior academically to other students. This finding has also been challenged since a comparison of various analyses indicate that the alleged superiority of the leftists is based on "self-reported grade-point averages," but that surveys which compare the "actual" grades reveal no differences. (51) Left activists seemingly have a propensity to "perceive themselves as ranking higher than they are in reality." (52) These findings that left-wing activists, such

24

101

as members of SDS or participants in sit-ins, do not have higher grades than conservative activists, or those involved in intramural campus politics, may seem at first to contradict the previously reported relationship between school academic quality and propensity to sustain demonstrations. In fact, it does not. The latter linkage is derived from the relationship in America between intellectuality, as reflected in cultural tastes and occupational preferences, and political liberalism. Schools which are strong in the liberal arts, the non-professional subjects generally, attract students from relatively well-to-do, high culture-oriented and politically liberal families. They tend also to be better qualified for admission to the more selective colleges. The more prestigious a school, therefore, the more likely it is to have a significant segment of its student body predisposed to sympathetically support militant protests. But within such institutions, the available data clearly indicate that those who are deeply involved in radical activity resemble those active in other groupings in terms of scholarly achievements. In general, those who have the psychic energy to be active, whether as conservatives, moderates, or leftists, tend to be somewhat more qualified academically, than passive students.

Reports on the as yet scanty research on the characteristics of activists, as distinct from opinion survey results concerning the supporters of leftist activism in the student population as whole, in other countries also suggest that the small group of committed militants may differ considerably from the population which sysmpathizes with their general political orientation. Thus, although leftist students and sympathizers with militant radical

101a

24a

groups tend on the average to be of lower socio-economic status
than the student body as a whole in various countries in Europe and Japan,
reports from France, Germany and Japan, indicate that the activist core group
tend to resemble those in the United States, in being disproportionately compelled
of the children of men engaged in intellectually linked high
status professions, particularly academe itself. Presumably being of a
high status, intellectually oriented, left-leaning background provides both
the political predisposition, the family support, and the psychic security in
a university environment, to engage in radical protest. The less privileged
supporters of radical ideas remain close to their family values, but like
their more conservative status compeers in America are too involved in
trying to secure vocational benefits from their university experience to
be active in politics.

The reports that left activists have more "democratic values" than
other students have also been challenged by the results of a study which
attempted to test a hypothesis of mine regarding the source of the reported
positive traits. It appeared that "their ideologies rather than their true
sentiments"...are dictating the answers... (that) leftists who have demonstrated
intolerance and authoritarian behavior traits in practice may still give
voice or pencil to liberal values in principle." (S3 Miller and Everson report
that their findings show "a remarkable fit with the Lipset thesis (and under-
standably somewhat disconcerting to the authors of this paper). We cannot

25

reject the Lipset model. In fact, it provides the best fit of any model
tested." (52)

Many scholars in this field have generally ignored the contradictory
evidence and methodological inadequacies of studies purporting to demonstrate
the greater academic success and healthier personalities of left-wing activists.
Given the sharp discrepancies in research data, it becomes obvious that we
must ask way. Curiously, the most insightful explanation for the bias has
been suggested by an investigator, Richard Elum, who, himself, has given
expression to the positive stereotype. Elum points out that there is a cor-
respondence of interests and values between the intellectual community and
the protesting students.

The importance of adjustment, of curiosity, of social criticism, and of
"progressive" sociopolitical doctrine, as well as an emphasis on...
spontaneity in relationships, and on being antagonistic toward traditional
authority, are likely to be found in the social sciences and mind-studying
trades, or espoused by their members, as well as by the liberal students.
Consequently, when these students and clinicians undertake to evaluate
today's left and/or drug-using students, they are often looking at people
much like themselves...(Their) "liking" reactions (for these students)
probably reflect preferences for people acting more as...(they) thought
people ought to act...The danger is that the evaluation may be positive
only because of the charm of the young people without the investigators'
recognizing the grounds for their reactions and without coming to grips
with either fundamentals or implications of student behavior. We are posing
the problem of investigator indentification with his subjects, of "counter
transference," in which it may be as some of the students contend—that the
young are admired because they act out the fantasies of their frustrated
elders. The corollary danger is also acute and is common place. When con-
servative people offer their more negative evaluations...many university and
professionally based people reject outright what the "reactionaries" have to
say.

As the 1960's drew to a close, a second factor entered overtly to affect
the selection of research topics and the way in which research
results are presented. With increasing polarization on campus, many of the
more radical activists concluded that no useful function could be served by
their cooperating with social science inquiries concerning student activism.

Empirical research was defined as "pig research", as inherently a form of counter-insurgency, regardless of the political values of the scholars involved. Two major national studies of student behavior, one conducted by the American Council On Education and the other by the Carnegie Commission on Higher Education, were frequently attacked in the left-wing student press, and students were urged not to cooperate, not to permit themselves to be interviewed. At least one major analyst of student protest, the Santa Barbara sociologist, Richard Flacks, who had been active in SDS as a student and who has remained an active radical as a faculty member, announced at the 1969 session of the American Sociological Association on student activism, that he no longer would do empirical studies of student activists, since his experience had convinced him that Establishment forces made use of his work in spite of his intentions. Another equally creative, sympathetic, non-student, radicalist, Kenneth Keniston, raised the issue of the political consequences of reporting unpalatable facts about radical students in the context of a review of a book on the Harvard demonstrations of 1969, which was written by Steven Kelman, the national chairman of the Young People's Socialist League which was strongly hostile to SDS and the Harvard militants. Keniston was extremely sharply criticized by sociologist, Dennis Wrong, for this position.

Reviewing Steven Kelman's account of student politics at Harvard, *Push Comes to Shove*, Kenneth Keniston concedes the validity of Kelman's charge that the SDS radicals "are undemocratic, manipulative, and self-righteous to the point of snobbery and elitism," but then observes that although "Kelman's angry book is written almost entirely to those on his Left ... his book will mostly be read by those far to his Right, and it will be used (much against his wishes) to provide further ammunition for the Reagans, Mitchells, and Agnews in their politically profitable war against the alienated and radical young"...

[0] ne finds Keniston clucking his tongue over Kelman's "expose of the dirty linen of cultural revolutionaries and political revolutionaries in Harvard SDS," as if the only important consideration were what the right-wing neighbors will say. 56

The political values and concerns of scholarly researchers are not the only element which may produce variations in research results.

Studies concentrating primarily on activists which attempt to distinguish the social and psychological traits of students of different persuasions are also confronted by social analytical problems. Whether or not students direct their extracurricular energies into politics is strongly linked to political orientations. Studies of student bodies in different countries indicate that those on the left generally (and the small group

26

on the extreme right) view politics as an appropriate and even necessary
university activity. [56]
[54] Committed morally to the need for major social
changes, leftists feel that the university should be an agency for social
change; that both they and their professors should devote a considerable
portion of their activities to politics.

Conversely, however, the less leftist students are, the more likely they
are to disagree with this view, the more prone they will be to feel that the
university should be an apolitical "house of study." Liberals and leftists,
therefore, are much more likely to be politically active than moderates and
conservatives. A relatively strong conservative stance will not be reflected in
membership or activity in a conservative political club. This means that
on any given campus or in any country, the visible forms of student politics
will suggest that the student population as a whole is more liberal or
radical leftist than it actually is. Since conservative academic ideology
fosters campus political passivity, one should not expect to find much con-
servative activity.

Presumably it takes a lower threshold of political interest or concern
to activate a liberal or leftist than a conservative. One would deduce, therefore,
that the average conservative student activist should be more of an extremist
within his ideological tendency than the average liberal. Hence a comparison
of campus activists of different persuasions should find a greater share
of extremists among the conservatives than among the Liberals.

## The Conflict Continues

No society should find it remarkable that a visible proportion of its
student population is actively involved in politics. It can be strongly
argued that the circumstances of their being a "privileged" group which give them

the psychic security to act are also among the factors which make their activism
possible. It can also be argued on the same grounds that a politically
inactive student population is a cause for greater misgivings than an active one.
The fact remains, however, that a large part of the group of self-identified
"radicals" in the American movement which began in the mid-sixties have been
close to total alienation from the rational and the political world. The
overwhelming majority of them do not belong to any of the numerous "small c"
communist groups which dominate the organized New Left and maintain some links
(though often very nebulous) to philosophical and tactical doctrines of Marxism-
Leninism. They belong, in fact, to the renunciat... rather than the radical
tendency. The anarchist, Paul Goodman, whose writings were a basic text for many
of the Berkeley activists of 1964-65, and who was invited to teach at San
Francisco State, with the students voluntarily paying the bill, wrote at the
end of the decade with troubled concern about the future of the movement
with which he once almost totally identified. As he points out, many of them
had isolated themselves from any ability to communicate about reality.
Students

There was no knowledge, but only the sociology of knowledge. They had
so well learned that physical and sociological research is subsidized and
conducted for the benefit of the ruling class that they did not believe there
was such a thing as simple truth. To be required to learn something was
a trap by which the young were put down and co-opted...

Inevitably, the alienated seem to be inconsistent in how they take the
present world. Hippies attack technology and are scornful of rationality,
but they buy up electronic equipment and motorcycles, and with them the whole
infra-structure. Activists say that civil liberties are bourgeois and they
shout down their opponents. But they clamor in court for their civil liberties.
those who say that the university is an agent of the powers that be, do not
mean thereby to reassert the ideal role of the university, but to use the
university for their own propaganda.

Though each one is doing his thing, there is not much idiosyncracy in
the spontaneous variety. The political radicals are, as if memorized,
repeating the power plays, factionalism, random abuse, and tactical lies that
aborted the movement in the thirties. And I have learned, to my disgust,
that a major reason why the young don't trust people over thirty is that they
don't understand them, and are too conceited to try. Having grown up in a world

28

[10]

too meaningless to learn anything, they know very little and are quick to resent it. (57)

Others on the left have noted the strong similarities between the action-oriented segments of their movement and the extreme right. In fact, The National New Left weekly, *The Guardian*, in reporting on a meeting of the National Youth Alliance, an overtly racist advocate of Right Power violence and an offshoot of "Youth for Wallace," commented: "Contemporary commentators often jump the extremes of right and left together. Indeed, despite obvious differences there were striking similarities exhibited..." (58) Some sections of the movement have gone even further to point up the close resemblances between some groups on the New Left and the original youth-oriented Fascist Party of Benito Mussolini. An editorial in *The Campaigner*, published by the New York and Philadelphia Regional SDS Labor Committees, stated: "There is a near identity between the arguments of anarchists (around the Columbia strike movement, e.g.) [that is, Mark Rudd and his followers who became the Weathermen faction] and Mussolini's polemics for action against theory, against program..." (59)

An article in the same magazine argued:

"It is an irony of history that certain New Leftists today would be quite at home with Mussolini's radical polemics... We must look to historical precedent in order to reveal the dangers inherent in certain New Left rhetoric today... [Mussolini] fought for the idea that the revolution would be decided in the streets... Similarly, fascism celebrated youth as a class. "Giovenezza" was the official Italian hymn to youth; similar examples are found in Nazi propaganda. The image of youth was extended to attack on the "old" capitalist nations, the "old," effete parliamentary bureaucrats."

The authors of this article go on to point to other similarities, including the evolution of the ideas of George Sorel, the French syndicalist theoretician, "the spiritual leader of those Italian syndicalists who produced the fascist movement. 'Purgative violence,' so recently repopularized by the

29

writings of Franz Fanon, played a central role in the revised [fascist] syndicalist theory." (60-68)

The sociologist Peter Berger, who has been active in the peace organization SANE as well as in various anti-war protests, also reports that as a European emigré, "observing the [American] radicals in action, I was repeatedly reminded of the stormtroopers that marched through my childhood in Europe." Trying to understand this emotional reaction, he found that Old Left (Communist) activists did not produce this feeling in him, although he was opposed to them. He was forced to conclude that the new Left has strong similarities to fascism which is lacking in the Old Left.

What is specifically fascist about this ideology?

A movement characterized by its negations rather than by a positive vision of the future: The new radicals take it as ipso facto evidence of counterrevolutionary intellectualism if one asks specific questions about their design for the future... The basic counter-position is between "the movement" (die Bewegung, as the Nazis called themselves) and "the system" (das System...), the one absolutely noble and embodying the wave of the future, the other absolutely corrupt and representing nothing but decaying stasis...Liberal democracy is a sham and, indeed, is the principal enemy... Rationality is nothing but manipulation on behalf of "the system."...

position

The clearest symptom of the continuity of...themes is the mystique of the street. I recall a recent scene I watched on television, a group of students chanting rhythmically, "The streets belong to the people!" and the almost physical shock, as I remembered, at this moment, the opening lines of the second verse of the "Horst Wessel Lied," the anthem of the Nazi movement: "Die Strasse frei den brauen Bataillonen..." ("Clear the streets for the Brown battalions...")

The political cult of youth: How, in the midst of all the glorification of youth that surrounds us today, could one forget that the anthem of Mussolini's Italy began with the invocation "Giovinezza, giovinezza, primavora di bellezza..." ("Youth, youth, springtime of beauty...")?

M The totalization of friend and foe, and the concomitant dehumanization of the latter: Again, linguistic usage is highly instructive here. Anyone who remembers the Nazi use of *Saujuden* (Jewish pigs) should stop to reflect about the human implication of the current usage of the term "pigs."

Finally, the assurance of the radicals that they represent a mystical "general will," even though it is undiscoverable by empirical means... This elitism is particularly repulsive in view of the democratic rhetoric... In fact, the new radicals are not only contemptuous of the mechanisms of liberal parliamentary democracy; they are fundamentally contemptuous of any procedures designed to find out what the people want for themselves...

