50

Santayana was not alone in voicing complaints about the orientations of the students of the twenties in terms which resemble the agitated outcries of faculty in the sixties. Thus an Oberlin sociology professor argued in 1922: "Youth is dogmatic. . . . The enthusiasm of youth may appropriate socialism or free thinking instead of the traditional faith, but it is likely to have the zeal of religion, and call bigotry, liberalism." C. Hartley Grattan, a well-known professor of English, complained bitterly in 1925 that students judged literature on political rather than aesthetic grounds.

The students! . . . 'tend to applaud contemporary writers because they are rebels, not because they are artists . . . . And consequently students tend to neglect really fine writers whose rebelliousness is not so apparent, or but a minor part of their work. . . . Then, too, sympathy for a particular social attitude leads to the acceptance of bad but congenial writers, and the rejection of good but incongenial ones. . . .

What the college student needs to guard against more than anything else is the tendency, in reaction to an even greater stupidity, to accept all that is new as good, and all that chimes in with his social attitude as best.

Some indication of the renunciatory concepts advanced by the more radical students which concerned men like Miller and Grattan may be found in the effort of the editor of *The New Student*, Douglas Haskell, to present the policy of his paper. *The New Student* was the predominant expression of student activism in the 1920s. It was published regularly as a national paper and magazine, once every fortnight.

Herbert Adolphus Miller, "Youth and Age," *The-New Student*, 2 (November 4, 1922), p.1.

C. Hartley Grattan, "The College Student and Contemporary Writers," *The New Student*, 4 (February 28, 1925), pp.8-12.

51

through the decade, supported by subscriptions around the
country. In many ways, Haskell presented an approach to
society and knowledge which was close to that which was
to disturb Paul Goodman about his students at the end of the
1960s.

We do not believe it is any longer possible for
the American college to give an education to its students
but we still believe it is possible for students to get an
education for themselves in American colleges. . . .

With all respect to the older generation, some
of us become more and more certain that they cannot feel
the chaos as we do. . . . Spiritually, this is an age
of ruin of nausea. We suspect that many of our elders
retain the nineteenth century belief in science and knowledge.
We cannot share it. We need a faith. . . . At least we
know what must go.

Mechanization must go.

A certain scholarly, scientific attitude must go.
The values for which we are searching do not seem susceptible
of proof, of capture by the "scientific spirit." The faith,
the assumptions on which science rests are lacking, hence
there are no "social sciences." Moreover we need to look
ahead; and creative thought is different in kind from mere
knowledge. . . .

We cannot even accept the leadership of the
younger [faculty] men. The forces of decay are so strong
that we cannot trust a cock-sure psychology or a "radical"
sociology any more than we could the old hand-dried economics...
[although] we still find inspiring friends among our teachers,
little as most of these have to give us. . . .

We suspect that there are many individual
students who do not care to join organized groups, who never-
theless have ideas better than do many leaders of organizations.
Often the sanest imagination belongs to the pure in heart who
are not even conscious of any revolutionary tendency. These
people should be kept in touch with one another.

Through *The New Student* we are trying to arrange
an interchange of ideas between them. . .

D.P.H., "This Paper," *The New Student*, 3 (October 20, 1923), pp. 1-2

-51-a-

The largest single protest group was probably the Student Christian Movement (SCM) which urged "the correction of such social matters as child labor, industrial strife, poverty, and above all war." W.H. Cowley estimates that the SCM had enlisted about 55 percent of the undergraduate population, and that in sum, "during the twenties approximately one student in ten joined a group or groups devoted to examining broad societal problems...." This statistical datum pertaining to the strength of moderate radicalism or progressivism may be found in the

(12) W.H. Cowley, "Notes-on-Universities," chapter 11, pp. 32 and 36.

52

results of a presidential straw vote conducted in 120 colleges and universities in 1924 which reported that 14.5 per cent of the 51,457 students who completed ballots supported Robert LaFollette, the third party candidate of the Progressive and Socialist parties. This may seem like a large left-wing bloc, but LaFollette secured 16.6 per cent of the national vote. The percentages received by the three presidential candidates in this campus poll corresponded closely to that which they secured among the general electorate.

Thus Coolidge captured 58.6 per cent in the straw vote and 54.1 per cent among electors, while Davis, the Democratic candidate, had 26.9 per cent on campus, and 28.8 per cent in the nation as a whole. These results would

suggest that the campus population strongly resembled the adult world in its politics, that in the conservative Republican twenties, students were also predominantly conservative Republicans. Although this empirical generalization is undoubtedly true, it is important to note that the undergraduate population of this period comprised about 10 per cent of the age cohort, as constrained with close to 45 per cent today. This meant that the students were largely from families, whose conservative Republican propensities were far higher than that of the general electorate. Hence it is likely that the campus support for LaFollette represented a shift to the left among students as compared with their family politics. Some slight evidence for this thesis may be found in the report of the campus poll which indicates that in a number of colleges, Coolidge's support was lower among seniors than among freshmen, while LaFollette's increased

53

A year later, a leading newspaper, the *New York World* editorialized concerning the "revolt which is going on in colleges and universities all over the country" in terms which indicate that a significant minority of students were involved in various activities. The *World* credited *The New Student* with a major role.

Revolt against what? That is a little hard to say. In one college there is a revolt against stupid courses, in another against abridgement of free speech, in another against the cheap commercialization of the endowment drives, in another against official interpretations of American history. Always there are the same symptoms: the outlaw student paper, with its devastating satire and cartoons; the speeches, the meetings, the reprisals by the faculty, the mutterings of discontent in the student body. The revolt has been growing for two or three years now; in a loose sort of way it is organized, for it has a magazine, *The New Student*, which circulates widely, and is given over to recording its spicy doings. It has reached such proportions that it cannot be disregarded.

Organized campus protest in mid-twenties revolved around the issues of peace and the Sacco-Vanzetti case. The disillusionment with the last war brought considerable support for the movement to reduce the scope of the Reserve Officers Training Corps (ROTTC) on various campuses. "In 1925, a tremendous agitation began against compulsory military training. . . ." The pages of *The New Student* reported incident after incident on campuses throughout the nation of demonstrations against compulsory military training.

The most important single issue arousing leftist sentiment among intellectuals and students in the mid-1920s,

19. "The Students Buck the Drill-Master," The New York World, November 18, 1925, as reprinted in *The New Student*, 3 (December 1925), p. 15

20. *Students in Revolt* (New York: League for Industrial Democracy, 1933), p. 7.

54

however, was the Sacco-Vanzetti case. The conviction of these two immigrant anarchists for murder in 1921 resulted in an increasing crescendo of protest among liberals and leftists around the world. Gradually a large proportion among those so inclined became convinced that the majesty of the American juridical and police system had been deliberately mobilized to execute two innocent men. The conflict between the protesters in the American intellectual world and the powers enlarged the cleavage between the two to the point where each was ready to believe the worst about the other.

> Thus when writers and professors begin to voice...! doubts, it seemed to many conservatives only another proof of dangerous radicalism among the intellectuals. And the writers and the professors, bringing out fact after fact which showed the prejudice and perjury involved in the conviction, came increasingly to feel that the leaders of business and government were not interested in evidence but only in teaching the radicals the brutal lesson that there was no room for dissent in America. 19

Since the trial took place in Boston, Harvard was much involved in the protest on both faculty and student level. President A. Lawrence Lowell chaired a three man committee appointed by Governor Fuller, which concluded that the two anarchists were guilty. "The case! / !./ emphasized the dichotomy between the professors and the powers that ruled the academic community.... / The socially and politically aware members of the academic community were imbued with a deep distrust and hostility to the conservative elements. / ! !

15. Earnest, op.cit., p.279.

55

in the church, business, and government. ... Many a student who knew nothing about the trial of Socrates became deeply stirred over that of Sacco and Vanzetti.... [T]housands of them came to believe it important to know more about shoe makers and fishpeddlers.⁸⁰

Much of the activity against R[ob]T[C], the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti, or the myriad of other issues such as opposition to American military intervention in the Caribbean, during the 1920s reported in The New Student, seemingly involved white students in the more prominent universities and colleges. Schools like Harvard, Dartmouth, Yale, Wisconsin, California, appear frequently. In this respect, also there has been seeming consistency in the sources of collegiate activism. Another group which was to figure prominently in the activism of the late 1960s also entered the campus unrest scene during this decade, the Negro students.

and a myriad of other issues

As during the 1960s, campus protest by black students cannot be viewed primarily as an outgrowth of their situation in the university. The decade of the 1960s was also marked by racial violence, most of it initiated by whites; but Negroes fought back, killing whites in Chicago and other cities, using guns in the black belt in the South.

Ibid., pp.281-282. For contemporary accounts of campus activities on behalf of Sacco and Vanzetti, see articles in The New Student, 6 (1927), e.g., "Proper Case for Clemency," April 27, 1927, p.1, "Students for Sacco, Vanzetti," May 4, 1927, p.1, "Sacco-Vanzetti Pleas," June 1, 1927, p.2

perhaps, only 36 percent of McCarthy supporters and 29 percent of Kennedy backers criticized the police for using "too much force." The antagonism to the Chicago demonstrators carried over to anti-war protest generally.

On a feeling thermometer running from zero to one hundred degrees, 35 percent of the respondents. . . rated "Vietnam War Protestors" at zero. By contrast, the next coldest group---"Liberals" were rated zero by 5 percent of respondents. One must return to the 1964 Survey Research Center election study to find two groups received more coldly than protesters---the Ku Klux Klan and the Black Muslims. ✓

During the Cambodian incursion in May 1970, the campus demonstrated its antagonism to the war through massive strikes and other forms of protest. Yet, the opinion polls revealed that the electorate as a whole, though overwhelming-liesopposed to the war, declared, in a Gallup Poll taken late in May, that the most important problem facing the country was campus unrest. And a variety of opinion surveys completed before the November 1970 state and Congressional elections indicated that various politicians who had taken a strong stand against campus unrest gained thereby. Evidence of such reactions, and the scurrying to cover among many liberal Democratic candidates who felt the need to condemn student protest, led Sam Brown, the organizer of the student-based McCarthy campaign in 1968 and of the national anti-war Moratorium movement in the fall of 1969, to write a bitter analytical article in the August 1970 issue of the Washington Monthly which strongly argued that much student protest was counter-productive. ✓

Perhaps the most dramatic examples of the negative effect of being identified with student activism on the fortunes of major electoral parties occurred in the Japanese election in December 1969, and in the Finnish one in March 1970. The Japanese Socialist Party, which is dominated by its left-wing China oriented faction, strongly opposed the efforts of the Liberal-Democratic government to enact strong campus control measures, and of the student affiliate of the Communist party to prevent disruptive forms of student protest, while cooperating with efforts at campus reform.