30

[14]

If one adds up these themes, one is confronted by an ideological constell-
ation that strikingly resembles the common core of Italian and German fascism.
Indeed, one is drawn to the conclusion that the concepts and interpretations
drawn by many contemporary radicals from Marxism are grafted upon a body of
motives and perspectives on the world that have nothing to do with Marxism. [68]

The parallelisms which Berger draws between major sections of the
Now Loft and the fascist movements of the twenties and thirties are, of
course, startling, precisely because they strike home. But the question must
be raised to what extent this common ideology and tactics have comparable
roots. As Berger notes, the Italian fascist party glorified "Youth." Before,
the seizure of power, it was, in fact, largely an anti-system youth party.
Few leaders other than Mussolini were over thirty. Many of its activists
were students. [69] The German Nazi movement was somewhat different, but
again, it should be noted that its earliest centers of strength were the
universities. The Nazis captured control of the national German student
organization and of the student councils in the bulk of the universities by
1931, before they had anything like comparable strength in any other stratum.
As in Italy, their activists were young men. [70] Where youth is unrestrained
by being part of an adult party or organization, it is probable that their
variant of radicalism, whether rightist or leftist, will take on the violence-
prone elitist orientations noted by Berger and the others.

Writing close to 60 years ago, the young undergraduate socialist,
Randolph Bourne, perhaps the most impressive young radical intellectual the
United States ever produced, discussed at length the characteristics of
youth in politics. Much of his analyses and descriptions of the collegiate
youth before World War I are proscient of Berger's harsh descriptions,
although Bourne, himself, was largely positive.

Youth can never think of itself as anything but the master of things.... Its enthusiasm for a noble cause is apt to be all mixed up with a picture of itself leading the cohorts to victory. The youth never sees himself as a soldier in the ranks, but as the leader, bringing in some long-awaited change by a brilliant coup d'état....

21

The youth of today are willful, selfish, heartless, in their rebellion. They are changing the system blindly and blunderingly. They feel the pressure, and without stopping to ask questions or analyze the situation, they burst the doors and flee away. Their seeming initiative is more animal spirits than anything else...

It is a fallacy of radical youth to demand all or nothing, and to view every partial activity as compromise. Either engage in something that will bring revolution and transformation all at one blow, or do nothing, it seems to say...

Radical youth is apt to long for some supreme sacrifice and feels that a lesser surrender is worth nothing. But better than sacrifice is efficiency! It is absurd to stand perplexedly waiting for the great occasion, unwilling to make the little efforts and to test the little occasions, and unwilling to work at developing the power that would make those occasions great. (64)

But Randolph Bourne's complaints about some of the traits of the radical youth of his day were only reiterating ancient descriptions of the tension between youth and authority. Much of this was known, at least as early as

Aristotle, who said:

> [Youth] have exalted notions, because they have not yet been humbled by life or learnt its necessary limitations; moreover their hopeful disposition makes them think themselves equal to great things; and that means having exalted notions. They would always rather do noble deeds than useful ones: their lives are regulated more by moral feeling than by reasoning... All their mistakes are in the direction of doing things excessively and vehemently...

> (They love too much, hate too much, and the same with everything else. They think they know everything, and are always quite sure about it; this, in fact, is why they overdo everything.) (65)

In essence what Aristotle and more recent commentators on the values and attitudes of youth have said is that youth lacks restraint. If political behavior can be seen as a combination of impulse and restraint, then young people are much more likely to press for the attainment of seemingly positive ends, and to ignore the extent to which the means used shape the ends which are achieved. Restraint, in essence, involves curbs on the means one uses to secure what one wants. And as Earl Raab and I have noted in our analysis of right-wing extremism, "democratic commitment can be seen essentially as a matter of restraint." The Bill of Rights is couched in the languages of restraint: "Congress shall make no law..." It is the essence of extremism

32

in politics to eliminate restraint, to conceptualize the struggle as one
between absolute good versus absolute evil, thereby justifying the use of
any tactics. Political socialization in democracy involves learning
about restraints, about means-ends relationships, as well as about how to
secure objectives. It must develop a political superego, which limits the
uninhibited desire to destroy those in the way. And the greater propensity
of youth for the "ethic of absolute ends" as distinct from the "ethic of
responsibility" discussed earlier is another way of saying that youth politics
are more likely to reflect Impulse than Restraint. It also is another way
of indicating that youth are more prone to favor change, reform, radicalism,
of all varieties, than older people. Youth-based movements, therefore, whether
of the left or right, should have major elements in common.

This point may again be illustrated by reference to extreme right-wing movements. In 1968, many in the non-college segment of American youth showed their propensity to go to political extremes in defense of their values by disproportionately backing George Wallace. All opinion polls agreed that in various stages of his campaign up to and including Election Day, Wallace (twenty-one to twenty-nine) secured more votes from the 21-29 year-old group than from older age cohorts. He was also heavily backed according to opinion surveys among high school youth, particularly those of less-well-to-do parentage who had no plans for a college education. Within the Wallace movement, itself, the youth segment, which formed the independent group, The National Youth Alliance, after the election turned out to be much more overtly racist, pro-violence, and anti-democratic than any other outgrowth of the American Independent Party. The young former Wallacites, in effect, went to the extreme of their tendency.

33

In so doing, as various New Leftists noted, they resembled the New Left. [Footnote 1]

The Guardian reported:

> [NYA] leaders hit hard at the establishment, the liberals and their elders for botching up the country. "We are more anti-establishment than anyone...."

> The alliance attacked the "criminal politico-economic system of maintaining full employment and buying votes by intervention in alien wars...." The alliance warns rightists of the consolidation of corporate concerns....

> The NYA resembles the New Left also in seeing its primary constituency as young workers and college students. It "vowed" to forge a "revolutionary" alliance of students and young workers to crush the left, stem the "liberal" tide and save a dying republic.... (68)

> These rightist youth, unlike many of their elders in the Wallace Movement, but like the New Left, openly proclaim their opposition to conservative economic principles and "bourgeois values."

> We do not concern ourselves with the intricacies of economic conservation. We shall never deny what is needed to those who need it.... Those who seek to put bourgeois values over the hopes and aspirations of the people are enemies of the Right Front.

> The NYA hopes to unite all American youth in a movement for peace, progress, and the restoration of the rights of the American people. (69)

> The Alliance even makes some of the same complaints about American higher education that New Leftist students have uttered. "You are no longer the individual you thought you were; but are now a mere number in a file.... Your English professor hardly shows up for class." (70)

> The NYA has contempt for George Wallace and many other rightist leaders for adhering to the rules of the political game. They proudly announce their belief in racial equality by wearing buttons with the mathematical symbol of inequality. They denounce the Jews, Negroes, American Indians, and all other nonwhite races as inferior. They call for teaching the superiority of the white race in "white studies" courses.

> The emergence of right-wing extremism among youth is not limited to the American defenders of segregation and white supremacy. In Germany, where the radical right-wing National Democrats secured more electoral

backing (4.6 per cent) in 1969 than the left-wing movement supported by the
New Left students (0.6 per cent), "it seems that the young people have infused
the [rightist] movement with new strength." (69) In France, _Le Mondo_ reports
that "extreme right-wingers are on the move again...."

The fact that students and young people predominate in these new far-
Right movements explains the injection of fresh ideas into the shopworn
theories of fascism, elitism, and totalitarianism....

Since the May 1968 student-worker revolt in France, certain groups of
young right-wingers have been rival[ing] the Left in condemning the consumer
society and the industrial bosses....

Unyielding nationalism is one of the main planks of a rather small group calling itself Action Nationaliste, which draws most of its support from students at the Institut for Studies in Political Science....

Far-Right activists usually do not bother to conceal their taste for
violent action and mystery. The Mouvement Jeune Revolution, for instance,
reveals in secrecy....MR, like the other extreme right-wing organizations,
attracts rightists who "want to do something." (78)

The emotive movement of the 1960s is not the first American student
expression of sharp discontent with the university and society. Although
probably the most powerful one, since, though a minority, it is based on a
campus population of close to eight million, it has been preceded by many others
which have played a role in changing the university, politics, and cultural
practices. Whether one despaired or rejoices about the activities of the
current generation-unit of renunciatory youth, any effort to evaluate it
must rest not only on comparisons with youth and extremist movements in other
countries, but some knowledge of the previous comparable activities of American
students is necessary. The next two chapters turn to this effort.

Chapter III

Who Are the Activists

FOOTNOTES

Social

1. Richard Flacks, "The Liberated Generation: An Explanation of the Roots of Student Protest," *Journal of Social Issues* 23, No. 3 (1967), pp. 66, 68. Kenneth Keniston, "Notes on Young Radicals," *Change*, 1 (November-December, 1969), p. 29. For a summary of various studies bearing on this point see also Richard G. Braungart, *Family Status, Socialization and Student Politics: A Multivariate Analysis* (Ph.D. Thesis, Department of Sociology, Pennsylvania State University, 1959).

p. 61; Kenneth Keniston, "The Fire Outside," *The Journal*, M 9 (September-October, 1970), pp. 9-10.

2. See Richard Flacks, "Who Protests: The Social Bases of the Student Movement," in Julian Foster and Durwood Long, eds., *Protest: Student Activism in America* (New York: William Morrow, 1970), pp. 147-152, and

S.M. Lipset, *Political Man* (New York: Doubleday, 1960), pp. 109-110, 285-294.

see Nathan Glazer, "The New Left and the Jews," *The Jewish Journal of Sociology* 11 (December 1969), pp. 122, 127-131; Flacks, *op. cit.*, p. 65; Nathan Glazer, "The Jewish Role in Student Activism," *Fortune*, 79 (January 1969), pp. 112-113, 126-129; S.M. Lipset, *Revolution and Counter-revolution*, revised edition (New York: Doubleday-Anchor Books, 1970),

Chapter 4 (A Revised Version of "The Secession of Posies," "Encounter," December 1969, pp. 11-12, 197-199).

3. Michiya Shimbori, "Zegakuren: A Japanese Case Study of a Student Movement," *Sociology of Education*, 37 (Spring 1964), pp. 232-233; C.J. Lammers, *Student Unionism in the Netherlands* (Leyden: Institute of Sociology, University of Leyden, 1970, mimeographed), pp. 25-26, 31; Frank Bonilla and Myron Glazer.

*Student Politics in Chile* (New York: Basic Books, 1970), pp. 00; Ted Goertzel, "Political Attitudes of Brazilian Youth," (Paper presented at Session on "Politics of Students and Young Workers, VIIth World Congress of Sociology, Varna, Bulgaria, September, 1970), p.3; Klaus

R. Allerbeck, "Alternative Explanations of Participation in Student Movements," (Paper prepared for the VIIIth World Congress of International Political Science Association, Munich, September, 1970), pp. 13-14; Tessa Blackstone, Kathleen Gales, Roger Hadley and Wyn Lewis, *Students in Conflict* (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1970), pp. 00;

4. Allerbeck, *op. cit.*, p. 14.

5. Reports on the membership of the YAF may be found in David L. Westby and Richard G. Braungart, "Class and Politics in the Family Backgrounds of Student Political Activists," *American Sociological Review*, 31 (October, 1966), pp. 690-692; Braungart, *op. cit.*, p. 112; David L. Westby and Richard

G. Braungart, "The Alienation of Generations and Status Politics: Alternative Explanations of Student Political Activism," in Roberta S. Sigl, ed., *Learning About Politics* (New York: Random House, 1970), pp. 476-488;

David G. Jansen, Bob B. Winborn and William D. Martinson, "Characteristics Associated with Campus Social-political Action Leadership," *Journal of Counseling Psychology*, 15 (November, 1968), pp. 552-562.

7. Lipset, *op. cit.*, pp. 310-342; S.M. Lipset, "The Politics of Academe," in David C. Nichols, ed., *Perspectives on Campus Tensions* (Washington, D.C.: American Council on Education, 1970), pp. 85-118; see also chapter 6 of this book, pp. 00-00.

8. Roger M. Kahn and William J. Bowers, "The Social Context of the Rank-and-File Student Activist: A Test of Four Hypotheses," *Sociology of Education, 43* (Winter 1970), pp. 39,45-47,48-49; Braungart, *op. cit.*, pp. 61-62; Flacks, *op.*xxxixx "The Liberated Generation...," *op. cit.*, pp.69-70; Paul Heist, "Intellect and Commitment: the Faces of Discontent," in O.W. Knorr and W.J. Minter, eds., *Order and Freedom on Campus* (Boulder: Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education, 1965), pp. 61-69.

9. For a summary of the literature see Kenneth A. Feldman and Theodore M. Newcomb, *The Impact of College on Students*, I, (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1969), p. 161; see also Kahn and Bowers, *op. cit.*, pp. 39,46-48.

10. Hanan, Selvin and Warren Hagstrom, "Determinants of Support for Civil Liberties," in S.M. Lipset and S.S. Wolin, eds., *The Berkeley Student Revolt* (New York: Doubleday-Anchor Books, 1965), p. 513.

11. Morris Rosenberg, *Occupations and Values* (Glencoe: The Free Press, 1957), pp. 19-22; See also James A. Davis, *Undergraduate Career Patterns* (Chicago: Aldine, 1965), pp. 52-53.

12. Westby and Braungart, *op. cit.*, pp. 690-692.

13. Braungart, *op. cit.*, p. 142.

14. A. Riley Dunlap, "Radical and Conservative Student Activists: A Comparison of Family Backgrounds," *Pacific Sociological Review*, 13 (Summer, 1970), pp. 178-179.

15. Robert B. Smith, "Campus Protests and the Vietnam War," (Mimeographed paper, Department of Sociology, University of California, Santa Barbara, 1970), p. 21.

16. Report of Louis Harris Survey of Students, May 20-28, 1970, p. 327

17. Charles V. Hamilton, "Minority Groups," in Robert H. Connery, ed., *The Corporation and the Campus*, Vol. XXX, no. 1, of The Proceedings of the Academy of Political Sciences, pp. 20-21.

18. Anthony M. and Amy W. Orum, "The Class and Status Bases of Negro Student Protest," *Social Science Quarterly*, 49 (December, 1968), p. 528, footnote 30, and references to other work there included.

19. Report of Harris Survey of Students, May 20-28, 1970, p. 139.

20. *Ibid*, pp. 155-156.

21. *Profile of a Generation* (New York: Daniel Yankelovich, Inc., April 1969, prepared for CBS News), pp. 159-172, and *passim*.

22. See Report of Harris 1970 Student Survey, *op. cit.*, *passim*, and Yankelovich, *op. cit*.

23. For summary of the evidence see S.M. Lipset, "The Politics of Academe," in (to come) *op. cit*.

39. Block, et al., on. cit., pp. 163-164 and Table 7. It is not clear from the report whether the investigators inquired as to respondents' religion or that of their parents. Left-oriented people tend to say "none" for their own religion. Hence, unless family religious background is probed, many of the "none" turn out to in fact come from Jewish backgrounds.

36. Keniston, op. cit., p. 31.

39. David Matza, "Subterranean Traditions of Youth," *Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science*, 338 (November, 1961), p. 105, *passim*;

David Matza, "Position and Behavior Patterns of Youth," in Robert E.L. Faris, ed., *Handbook of Modern Sociology* (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1964), pp. 209-214.

40. Kenneth Keniston, "The Sources of Student Dissent," *Journal of Social Issues*, 23, No. 3 (1967), pp. 110-115;

Kenneth Keniston, "The Fire Outside," *The Journal*, 9 (September-October, 1970), pp. 9-10.

41. Alvin W. Gouldner, *The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology* (New York: Basic Books, 1970), p. 78.

42. Keniston, "Notes on Young Radicals," op. cit., p. 32.

43. Block, Haan, and Smith, *op. cit.*, pp. 146-147, 163-165.

44. Richard Blum, "Epilogue: Students and Drugs," in Richard Blum and Associates, *Students and Drugs: Drugs II* (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1969), p. 366.

45. Richard Blum, "Prologue: Students and Drugs," in *Ibid.*, p. 8.

46. James W. Trent and Judith L. Craise, "Commitment and Conformity in the American College," *Journal of Social Issues*, 23 (1967), p. 39.

47. S.M. Lipset and P.G. Altbach, "Student Politics and Higher Education in the United States," *Comparative Education Review*, 10 (June, 1966), pp. 320-349.

49. The review of the literature is on *Drugs 331-334*. This article was reprinted and updated in S.M. Lipset, *Student Politics* (New York: Basic Books, 1967), see pp. 222-224. See also *Draungart, op. cit.*, pp. 331-332; and Larry C. Kerpelman, "Student Political Activism and Ideology: Comparative Characteristics of Activists and Nonactivists," *Journal of Counseling Psychology*, 16 (1969), pp. 8-13.

48. Larry C. Kerpelman, *Student Activism and Ideology in Higher Education Institutions* (Washington, D.C.: Bureau of Research, Office of Research, U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, March, 1970), pp. xv, 79, 85.

49. Roy E. Miller and David H. Everson, "Personality and Ideology: The Case of Student Power," (Paper presented at the Midwest Political Science Association, April 30-May 2, 1970; Public Affairs Research Bureau and Department of Government, Southern Illinois University), p. 36.

50. Cowdry and Keniston, *op. cit.*, pp. 21-23.

51. Korpolman, *op. cit.*, pp. 5-6; 42, 80; for a similar point see Lipset and Altbach, *op. cit.*, pp. 223-224; for recent data on this see Smith, *op. cit.*, p. 31.

52. *Kerpolman, cit.* p. 80; see also Lipset and Altbach, *op. cit.*, footnote 61, p. 250.

53. Enunciated as a possibility in S.M. Lipset, "The Activists: A Profile," in Daniel Bell and Irving Kristol, (*eds.*), *Confrontation: The Student Rebellion and the Universities* (New York: Basic Books, 1965), p. 56.

54. Miller and Everson, *op. cit.*, pp. 35, 38-39.

55. Blum, "Epilogue...", *op. cit.*, p. 377.

56. Dennis H. Wrong, "The Case of the 'New York Review'", *Commentary*, 50 (November 1970), pp. 62-63. The Keniston review of the book by Kelman was published in the *New York Review of Books*, September 24, 1970.

57. Glaucio A.D. Soares, "The Active Few: Student Ideology and Participation in Developing Countries," in S.M. Lipset, *ed.*, *Student Politics* (New York: Basic Books, 1967), pp. 124-147.

58. Paul Goodman, "The New Reformation," *New York Times Magazine*, September 14, 1969, pp. 33, 143, 144. Similar criticisms have been advanced by Norman Birnbaum, the Amherst sociologist, who was founding editor of the *New Left Review* in London, and who is both an identified Marxist scholar and a disciple of C. Wright Mills.

"The historicism and pragmatism of American thought has found a parody in the disdain for political thinking exhibited by most of the militants of the American student left. An unreflected doctrine of immediacy, an explicit fear of academicism (and an implicit incapacity, engendered by a defective university system, for sustained thought), a considerable ignorance of nearly everything and especially of the history of socialism, combine in the Jargon, the slogans, and the bewilderment of the avant-garde of the new American left." Norman Birnbaum and Marjorie Childes, "The American Student Movement," Julien Nagel, *ed.*, *Student Power* (London: Merlin Press, 1969), p. 139.

59. "Rightists Launch Offensive," *The Guardian*, 21 (February 8, 1969), p. 8.

60. *The Campaigner*, 1 (September, 1968), p. 9.

61. C. LaRouche and L. Marcus, "The New Left, Local Control and Fascism," *The Campaigner*, 1 (September, 1968), pp. 10-33, *passim*.

62. Peter L. Berger, "Between System and Horde," in Peter L. Berger and Richard J. Neuhaus, *Movement and Revolution* (New York: Anchor Books, 1970) pp. 44-45.

63. Daniel Guerin, *Fascism and Big Business* (New York: Pioneer Publishers, 1939), pp. 47-50, 62-63; Guido Martinotti, "The Positive Marginality: Notes on Italian Students in Periods of Political Mobilization," in S.M. Lipset and Philip Altbach, *Students in Revolt* (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1969), pp. 173-175.

64. Guerin, op. cit., pp. 48-50, 63; Karl Bracher, *Die Auflösung der Weimarer Republik* (Villingen, Schwarzwald: Ring Verlag, 1961), pp. 146-149; Peter Gay, *Weimar Culture* (New York: Harper and Row, 1968), pp. 139-140; Fritz K. Ringer, *The Decline of the German Manderin* (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1969), pp. 250-251; John Orr, "The Radical Right," in Nagel, op. cit., pp. 73-90; Lewis Feuer, *The Conflict of Generations* (New York: Basic Books, 1969), pp. 284-291.

65. Randolph S. Bourne, *Youth and Life* (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1913), pp. 23, 266, 304, 305.

66. The Basic Works of Aristotle, edited by Richard McKeon, (New York: Random House, 1941), in "Rhetorica," p. 1404. Aristotle goes on, of course, to say equally unflattering things about the character of the "Elderly," who err on the side of caution, being small-minded, cynicism, concern for the useful rather than the noble, and so forth. Typically, the best are those in the middle. "Men in their Prime," who tend to have the "right amount" of each relevant trait. The Prime age for "the mind [is] about forty-nine," of each relevant trait. The Prime age for "the mind [is] about forty-nine," pp. 1405-1406.

67. See S.M. Lipset and Earl Raab, *The Politics of Unreason: Right-Wing Extremism in the United States 1970-1974* (New York: Harper and Row, 1974), chapters 1, 11, and 12 for this discussion.

68. Ibid., pp. 69-70. This discussion of the youth support for Wallace and the ideology of the National Youth Alliance is taken from that book.

69. "Rightists Launch Offensive," *on. cit.*

70. Dennis C. McMahon, "The National Youth Alliance," The *American Mercury*, 105 (Spring, 1969), p. 63.

71. National Youth Alliance leaflet headed "Lost and Alone."

72. Ralph Blumenthal, "Infusion of Youth Strengthens Radical Rightist Party in West Germany," *New York Times*, March 2, 1969, p. 2.

73. Noël-Jean Bergeroux, "Shot in the Right Arm," *Le Monde - Weekly Selection*, March 25, 1970, p. 2.

The-Historical Background:-
From the Revolution to World War I.

Many of the explanations for the emergence of student political and cultural protest during the 1960s suggest that this event is causally related to structural changes in the university system, or in the ways in which Americans bring up their youth. Thus some writers have pointed to the presumed educational deficiencies derivative from increased university size, or greater concern for research than for teaching. Others have accounted for student patterns of cultural renunciation (drugs, hair, dress, freer sexual practices, etc.) as a consequence of increased parental permissiveness, the unwillingness of adults to discipline children. Some interpretations stress the gravity of the problems facing the nation, especially the Vietnam War, the inability to fulfill the promises of equality made to Negroes, and the various ecological pressures stemming from industrialism, metropolitanism, and population pressures, in undermining the legitimacy, the "title-to-rule," of the dominant social institutions.

While all of these factors would seem to have some relationship to the expansion of student unrest, placing the analysis of student activism in comparative and historical perspective challenges the interpretations which seek to

account for its current American phase by reference to
unique national patterns. Clearly the present wave of student
unrest has affected universities and countries in all parts
of the world, underdeveloped, Western European, and Communist.
and
Student protest movements have been more widespread/ involved
a larger proportion of the university population in coun-
tries as varied as France, Japan, South Korea, Indonesia,
Czechoslovakia, Poland, Senegal, Argentina and Mexico. I
have dealt with various aspects of student activism in other
countries elsewhere, and I do not want to repeat these dis-
cussions here, except to note that the similarity in patterns
of behavior found in so many different cultural, familial,
educational environments suggests that many of the contemp-
orary America-centered interpretations are at best incomplete.¹

The broad structural explanations, which stress
the uniqueness of aspects of the contemporary scene, are
also largely stated in absence of any consideration of the
history of American campus activism. Much of what has been
written is based on the assumption that American students have
been quiescent until recently, presumably because their
educational experiences were relatively good. In fact, the
historical record reveals previous periods in which important

¹S. M. Lipset, "University Students and Politics in Underdeveloped Countries," in S. M. Lipset, ed., *Student Politics* (New York: Basic Books, 1967), pp. 3-53; "Introduction: Students and Politics in Comparative Perspective," and "The Possible Effects of Student Activism on International Politics," in S. M. Lipset and Philip Althach, eds., *Students in Revolt* (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1969), pp. xv-xxiv, 495-521.

3

segments of the college population have engaged in campus
violence, in cultural and sexual experimentation, and in
political radicalism. Earlier efforts to explain developments
have frequently been stated in almost identical terms with
those given for current events. Both in the last decades of
the nineteenth century and in the 1920s, many writers urged
that the increased emphasis given to research and extramural
service activities by faculty resulted in inferior education
and consequent student resentments. Similarly, the widespread
demand
for increased "student power" in the 1890s, and the innovations
in cultural and sexual behavior, and the disregard for law
exhibited by many collegians in the 1920s, were both credited
by contemporary analysts to the changes in the American family
system, particularly the decline in parental authority. In
calling attention to these and other similarities between the
interpretations of the past and the present, I am not arguing
that any of them are necessarily wrong. But clearly any
effort to understand the sources of student behavior in a
given time and place must be rooted in a general understanding
of the factors in the social situation of university students
which encourage particular modes of behavior among them
generally, as well as knowledge of the way in which different
segments have acted over time and place.

Groups dedicated to change either within society, or

more commonly within the university have been relatively frequent among the undergraduate population. There are many explanations,^ obvious and less obvious,^ offered particularly in recent years for their special qualities. Generalizations made in the preceding chapters, various elements in their situation, their exposure to familial, religious, and social ideals presented in an absolute fashion, their relative lack of experience with the conflicting pressures derivative from varying value obligations or role demands, the insecurities stemming from being marginal men, in between the security and status derived from their family, and the obligation to find a mate, career, and status of their own. Press them to see more clearly and purely the imperfections in university and society. On the other hand, they are freer than other segments of youth as well as older generations to act without concern for consequences to themselves or those close to them. They are rootloose, in between engagements so to speak, and with considerable energy to use up. And whatever outlet any particular group of them choose to use, the ecology of the university,^ the easy communication among those on a campus,^ makes it possible for all predisposed in a given direction to find one another, to mobilize that minority of students who are in agreement. Out of their new awareness as members of an intellectual community, out of their detached and advantaged

position, students are better able than most of us to recognize the flaws, the inconsistencies around them, and can afford to be offended by them. Sometimes their horizons are limited to the institutions that are close by, the universities themselves, as in much of the nineteenth century; in periods of broad social ferment, however, the world and its problems are their oyster. These statements are as valid for an *avant-garde* unit of the American student population ever since the beginning of the Republic in 1776 as they are for those of any other nation, as a brief examination of their behavior over time demonstrates.