In the elections, the Communists gained greatly while the Socialists lost a third of their seats. In a statement evaluating the

12

The Vietnam War with direct armed conflict and intervention by the United States has, of course, exacerbated the extent of the opposition to the United States. The common theme justifying alliances among the student left in different countries has been opposition to American foreign policy. This fact, however, should not lead us to underestimate the extent to which these movements are really primarily domestically oriented or directed against local power structures and universities and the political parties and culture. These are the revolts of activist youth against the older generation in power in their own country. They have the effect, however, of also being a revolt against the system of international alliances and against America's role in the world.

In the Eastern bloc countries, of course, as noted earlier, these revolts are directed to some considerable degree against the system of alliances among the communist countries. There, the alliance is also a power system in that the Soviet Union keeps control over other countries through it. But basically youth on both sides of the curtain are seeking to reform or revolutionize their own societies and they are opposing the main power to which their country is linked, which they see as a source of support for the status quo at home and abroad. In short, it is the fact that the cold war has declined, that the basis for the system of alliances is no longer as strong as it once was, that has made a new international youth movement possible.

The movement of the 1960s differs in a number of significant ways from earlier student movements. As compared to the previous ones, it has almost no relationship to adult organizations. Student and youthful leftist groups, before World War I or during the interwar period before World War II, wore to a large extent the youth or student affiliates of adult political

to street violence, also had created a backlash among the more moderate and conservative and established parts of the electorate.

In France, the student revolt has had one obvious political consequence; it has given France its first majority party government in history, one which is right-wing. Thus, it may be argued that student demonstrations strengthen the conservatives within the body politic, that they help place conservatives in power or increase their majority. Such contentions also have been made about California politics and US politics generally. The Berkeley disturbances were credited with having played an important role in electing Ronald Reagan in California. The Chicago demonstrators helped elect Nixon in 1968.

The counter-productive character of confrontations with the adult public was brought out strikingly by different surveys of reactions to the battle between Chicago police and anti-war demonstrators at the 1968 Democratic convention. A nation-wide Sindlinger telephone sample survey taken soon after the conflict reported overwhelming support for the behavior of the police. A national voting survey conducted by the University of Michigan Survey Research Center two months later found that only 19 percent thought "too much force" had been used against the demonstrators in Chicago; 25 percent said "not enough force." and 32 percent indicated the police had employed the "right amount of force." More significantly

picture in Germany based on 1968 surveys of students and youth (18-25) is even more striking. Forty-three percent of all youth as contrasted to 7 percent of students agreed "one should not tolerate criticism towards one's fatherland from foreigners." Fifteen percent of the former and 60 percent of the latter dis-approved of capital punishment. Less than a third (29 percent) of the youth sample believed in the right to strike and demonstrate if the public order is endangered, while the majority in two student surveys (54 and 62 percent) agreed with the right. Similar differences occurred with respect to a variety of questions dealing with democratic attitudes, tolerance for opposition, and the like.¹⁵ In Japan, where surveys of students show significant majority sympathy for socialism,

a survey in June 1970 of manual workers indicated that those under 22 years of age were quite conservative, much more in fact than the older workers. The survey reported that "35.8 percent of the young versus 27.4 percent of the older workers felt a capitalist social system was the best for Japan, while 11.7 percent of the young and 22.3 percent of the older workers preferred a socialist system."¹⁶ A Brazilian survey completed in 1964

just before the military coup d'état indicates that workers generally and with young workers, in particular, were "much more conservative than students.... The differences between young workers and students are much greater than the differences between young workers and older workers." ¹⁷

267c

The sharp cleavage between the views of university students in the United States and other countries and those of the population is not solely, or even primarily, a function of a "generation gap." As noted earlier in chapters 2 and 3, young people as such have furnished disproportionate strength to the candidacy of George Wallace, and have not been more heavily opposed to the war than older age groups. The gap *within* the youth, the conflict among generation-units has been greater than *between* different generations. This conclusion is brought out sharply by reactions to the use of force at the 1968 Democratic conventions. Among white respondents, the percentages agreeing that "too much force" was used against the demonstrators was 14 for those who had not graduated from high school, 20 among high school graduates, 32 for those with some college, 50 for college graduates, and 63 per cent for those with a graduate degree. Among college students, the proportion was highest, of course, 67 percent. 13

A similar gulf between student and non-student, predominantly working-class, youth with respect to attitudes toward radical change in the political and cultural spheres is indicated by surveys in other nations. Thus the report on a survey of two samples of youth (17-26), national and university student, indicates that 34 percent of the national sample and 44 percent of the students favored major social changes; 12 percent of the first group and 16 percent of the second agreed that a complete revolution was needed. 14 The

18

in reducing the size of opposition student movements, and will try to avoid
giving the activists any justification for engaging in violence against the
government. Many politicians see foreign policy issues as a major source of
annoyance for their students. Former Chancellor Kiesinger explicitly credited the
Vietnamese War with being responsible for the growth of a violent German
student movement and for the alienation of many German youth. Whether
he was right or wrong is irrelevant; what is important is that he saw it this way.
In Japan, which witnessed a strong new left-type student movement before
the phenomenon occurred in the United States and Western Europe, student
opposition to international alliances with the United States, while not upsetting
them, has had the effect of reducing the public commitment of the Japanese
politicians to such alliances. The United States has withdrawn forces to
avoid student protests.

In evaluating the cost to the nation, or to the government and political
forces of a given international policy, those in power currently must count
as one of these costs an increase in street opposition to the government,
a decline in respect for law and order. Should the other forces pressing for
maintenance of the alliance weaken, one may therefore assume that the rise
of an activist student movement will become a force for isolationism. If a
politician must choose between internationalism and isolationism and if he feels
that the international consequences of the choice have become less important,
he may opt for the isolationist course to gain domestic tranquility, to
maintain law and order, to reduce emotional opposition.

The continuation of the Vietnam War has, of course, made international
relations a major source of emotional tension. For those opposed to the
war, any alliance with the United States may be perceived as an alliance with
murderers, with those who are killing a small country. In the absence of

26

specific generations which have different long-term impacts. The concept of the generation, therefore, is not only valuable for historians seeking to explain what happened, but for anyone seeking to predict what will happen.

No society should find it remarkable that a segment of its student population should be involved in activist student politics that is directed militantly against the *status quo*. It can be strongly argued, as C. Wright Mills (argued), that students are the one group who will continue to supply recruits for such causes, even when no other stratum is available.¹⁸ A completely inactive student body is a much more curious phenomenon historically than one which is involved to some degree in activism. Any efforts to analyze the future of politics, whether on the domestic or international scene, will ignore the students at the peril of being in error.

17b

267 b

election results, the Communists credited the Socialist
defeat, in part, to the party's "trailing behind the
Trotskyite anti-Communist gangs of thugs and the blind
followers of Mao Tse-tung," that is, the militant student
group. In Finland, the coalition Popular Front government
of the Communists, Social-Democrats and the Center party,
supported by a small New Left oriented party, acceded to the
demands for increased student power of the Finnish Students'
Union. The Center party Minister of Education brought in a
bill to reform university governance by providing for heavy
student participation in university governance, a proposal
strongly opposed by the Professor's Union. The March
elections brought about the greatest shift in votes
ever experienced in Finland. The Center party lost almost
all its seats, and a totally new group, the Countryside party,
formed to fight it, captured 18 seats. The New Left TPSL
also lost all of its six seats; the Communists declined
greatly, while those other parties which had also strongly
opposed the student's demands, the Conservatives and Liberals,
were big winners.

The picture, of course, even in electoral terms, is not clear-cut. In
Italy, the 1968 national and 1970 provincial elections did not produce any
change, although the pro-activist left split-offs from the Socialist party were
quite small.

In Germany, the Social Democrats gained in 1969, but they were
openly hostile to the SDS, and the small leftist party which backed the
campus militants took 6 per cent of the vote. In general, it seems apparent
that the effect of extra-parliamentary youth politics in the 1960s was to
reinforce the electoral appeal of the conservatives.

Chapter 7

Political
Some Consequences of Student Activism
in Comparative Perspective

II

The rise of student protest movements since World War II
has been more extensive and more important than in earlier
periods. Students played a major role during the 1950's
in overthrowing or weakening regimes in the underdeveloped and
communist worlds. Thus, student movements were important in the
revolts against Peron in Argentina in 1955, against Perez Jimenez
in Venezuela in 1958, in different protest movements in South
Korea and South Vietnam during the 1950's, in India, Japan, and
many other countries. They helped initiate liberalizing move-
ments in Poland, Hungary, the Soviet Union, and China in 1955.
1956. During the 1960's, of course, student protest spread to
the developed countries of Europe and the United States.

These movements have a great deal in common in tactics and political style. Student culture is a highly communicable one, the mood and mode of it translate readily from one center to another, one country to another. Yet it would be a mistake to try to interpret the seeming phenomenon of a worldwide student revolt as a response to common social conditions or as an effort to secure a common objective. The sources of student protest must be differentiated among different types of societies: underdeveloped systems, authoritarian regimes, mainly communist, and the developed democratic societies.

responsible for national backwardness, is accompanied by support
for the communist model as an example of a successful effort
to break through the restrictions on development and modernization.
Since the existing social system is often allied internationally,
with the United States, the student opposition movements tend
to associate the symbols of the United States, capitalism, the
free world, with the conservative elites of their own society.
Opposition to domestic traditionalism and liberalism becomes
translated into support for some form of leftism which in in-
ternational terms means opposition to the United States. Hence,
in large measure, leftist student activism in most of the under-
developed world is a force against any alignment with the
United States. It is, however, not necessarily a force for support
of the Soviet Union.