## Protest and Violence on Campus: From the Revolution to the Civil War

The first record of American students as a protest group may be found in the annals of the American Revolution. As Richard Hofstadter points out: "In nationalist and colonial revolutions college and university students have always played an aggressive part, and to this the American college students were no exception."² Samuel Eliot Morison quotes a member of the Harvard Corporation writing in

² Richard Hofstadter, *Academic Freedom in the Age of the College* (New York: Columbia University Press, 1961), p. 206. See also Samuel Eliot Morison, *Three Centuries of Harvard* (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1936), pp. 132-148. A recent historian of American education suggests that from the early nineteenth century on, students through their protest activities and extracurricular institutional innovations have been the "most creative and imaginative force in the shaping of the American college and university," Frederick Rudolph, "Neglect of Students As a Historical Tradition," in Lawrence E. Dennis and Joseph F. Kaufman, eds., *The College and the Student* (Washington: American Council on Education, 1966), p. 47, see also pp. 47-58

the early 1770s that the students "are already taken up with politics.
They have caught the spirit of liberty."³ The celebrated educational historian
W.H. Cowley has described the general reaction of students to the Revolution.

All of the nine existing colleges either closed down or greatly limited
their operations because most of their eligible students had joined the mili-
tia or the Continental Army, but more relevant here are instances of students
frustrating the British and discomfiting Loyalists. Two such illustrate these
numerous harassments: Harvard students drove out of Cambridge the tutor who
directed British troops to Lexington and "the shot heard round the world;" the
soapbox harangues and the pamphlets written by an eighteen-year-old Kings College
undergraduate named Alexander Hamilton helped arouse the mob that, despite
his pleas against violence, three weeks later forced President Myles Cooper
to seek refuge on a British warship bound for England.⁴

For a half century after the Revolution, students recurrently engaged
in protests, some of them quite violent in character, directed against the
universities for various deficiencies. G. Stanley Hall noted a seven-year-
long Harvard outbreak beginning in 1790 against the examination system, and
"more serious rebellions" in 1807 and 1830. He also recorded similar events
in other universities, and the presence among many faculties of "a fear that
the whole student body is capable of being united and arrayed in organization
against their authority." Morison concluded: "The typical student of the
early seventeen-nineties was an atheist in religion, an experimentalist in
morals, a rebel to authority."

At Harvard a series of strikes and other demonstrations occurred in the
late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries against bad food. Many students
were expelled, actions which often led to new and more intensive protests.

³. Morison, op. cit., p. 138.

⁴. W.H. Cowley, unpublished "Notes on Universities," Chapter 11, "Student Participation," pp. 11-25.

Footnotes 5-7 are on-page 6 a.

In 1818, four students were dismissed for throwing crockery during a food riot. "Their classmates chose to fight the tyranny of the administration, and led by young Emerson and many sons whose fathers' names are still remembered as great patriots of the American Revolution, they rallied round the rebellion tree." Emerson was suspended for his role in this affair. In 1823, over half the senior class was expelled shortly before graduation. During that year there had been explosions, the dropping of inked water on tutors, etc. In 1834, the resort to the power of the public authorities by President Quincy to punish riotous students, then as now considered a violation of university norms, brought a drastic reaction from the students comparable to the events of 1969 when police were summoned to Harvard Yard.

Then, hell broke loose! Quincy had violated one of the oldest academic traditions: that the public authorities have no concern with what goes on inside a university, so long as the rights of outsiders are not infringed. The "black flag of rebellion" was hung from the roof of Holworthy. Furniture and glass in the recitation rooms of University were smashed, and the fragments hurled out of the windows. The juniors, led by Ebenezer Rockwood Hoar, voted to wear crape on their arms, issued a handbill with an acute dissection of the President's character, and hanged his effigy to the Rebellion Tree. A terrific explosion took place in chapel; and when the smoke had cleared, "A Bone for Old Quin to Pick" was seen written on the walls. A printed seniors' "Circular," signed by a committee who were promptly deprived of their degrees, gave their version of the Rebellion in language so cogent that the Overseers issued a forty-seven-page pamphlet by Quincy to counteract it. ... | Quincy never recovered his popularity. 9

At Princeton, according to Harry Bowes, student of the history of student rebellions, "following a rebellion in

Harry P. Bowes, University and College Student Rebellion in Retrospect and Some Sociological Implications (Ed. D. Thesis: School of Education, University of Colorado, 1964), p. 96; see also Charles A. Wagner, *Harvard: Four Centuries of Freedom* (New York: P. Dutton, 1950), p. 87.

9. Revision on cit. pp. 252-253

8

1806 half the students were expelled. This dealt the college a blow which impaired its usefulness for over a decade. Six rebellions equally violent occurred from 1800 to 1830. During one riot, the students gained possession of the college buildings and defied authorities to try and enter them.

On another occasion, after three students were expelled, "for several days Nassau Hall resounded to the report of pistols and the crash of bricks against doors, walls and windows."

Yale also had frequent rebellions culminating in the "Great Rebellion" of 1828, which resulted in the "rustication from the college of some forty students." The University of Virginia, following Thomas Jefferson's enlightened policies, gave its students more freedom than other schools. The University established a plan "under which a board of six student 'censors' would assist the faculty in maintaining order." A series of riots in 1825 undermined the effort. "Three former presidents of the United States who had administered the nation for twenty-four of its thirty-six years (Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe) sat on the Board of Visitors when it met to restore peace, but not even their knowledge and prestige could breathe life into a scheme of self-government that collided with the deeply embedded tradition of student contumacy."

10. Bowes, op. cit.

11. Cowley, op. cit., p. 15.

8 a

The College of South Carolina is cited in the literature in this field as a more typical example of a Southern school which underwent frequent riots and other disturbances, many protests against poor food, and compulsory commons. In 1822, President Cooper of the College wrote to Thomas Jefferson that "Republicanism is good, but the rights

of boys and girls are the offspring of Democracy gone mad."¹²
Parents frequently intervened to get a harsh punishment revoked.

Jefferson, himself, wrote in a letter to George Ticknor of Harvard on July 16, 1823: "The insubordination of our youth is now the greatest obstacle to their education. We may lessen the difficulty, perhaps, by avoiding too much government, by requiring no useless observances. . . On this head I am anxious for information of the practices of other places, having myself had little experience of the government of youth."¹³

No analysis has been made of the backgrounds of the students who caused trouble in those days. Morison, however, at indicates that the beginning of the nineteenth century, as much later, the sons of the well-to-do were the discontented, while those from less privileged backgrounds took delight in their opportunities to benefit themselves. "If the college atmosphere seemed oppressive to young scions of rich mercantile families, it was Elysium to boys. . . who came up to Cambridge from poor or provincial surroundings after a hard struggle to qualify."¹⁴

Dormitories were deliberately established at various schools as a means of giving students a common experience under the protective shelter of the faculty's guiding hand. . . Group living was supposed to develop self-respect and group responsibility. However, as Bowes points

¹². *Ibid.*, pp. 75-76.

¹³. Thomas Jefferson, *Writings* (Washington: Thomas Jefferson Memorial Association, 1890), Vol XI, p. 455.

¹⁴. *Voxicon* on cit. pp. 179-180.

10

out, the dormitory "also brought students into close proximity usually under poor [living] conditions|. |. |. |It was a hatching ground for pranks and plots. In general, dormitories helped to create an atmosphere that invited frustration, peer conformity, and crime."15

Although much of a student "indiscipline" in the first half of the century after Independence, it revolved around local college issues, underlying a considerable part of it was resistance to the efforts of the schools to impose a traditional uncritical religious outlook on undergraduates receptive to the intellectual challenges to orthodox Protestantism. Bowes notes that "the 'college fathers' |. |. |strongly associated the spirit of liberty and self-reliance with infidelity and godlessness.. . | [On one occasion] a number of Princeton students celebrated a triumph over the faculty by breaking into the Presbyterian church, removing the pulpit Bible, and burning it. The leader of the senior class claimed to be an atheist and stated that Godwin's *Political Justice* was his bible. His attitude was quite popular during this period of American history."16

15 Bowes, op. cit., p. 84; see also Rudolph, op. cit., pp. 96-97.

16 Bowes, op. cit., p. 76; T. J. Wertenbaker, *Princeton, 1946-1949* (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1946), p. 136.

11

The conflicts over the right of the college to impose its religious views and practices on the students were to some degree linked to the domination of most schools by conservative, often clerical, groups of trustees, presidents, and faculty. According to Earnest, in "the early days of the Republic the teaching, except in a few Southern colleges under the influence of Jefferson, was mainly Federalist," in politics, and theologically orthodox.¹⁷ Conversely, Sister M. Kennedy indicates "Deism made rapid inroads among the college students of the day. Disrespect for authority, a sense of impermanence, and liberal theological ideas were heightened and spread by the Revolution. When the intellectual repercussions of the French Revolution reached the United States, skepticism and infidelity became rife and were accompanied by greater rowdyism in the colleges."¹⁸ Many clergymen attributed student unrest to the "vogue of in fidelity, Jeffersonianism, and rationalistic philosophy."¹⁹

The student opposition to rigid discipline within the colleges, as well as to the religious control over them

¹⁸ E. Earnest, *Academic Procession. An Informal History of the American College 1830 to 1953* (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1953), p. 31; Horstager, op. cit., pp. 241-242.

¹⁹ Sister M. Kennedy, *The Changing Academic Characteristics of the Nineteenth Century American College Teacher* (Ph.D. Thesis: Department of Education, St. Louis University, 1961), p. 52.

²⁰ *Ibid.*, p. 72; John Brubacher and Willis Rudy, *Higher Education in Transition* (New York: Harper and Bros., 1958), p. 53.

and to the dogmatic beliefs enunciated by many of the
colleges, did not constitute generational conflict per se.
Rather they reflected and were allied to the liberal forces
in the outside world led by Jefferson. These stressed the
need for greater freedom from institutional control within
the clerically dominated institutions of higher education,
as well as the need for a totally voluntaristic religious
system in the society as a whole. Morison reports that many
of the conflicts within the Harvard Board of Overseers were
along party lines, with the Federalists supporting strict
authority and the Jeffersonian Republicans arguing for
student rights.²⁰ In the larger polity, many of the
Jeffersonians argued that the state was obligated to provide
services for its citizens seven days a week,¹ that it could
not deprive non-Christians of their right to receive mail
on Sundays. In 1810, Congress passed a law providing for
the Sunday delivery of the mails. The issue of Sunday
activities was to remain a major one for some decades.²¹
In 1830, a Senate committee report, authored by a future
Vice-President, Richard Johnson, stated explicitly that in

20. Morison, op. cit., pp. 211-212.

21. John R. Bodo, *The Protestant Clergy and Public Issues
1812-1848* (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1951),
pp. 39-43; Anson P. Stokes, *Church and State in the United
States* (New York: Harper and Bros., 1950) Vol. II, pp. 12-21.

13

[LC]

the United States religion and irreligion had equal rights, and that laws proclaiming that the government should not provide services on Sunday would work an injustice on irreligious people or non-Christians, and would constitute a special favor for Christians as a group. The report enunciated in unequivocal terms: "The constitution regards the conscience of the Jew as sacred as that of the Christian, and gives no more authority to adopt a measure concerning the conscience of a solitary individual than that of a whole community... If Congress shall declare the first day of the week holy, it will not satisfy the Jew nor the Sabbatarian. ... It is the duty of this government to affirm to all to the Jew or Gentile, Pagan, or Christian the protection and advantages of our benign institutions on Sunday, as well as every day of the week."

22

Such sentiments, or course, outraged the Evangelical Protestant segment of the community. The Anti-Masonic party, which swept through the more isolated rural areas of the north in the late 1820s and early 1830s, in many ways represented the first major backlash movement

22 Richard M. Johnson, "Sunday Observance and the Mail," reprinted in George E. Probst, ed., *The Happy Republic* (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1962), pp. 250-254.

14

directed against the cosmopolitan educated elite who were
corrupting traditional values through their power over
politics, the media, and the cultural and intellectual
centers. It identified the Masons, the Jacksonians, and
the deistic intellectuals, as anti-Christian. Campus
religious liberalism, therefore, was involved in one of the
major conflicts of the day.²³

Bowes concludes his discussion of the period
from 1790 to 1830 by saying that student behavior reflected
"the growing liberalism of the age, a liberalism which was
impatient with puritanical restraint and in some cases with
religion itself." The universities tried "to crush what
they termed as irreligious, immoral, and disorderly behavior,"
but failed. He suggests the internal conflicts resulted in
"a deterioration of creativity, good scholarship, and
inspirational teaching."

Although the succeeding epoch, from 1830 to 1880,
witnessed fewer conflicts over discipline, much occurred
which also had a contemporary air about it. President Quincy
or Harvard was plagued with the problem or non-conformity of
dress by the students."²⁴

Quincy himself, as an undergraduate,

²³ S. '1. Lipset and Earl Raab, *The Politics of Unreality: Right-wing Extremism in America, 1790-1970* (New York: Harper and Row, 1970), Chapter 2.

24 Bowes, op. cit., pp. 107-105, 108

had insisted in 1818: that "Resistance to tyrants is obedience
to God." He led a forbidden rally around the "Rebellion
Tree," and was suspended by President Kirkland for this action.

In mid-nineteenth century conflicts with students, the police
are described by Bowes as "often guilty of needless brutality
and lack of tact." In defense of the police it should be
added that the "students make it a point to wantonly insult
and exasperate the peelers [police] on every occasion on
when it can be done with safety."²⁷

At the University of Virginia, which had started with more trust in
student self-government than any other school in the country, "fear of student
violence kept the faculty on edge."

But when the boys organized an independent military company and announced
that they would resist the "tyrannical movements of the faculty" which ordered
them to remove all arms from the campus, the teachers in 1836 out of desperation
or boldness ordered a substantial number of expulsions. Two days of rioting
ended in compromise: the appearance of the militia upheld the majesty of the
law and the retreat of the faculty readmitted the offending students. Ironically,
the professor who engineered the compromise was shot to death by a student
four years later. 28

It is difficult to generalize concerning the
political and social sentiments of American students in the
Jacksonian and pre-Civil War periods. One American, C. A.
Bristed, who graduated from Yale in the late 1830s and then
went on to study for five years in Cambridge University,
during which time he also visited continental universities,
concluded: "that the majority of highly educated young men
under any government are opposed to the spirit in which
that government is administered. Hasty and imperfect as
the conclusion is, it certainly does hold good for many
countries. . . Bristed went on to argue that the typical
student "sees the defects in the government of his country;

side which promises to remedy them, without reflecting at
what cost the remedy may have to be purchased."²⁸

If American students in the 1830s and 1840s were critical of a mass electoral democracy from a conservative elitist stance as Bristed suggests, they did little actively to foster this viewpoint. During this period, however, a number of abolitionist clubs appeared on various campuses. The University of Michigan had a secret organization devoted to smuggling runaway slaves into Canada.³⁰ The Amherst abolition society included one third of the student body before it was banned in 1835. Other schools with such societies included Dartmouth, Franklin, Hamilton, New York, Williams, Union, Western Reserve, Illinois, Oberlin, Marietta, Miami University (Ohio), Kenyon, and many others. Many of these campus groups secured public, and thereby historical, attention because efforts were made during the 1830s to deny their right to exist. "[I]t appears from a study of the cases that the infringements upon freedom of opinion in Northern colleges arose less from fear of the ideas of the student abolitionists than from distrust of the *agitative* and *apparently* radical methods they employed." The administrative opposition disappeared, since with "the penetration of abolitionism into the upper levels of Northern society and with its entrance into politics and the church, antagonism

²⁸ C. A. Bristed, *Five Years in an English University* (New York: G. P. R. Putnam, 1877), p. 61.

²⁹ Howard H. Teckham, *The Making of the University of Michigan 1817-1907* (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press,

17

to its discussion in Northern colleges quickly lessened. Some elite northeastern schools such as Princeton, Harvard, Yale and Pennsylvania had large southern enrollments and their administrators sought to avoid internecine warfare on campus. The occasional college straw vote I have run across indicates overwhelming backing for the Republicans in 1856 and 1860.

There is some indication that southern students were more aggressive in fostering their regional point of view than their northern peers. Cowley reports that students often joined "in molesting anti-slavery visitors from the North and the South" southerners who expressed even mild doubts about the sanctity of slavery. In 1856, for example, University of North Carolina students burned in effigy and threatened to tar and feather a professor who supported the newly organized Republican party. In the same year University of Virginia students cheered when their alma mater presented Proston Brooks with a cane like the one he used on the floor of Congress to beat Charles Sumner into invalidism."

30. Russell-Nye, *Fettered Freedom: Civil Liberties and the Slavery Controversy* (East-Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1949), p. 93. Hofstadter, *op. cit.*, pp. 259-261; Earnest *op.cit.*, pp. 66-68, 85, 90.

31. Cowley, *op. cit.*, p. 26.

After the Civil War, many "disorders in Southern universities" resulted from student membership in such organizations as the Ku Klux Klan. The Klan and other white supremacy groups were strong in a number of universities and used terror tactics against campus opponents and Negroes. A

Much of the intra-mural tension in this period, however, did not relate to any political issue. Essentially, students exhibited often in fairly violent fashion resentments against the faculty which were comparable to those expressed a century later. A recent sophisticated history of the American university reports:

[A] personal relationship [between faculty and students] had seldom existed in the past, and least of all in the mid-nineteenth century. The barrier between teacher and student loomed, if anything, far higher... it had...been revealed by riots, the throwing of stones at professors' houses, and in at least two cases by actual murder of a professor. At Dickenson College in 1866, "students regarded the faculty as a species of necessary evil...."

[C]ollege students betrayed many of the symptoms of a deeply disloyal subject population. Why else would oaths of allegiance have seemed appropriate for the students at Yale during the sixties and seventies? Or why would the freedom of students to congregate in large groups sometimes be inhibited by regulation? (e.g., at Harvard in 1871).

## Student Power and Radical Politics: The Interbellum Years

The period from the end of the Civil War until the turn of the century witnessed few politically related campus activities, other than efforts to support one of the two major party presidential candidates. There is some suggestion in the historical literature that if political protest was absent among the students of this era, that romantic renunciatory, anti-commercial and industrial-civilization sentiments were present. In "[C]ontemporary observers of the college scene, including those who studied freshman themes for the content of their ideas, agreed that the college student of this period placed high regard upon veracity, frankness, honesty, and such virtues, while opposing hypocrisy and sham." One student editorial in 1872 in a national paper for undergraduates, proclaimed Hamlet as the one character who suggests the ideal of students, for he was "the noble-hearted friend, pure, chivalrous."

This choice of hamlet as the ideal of American undergraduates a
century ago is particularly appropriate for as Erik Erikson points out he
Hamlet is "an abortive ideological leader," who exhibits in Shakespeare's
portrayal the special identity problems and need for commitment problems of intro-
spective youth. He "is the morbid young intellectual of his time, for did he
not recently return from studies at Wittenburg, the hotbed of humanist
corruption, his time's counterpart to Sophist Athens and to today's centers
of learning infested by existentialism, psychoanalysis - or worse?... He is
estranged from the ways of his country,... and, much like our 'alienated'
youth, he is estranged from and describes as 'alienated' the overstandardized man
of his day, who 'only got the tune of time and outward habit of encounter.'...
He abhors conventional sham and advocates genuineness of feeling." And for
Hamlet's appeal lies precisely in the fact that he is a complex figure who
epitomizes the inherent chaos of idealistic youth, "that his fidelity must
bring doom to those he loves, for what he accomplishes at the end is what he
tried to avoid at first. He succeeds in actualizing only what we would call his
negative identity and in becoming exactly what his own ethical sense could not
tolerate: a mad revenger."

The students of that long-past American age not only sought to identify
with heroic and tragic figures, they also expressed their renunciation of the
corrupt modern world in the practice common among Yale students in the late
1860's, who "often indulged in primitivistic idylls, camping out for a week
or two on lonely islands in the Long Island Sound ... living after
the manner of the primitive savage, the independent barbarian..." In their
romantic enthusiasms, these American students reembodied the much more full-blown
renunciatory groups of German youth who formed the extensive Youth Movement
before World War I.

Student demonstrations revived on an extensive scale in the last two
decades of the century. They were largely directed "against the doctrine of
*in loco parentis*." Student newspapers demanded that the college "should
adjust itself to the liberal changes in the structure of the American family."
The *Williams Argo* argued that "Few parents would attempt any such government
of (20-year-olds as do colleges of their students." At a number of schools
in this period students forced through public "trials" of their president and

secured the removal of many of them. Lincoln Steffens described a successful uprising at Berkeley during his freshman year (1885) at the University of California, Berkeley.

One evening, before I had matriculated, I was taken out by some upper classmen to teach the president a lesson. He had been the head of a private preparatory school and was trying to govern the private lives and the public moral of university "men" as he had those of his schoolboys. Fetching a long ladder, the upper classmen thrust it through a front window of Prexy's house and, to the chant of obscene songs, swung it back and forth, up and down, round and round, till everything breakable within sounded broken and the drunken indignation outside was satisfied or tired. ... [The president] was allowed to resign soon thereafter....

Students were sometimes instrumental in naming new presidents.

Lewis Feuer points to various examples of faculty support for student protest against college administrations and suggests: "Ambitious faculty men who allied themselves with student uprisings found a new avenue for upward mobility." The rebellious students, though expressing a high degree of alienation from their institutions and faculty, showed little interest in national politics, especially of a radical or reform kind. Analysis of campus straw votes indicated that all "over the United States (except, of course, in the South) college students recorded an overwhelming preference for the Republicans. This was true both in the Midwest and land-grant institutions and on the East Coast."

The one source of a politically related controversy during this period was the requirement of the Morrill Land Grant Act that universities benefitting from it must provide compulsory military training. Many students from state universities, those primarily affected, strongly objected to the training to be given military drill. The University of Wisconsin paper, the *University Press*, argued in 1870 that the American tradition opposed militarism. The most violent protest among the many hurled against such activities occurred in 1886, when students attempted to sabotage the program by breaking in and stealing the stocks and barrels of one hundred muskets. Tensions derivative from the existence of military drill precipitated major student protests at the University of Illinois in 1879-1880, and again in 1889-1891. In both instances, the President was struggle ended with the resignation of the president. These conflicts, like later ones, resulted in student activists generalizing their antagonism to the power of the faculty and Regents. Thus a student paper, the *Vindicator*,

"lashed the entire Faculty for twisting truth and using power unjustly, and boldly ridiculed individual professors!" It described a typical Regent as "A man who builds axhouse his house of cheap bricks, bought at reduced rates, on pretense they are for state purposes, and then denies it before a committee of the legislature." During the second conflict, a student paper argued: "It seems inconsistent in this age and country to educate young men and women in republican sentiments and at the same time attempt to govern them by a set of laws in the making of which they have no voice at all...."

Demonstrations against a compulsory military drill in state universities apart, almost all of the student protests of the late

Nineteenth Century were manifestly directed against the shortcomings of the institutions as schools, around the issues of discipline, curriculum content, administration power, due process, student self-government, and the like.

"Disaffected young men rebelled through boycotts, strikes and demonstrations.... Frequently the most promising students led the agitation."

Then, as now, according to Feuer, they occurred "not in the universities where students were from the lower classes but in the schools of the more well-to-do, not in the universities where the sciences and the practical arts were pursued but in the colleges of the liberal arts." He went on to suggest that class origins made the difference.

The class origin of the students, indeed, was a decisive factor in their unrest, but in a way precisely opposite to what a Marxist would expect. The Michigan or Illinois student .!./.!..came from a home where life's struggle was real and keen; he came to a state university because it was virtually free; often he worked his way through college; he chose his courses with an eye to his livelihood... When the obstacles of life are genuine and concrete .!./.!..then there are no surplus energies available for generational revolt. ¹⁸

If the period of student protest in the first quarter of the Nineteenth Century witnessed the rebellious students pressing for values which they shared with adult Jeffersonians, the widespread demonstrations of the last quarter often involved a shared concern with the faculty for a change in university governance. This was also a period of faculty revolt against the absolute power of college presidents.

Throughout the 1880s and 1890s .!./.!..professors began increasingly to identify themselves by academic discipline or as members of a separate, professional class. One sign of this new faculty solidarity was the unprecedented frequency with which faculties as a whole openly opposed their presidents. Another sign was the professors' success in having faculty positions rearranged by intellectual disciplines, or departments, rather than individual chairs whose incumbents .!./.!..were responsible only to the president. Yet a third sign was the unprecedented growth that occurred in the formation of professional societies during these years. ⁴⁹

Articles published in a variety of magazines read by the élite, the *Nation*, the *Critic*, the *Atlantic Monthly*, the *Forum* and others, contained frequent articles by professors

Feuer, op. cit. p. 341

Peterson, op. cit. pp. 139-140.

20

and others concerning the problems of higher education.
They dealt with sources of student unrest, the relationship
between research and teaching, academic governance, faculty
salaries and the like. It was generally recognized that
higher education was in a stage of change and crisis. The
emphasis on teaching and close faculty contact with under-
graduates was attacked as a source of student discontent.
It is interesting to note that even before the Civil War,
student unrest was explained by "a growing [faculty] minority
[as resulting from] . . . the faulty methods of teaching and
the uninspiring content of instruction. A small contingent
of Americans who had studied at German universities came
home to insist that power was better exercised over subjects
than over subject schoolboys, that a contribution to philology
was far more significant than a contribution to student
manners, that the whole emphasis of the college should be
shifted from discipline to scholarship. This theme was

shifted from discipline to scholarship. This theme was
Shortly after the war, the Ann Arbor undergraduate paper, *The University Chronicle*, complained that "the University was not on a par academically with most Eastern universities and ought to admit it." It attacked the University for appointing too many faculty "without tested reputations." These demands for scholars were advanced in much stronger and more general terms as a response to the turmoil of the latter part of the century.

An editorial on "College Discipline" in *The Critic* of July 30, 1881,
raised the question why "American youths in

21

college behave worse than |. |. | German youths." Its
explanation for lesser student indiscipline was "the German
policy of non-interference by faculty with students" supposedly
derived from the fact that German professors were primarily
dedicated to research. And both to improve "real learning in
American colleges," and reduce student unrest, the editorial
writer of *The Critic* argued:

> It must be borne in mind that the modern specialist gains
> no reputation by merely appropriating the knowledge of
> the past in his branch of study; one must continually
> question Nature and push back the boundary of darkness
> which on all sides surrounds him. He must mark out a new
> path of investigation and arrive at new results. The
> ideal professor is not the mere pedagogue who sits at his
> desk hearing recitations, . . . The time has evidently come
> for the return of the latter type to his proper sphere
> and the establishment in professorial chairs of zealous
> [research] specialists.

A German psychologist turned Harvard professor, Hugo Münsterberg, argued in the same vein some years later: "A young scholar ought to devote himself to special problems, where he can really go to the sources; instead of that our young instructor has to devote himself to the widest fields, where it is impossible to aim at anything but the most superficial acquaintance."

"College Discipline," *The Critic*, 1 (July 30, 1881), p. 204. Yet thirty years later, an analyst of the American university scene who contended as of 1909 that "almost every educator. [who] if asked what was the main fault of our large colleges, would . . . [reply] that it was the loss of personal relationship between instructor and student," also argued that the "less personal attention they [students] get from professors the better some of them like it." Edwin E. Slosson, Great American Universities New York: Macmillan and Company, 1910), pp. 76, 386.