The leftist student groups differ considerably from country
to country, and in recent years there has been an increasing
growth of "third force" revolutionary organizations which are
both anti-American and anti-Soviet. Some tend to be Maoist,
others identify in a very loose way with trotskyism, a few are
explicitly anarchist. There is an *increasing* tendency to take
over a variant of what has come to be known as the new left
ideology, that is opposition to all power groups. But regardless
of the differences among the leftists, there can be little question
that the focus of their hostility in international terms is
the United States. This opposition has become intensified with
the escalation of the Vietnamese War since 1964. In large

measure opposition to American intervention in Vietnam has become
the predominant political issue of many of the left-wing groups.

There is one major variation among the different under-
developed countries which relates to the image and role of the
governing power, i.e., whether it is viewed as leftist or not.
the political movements of students in countries which are
aligned to the Soviet bloc have often opposed Soviet policy.

Two outstanding examples of this phenomenon occurred in
Indonesia under Sukarno and in Ghana under Nkrumah. In both of
these countries led by pro-communist leaders, the students
took a position in opposition to the regime, arguing in favor
of increased liberty within the universities and political
life generally. Their advocacy of greater freedom and their
criticism of various actions of the regime led them to foster
the ideologies of democracy and certain kinds of liberalism.
In a sense, the general proposition may be advanced that the
most activist student groups tend to be opposed to the existing
regime, and consequently take on a political ideology in oppo-
sition to it. The situation in the various communist countries
is, of course, a case in point. Where student activism has
developed in communist societies it is critical of the existing
regime, especially as oppressive and also critical of its
international orientation. To some degree in Eastern Europe,
the oppositionist students have favored withdrawal from the
Warsaw Pact, have shown signs of being pro-Western, and have
taken up the issue of Communist-Israeli relations as a symbolic
one. The students in Poland and Czechoslovakia have been
strongly in favor of Israel.

The sources of the tensions between the regime and the university and intellectual life which are conducive to student activism in communist countries are somewhat different from those in the third world. As in the underdeveloped countries, there is an inherent gap between some norms which are an aspect of university and intellectual life, namely, academic and intellectual freedom, and the structure of society. Intellectual and scientific life requires freedom. To simply mouth party truth, or to limit the problems which one studies or the conclusions which one reaches, to those which are authorized by the regime, places a basic strain on intellectual activity. Lenin and the Bolsheviks, of course, distrusted intellectuals precisely for this reason. It is antithetical for an intellectual to simply be a publicist or spokesman for a given system. Intellectuals, as a class, are not supposed to place a premium on originality as a source of status, and originality means rejecting the verities of the present and past. Hence there is a predisposition among those involved in the world of the intellect, whether inside or outside of the university, to resist authority on such issues, a strain which becomes manifest during periods of crises. One of the most dramatic examples of the strength of such values among intellectuals and students under communism surfaced during the brief "hundred flowers bloom" period in China in 1956. The relaxation of controls by the Maoist regime produced a sudden outburst of critical speeches and statements on the campuses of the country which denounced the government for inhibiting free speech, research, and teaching, and for maintaining an absolutist state. Many of these criticisms pointed to titoist Yugoslavia as an example of a communist state.

still place a greater emphasis on egalitarianism and the free competition of ideas than do other institutions. It is worth noting again that the current wave of student unrest in the United States arose as a response to the one issue, race relations, in which the United States has retained an aspect of pre-modern traditional caste values, which are basically at odds with the norms of a democratic industrial society. Antimperialism, that is, opposition to colonial rule, is another example of student identification with the explicit values of democratic society against its own practices. Previous to the emergence of American student protest, the largest upheaval in the Western world was occasioned by French student support for the FLN in the Algerian War. The protest against the Algerian War involved many thousands of students, who engaged in fairly drastic measures to sabotage the war effort. 4

There is, however, another source of the tension between intellectuals and modern society, which though not new, is one which has only recently been recognized as a source of political resentment. It involves opposition to the trend toward the growth of hard social science and expertise, the decline of diffuse intellectualism in the social arena. The differentiation of social science knowledge into distinct fields of technical expertise has sharply undermined the role of the humanist intellectual who has traditionally claimed the right to comment on and influence public policy. This phenomenon may be seen most strikingly in economics. Economists now contend that many of the decisions about economic policy require technical knowledge beyond the competence of the informed layman. And as the other social sciences have extended their spheres of competence, and have become more systematically empirical and quantitative, they also question the ability of laymen to

30

they specify/describe the "role structure of the scientist" (Parsons) and "the cultural values and mores governing the activities termed scientific" (Merton) in terms which are in variance with the involvement of faculty in a indoctrination, in preparation for life, and with the total personality and character found in the school.

Merton emphasizes the neutral, objective, disinterested, and
sceptical values inherent in the scientific process. Parsons similarly
points out that the ethos of science, which includes functional specific
(professional specialization) and achievement orientation as well as those
activities mentioned by Merton, has "above all become embodied in the uni-
ность as its principal institutionalized frame." These guiding values impl-
ply that professors have no general claim to superior knowledge, but must con-
tribute to the success of the enterprise (Treatise on the theory of
organizing, scepticism and universalism in their application of objectivity in
their specific area of expertise with an understanding of the boundaries of
their professional abilities. Further, both men stress that while scientists
must conduct themselves to commensurate with these values, non-scientists
including students, must reciprocally respect the scientist's inviolable
rights in his own field.

37. Robert K. Merton, *Social Theory and Social Structures* (Glencoe: The Free Press, 1949), pp.308-314; Talcott Parsons, *The Social System* (Glencoe: The Free Press, 1951), pp.342-344; Talcott Parsons, *Essays in Sociological Theory and Applied* (Glencoe: The Free Press, 1949), p.189.

32

schools vary in faculty and student orientation with respect to the different concept of the college they sustain. Much of the consequences of the distinction attempted here between the school and the research institute graduate-training role of the university, and between the pupil and the student roles open to undergraduates, were developed by Riesman and Gusfield in their analysis of the differences in the activities of undergraduate institutions. They distinguish between the "adult-forming" and "youth-prolonging" aspects of higher education by noting that by using

adult standards of performance, universities "weed out" the child-like students, and a limited sense, the highly specialized professor also provides a model of one possible adult role. However, the instructor who views himself less as a specialist and more as a member of a broad intellectual subculture seeks to preserve youthful traits in his students and tends to remain young himself,

... young in the sense of being rebellious, open, uncommitted to specific authoritative roles. Correspondingly, they are much less eager than their more didactic colleagues to induct the student into a particular speciality; what they want of them is a greater playfulness, a release of inhibitions imposed by the parochial past and the looming vocational future in other words a moratorium."¹⁴⁰

It may be argued that the traits of science enunciated by Parsons and Merton and of "adult-forming" educational functions specified by Riesman and Gusfield are relevant to scientific research and the work of research institutes but not to colleges and universities. The latter are primarily educational not research organizations. Hence the application of scientific traits to the college properly has made for student dissatisfaction and unrest. This argument, made by both students and politicians in authority over universities, clearly is quite valid. Much of what is done in the American system of higher education is closer in function to the work of high schools than it is to graduate centers of education and research. The courses usually taught in lower division, in the freshman and sophomore years, in most colleges and universities are extensions of high school work, if they are not in fact courses identical to those given in many high schools. Elementary work in languages, in mathematics, in English, in a variety of other subjects, is not on the level of university courses in the sense in which the university has developed in Oxford and Cambridge, in Germany, and elsewhere. The university in much of Europe has ideally at least been closer in requirements to the American graduate school than to the under

16

Genovese, himself a recent victim of political persecution, like Wolfe stresses his belief that leftist student efforts to dominate the university will result in rightist control.

The pseudo-revolutionary middle-class totalitarians' support demands for student control as an entering/ideological wedge for a general political purge of faculties, a purge they naively hope to dominate. But they may very well help to re-establish the principle of the campus purge and thereby provide a moral and legal basis for a new wave of McCarthyism. The disgraceful treatment of Professors Staughton Lynd and Jesse Lemisch, among many who have been recently purged from universities by both liberal and right-wing pressure, has already set a tone of renewed repression, which some fanatical and unreasoning left-wing militants are unwittingly reinforcing.

Universities must resist the onslaught now being made against them by superficially radical bourgeois students who have exploited the struggle over black studies programs to advance their own tactical objectives.

It is important to recognize, as both Hughes and Genovese also point out, that many of the faculty, administrators and trustees who now would emphasize the inherent need for university autonomy against pressures from leftists to manifestly combine politics and scholarship, have contributed to the current situation. Since the

Hughes and Genovese, "Black Studies: Trouble Ahead," The Atlantic 223 (June, 1969), pp. 38-39, 41. Another leftist historian, Willis Appleton Williams, whose graduate students at Wisconsin had started the earliest new left journal, *Studies on the Left*, also has commented in extremely critical terms about the recent crop of campus New Leftists. "They are the most selfish people I know. They just terrify me. They are acting out a society I'd like to live in as an orangutan."

"They say: 'I'm right and you're wrong and you can't talk because you're wrong.' They think the university president should be leading the revolution---it's ludicrous." Quoted in Nan Robertson, "The Student Scene: Angry Militants," *New York Times*, November 20, 1967, p. 30.

1950s, the American university has increasingly become a major center of political involvement. Many faculty have engaged in applied, policy-oriented research, and have not taken care to separate their academic from their policy advisor role. Professors and institutions have lent their prestige to "establishment" as well as other causes. Universities, through their choice of politically involved men to receive honorary degrees and other indicators of esteem, have implicitly endorsed the value of the work which these men have done. And if the name of the university is used in ways which have clear political consequences, it is difficult to now argue that leftist efforts to use the university should be ruled out, even though they may involve more overt forms of politicization. The argument that the defenders of the status quo can be more subtle in their politically relevant endeavors clearly has merit. Now that the issue of politicization and university autonomy has been joined again, there is a clear need to think through the rationale behind the involvement of academe as such in nonacademic concerns.

Writing as a radical critic of society and the university, Noam Chomsky carries the argument further by pointing out to student activists that they are pressing the university to live up to standards which no institution which operates within a given inequalities social system can do.