43. Hugo Münsterberg, "Productive Scholarship in America," *The Atlantic Monthly*, 97 (May, 1901), p. 624.

JP Faculty defenders argue that excessive emphasis on teaching made for dull lecturers who bored their students, and impelled them to dislike their college. In an article published in 1894, "Research The Vital Spirit of Teaching," G. Stanley Hall argued that "Excessive teaching palls and kills." Exciting teachers are men whose knowledge "is fresh from the sources, and not second- or third-hand." Münsterberg was to make a similar point.

The young man who has to conduct twenty "recitations" a week, and to read hundreds of examination books, and to help on the administrative life of the place, begins by postponing his scientific work to the next year, and the year after next, when he shall be more accustomed to his duties. But after postponing it for a few years more his will becomes lame, his power rusty, his interest faded.

Since college presidents and trustees supposedly were primarily interested in assuring that the faculty spent most of their time with students, an objective which some protesting students resented as much as those faculty who sought more time for research, Hall, though a new university president himself, called for faculty self-government. "[The] ideal university| . | . . is sure to need a larger academic policy be shaped more by the faculty, who can/best trusted with the interests of science if their quality is once well established| . . . ."

G. S. Hall, "Research The Vital Spirit of Teaching." The Forum, 27 (July, 1894), p. 570.

Münsterberg, op. cit., p. 624

Hall, op. cit., p. 561.

23

Important segments of the students and the faculty were demanding greater freedom, more right to participate in government. A variety of student senates or councils were established for the first time. Undergraduates were allowed to take part in disciplinary committees or boards at a number of schools. These seeming triumphs had some real consequences in the elimination of areas in which colleges claimed the right to act in loco parentis. The experiences with shared power through student self-government was much less successful, however, than the increase in faculty influence at major schools.

But though the students begged loudly for a "New System" when they were without it and complimented themselves on the prospect of running the college, once student government was a reality, the undergraduates lost much of their enthusiasm. There had always been something fraudulent in the idea of student government. Students did not, and could not, literally govern the college. The idea of student government was most often a proposition administrations tried to use to harness the rebellious energies of undergraduates. The Bowdoin Orient expressed typical disillusionment when it editorialized of Bowdoin's Student Jury, a system colleges throughout the East were clamoring to imitate: "The students do not desire to govern themselves nor is there any logical reason why they should be expected to do so. The faculty is given the authority and the raculty cannot delegate their responsibility."

To the fin de siècle undergraduate, independence meant freedom from faculty interference in his extracurricular organizations. Students discovered that they did not want to take over the colleges, but rather to insulate themselves from its demands. The grandest independence American students could conceive was their outright rejection of raculty, trustee, and alumni pleas to make a race-saving gesture before the public and reestablish the famous Senate.

Siècle

47 Peterson on eit. pp. 145-146.

24

The awareness that student participation in the governance of universities involved cooptation rather than shared power, links critics of the campus scene of the 1890s with those of the 1960s. This was not the only similarity that may be found in the writings of the two periods. Then, as now, men differed as to the significance of student indiscipline. Some argued that it was the work of a small minority who did not really represent the feelings of, or the problems concerning, the great majority.

Thus a Harvard professor, N. S. Shaler, in a discussion of "The Problem of Discipline in Higher Education," contended in 1889, in terms of many articles concerning the contemporary student population, that the considerable "public remark as to the evil behavior of Harvard students" was occasioned by the extreme actions of two to three percent which are well publicized, and "carry alarm into the households whence come some twelve hundred normally well-behaved young men."

The controversies among faculty, administrators, and others, as to how to handle the disruptions on campus also resembled current debates. Men differed all during the

48 N. S. Shaler, "The Problem of Discipline in Higher Education," The Atlantic Monthly, 51 (July, 1889), p. 35.

25

Nineteenth century as to whether to follow Jefferson's advice to reduce external controls and punishments as a means of reducing student hostility, or that of President Josiah Quincy of Harvard who resorted to calling the police and to trying to enforce civil law within the university.

accepted

The norm, accepted in many foreign countries, that universities are autonomous and that the police should not be called to intervene in intra-mural disturbances has always had strong support in the United States, particularly among students. Francis Wayland, pre-Civil War president of Brown, argued that campus unrest would be ended by subjecting students to the same civil penalties and external police power as the rest of society. He pointed out that he had "known college officers to take very great pains to shield students from the consequences of their violation of municipal regulations." Discussions in the public press made the same point during the upheavals of the end of the century. An article by a professor in *The Forum* in 1887 concerning "College Disturbances" stated that they were in some part a result of the notion "that a different code of honor, morals, duty, and conduct belongs to college life from that which attends common life.". It stated that a college community is to some degree exempt from common

Francis Wayland and H. L. Wayland, *A Memoir of the Life and Labors of Francis Wayland* (New York: Sheldon and Co., 1887), Vol. 1, p. 264. A Graduate of '69 assumes in his book on life at Yale "that no peeler can lawfully enter... the college yard" op.cit., p. 516.

20

obligations and responsibilities. . . Students' many, not all' act upon the assumption, and the public in too many cases practically concedes it. Practices condemned and punished by the common and statute law are looked upon as allowable |. |. |. | in college. 50 60

Although, as noted above, many academics argued successfully in favor of reducing the teaching load and increasing support for research as a means of improving the calibre of undergraduate education; these changes were followed by in the press which articles voiced the sentiment of administrators, trustees, and some of the protesting students in contending that research was interfering with adequate instruction and consequently made for student unrest. An article in the *Educational Review* in 1895 complained that "most young college professors are more concerned with their subjects than with their pupils." Charles Ramsey argued:

> In the zeal for special research which has become the ideal aim of much college instruction, it has come about that only the most brilliant scholars are chosen to be instructors, regardless of their lack of more strictly professorial preparation and experience. As such instructors are usually promoted, this in turn has also become the ideal method of recruiting professorial ranks.

50 S. C. Bartlett, "College Disturbances," *The Forum*, 4 (December, 1887), p. 427.

51 See summary and excerpts of an article by Charles Ramsey in the *Educational Review* for January, 1895, in "Needed Reforms in College Teaching." *The Review of Reviews*, 11 (February, 1895), p. 2.

27

[L]

The *Nation* editorialized in 1900 on "The Decline of Teaching," arguing that it resulted from the fact that it "is the making of books, and not the training of the young in habits of thought and work, that holds out to the teacher of to-day the main promise of reward." 624 *World's Work* suggested in 1901 that research and teaching ought to be separated, that the two interfere with each other. "And in most of our universities the teaching of youth has become less efficient than it once was, and surely less than it ought to be, because of the too common effort to unite it with original research." 63

#>

TP

An article in the *Atlantic Monthly* in 1902, while recognizing that talented professors ought to be encouraged to engage in creative scholarship, "to explore the farthest boundaries of human knowledge," strongly argued that the passion for research resulted in the neglect of other professorial duties by the large majority who were not genuinely creative.

Yet the college teachers who really make original contributions to human knowledge are few in proportion to the total numbers engaged in the profession. The passion for scholarship, like that for poetry, does not always imply a corresponding power for production; and because we are glad to release some picked man from

52

"The Decline of Teaching," The Nation, 70 (March 8, 1901): 1-11.

53

"For Better Teaching and Better Research," The World's Work, 2 (July, 1901): 3-13.

the common social obligations and services, and bid
him Godspeed upon his adventures, it does not follow
that a similar freedom may be claimed by those who
stay at home.

Seven years later in the same magazine, Abraham
Flexner published what was to become the classic story
illustrating lack of concern for undergraduate teaching.

I took occasion, not long ago, to ask a college dean who
was the best teacher in his institution. He named a
certain instructor.

"What is his rank?"

"Assistant Professor."

"When will his appointment expire?"

"Shortly."

"Will he be promoted?"

"No."

"Why not?"

"He hasn't done anything."

A comprehensive and highly praised survey of the operation of the
<u>Great American Universities</u> published in 1910 generalized following a discussion of the situation of students at Harvard concerning the absence of concern among faculty for undergraduates.

Here is the weak point of all the great colleges, and even of the smaller
ones - the lack of personal contact between teacher and student. It is not
due to the influx of an overwhelming number of students because the faculty has
generally grown in proportion or more. It is partly due to defective organi-
zation and partly to the development of a new school of teachers, who detest
teaching, who look upon students as a nuisance, and class work as a waste of
time.

The current debates concerning the multiversity,
dealing with the involvement of professors in extra-mural
organizations, reiterate points made at the turn of the century.
Some welcomed the participation of faculty in such activities;
others saw them as interfering with scholarly and teaching
duties. The description in any case is familiar.

[A] newer type of college professor is !... everywhere
in evidence; the expert who knows all about railroads
and bridges and subways; about gas commissions and
electrical supplies; about currency and banking,

29

[L]

Philippine tariffs, Venezuelan boundary lines, the industries of Puerto Rico, the classification of the civil service, the control of trusts ... [The] college professor who represents the "humanities," rather than the distinctly scientific side of modern education, is likewise brought closer to the public than ever before. The newspapers report it and misreport it. Editors offer him space to reply. Publishers weary him with appeals to write textbooks. The professor's photograph assaults your eye in the market place. The college press club and the university's bureau of publicity gives his lecture dates in advance. The prospectus of your favorite magazine bids you inspect his literary qualifications as well as his thoughtful countenance. Who's Who in America informs you of the name of his second wife.

Then, as now, participation by professors in political affairs led to their being denounced. Turn-of-the-century comment sounds extremely contemporary.

Within a twelvemonth college teachers have been openly denounced as "traitors" for advocating self-government for the Filipinos. In many a pulpit and newspaper office, last September, it was declared that the utterances of college professors were largely responsible for the assassination of President McKinLEY. One must admit that a good many college professors have taken the Irish members of Parliament as their exemplars, and are boyishly pleased if they can merely obstruct the business of the House. Miss Evelina Burney once wrote of Sir Philip Jennings Clerk, "He is a professed minority man." This type of man is familiar in academic circles.

This period also witnessed the first large group of academic freedom cases. A number of schools sought to fire controversial professors. The emergence of the

56 B.P., on. cit., pp. 284-285

57 Ibid., p. 286.

"controversial" academic was, of course, not a coincidence. It stemmed from the shift in the conception of the professor from teacher to research, "from conserving to searching." Insofar as research, innovation, frontier knowledge began to gain status within academe, faculty members were occupationally motivated to reject the values and lore of the past, to assume that the knowledge and agreed wisdom of the present was tentative, that "tradition was mere opinion and experience, but that opinion improves as society ages and that experience grows stale with senescence."

The growth in explicit reformist political concerns among the faculty and in the intellectual community generally after 1900 was to be paralleled among a small minority of students who became involved in socialist politics in the form of the Intercollegiate Socialist Society (ISS) formed in 1905. By 1908, a conservative English visitor, Alexander Francis, was impressed that the spread of socialism in America had deeply penetrated the intellectual and student worlds.

If the term "intellectuals" covers all who have had a college career, a considerable number of them may be said to have professed socialism. Socialist societies have established themselves at the universities; and Secretary Taft, speaking at Yale, referred somewhat

Metzger, op. cit., pp. 43-44; for a detailed analytic account of the shift see Voysey, op. cit., pp. 121-179.

31

scornfully to these "dreamers and impracticable thinkers at the universities of this country who would abandon the system lying at the base of modern society." Well, youth everywhere is prone to be full of impetuosity and self-confidence, at once purblind and bold; and in its state of half-culture, undergraduate youth is peculiarly apt to seize with enthusiasm upon a general principle, regardless of its limitations or relations to other principles. But I met not a few professors who hold and teach socialistic doctrines; and it is significant that most, certainly the most extreme, of these have positions in colleges and universities which have received large pecuniary gifts from millionaires.⁷⁰

The young socialist Randolph Bourne, while still an undergraduate at Columbia in 1912, generalized in the same fashion concerning the spread of socialism among undergraduates and the role of the faculty at the leading American universities.

"Settlement work and socialist propaganda are now the commonplaces of the undergraduate." And he went on to argue that these tendencies were clearly a function of the university, for "his education, if it has been in one of the advanced universities, will have only tended to confirm his radicalism. . . ." The younger teachers, particularly, rejected traditional values, and Bourne called on the dedicated undergraduate to "ally himself with his radical teachers in spirit and activity. . . ." The college thus becomes for the first time in American history a reorganizing force. It now finds arrayed against it, in spirit at least if not in open antagonism, the churches and the conservative moieties or opinion.

⁷⁰ Alexander Francis, *Americans: An Impression* (London: Andrew Melrose, 1909), pp. 223-229.

⁷¹ Randolph S. Bourne, *Youth and Life* (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1906).

David Shannon reports that "in the great upsurge of progressivism and radicalism just before World War I, the ISS had chapters in sixty colleges and universities. There were chapters in the major New England colleges, most of the state universities outside the South, and the most prominent Protestant denominational colleges." The ISS had about 2,000 dues-paying members, among a national college population of under 400,000 in 1912-13. For comparative purposes this may be placed alongside the claim of SDS of 6,000 dues-paying members out of a national higher education population of close to 7,000,000 in 1968-69.

Once socialism entered the university, student protest enunciated a set of ideological themes and action concerns which have continued down to the present. Upton Sinclair, one of the organizers of the ISS, used the "factory" analogy in his analysis of the operation and function of the university.

John Reed, a founding member of the Harvard Socialist Club, left behind two autobiographical reminiscence essays which were published long after his death. The first was written in 1912, shortly after his graduation, while the second was

David N. Shannon, *The Socialist Party of America* (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1937), pp. 55-56; Ira Kipnis, *The American Socialist Movement 1897-1912* (New York: Columbia University Press, 1952), pp. 259-260.

Upton Sinclair, *The Goose-Step* (Pasadena: "The Author," 1923), p. 460.

32a

drafted five years later. His description of events and ideology
has a strong modern ring:

What's wrong with Harvard? Something is the matter. Numbers of letters from alarmed alumni pour into President Lowell's office every day, asking if Socialism and Anarchy are on the rampage among undergraduates. . . . | Old graduates shake their heads mournfully and agree the place is going to the dogs. . . .

[The] group that founded the [Socialist] Club were Fabians, that is, they believed in "permeating" the University with the doctrine which they stood for. . . . | The idea was to stir up criticism, revolt, discussion, opposition, not only of the present state of things in the outside world, but of the state of things at Harvard. They wanted to make undergraduates take sides on every issue that concerned them; to learn what they wanted to learn, and demand of the Faculty that the "dead wood" among the teachers be cleared away. . . .

So Lippman and MacGowen, the inner circle of the Socialist Club, deliberately planned to get control of every organization that would help them, or at least to be represented therein. . . . | They set themselves enthusiastically to become accomplished dialecticians, indomitable arguers, to be able to talk, and talk well, on any subject that might be brought up. . . . [T]he Harvard Socialists turned their theories upon themselves, determined to work them out at Harvard University

[W]ithin half a year, the active enrolled members of the Club amounted to fifty, with about twice as many more interested. . . .

Many of the professors and instructors had become interested in the various undergraduate movements. . . . the Socialist Club received the warm sympathy and support of the great William James, of Professor Adams, of Professor S. B. Johnson. 74

68. John Reed, "The Harvard Renaissance," The Harvard Progressive. (March 1939), pp. 8, 10, 22. The 1917 essay was somewhat similar in tone: "Students themselves criticized the faculty for not educating them . . . . Some men, notably Walter Lippman, had been reading and thinking and talking about politics and economics, not as dry theoretical studies, but as live forces acting on the world, on the university even. . . . [The] members of the Socialist Club, . . . wrote articles in the college papers challenging undergraduate ideals, and muckraked the university. . . . The result: | of this movement upon the undergraduate world was potent. All over the place radicals sprang up, in music, painting, poetry, the theatre, etc. The more serious college papers took a social-istic, or at least, progressive tinge. . . ." John Reed, "Almost Thirty," New Republic, 86 (April 29, 1936), pp. 332-333. For other contemporary accounts of the activities of the Harvard Socialists, see Francis B. Thwing, "Radicalism at Harvard," Harvard Graduates' Magazine, 20(December, 1911), pp. 260-263; Gerrit C. Henderson, "The College and the Radicals," Ibid., 20(March, 1912), pp. 463-465.

33

149

[L.C.]

Sociahst

The Harvard Club, like its campus successors in the Student League for Industrial Democracy in the 1920's, the American Student Union in the 1930's, and the SDS in the 1960's, took as one of its tasks, improving the conditions of Harvard cafeteria and cleaning workers. The radical group organized in 1908 also set a precedent followed by the others in later decades for campaigning on local off-campus issues, particularly with reference to housing conditions in Cambridge and Boston.

Writing in _The New Republic_ in 1916, Randolph Bourne argued that intellectual and student radicalism had become too popular for their own good. "The real trouble with middle-class radicalism today is that it is too easy. It is becoming too popular. . . . Let the college man or girl . . . join the Intercollegiate Socialist Society or some similar institution, and discover how discouragingly respectable they are." He sounded like some contemporary older left critic of the New Left when he criticized these groups for being "full of the unfocussed and unthinking," and argued that they could most effectively serve the radical movement "by being fiercely and concentratedly intellectual. This is something these organizations have so far failed to do."

Bourne went on to urge that "intellectual radicalism should not mean repeating stale dogmas of Marxism", . . . The young radical today is not asked to be a martyr, but he is asked to be a thinker, an intellectual leader." However, Bourne noted that many of the young socialists of his day dropped away when they failed to make contact with the working-class.

"The young radical soon learns to be ashamed of his intellectual bias, and after an ineffectual effort to squeeze himself into the mind of the workingman drifts away disillusioned from his timid collegiate radicals." (SP 75)

Bourne indicated support for social reform and socialist causes that went considerably beyond the narrow circles of the dues-paying members of the ISS, much as support for the New Left during the late 1960s was more extensive than the 2,500 to 3,000 members claimed by SDS in different years. Another indication of this pattern was suggested at the most conservative of Ivy League institutions, Princeton, by F. Scott Fitzgerald, in his description of life there before the U.S. entered World War I.

SP

Galloni, Randolph-S. Bourne, "The Price of Radicalism," The New Republic, 6 (March 11, 1916), p. 101.

35

In his last years at Princeton, Fitzgerald noted that the students around the small tables in the Nassau Inn "began questioning aloud the institutions that Amory and countless others before him had questioned so long in secret." They discussed sex and socialism, and the "social barriers as artificial distinctions made by the strong to bolster up their weak retainers and keep out the almost strong." In "a fury of righteousness" (100 men resigned from their clubs.)

Between 1914 and American entry into the war, there was considerable anti-war activity involving both socialist and campus peace groups. A poll of 80,000 students in May/1915 on "the question of introducing military drill" in colleges, found that 63,000 voted against it. Opposition to military training in the form of RCOFTC was, of course, to continue to be a major feature of student activism in later periods, viz., the mid-twenties, the 1930s, and most recently in the late 1950s.

The early twentieth century demand by many college students for relevance, for the opportunity to apply their values in social betterment, met its greatest fulfillment, however, not in radical or anti-war politics but in the participation in settlement work, in direct contact with the

36

poor in the urban slums. Thousands of students and young
graduates threw themselves into staffing the rapidly growing
number of settlement houses. By 1911 there were 413 of them,
three-quarters of which had been formed since the turn of the
century. They involved 2,500 residents and another 10,000 to
15,000 student volunteers.

In America, settlements came as an exciting release to the feelings of purposelessness that had frustrated so many college graduates. Settlements in this country were protests by students against learning that was never put to use. The settlement movement offered students the chance to put the collegiate ideals to work in these cities, just then beginning to dominate national life, and spread their problems across the country. To the early settlement leaders it seemed inevitable that students should predominate in the movement. To Jane Addams it was plain that young people led the reform because they were the ones to feel most fully the lack in their own lives that came from being estranged from the active part of the nation. Students would go into cities ultimately because only there could they save themselves from atrophy. It was their defense against the kind of deterioration into irrelevance that had so frightened their elders in the elite.

Although the Settlement House movement clearly involved many Progressives and liberals, it should be noted that some of the most prominent leaders of it, people like Jane Addams, Lilian Wald, and Mary Simkhovitch, were socialist supporters. The outlook of the movement struck an English student visitor in 1900-1909 as involving the assumption that

67 Peterson, pp. 179-184.

37

"there is no such word as 'cannot' in the lexicon of youth,"
and that his "favorite motto is 'Do it right now.'" Acting on
these principles, he is dealing with the vast social problems
that beset him through the agency of the various Settlements

An analysis of the backgrounds of those active in
settlement work points up the similarities among young people
who choose the path of reform and transformation of the
situation of the poor in different epochs.

Most settlement workers came from families that were moderately well-to-do. The fact that they were able to enter settlement work at all, especially during the early years, was often an indication that they did not have to earn a living.

...Whatever their occupation, many of the parents were actively involved in reform or concerned with aiding the poor... There were some who entered a settlement against their parents' judgment, but the majority inherited a tradition of service... In some cases they felt they were rebelling against their parents, but more often they were translating an inherited impulse to fit a new situation and a new generation.

Campus criticism threw up another wave of protest against pre-World War I American society, the Young Intellectuals. The very term was used to mean a critic of society. As Henry May

points out its "origins were partly socialist; the
intellectual to the Marxists was the bourgeois who repudiated
his class. The groups who so identified themselves came
from two streams, midwesterners, and graduates of Ivy League
colleges, particularly Harvard, Yale and Princeton. Like
those involved in the ISS and settlement houses, "most of
these young radicals came from secure upper-middle class
families, and for this reason were eager to like and admire
the poor, especially, the urban poor, especially the recent
immigrants. They flocked to New York, and took up their
cause, particularly that of the Jews, who lived in abysmal
crowded slums in the midst of extreme wealth.

The Young Intellectuals turned the conventional
hierarchy upside down. Anglo-Saxons, repressed and bigoted,
were at the bottom of the scale; at the top were the
Italians, the Slavs, and above all, the Eastern European
Jews of the East Side. Writers of Puritan ancestry like
Hutchins Hapgood, earnest radicals like Ernest Poole, who
was studying Yiddish, found an endless satisfaction in the
quarter's crowded streets.

The Young Intellectuals, like many of the student
socialists from whose ranks they frequently came, found the
electoral activities of the growing American Socialist Party

⁷⁰Henry F. May. The End of American Innocence. A Study of the First Years of Our Own Time 1912-1917 (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1917) p. 281.

78Ibid.. p. 304.

72Ibid.. p. 282.

39

prosaic and boring. Like their compers in the future, they
were attracted to militant tactics, including violence.

Where the left wing of American socialism merged with the
I.W.W., the Young Intellectuals found a focus for their
loyalty. Syndicalism attracted them because of its appeal
for direct action and also its European intellectual prestige.

... Anarchism, the noblest of radical dreams, attracted many of the Young Intellectuals. ... The anarchist movement, with its drama of bombs and spies, outrage and espionage and persecution, had furnished subjects for Dostoevsky, Henry James and Joseph Conrad.

... The anarchism of Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman appealed deeply to the Young Intellectuals. For one thing, Russia, and particularly Russian radicalism, had great prestige. Furthermore, the anarchist leaders hated the halfway measures and compromise goals of current progressivism or majority socialism. Their morality, like their courage, was absolute. They attacked bourgeois culture, marriage and religion as well as government. In the face of public hatred, they refused to give up their belief in the propaganda of the deed. Destruction must be justified by the establishment of a new reign of individualism and brotherhood, mystically combined.

... [Another] revolutionary cause which greatly interested the Young Intellectuals [was] the revolt in sexual morality. ... Neither socialism nor feminism necessarily implied sexual radicalism. ... Yet the left wing of feminism and revolutionary socialism could come together. ...

The élan of the various student-based movements, both political and settlement house, was destroyed by the war. Their adherents divided sharply as to whether to support or oppose America's entry, a conflict which continued even after the declaration of war. With minor, though distinguished exceptions, the campus threw itself wholeheartedly into Wmaking the world safe for democracy, and had little time

73 Ibid., pp. 301-308.

10

left for other causes.

Any evaluation of the campus-based movements which emerged after 1900 must first recognize that they did not constitute an independent youth or student revolt against the older generation, whether on campus or off. These were also the years of a growing Progressive and Socialist movement which culminated in the large third party votes received in 1912 by Theodore Roosevelt (27 percent) on the Progressive Party ticket, and by Eugene V. Debs (6 percent) running as a Socialist. The Socialist Party received over 900,000 votes and had close to 125,000 members in that year. Both the Intercollegiate Socialist Society and the Settlement House movement were campus expressions of the same tendencies which inspired mass support for reform and radicalism in the population as a whole. The rapid growth of the industrial cities with their teeming immigrant slums, their corruption and their high crime rate, shocked the sentiments of many middle-class Americans, including a large proportion of their children away in college.

The college faculties, as Francis and Bourne reported, undoubtedly contained many sympathetic to these efforts for social change. The settlement houses "were enthusiastically supported by most of [...] [the] idealist professors."⁸⁵ There are no reliable data concerning the

74

Davis, op. cit., p. 183.

41

politics of college faculty as a group before World War I.
One study which dealt with faculty attitudes toward religion
did, however, suggest that they were more liberally or
radically disposed than has generally been assumed. James
Leuba, a psychologist, studied the religious beliefs of
randomly selected samples of the membership of the sociological,
psychological, and historical societies, and of scientists
listed in American Men of Science in 1913-14. He reported
that the majority in each group did not believe in God or
immortality. Although religious and political beliefs are
clearly separate, a variety of studies, including some of
faculty opinions in the last two decades, indicate a high
correlation between religious and political outlooks.
Irreligious people are much more likely to have liberal and
left-wing views than believers.

There are no comparable data for the non-academic
portion of the population before World War I. The religious
census data, however, report that 55 percent of all persons
(14 years of age or older were actual members of religious
denominations during this period. Leuba was able to compare
academic and non-academic members of the American Sociological
Society, and found that the academics were more likely to
disdain religion. Perhaps more significant was his finding
that the more distinguished professors were much more

42

irreligious than their less eminent colleagues. This
result coincides with much more recent survey studies of
academic politics which also suggest that academic prestige is
associated with more liberal-left views. Seemingly, before
1914, sizable groups of American academics, particularly the
more scholarly and creative among them, located disproportionately
at the more distinguished schools, were out of step with
conventional social opinion. Then as now, therefore, the
children of the elite attending such institutions were
involved in an intellectual milieu in which a liberal outlook
held sway. Those students who sought to act out the
implications of such orientations in political clubs like
the ISS, or through participation in settlement houses, were
not in revolt. Rather, as Randolph Bourne argued, they were
probably conforming to the dominant values in the liberal
arts in the leading schools.

Leuba collected comparable data on the religious
beliefs of students which unfortunately are not as representative
of larger populations as his surveys of different groups of

⁹⁵ James H. Leuba, *The Belief in God and Immortality* (Boston: Sherman, French and Co., 1916), pp. 221-288.

⁹⁶ Paul E. Lazarsfeld and Wagner Thielens, Jr., *The Academic Mind* (Glencoe: The Free Press, 1958), pp. 144-146, 150-151, 161-163.