Consider, for example, the matter of government contracts for research.... [T]here is little doubt that government research contracts provide a hidden subsidy to the academic budget, by supporting faculty research which would otherwise have to be subsidized by the university. Furthermore, it is quite probable that the choice of research topics, in the sciences at least, is influenced very little by the source of funds, at least in the major universities. It is doubtful that scientific education can continue at a reasonable level without this kind of support. Furthermore, radical students will certainly ask themselves why support from the Defense Department is more objectionable than support from capitalist institutions.ultimately, from profits derived by exploitation, nor support by tax-free gifts, that in effect constitute a levy on the poor to support the education of the private [The university] cannot free itself from the inequities of the society which exists.

Chomsky, op.cit., pp.58-59. At the December 1969 meeting of the AAAS, 'surprised the radical students and faculty members on the audience at a discussion about academic research and the military.... Chomsky, an outspoken critic of the Vietnam war and of military research, argued that chemical and biological warfare research should be conducted on university campuses so that the students and faculty members could keep track of what is going on.... Chomsky argued that students should be 'effective revolutionaries' and that 'breaking locks has brought practically no new information.' As an example of why he thinks military research should be conducted on university campuses, Chomsky said the recent reveal- about the physical deformations in university campuses because there

10

231 [10]

Chomsky goes on to argue in *Similar Terms* to Robert Wolfe that radicals must defend freedom of inquiry within the university, including the right of faculty to "work on counterinsurgency" if they so choose, for once the principle of interference with research is introduced, it is likely in the long run to legitimate repression of radical ideas. The leftists, in other words, have an interest in protecting the right of their campus opponents even to do research which is paid for by oppressive forces involved in atrocious activities. As Chomsky puts it:

> One legacy of classical liberalism that we must fight to uphold with unending vigilance, in the universities and without, is the commitment to a free marketplace of ideas. . . . Students are right to . . . point out . . . access to funds, power, and influence is open to those who undertake . . . work [on counterinsurgency], but not, say, to those who would prefer to study ways in which poorly armed guerrillas might combat an enemy with overwhelming technological superiority. Were the university truly "neutral" and "value-free," one kind of work would . . . be as well supported as the other. The other is valid, but does not change the fact that the commitment is nevertheless under-taken with eagerness and a belief that it is right. Only coercion could eliminate the freedom to undertake such work. Once the principle is established that coercion is legitimate, in this domain, it is rather clear against whom it will be used. And the principle of legitimacy of coercion would destroy the university as a serious institution; it would destroy its value to a free society. This must be recognized even in the light of the undeniable fact that the freedom falls far short of ideal.

From his experience in universities, Chomsky argues that the university as decision-making and administration, hence fairly responsive to the wishes of its members."

It now exists "is highly decentralized and rather loose in its structure of decision-making and administration, hence fairly responsive to the wishes of its members." He suggests that much about the university which radical students dislike "results not from trustee control, not from defense contracts, not from administrative decisions, but from the relatively free choices of faculty and students." Hence, he feels that various proposals for "Restructuring of the university," will eliminate the ills which bother the radicals, but rather are "likely to have the opposite effect, namely, they may lead toward a system of enforceable regulations that may appear democratic on paper but will limit the individual freedom that exists."

20. *Ibid.*, p. 59

21. *Ibid.*, p. 60

Barrington Moore has also pointed out that students in fact do have a great deal of power in the contemporary university. He, therefore, calls on the students to use the traditional methods of scholarly discourse, that reliance on rigid and dogmatic tactics will have less effect in pressing for radical ends within the campus.

Directly and indirectly the students in a university, especially the best students, have a tremendous influence on this general climate of opinion. If imponderable, this climate is probably the most influential single factor in determining individual decisions in a university and thereby deciding what the university really is. Naturally the faculty plays a decisive part as well. But I wonder if the students actually realize how much influence they do possess. . . . I have yet to know a scholar who did not respond in some fashion to the flow of written and oral arguments presented by good students. This situation provides the most significant opening for students who respond critically and negatively to the world about them. If they come to the faculty rigidly and dogmatically prepared to defend radical positions at all costs, they will get nowhere and defeat their own purposes. The consequences of this rigidity are often a tragic waste of essentially fine human materials. On the other hand, if they come in some degree prepared to be convinced as well as to convince, and if they are also willing to do the hard work necessary to demonstrate their intellectual mastery of the evidence, their impact can be enormous.

The issues of university governance, as far as they involve student participation, also relate in part to a comparable set of concerns about politics and scholarship. Since the students in the social sciences and to a lesser extent the humanities are the most radical, the demands for student participation have generally been raised most in these fields. These areas, however, are not only the most politically relevant, they also differ from the natural sciences in that judgments concerning methodological issues and research competence remain highly subjective. There is almost no recognized piece of research, or scholar, in these disciplines whose distinction is not controversial. With few exceptions, it is quite possible to argue that any given work is either methodologically inadequate, that it is following a sterile approach, and/or that its weaknesses stem from biases which have led the researcher to ignore important factors and to come to erroneous conclusions.

In these less precise fields of scholarship, the more committed individuals are to a political role, as distinct from a scholarly one, the more likely they are to judge scholarly work by its presumed political consequences. Obviously, such factors, and other sources of personal values as well, affect the way in which academics evaluate each other, regardless of age or institutional status. But in a politicized era, those who have not been fully socialized to the norms of the academy, who are more wont, as students, to feel the primacy of politics, will look for political allies among their professors. Not accepting the worth of the particular discipline in the same terms as its professional practitioners, being less disposed to believe that most scholars try to be objective, students will be more prone to want the university to act in directly political terms than will professors. In dealing with curricular matters, they will be less likely to respect the need for abstract theoretical, methodological, or "basic" fields which do not deal directly with social problems than their elders. An increase in "student power" in matters of faculty appointments or curriculum, therefore, almost inevitably means greater politicization in the methodologically soft disciplines.

There are important arguments against student involvement in the selection of faculty or the research program of other scholars which go beyond the particular issue of politicization. If intellectuals and professors as allintellectuals are obligated to stress innovation, creativity according to the standards and logic of their fields, then the questions of who shall take part in a given creative field or what kinds of work shall be considered important can not be put to a vote of REACH anyone. Allintellectuals including academics and students in the same position as an artist or serious composer. Talented people will consider the judgements of their audience, of those who buy their paintings, of museum directors, for the reactions of the consumers of their creative product will determine their income. But no creative intellectual worthy of that name will consciously subject his work to the direction of this decision of the market-place. In any case, innovators, creators, are by definition, deviants, who explore unanticipated areas. If students are allowed to vote on the choice of faculty (they should, of course, be consulted), they, like other laymen, will favor what is currently popular. Even in the social sciences, some fields of current "relevance" such as urban studies were of little interest to students during the 1950's. Fellow intellectuals know that they can not exclusively dictate what others should do. Thus, many faculty see the struggle to maintain the rule that only professionals may vote on

20 a

233 n

new members as part of the historic effort of intellectuals to maintain or gain their freedom from interference by patrons, by those with consumer power.

A case against student interference with the work of the professor [name] has been effectively made by the British sociologist, Ernest Gellner, who himself has been a severe intellectual critic from the left of dominant trends in his discipline.

What is worrying about the student part of the [New Left] movement is its occasional illiberalism. However libertarian its members may be about legalizing marijuana, they do sometimes put forward proposals such as the student control of 'What is taught and how.' It does not occur to them that the implementation of this proposal would not involve the transfer of power from one set of people to them, but the institution of control where none exists at present:...[A]t least-in-British universities, teachers ... are safe and free to teach what and how they wish, and the students, who also complain, not without cause, of the quality of teaching, know that there is very little control of teachers. Those who demand control by themselves over 'What' is taught do not seem to realize the enormity, not of giving them control, but of instituting control at all, or rather, of replacing the present "sociological" controls, working through indirect pressures which can be defied without excessive difficulty by anyone really wishing to do so - by formal and, presumably, enforced controls. The present pressures are limited in their effectiveness precisely because they are held to be illegitimate: they can only operate in camouflage, and this hampers them. But the rebels wish to institutionalize and legalize the controls which they would impose, and thus nothing would inhibit their effectiveness. They do not seem to have pondered the institutional implications of their proposals. What is to happen to teachers who disobey their instructions? One can only wonder whether they do know what they are saying, and are profoundly illiberal and totalitarian, or whether they do not know what they are saying, and the proposal is thus merely part of ... general invertebrate thinking. 23

Since the late nineteenth century, when American faculty began to turn increasingly to research, there has been a perpetual argument: the relative advantages for teaching and intellectual life of varying emphases and encouragement to research or teaching. The thesis that research interferes with teaching, that undergraduates are being short-changed as a result, was present by the beginning of this century. Suggestions that universities establish teaching doctorates which do not require a dissertation as a means of upgrading undergraduate teaching also date back to that period. The "neglected" undergraduate has been a favorite article topic for well over three quarters of a century. And such writings have pointed to the pressures on professors to engage in extra-mural activities for almost as long. Thus the eminent professors of earlier decades were accused of neglecting their university duties for the lecture circuit and for writing financially lucrative textbooks or articles for magazines or the popular press.

The issue of teaching versus research, however, did not take on a political character until recently. In fact, if any deduction concerning [name] sides of the question

The need to formally separate the political concerns of scholars as citizens from their academic role was held up at the convention of the American Historical Association in Washington at the end of December 1969 by three prominent historians who have attested to their personal involvement in politics. The leaders of a fight against a resolution which would have placed the Association in formal opposition to the Vietnamese War were Eugene Genovese, H. Stuart Hughes, and C. Vann Woodward. Genovese, who is probably the leading Marxist historian in the United States, lost his position at Rutgers University five years earlier, because of his open advocacy of a victory for the Viet Cong. Hughes, who has been president of the peace organization SANE for many years, ran for U.S. Senator from Massachusetts on a third-party peace ticket. Woodward, the leading historian of the South, has spent considerable time in civil rights activities. He was also prominently involved in the early meetings which established the Socialist Scholars Conference some years ago. These three men successfully argued, in opposition to the proposals of the "radical caucus," that the historians were morally obligated not to confuse scholarship and politics. They felt that radicals must defend scholarly institutions from politicization, even when these efforts came from young leftists.

Both Hughes and Genovese have published strong statements emphasizing their belief as political dissenters in the separation of politics and scholarship. Thus Hughes states:

> The social wrongs that may be committed by the university, such as being a bad landlord or aiding the "military-industrial complex," are not to be corrected by turning it into a social service institution. There are other institutions better equipped to do that. If you lose the "ivory tower," you've lost the university....

> Just because a minority of conformist professors corrupted our universities through their tie-in with the "military-industrial complex"... just because one minority misbehaved is no reason for us, the opposing minority of dissenters, to turn around and do the same....

> The present need, then, is for de-politicization rather than re-politicization.... The task is to de-politicize connections with the right, rather than to re-politicize from the left.... If we don't do so, we will experience a polarization of the faculty and the campus, and whereever this has happened, whether under the auspices of the right or of the left, the result has always been a lowering of intellectual tone and the near-impossibility of teaching controversial subjects such as contemporary history.

25

mittee system, who assist the deans, who keep the place going in normal times. (In a national survey of social science faculty conducted in 1955, Lazarsfeld and Thielens found that conservatives are more likely to be department chairmen and to be active in campus affairs than liberals, even when age is controlled.)²⁸ Hence when student groups raise the teaching-research issue, they are likely to confound the basis for faculty political cleavage. The "conservatives" and the "Establishment" agree with them while the more research-oriented "liberals" will, if they honestly speak their minds, be more likely to disagree.

The same apparent "contradiction" exists with respect to outside involvements as consultants for government agencies or business firms. The radical students assume that both sets of institutions are reactionary, and presumably those faculty who are involved with them have "sold out" and should be among the more conservative members of the faculty. But in fact a 1966 national faculty survey conducted by the National Opinion Research Center indicated that professors who had never worked for extra-mural organizations, whether business or government, were most disposed to back government policy on Vietnam. Those who had served government were most opposed to the policy.²⁹ An even stronger relationship between having been called in as a consultant to business and political liberalism was indicated in the Lazarsfeld-Thielens study of social scientists' reaction to (Joe) McCarthyism. Holding age constant, those who strongly favored academic and civil liberties for Communists and other unpopular minority dissidents were most likely to have been consultants for business. At every level, the "clearly conservative" had the lowest level of involvement with business.³⁰

27. Paul Lazarsfeld and Wagner Thielens, Jr., *The Academic Mind* (Glencoe: The Free Press, 1958), pp. 151-152, 443

28. C. Edward Noll and Peter H. Rossi, *General Social and Economic Attitudes of College and University Faculty Members* (private report, Chicago: National Opinion Research Center, University of Chicago,

Not surprisingly, analyses of faculty opinion agree that the most important single determinant of attitude toward given campus demonstrations, or student activism, generally, has been personal political outlook. The more liberal-to-left a professor is on wider social and political issues, the more likely he is to support radical student activities. The principal factors modifying this generalization are the related ones of age and longevity at a given institution. Within the same political category, e.g., faculty holding radical or liberal opinions, the older ones and those who have been at a given school longest are least likely to back campus demonstrations or locally relevant campus demands.

But, most student activists, even the more moderate among them, sharply challenge the description of their faculty as a critical, antistablishment group sympathetic to the same ideals as themselves. For in spite of the initial endorsement through faculty meeting resolutions of the objectives of given campus protests, the activists find a lack of commitment to the endeavors of student protest movement even by those faculty who are intellectual oriented, critical of the status quo, and liberal-left in their political ideology. A study of opinions of a sample of social science faculty who had signed various advertisements against the Vietnam War validated the impressionistic complaints of the activists, for only 21 percent of this group of antifwar professors indicated that they approved of the student demonstrations that had occurred at places like Columbia, Cornell, Harvard, and San Francisco. State. These liberal-left faculty seem to justify the charge levied by many student activists that the faculty, like their parents, are hypocrites, that they do not act in ways congruent to their proclaimed beliefs.

It becomes necessary for the liberal faculty to explain themselves to their students. The conservatives will obviously oppose the politicization of the campus from the left, but theirs is not a relevant objection to leftist students. There are important reasons why scholars have opposed politicization, regardless of their political ideology, which derive from the very nature of

87

conservative tides, to avoid giving reaction the excuse for repression by the "adventurist" or "putschist" tactics of the left.

But whatever the future of the current wave, this American record does lend support to those explanations which stress the inherent potential of students as the most available social base for innovative forms of cultural behavior and aggressive political action dedicated to the attainment of "absolute ends." It reinforces the conclusion that the student population is the most volatile and most easily mobilizable of all social strata. Whether, and how, and for what causes it is mobilized, will depend on specific events, on changes in the larger climate of opinions and custom within intellectualdom and the polity and society generally.

Foremost among the forces in the adult world which affect student reactions is the faculty. Some analysts have even argued that faculty discontents and policies are at the heart of student reactions. But this relationship, even between faculty and student radicals, is not a simple one. The following chapter turns to a discussion of some aspects of this.

## Faculty and Students: Allied and In Conflict

The descriptions of student activism in the 1960s, as well as over the previous century and a half, have indicated an alliance between student and adult protest. The early nineteenth-century undergraduate opponents of orthodox theology found support from the Jeffersonians on the Harvard Board of Overseers as well as in other institutions. Student abolitionists were allied to older activists in the movement. The wave of student rebellion against parochial rules and the absence of student government in the last two decades of the century was clearly linked to the changes in the role of the faculty which led many professors to demand more intramural power and freedom. The various types of student political protest from the Intercollegiate Socialist Society of the first decade of the present century down to the Students for a Democratic Society of the 1960s were each, in turn, related to trends in the adult world, particularly among faculty. In a real sense, therefore, student rebellion has not been a generational revolt, but rather has represented the under-graduate contribution to social and political tendencies which have been present within each age group. The students, for reasons discussed earlier, have frequently been the most militant, the most extreme, the least disciplined, the most uncompromising segment of the ideological grouping of which they have been a part, but it is rare that any student movement has occurred without counterparts in the larger intellectual world.

Current Faculty involvement in stimulating or supporting student unrest during the current wave of unrest has been documented in various surveys conducted by the American Council on Education. A comprehensive analysis of demonstrations which occurred at 181 institutions during 1967-1968 found that faculty were involved in the planning of over half of the student protests which occurred. In close to two thirds of them, faculty bodies passed resolutions approving of the protests. Faculty have clearly been bitterly divided on the issues involved in campus unrest, but a detailed account of the events can be found in Robert F. Boruch, "The Faculty Role in Campus Unrest," in ACE Resarch Notes (1969), pp. 50-52.

2

investigation of the sources of faculty political involvement point
to predispositions among professors to sympathize with student
activism, as well as to the existence of basic tensions between
student radicals and faculty supporters which result in faculty
backing for student protest on any given campus, being short lived.

Intellectuals, who, as we have seen, are concerned with creation and innovation and are partisans of the abstract and the ideal, have a predominant sympathy for causes and ideologies which reject the status quo in their particular society and wing. Such orientations need not be political, and they may be right-wing or left-wing. Daniel Patrick Moynihan has advised Richard Nixon that since "about 1940, the cultural elite have pretty generally rejected the values and activities of the larger society. It has been said of America that the culture [the intellectual elite] will not approve that which the polity strives to provide."³

This comment of Moynihan's errs on the side of being too parochial. Similar judgements concerning the inherent tendency of the intellectuals to oppose the system have been made at different times by writers as diverse as Joseph Schumpeter, Robert Michels, Karl Mannheim, Reinhold Niebuhr, Sidney Hook, Richard Hofstadter, Lewis Coser, and many others. One hundred years ago, Whitelaw Reid, then the new young editor of the *New York Times*, presented what has come to be a frequently expressed thesis concerning the relationship between the academy and the rest of the elite, one which resembles Bristed's 1840 statement concerning the opposition tendencies of students discussed in the previous chapter.

Exceptional influences eliminated, the scholar is pretty sure to be opposed to the established. The universities of Germany contain the deadliest foes to the absolute authority of the Kaiser. The scholars of France prepared the way for the first Revolution,

² See S. M. Lipset, "The Politics of Academia," (Paper presented for American Council on Education Commission on University Problems of this chapter is taken from that paper, which will be published in full by the A.C.E.).

³ "Text of a Pre-Inauguration Memo from Moynihan on Problems in the New York Times, March 11, 1970, p. 30.

and were the most dangerous enemies of the imperial adventurer who betrayed the second. . . . While the prevailing parties in our country were progressive and radical, the temper of our college was to the last degree conservative. As our politics settled into the conservative tack, a fresh wind began to blow about the college seats, and literary men, at last, furnished inspiration for the splendid movement that swept slavery from the statute book. . . . Wise unrest will always be their [the scholars] chief trait. We may set down. . . the very foremost function of the scholar in politics, To oppose the established.

As for the scholar, the laws of his intellectual development may be trusted to fix his place. Free thought is necessarily aggressive and critical. The scholar, like the healthy red-blooded young man, is an inherent, an organic, an inevitable radical. . . . And so we may set down, as a second function of the American scholar in politics, An intellectual leadership of the radicals.

And most recently, the most significant conservative in American academia, Milton Friedman, has approvingly quoted an unpublished manuscript of his equally conservative economist, colleague, George Stigler, to the same effect as Whitelaw Reid:

> The university is by design and effect the institution in society which creates discontent with existing moral, social and political institutions and proposes new institutions to replace them. The university is, from this viewpoint, a group of philosophically imaginative men freed of any pressures except to please their fellow faculty, and told to follow their inquiries wherever they might lead. Invited to be learned in the institutions of other times and places, incited to

4 "The Scholar in Politics," (A Commencement Address delivered at Dartmouth and Amherst Colleges, and before the alumni of Miami University), Scribner's Monthly, 6 (1873), pp.613-614. (Emphasis in Original). Twenty-eight years later speaking at Stanford in 1901, an older Reid saw the same behavior by American academics as bad. "It is a misfortune for the colleges, and no less for the country, when the trusted instructors are out of sympathy with its history, with its development, and with the men who made the one and are guiding the others." Whitelaw Reid, *American and English Studies*, Vol I (New York: Scribner's, 1913), pp.241-242.

new understanding of the social and physical world, the university faculty
is inherently a disruptive force. ✓

Much of that discontent during the last decades of the
nineteenth century was expressed as conservative disdain for the
crude materialism of *nouveaux riches* businessmen and the vulgarity
of taste in democratic society. Increasingly, however, during the
twentieth century, the critical stance of the intellectuals,
including first the social scientists/ and later the humanists/
within the university, took the form of a predominant sympathy for
antiestablishment, liberal-left positions. Opinion studies, the
earliest of which date back, as noted in the previous chapter, to
before the first World War, indicate that American academics as
a stratum, have been much more likely to express liberal opinions
in religion and politics than other strata. They have lent dis-
proportionate support to athlos, antiwar, civil rights, civil
liberties for deviants, liberal Democratic, and third party causes.
Given this relatively consistent outlook among the pace-setters
of the academic and intellectual world, it may be argued that
faculties should have shown much more support for student protest
than in fact emerged. A look at some of the reasons for faculty
opposition may help explain the growing tension between faculty
and student activities.

The most obvious and important source of division in faculty
response is linked to variations in faculty roles. Professors
clearly differ in the extent to which they are involved in creative
intellectual, scholarly, and hence critical functions, as

5. George Stigler, unpublished memorandum, as quoted in Milton Friedman, "The Ivory Tower," Newsweek, (November 10, 1969), p. 92. For a similar comment from the left, see Noam Chomsky. "Philosophical and Public Policy," Ethics, 79 (October 1968), pp. 5-6. "Perhaps the most important role of the intellectual since the enlightenment has been that of unmasking ideology, exposing the injustice and repression that exists in every society that we know, and seeking the way to a new and higher form of social life that will extend the possibilities for a free and creative life." Chomsky goes on to argue that the intellectual will cease this role when he becomes an "administrator" in the post-industrial society.

5

contrasted with teaching, professional, and applied activities. Most faculty employed in the (2,500) institutions of higher learning in America are primarily teachers, not scholars, and hence more dedicated to the passing on of the existing tradition, not the enlargement or critical rejection of it. Second, disciplines vary in the degree to which they are "intellectual." The more intellectual fields, those more dedicated to the value of knowledge, art, basic research, as valued goals in themselves, tend to recruit or produce practitioners on both the student and faculty level who are sympathetic to anti- establishment reform or radical positions. Conversely, the more practical fields, such as engineering, education, business, and agriculture, include on all levels the more conservative.

Given the relationship between intellectual creativity, commitment to innovation, and political criticism, it is not surprising that a variety of surveys indicate that the most successful scholars in all fields, those most dedicated to research and to national intellectual activities rather than teaching and local campus affairs, tend to be the most liberal or left-wing members of an academic elite. This pattern results in a high correlation between the academic quality of institutions and faculty predilection for liberal-left politics.

( ) The particular disciplines and universities which have the highest proportion of students inclined to the left politically and to which most heavily involved in campus demonstrations are the same ones whose faculty members have the most sympathy for the values and causes espoused by the students. Hence, as we have seen, the "gap" between student and faculty political orientations, like that between parents and their offspring, is relatively small. The liberal-left children of liberal-left parents study subjects and are in colleges, whose teachers are also among the more left-disposed among American academie.

78-b

candidates was undoubtedly much higher in the major centers of academia. A
comprehensive survey of the opinions of social scientists completed in 1955
revealed that the Republican candidates in 1948 and 1952, Thomas E. Dewey and Dwight
Eisenhower, took only 28 and 34 percent of the vote. The overwhelming majority
of the social scientists supported the academic and political rights of
Communists and other radicals in the midst of McCarthyism. Since backing
for these views and for political liberalism and radicalism increased with
quality of university, it is clear that the more intellectually oriented
students of the 1950s were in an environment in which prestige was associated
with opposition to conservative views.

Perhaps the most telling report concerning the mood on the American
campus during the 1950s are the conclusions reached in a book by a conser-
vative, M. Stanton

79

Evans, concerning the conservative revival during the decade.
In general, Evans emphasized all the evidence from pre-election
straw votes, formation of conservative clubs, student reactions
to various issues, to point up the magnitude of right-wing
strength. The evidence clearly pointed to the greater political
conservatism among the campus population during the early and
mid-fifties as compared with the previous two decades. Eisenhower
had widespread student support. Yet all during the period,
sizable minorities expressed attitudes toward the role of
government, welfare, and foreign policy, which can be best
described as left-liberal and even socialist. And in summing
up the results of various opinion studies made during the
fifties, Evans concluded that the dominant student mood "is
permissive, anti-religious, and relativist in the realm of
ethics; statist in the realm of politics; anti-anti-Communist
in the *sui generis* crisis which grips our age. In a word, it
is liberal." These conclusions, it should be noted, were
derived more from studies of the late fifties than from the
early years, and may help to explain the rapid growth of civil
rights, anti-war and leftist activism in the following decade.

59 M. Stanton Evans, *Revolt on Campus* (Chicago: Henry Regney Co., 1961), p. 217.

A summary of the findings from various surveys of student opinion com-
 ploted during the 1950s compared the characteristics associated with liberal
 or left social attitudes in that decade with those found in the studies of
 the 1960s, reported in Chapter 4, and concludes "that liberal or left students
 in each decade are recruited from similar sociological reservoirs," as
 were those of the 1930s. That is, those on the left side of the ideological
 division were more likely to be in the social sciences or humanities, to be
 Jews rather than Christians, to report higher grades, and to come from Demo-
cratic rather than Republican family backgrounds.

This brief survey of American campus discontent and politics is not designed
to prove any general thesis concerning the cyclical sources of such behavior.
The repeated periods of student unrest and political activism have given rise
to various efforts to account for a given wave of protest. The similarity
in causal analysis among them is striking. Most commonly, commentators
assume that the contemporary discontent is a consequence of a structural
trend, which has had as its inevitable results the contemporary state of
affairs. From Cornelia Conor writing in the *Atlantic Monthly* of February 1911
to the editor of the *New Student* in October 1923 to Margaret Mead in 1970,
writers have pointed to the ways in which new and rapidly changing modes of
communication and technology have upset standards, have reduced the influence
of older generations, and have led students to look for new values and to support
radical change. The analyses of the changing characteristics of the
university which presumably result in student unrest also have repeated them-
selves, often using identical explanations for close to a century.

80

Two studies of published material dealing with the role of the professor, one comparing articles from the 1890s to the late 1930s, and the other comparing turn of the century comment with those made in the late 1940s and 1950s, demonstrate this continuity in detail. ✓ Veysey's analysis of the *Emergence*

of the University<sup>18</sup> before 1910 argues that student complaints about faculty have been continuous and similar under varying conditions and teacher-student ratios<sup>19</sup>, the small nineteenth century college<sup>20</sup> the large research and graduate-oriented university, the lecture and the tutorial systems<sup>21</sup>. He points up comments suggesting an inherent "class" tension between students and faculty and administration.<sup>22</sup> Given the presence of discontent, commentators have pointed to comparable intrar<sup>23</sup> and extra-mural causes.<sup>24</sup> The campus-located ones take the form of inadequate teaching<sup>25</sup> over<sup>26</sup> specialized (or underspecialized); irrelevant to personal or social concerns; and impersonal (although there was a time when relations were viewed as too close)<sup>27</sup> and<sup>28</sup> at least since Jefferson's day, too tight institutional control.<sup>29</sup> The solutions have also been similar.<sup>30</sup> A multitude of articles written from 1900 to 1970 have called for greater rewards to teaching as compared to research, for special graduate programs to train college teachers, for a degree other than the Ph.D. for those who prefer to teach, for various programs which would end the lecture system, for more freedom for students to choose their courses and programs of concentration, for more generalized and socially relevant courses, for senior professors to teach elementary classes, and for greater student participation in the governance of the schools.

Off-campus factors are presumed to have resulted in a much higher degree of permissiveness, and a resultant lack of emphasis on basic morality, than was experienced by the previous generation, as a result of larger social adjustments which have undermined basic beliefs. These usually have been the result of

Voysey, op. cit., pp. 294-302.

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changes in the media, leisure activities, and pace of transportation; first the rise of the penny press, the silent movies and vaudeville, later radio and the automobile, and currently, television and the jet plane. Each older generation has convinced that the rate of change which has occurred in the last decade or two is the greatest in the history of mankind, that it has upset moral values, and that consequently, the young people have been more likely to follow their impulses than any previous one. If any solutions have followed from such diagnoses, it has been to urge a speed-up in the pace of political responses to the new moralistic demands of young people and to give them more of a share in the decision-making system.

The explanations for student unrest which focus on specific historical events also have in common an insistence that the experiences faced by a given student generation represent the greatest challenge to the American Creed that has been experienced in modern times. Thus, the radical wave before World War I was viewed as a response to the rapid growth of crowded, corruptly run cities, inhabited by hordes of immigrants living in abysmal poverty close to fantastic wealth. And in fact, the immigrant ghettoes of the East Side of New York were much more densely inhabited than the slums of Harlem today. The spread between the income of day laborers and the untaxed wealth of the *nouveaux riches* industrialists was also much greater than at present. Governments did almost nothing to aid the unemployed and poverty-stricken, who also were more *proportionately* unemployed than currently. The period from 1870 to 1914 did witness immigration at a rate of over a million a year, much of which was settled in the urban slums. There can be little doubt that *proportionately* more and more settlement house movements, all

83

of whom were represented among the campus population, were an earnest of the tensions created by the gap between the nineteenth century American ideal of a society of independent yeomen, and the reality of the machine-run immoral dirty city.

The generation which came of age during the 1920's was also convinced that history had dealt a body blow to the American dream. The promises of the war to end wars, "to make the world safe for democracy," proved to be hollow. The immediate post-war era was characterized by a wave of political repression against dissenters, the passage of immigration restriction legislation which was nativist in intent, and specifically designed to limit Catholic and Jewish migration, violent race riots in many cities, the rise of the multi-millioned member Ku Klux Klan, legislative efforts to prevent the teaching of evolution in many states, and the dismal failure of the Prohibition Amendment, as large segments of the middle-class and their college-student-offspring openly violated the law, by patronizing racketeer bootleggers to get their liquor.

The collapse of economic institutions, widespread bankruptcies, evictions from farms and homes of those who could not pay their mortgages, and from 15 to 20 million unemployed, all gave the students of the 1930's a set of domestic experiences strong enough to undermine faith in American institutions. Abroad they witnessed the seizure of power by the Nazis in Germany, the revival of religious persecution on a scale not seen for centuries, the expansion of totalitarian rule through force and war in Austria, Czechoslovakia, Ethiopia, Spain and China, with little opposition from the United States or other democratic countries.

84

And the promise of Communism turned to ashes with the state-created famines of the early thirties, the purge trials and large-scale imprisonments in concentration camps of the late thirties, and the ultimate conclusion: collaboration between Hitler and Stalin, to eliminate the independent states between their borders. An event which precipitated World War II. The youth of the thirties, too, could and did cry out that no other modern generation had their experience of such a series of catastrophic value-challenging events.

Post-World War II generations have obviously seen much to make them query the worth of the larger social system. World War II, like World War I, left in its wake more extensive authoritarian regimes. The nuclear bomb, and the emerging cold war, meant all those who have come of age since 1945 have lived under threat of annihilation. Hot wars in Greece, Korea, the Middle East, and Vietnam, made concern for peace a constant concern. Poverty in the underdeveloped world and at home were raised to mass consciousness. The struggle of the blacks in the United States for equal rights reached a level of intensity, probably not matched at any time since the Civil War. The failure of the United States to defeat a small impoverished Asian enemy undermined the American self-image that its foreign policy is designed to further the right to self-determination. Once again a major segment of American collegiate youth demonstrated their disgust at the failures of the society by various forms of personal and political protest.

85

The response of the alienated youth of the late 1960s to the changes and events they have experienced is undoubtedly greater and more intense than occurred in the earlier periods of this century. In part, the difference is produced by greater numbers, nationally, as well as on given campuses, and in particular areas. Given almost eight million students in institutions of higher education in 1969-70, the small percentage of the thoroughly alienated constitute a much smaller absolute mass base for aggressive/protest than has ever existed in any country at any time. The Boston metropolitan area, for example, has about 250,000 students in 55 colleges. Some of the protest groups, both white radicals, and black militants, recruit from all over the metropolis for demonstrations on a given campus.

The willingness of discontented Americans to violate the law, to use confrontation tactics, and even on occasion to resort to violence, is not new. The students of the early nineteenth century engaged in serious campus violence. Labor movement organizers and radicals blew up buildings and used dynamite to gain their ends around the turn of the century. Blacks and whites fought each other with guns in the early twenties. During the 1930s, striking workers occupied factories in massive industrial sit-ins, while militant farmers brought their guns to prevent foreclosure sales at neighboring farms.

It is relatively difficult to evaluate the severity of the current pattern of polarization as compared to past waves.

86

Clearly higher education has been affected more severely than at any previous time. The concentration of disaffection and alienation among students and younger faculty in the best universities and colleges of American has had an impact far beyond the campus. They are regarded by many who do not agree with them as the voice of their generation, a role which gives them considerable influence on those sections of the elite which are oriented towards the intellectual and university communities. Regardless of how small or disorganized the various radical groups are, there is a "Movement" today which includes the hundreds of thousands who read the "Underground Press," attend demonstrations and rallies, and give close moral support to the more violent militants.

The escalation of protest on the left and the right during the late 1960s does not necessarily mean a continued growth in political polarization, or even its maintenance at a high level in the 1970s. The brief look presented here into the history of campus-related unrest and protest should force us to be humble about both our ability to understand and to predict waves of discontent. Heightened social, political, or educational tensions seemingly bring a number of academic, societal and political reactions which reduce particular crises. Marxists in their historical analyses of revolutionary strategies have been well acquainted with the ebbs and flows of their potential strength. Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Trotsky, each pointed up the necessity for revolutionaries to moderate their tactics during

71

latter relationship led Gardner Murphy and Rensis Likert
to try to answer the question: "Why is the bookish student
more radical?" They concluded that modern intellectualdom
and radicalism are closely related.

The answer lies in a study of the modern temper.
The whole whirl of the first third of the twentieth century
is definitely a radical whirl, and this is particularly
true of the post-war period. To be bookish in this era has
meant to steep oneself in the disillusioned gropings of
post-war thinkers, most of whom, from philosophers to lyricists,
are clearly "radical" in the everyday sense of striving to
find a new base for the relations between men. . . . The
literary groups to which these men belong, the day-by-day
conversations which they train one another to think and to
feel, are full of the modern doubt and disquietude, and,
even more frequently, of the modern challenge and rebellion.
To be bookish today is to be radical. . . .

This is our theory, and it is nothing more;
but it is supported by many straws of evidence. We...note
that "books" are the one thing besides parents that are
credited by [radical] students with consistent and powerful
influence, and that radicals make mention of books and
magazines more frequently than conservatives do, as factors
to be underscored in the shaping of their attitudes. If our
hypothesis is correct, the preferred courses of radicals
will be those which emphasize wide reading as against those
emphasizing laboratory work, mathematical calculation, or
the acquisition of practical skills. A glance at Tables 34
and 35 [in the Murphy-Lickert book] will show that the
courses meeting this specification, such as philosophy,
psychology and English literature, yield the expected results.

Clearly the New Left of the 1960s recruited
activists from the same social pool as did the Communists
and other radicals of the 1930s and early 1940s. In fact
there is considerable evidence to suggest that the activists
of the 1960s, born for the most part in the 1940s, are to

502

Ibid., pp. 107-108.

(emphasis mine; S.M.L.)

72

59

a considerable extent the actual children of radicals and fellow travelers of the earlier generations. Given the educational, occupational and cultural background, it is likely that the overwhelming majority of their children went to university. And studies cited in the previous chapter report a family history of political activism and a left-liberal ideological outlook in the background of the contemporary crop of collegiate radicals.

While there can be little question that the decline of renunciatory tendencies and the failure of campus radicalism can be blamed on the Communists and their effort to gain support for the Soviet Union's foreign policy, the one comprehensive effort at a national representative sample (1220) of college youth, conducted for Fortune in the Spring of 1936, both documented the decline of the cultural renunciation which had characterized the twenties and the general lack of appeal of political radicalism. Concern with their economic future, brought a yearning for security, for a job with tenure. Fortune worried that the students were too willing to do what they were told to get and hold a job, and raised the question, "are good corporation heads made out of tractable material?" It found that the "family

The A.S.U. . . established radical traditions at certain universities. . . which were to be revived a generation later--often by the very children of A.S.U. members." Birnbaum and Childers, op.cit., p.133

73

[10]

as such is no longer an object of derison, as it was in the early twenties. Fathers and mothers are listened to once more. . . . Deference to the advice of father is part of the general yearning for security among the young." Politically, there had been a shift to the left, as compared with the surveys of campus opinion in the mid-twenties which had found Republican majorities. By the mid-thirties, "liberals and democrats... from the thick equatorial bulge of the [campus political] turnip..." An examination of the unpublished detailed report of the survey does indicate that many of the students did favor structural changes. Close to one quarter (24 per cent) of those interviewed, when asked about various terms which "suggest ideas toward which you feel sympathetic," picked "socialism" as a positive, as contrasted to 15 per cent for "conservatism," 45 per cent for "liberalism", and 2 per cent for "fascism." Over two-thirds indicated that they favored changes in the Constitution to enable people to live comfortably even if this means a revision in our attitude about property rights." Yet close to 90 per cent indicated their belief that "there are plenty of employers who will give you satisfactory promotion in due course if you work hard and learn your job well."

Fortune's reporters who visited many campuses were impressed with the relative weakness of the organized radical groups. The politically active and concerned are described as numbering at most between five and ten per cent. The exaggerated image of campus radicalism is sustained because the "college newspapers are often far to the left of the undergraduate bodies." In this respect, of course, the sixties resembled the thirties. There are other

"Youth in College," Fortune, 13 (June, 1936), pp. 99-102, 155-162.

53 Unpublished report of 1936 national college student study prepared by Cicerone

74

comparable patterns which are an outgrowth of similar peakings
in the cycle of concern for political reform in the two decades.
The college athletic and fraternity type social events lost
appeal in favor of a more positive concern for relevance in
courses. "Students have been flocking to history, economics,
and sociology courses. . . ."

Radical political activity in the 1950s was notable
by its absence. Liberal and left student organizations either
passed away or existed with tiny memberships and small agendas.
A number of conservative campus groups acquired considerable
publicity in the national media, as supposedly representing
the new campus mood.

54. "Youth in College," op. cit., pp.

75

Why was there such political quiescence on the campuses during the 1950s? Many who have written on the problem have suggested that it reflected the coercive pressures on the adult world, particularly faculty and other intellectuals, imposed by the various aspects of the phenomenon known as McCarthyism. Professors were fired at a number of institutions for refusing to take loyalty oaths, or for failing to answer charges that they had been or still were members of the Communist party. Relatively little was done to defend the civil liberties of those charged with being Communists, in part because few of them ever tried to defend their rights to be Communists or radicals. Rather the tactic of "taking the Fifth Amendment," of refusing to answer questions concerning political beliefs or memberships on the grounds of possible criminal self-incrimination made a civil liberties defense based on the First Amendment right to hold and espouse unpopular beliefs difficult. The issue in most cases became a detective story one; was the individual under attack actually a Communist, not whether he had a right to be one. In all previous periods of repression of radical opinion, those involved had vigorously defended their right to be political radicals, and by so doing had created causes célèbres around which others could rally.

In addition, the first four years of the fifties, 1950-1954, were not only the era of repressive McCarthyism, more importantly they were the years of the Korean War, of a war perceived as having been started by an invasion of a non-Communist state by a Communist one. War-time sentiments and pressures presumably also held critical sentiments in check.

76

But the interpretations which see the low ebb in student and other forms of radical activism as a response to repression are inadequate, since much the same pattern occurred among the students and intellectuals of western Europe and Canada. Polls of student opinion in Britain revealed conservative majorities. The London School of Economics, once the principal stronghold of radicalism in the British Isles, was frequently described in this period as having become conservative or at least apolitical. Canadian students and intellectuals, clearly out of McCarthy's reach, showed close political resemblance to their American brethren. The Canadian Forum, the Canadian magazine which most resembled American ones like the Nation, New Republic, or Progressive, in its outlook, and which had been outspokenly Socialist in its sympathies during the 1930's and 1940's, became increasingly critical of socialism as an ideological outlook during the 1950's. In many European countries, socialist parties modified their programs so as to eliminate references to the class struggle or to the traditional goal of a socialist society with little or no opposition from their intellectual or campus supporters.

The left-disposed segments of the students of the 1950's were caught up in a political era that inhibited deep political commitments and political activism. The experiences of the 1930's, and the behavior of the Communist states both internally (covert anti-semitism, new purge trials), and in foreign policy (the Czech coup of 1948, the Berlin Blockade, the North Korean attack) made them, as well as their intellectual elders, suspicious of simple answers to complex problems. Fear

77

of the aggressive power of monolithic Communism played the
same role in the late 1940's and the 1950's that fear of Nazism
had played during the late 1930's and early 1940's. The "lessons"
preached by the Communists to other radicals during the 1930's
were applied to Stalinism. To resist the totalitarian threat,
liberals and non-communist leftists, in effect, adapted the
tactics advocated by the Communists to fight fascism against
Stalinism, namely to concentrate on defeating the expansionist
enemy, even to the point of sharply reducing criticism of the
status quo in one's own country. For a second time, western
intellectuals accepted a defensist rather than a critical posture.
Few proposed radical answers to current domestic problems, and
still fewer were raising any important questions about inequality,
poverty, or power. The students under these circumstances
turned inwards. They became concerned with their psyches, their
personalities, and their feelings. The fact that The Catcher in the
Rye was a collegiate best seller in the 1950's should occasion
no surprise.

Yet it would be a mistake to reach a conclusion
from the presence or absence of an activist campus minority
in any given period concerning the viewpoints of the student
population. Clearly, the behavior of the very small minority
of politically involved or avant-garde oriented students at
any point in time must not be taken as typical of the attitudes
and values of the generation cohort. During the 1920's,
in spite of the concentration of attention on those engaged in

cultural revolt, and the increase in pre-marital sexual relations
from approximately 15 per cent to close to 30 per cent of the
female population reported by Kinsey, studies of religious
attitudes of college students revealed a commitment to
religiosity among the great majority. The national poll of
campus voting preferences in 1924 found that the large majority
of the students participating in this straw-vote were for Calvin
Coolidge. The 1936 Fortune poll pointed up the minority status
of the radicals of the thirties.

If it is proper to stress the unrepresentativeness
of those who set the dominant mood on campus during the 1920's
and the 1930's, it should also be noted that there was considerable
student support for unpopular views during the 1950's, even
though there was relatively little action. Thus a national
survey of a sample of male college students taken in April to
May 1952 revealed considerable opposition to the Korean War.
Thirty-three per cent expressed outright opposition, 19 per
cent were uncertain, and 48 per cent favored our policies in
Korea. Less than a fifth (19 per cent) stated that they never
had felt the war "is not worth fighting." Only 10 per cent
indicated that they would like to serve in the military. To
place these results in perspective, it should be noted that a
majority of American students still supported the Vietnam war
as late as 1967.

65. Edward Suchman, Rose K. Goldson and Robin Williams, Jr., "Attitudes Toward the Korean War," Public-Opinion Quarterly, 17(1953), pp. 173, 182.

The most popular explanation for inadequate teaching, for faculty involvement in research and consulting activities, and for inadequate resources, among radicals of the 1920s, both students and others, was the control of the university by reactionary trustees, almost all of whom were big businessmen, who could determine the internal decisions, through the absolute campus power of their appointee, the president. This thesis was presented in elaborate detail, campus by campus, by Upton Sinclair, in his book *The Goose-Step*, widely circulated among undergraduates of the decade. Yet some radical intellectuals closely acquainted with the workings of the university tried to challenge this simplistic approach, much as was to occur with respect to the revival of such interpretations in the 1960s. The *Freeman* magazine, then one of the most important liberal-radical organs, ran a series of articles on problems of higher education during 1922-23, directed in part to clarifying these issues. In discussing the role of the president, Somnia Vana argued that "nothing could be further from the truth," than the image of the all-powerful role of the president who could prevent heresy and intimidate the faculty. A new president "finds a mesh of academic rights, titles, and privileges before him. . . . His chief business is to raise money by collecting it from those who have it." He is expected to remain outside of academic issues, particular if they affect policies within departments. Any interference

65

by him with "departments is usually hotly resented." In
terms which closely resemble Clark Kerr's analysis of the
behavior of the president in *The Uses of the University*,
published over 40 years later, Vana argued that the president's
principal function is "constantly mediating among contending
academic interests," that he must have "a talent for mani-
pulation." The difficulty with reforming academe, argued
this 1920s student of American university life, was not
that it was controlled by the reactionary affluent, but
that there were so many vested interests within it protected
by "all kinds of customs, laws, compacts, understandings,
agreements, promises, and obligations, created by years of
conscious, unconscious, and subconscious operations. It
is a vast, magnificent, and historic tangle. About all
that the mighty gentleman who presides over it can do, is
to stand on a height above it and squirt perfume on the
ensemble."

Cultural Conformity: The Thirties Through The Fifties

The emergence of a pattern of seeming renunciation
by an important segment of the college generation of the
behavior of their elders, was curiously inhibited by the
depression of the 1930s. That traumatic event did, of
course, stimulate radical protest of a political nature
among both students and intellectuals. The American Student

66

Union, formed in 1935, as a coalition of Socialists, Communists, and liberals, was to report 20,000 members out of a student population of over one million, clearly proportionately much more than has ever been claimed by all the radical student groups in the hectic 1960s. In April 1934, 25,000 students were reported to have taken the Oxford Pledge against participation in war during the student anti-war week. By April 1935, 185,000 students were counted as participants in such demonstrations. Peace Day or Peace Week demonstrations in the late thirties are reported to have included several hundred thousand students.

A comprehensive academic study of the student movement of the early thirties, that by George Rawick, concludes that it "received its major impetus from the anti-war movement." Polls of students indicated that the strength of pacifist feeling was much greater than the following of the organized groups. Thus in one Ohio college sample in 1932, one third of the students said they would be conscientious objectors in a future war; and one quarter reported they might take that position, while only 41 per cent said they would definitely go if drafted

36. William R. McIntyre, "Student Movements," *Editorial Research Reports*, 2 (December, 1957), p. 925; Murray Kempton, *Part of Our Time* (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1955), pp. 302-3.

37. George D. Rawick, *The New Deal and Youth* (Ph.D. Thesis, Department of History, University of Wisconsin, 1957), p. 281.

67

187
[110]

in a war. In 1933, a national poll of 70 colleges found that 39 per cent of those queried stated they would not take part in any war, while 33 per cent said they would fight only in the event the U.S. were invaded. [46]

As in the 1920s and the 1960s, a second major set of concerns was "free speech." "It is significant that amongst the chief issues of contention [during the 1930s] was the student's right to political activity at all: bans on speakers, censorship of student newspapers, punishments for demonstrations, were frequent causi bellicum." [47]

The Communists, who were particularly influential in the leadership of the American Student Union, the American Youth Congress (claimed membership of affiliated groups including over five million youths), and the Southern Negro Youth Congress (claimed 500,000 youths), lost most of their influence by 1940 as a result of shifts in the party line related to the Soviet Union's foreign policies. The Young Communist League itself claimed a membership in 1939 of 22,000 youth, student and non-student.

The Communists and the various student and youth groups which they eventually dominated kept the potentially alienated within the political system. The C.P. following the international Popular Front line of the Comintern, insisted on supporting Franklin Roosevelt, the New Deal, the Democratic

68

Party, and an aggressive anti-Fascist foreign policy. These policies, together with involvement in the campaigns to organize workers by the C.I.O. attracted the largest portion of college dissenting youth, who could thus link a super-rational ideology with support for the underdog in the form of unorganized workers, persecuted Jews, and the Loyalists in the Spanish Civil War. And the rational in-system politics of the communists and the liberals, who were encouraged to remain so by the C.P., discouraged any thrust toward cultural innovation. Ironically, then, the very considerable power of the Communists within intellectualdom and the student movement severely weakened the pressures towards renunciation of American culture and polity. The dominant "radical" group held back the formation of a generation-unit which would have rejected the premises of Western political society undermined by the greatest depression in history.

The Communists set the tone for the student movement of the thirties. . . . because they had the advantage of numbers, because they offered the weak the impression of strength, and because they had a church which no one else could match. They offered in short an available escape from the reality. Most students, of course, managed to bear reality quite well enough to be apathetic about any avenues for escaping it. The Communists were a tiny fragment of the whole, but they were a majority of the committed. To reject them meant to surrender even the illusion of strength and condemn yourself anew to that alienation which had moved you to commitment in the first place. [Signature]

Although the Communists were always a relatively small group on and off the campuses, many individuals passed through the movement, particularly in the 1930s, and again

All-Kempton, op.cit., 320-321

69

during the period of the American alliance with Russia
in World War II. Estimates of the number range as high
as 750,000 different individuals. "Party members stayed
for short periods; they might be active for shorter
periods, and a good many didn't even pay their dues
regularly. What makes the figures concerning large
rapid turnover within the C.P. particularly relevant for an
analysis of student politics is that the overwhelming bulk
of those who joined were of college age. "The peak age
appears to be 18-23. In fact a majority of the rank and
time they are 23. The late teens seem to be an especially
susceptible time." It seems clear that "the proportion
of party members who have been to college is very high. Even
more striking is the great number of graduate degrees among
them."

Given the findings that the Communists were
heavily composed of people recruited from those who attended
college, it is not surprising that the membership, particularly
during the period of massive recruitment in the 1930s, was
heavily white collar and professional. Party leaders who
were committed to building a proletarian party frequently
expressed their dismay at this fact, and sought to get

48. Irving Howe and Lewis Coser, *The American Communist Party* (Boston: Beacon Press, 1957), p. 529; Morris L. Ernst and David Loth, *Report on the American Communist* (New York: H. Holt and Company, 1952), p. 14.

49. Ibid., p. 2.

50. Ibid., pp. 3-4.

70

students and college graduates to take jobs as manual workers.

The family backgrounds of the party members resembled those reported for New Left activists in the 1960's.

They have been brought up, in general, in comfort and often in luxury