42 a

scientists and social scientists. He secured 927 questionnaires
from "all the students of a number of classes belonging to
non-technical [liberal arts] departments of nine colleges of
high rank, and by two classes [78 answers] of a normal school."

He found that 56 per cent of the men and 82 per cent of the
women in this non-representative sample believed in "a
personal God." Less than 10 per cent rejected belief in any
concept of God. Leuba concluded from these and other data
that "considered all together, my data would indicate that
from 40 to 50 per cent of the young men leaving college
entertain an idea of God incompatible with the acceptance
of the Christian religion, even as interpreted by the liberal
clergy." The rate of unbelief "increases considerably from
the freshman to the senior year in college." These findings
are clearly less significant than those concerning the
faculty, but they do lend weight to the assumption that a
substantial minority of American students may have been
receptive to radical or progressive ideas before World War I.

The wave of activism and protest among the pre-World War I young was not blamed solely or primarily on the failings of the university, or the teaching or the faculty. Then, as during the 1920s and 1960s, spokesmen for the conventions

Leuba, op. cit., pp. 202-203.

43

located the decline in the morality of youth on societal
changes which had undermined parental authority. Cornelia
Comer bemoaned the effect of the media and the decline of
religion and family discipline, which resulted in a "culte
de moi" among the affluent young.

How can anything avail to refine children whose taste in
humor is formed by the colored supplements of the Sunday
paper, as their taste in entertainment is shaped by the
continuous vaudeville and the motion-picture shows? ... |
While most vaudeville performances have one or two
numbers that justify the proprietors' claim of harmless,
wholesome amusement, the bulk of the programme is almost
inevitably drivel, common, stupid, or inane . . . .
"I don't approve," your fathers and mothers say anxiously,
"but I hate to keep Tom and Mary at home when all the
other children are allowed to go". . . .

In the wrack of beliefs, your parents managed to retain .
their ingrained principles of conduct. Not knowing what
to teach you, they taught you nothing wholeheartedly . . . .
If you are agnostic-and-water, if you find nothing in
the universe more stable than your own wills--what wonder?
. . . [As a result] when these young people adopted a
philosophy, it was naive and inadequate. They talked of
themselves as "socialists." 79 89

Two months later, the Columbia junior | Randolph
Bourne | wrote a reply to this attack on the soft character of
the badly brought up young radicals. In it, he agreed that
home discipline had broken down, but he drew a different
conclusion. The youth of his generation could see more clearly
precisely because they were freer than previous ones from

78 Cornelia A. P. Comer, "A Letter to the Rising Generation, The Atlantic Monthly, 107 (February. 1911), pp. 147-148. 149.

44

allegiance to outmoded beliefs. "Having brought themselves
up, they judge utility by their own standards." He also
credited their exposure to the output of the mass media for
broadening their horizons. "In an age of newspapers, free
libraries, and cheap magazines, we necessarily get a broader
horizon than the passing generation had. We see what is
going on in the world, and we get the clash of different points
of view, to an extent which was impossible to our fathers."
And as a result of not having been indoctrinated by an older
generation which was certain of its values, Bourne argued that
his generation has "retained from childhood the propensity to
see through things, and to tell the truth with startling
frankness."

79 Randolph S. Bourne, 'The Two Generations.' The Atlantic Monthly, 107 (May, 1941), pp. 592, 593.

10. Bowes, op. cit.

11. Cowley, op. cit., p. 15.

12. *Ibid.*, pp. 75-76.

13. Thomas Jefferson, *Writings* (Washington: Thomas Jefferson Memorial Association, 1890), Vol XI, p. 455.

14. Morison, *op.cit.*, pp. 179-180.

15. Bowes, op. cit., p. 84; see also Rudolph, op.cit., pp. 96-97, and Oscar and Mary Handel, *The American College and American Culture* 16 (New York: Harcourt Brace & Co., 1960), pp. 37-39.
16. Bowes, op.cit., p. 76; T.J. Wertenbaker, *Princeton, 1946-1966* (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1946), p. 136.

17. E. Earnest, *Academic Procession. An Informal History of the American College* 1936 to 1953 (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1953), p. 31; Horstauter, *op. cit.*, pp. 241-242.

18. Sister M. Kennedy, *The Changing Academic Characteristics of the Nineteenth Century American College Teacher* (Ph.D. Thesis: Department of Education, St. Louis University, 1901), p. 52. (1961)

19. *Ibid.*, p. 72; John Brubacher and Willis Rudy, *Higher Education in Transition* (New York: Harper and Bros., 1958), p. 53.

20. Morison, *op. cit.*, pp. 211-212.

21. John R. Bodo, *The Protestant Clergy and Public Issues: 1812-1848* (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1954), pp. 39-43; Anson P. Stokes, *Church and State in the United States* (New York: Harper and Bros., 1950) Vol. II. pp. 12-20.

22. Richard M. Johnson, 'Sunday Observance and the Mail,' reprinted in George E. Probst, ed., *The Happy Republic* (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1962), pp. 250-254. (1962)

23. S. M. Lipset and Earl Raab, *The Politics of Unreason: Right-wing Extremism in America, 1790-1970* (New York: Harper and Row, 1970), Chapter 2.

24. Bowes, *op. cit.*, pp. 104-105, 108.

Francis Mayland and H. L. Mayland, *A Memoir of the Life and Labors of Francis Mayland* (New York: Sheldon and Co. [1967], Vol. 1, p. 264). A Graduate of '69 assumes in his book on life at Yale "that no peeler can lawfully enter. . . the college yard" *op.cit.*, p. 516.

60 S. C. Bartlett, 'College Disturbances,' *The Forum*, 4 (December, 1887), p. 427.

61 See summary and excerpts of an article by Charles Ramsey in the *Educational Review* for January, 1895, in "Needed Reforms in College Teaching." *The Review of Reviews*, 11 (February, 1895).

p. 21

62 "The Decline of Teaching," *The Nation*, 70 (March 8, 1900).

p. 18.

63 "For Better Teaching and Better Research," *The World's Work*, 2 (July, 1901) p. 913.

64 B. P., "College Professors and the Public," *The Atlantic Monthly*, 39 (March, 1902), p. 284.

65 Abraham Flexner, "The Problems of College Pedagogy," *The Atlantic Monthly*, 103 (June, 1909), p. 844.

66 E.E. Slosson, *Great American Universities* (New York: Macmillan, 1910), pp. 17-18.

67 B.P., *op. cit.*, pp. 284-285.

68 *Ibid.*, p. 286.

69 Metzger, *op. cit.*, pp. 43-44; for a detailed analytic account of the shift see *Veysey, op.cit.*, pp. 121-179.

70 Alexander Francis, *Americans: An Impression* (London: Andrew McIlrose, 1909), pp. 228-229.

71 Randolph S. Bourne, *Youth and Life* (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1913), pp. 48, 295, 325-326.

72 David A. Shannon, *The Socialist Party of America* (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1967), pp. 55-56; Ira Kipnis, *The American Socialist Movement 1867-1912* (New York: Columbia University Press, 1967), pp. 244-246.

73 Upton Sinclair, *The Goose-Step* (Pasadena: "The Author," 1923), p. 460.

74 John Reed, "The Harvard 'Renaissance,'" *The Harvard Progressive*, (March 1939), pp. 8, 10, 22. The 1917 essay was somewhat similar in tone: "Students themselves criticized the faculty for not educating them... Some men, notably Walter Lippman, had been reading and thinking and talking about politics and economics, not as dry theoretical studies, but as live forces acting on the world, on the university even... [The members of the Socialist Club]... wrote articles in the college papers challenging undergraduate ideals, and muckraked the university. ... The result of this movement upon the undergraduate world was potent. All over the place radicals sprang up, in music, painting, poetry, the theatre, etc. The more serious college papers took a social-istic, or at least, progressive tinge. ..." John Reed, "Almost Thirty," *New Republic*, 86 (April 29, 1936), pp. 332-333. For other contemporary accounts of the activities of the Harvard Socialists, see Francis B. Thwing, "Radicalism at Harvard," *Harvard Graduates' Magazine*, 20 (December, 1911), pp. 260-263; Gerard C. Henderson, "The College and the Radicals," *Ibid.*, 20 (March, 1912), pp. 463-465.

75 Randolph S. Bourne, "The Price of Radicalism," *The New Republic*, 6 (March 11, 1916), p. 161.

76. E. Earnest, *Academic Procession* (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1953), p. 249.

77 S. William Rudy, *The College of the City of New York: A History 1847-1917* (New York: City College Press, 1949), p. 316.

78 Peterson, op. cit., pp. 179-184.

79 A. G. Bowden-Smith, *An English Student's Wander-Year in America* (London: Edward Arnold, 1910), p. 267.

80 Allen F. Davis, *Spearheads for Reform: The Social Settlements and the Progressive Movement 1890-1914* (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967), pp. 35-36.

45

described as the "decade when the fragmentation first became deep and obvious". This period in which common values and common beliefs were replaced by separate and conflicting values. Walter Lippman referred to the "vast dissolution of ancient habits" in the 1920s. It is not surprising that old habits were dissolving. All of the changes which had been gathering in America, and which are usually described under chapter headings such as "technology," urbanization," and "mobility," seemed to be coming to a visible head in the 1920s. The 1920 census was the first in which the urban population exceeded the rural population. In the 30-year generation span since 1890, the number of Americans living in cities of half a million or more had tripled from 4 to 12 million, while the total population had not doubled. The number of people engaged in manufacturing had doubled. There were millions of people in new jobs, places and proximities.

Education was also spreading out among the American population. The limitation of college training to a small elite was coming to an end. The number of college-age youths attending college shot up from 4 per cent at the turn of the century to 12 per cent by the end of the 1920s. At the same time, America was beginning to turn the corner of its

Henry May, "Shifting Perspectives on the 1920s," *The Mississippi Valley Historical Review*, 43 (1956-57), p. 425.

Cited in William Leuchtenberg, *The Perils of Prosperity* (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1958), p. 176.

40

165

4 [10]

Nineteenth Century innocence and euphoria. Basic premises were being laid open to question/ by the general jarring loose of old associations, marked by the dramatic trauma of World War I.

This state of dissolution lent itself to a revival of the kinds of political protest which had characterized the pre-war radical movement of students and young intellectuals. But it also lent itself to another kind of disaffection, which often expressed itself in political terms but was really of a quite different quality. It involved not so much an optimistic passion for social betterment as a disillusioned rejection of the total set of classical rational assumptions on which American and Western society had rested. An identifiable generation-unit of youth began to share this disaffection with a growing class of writers and intellectuals, much the same phenomenon as was to recur in the 1930s.

The campus-based radical movement was initially in bad shape to take advantage of the disillusionment which characterized some students and many intellectuals. War-time repression and post-war anti-Bolshevik hysteria had undercut the civil liberties of radicals on and off campus. Socialists and Wobblies were jailed, and professorial opponents of the

See-Henry May. The Discontent or the Intellectuals: A Problem of the Twenties (Chicago: Rand McNally and Co., 1963).

war were fired. The radical movement first split over the issue of support or opposition to the war. It divided again concerning its reaction to the Russian Revolution and the efforts to create a Communist party. Conservatives, on the other hand, moved increasingly towards justifying a repressive stand to prevent the revolutionary wave from reaching American shores. Many in the business and conservative communities argued publicly that college faculties were honey-combed with Communists and Socialists. In February 1919, Edward L. Doheny, an oil millionaire, announced that a "majority of college professors in the United States are teaching socialism andcommunism Bolshevism...." In 1921, Vice-President Calvin Coolidge wrote a series of articles on "Enemies of the Republic" in The Delineator. His first one dealt with the activities of "Reds" in colleges. The break-down in the political order which disturbed him was a consequence in part of the fact that "college faculties rebel at the authority of presidents and trustees." And in an introduction to Coolidge's articles, the editor of The Delineator proclaimed: "Better a sane hewer of wood or drawer of water in one's family than a University graduate who has nothing more than antagonism to contribute to the service of society." Harry Haldeman, the founder of the Better America Federation of California, commented that his organization was "having students of radical tendencies watched."

A study conducted by the ISS of "Freedom of Discussion in American Colleges," reported in 1920 that "an increasing number of schools were (1) prohibiting outside affiliations for political groups, (2) placing increasing restrictions on speakers, and (3) censoring the faculty; and (4) restricting free expression. Right to express liberal opinions." Partly as a reaction to such pressures, the ISS changed its name to the League for Industrial Democracy. Various campus clubs dropped the name "Socialist Club."

Chapter VI S

Historical Background: The Twenties - Through the Fifties

But if the campus had been a recurrent source of
discipline, illegal pranks, and unrest, there is no real
evidence that any major segment of the student population was
alienated from society and polity in the first century and a
half of American national existence. But a major such generation-
unit had its watershed in the 1920s, which Henry May has

48

in favor of varying titles such as "Social Science Club,"
"Social Problems Club," "Politics Club" and assorted others.

Such pressures seemingly did not reduce the scope
of campus radicalism, since the LID found large audiences for
the speakers it toured across the nation. Right-wing attacks
seemingly stimulated the more liberal minority to react
sharply to the severe post-war repression, to industrial
ills, and to militarism.

Anti-war, progressive, and socialist clubs, which
invited controversial speakers to the campus, sprang up
around the country. As Earnest notes, the issues of free
speech occasioned serious controversies in many colleges.
"Students demanded the right to hear all sides of every
question; conservative alumni, trustees, and citizens
objected to colleges becoming a forum for radical views."

The renewed wave of meetings, demonstrations,
and discussions of campus radicalism led some older
intellectuals to once again perceive socialism as the
prevailing undergraduate mood. Writing in May, 1922, George
Santayana reacted strongly to its presence: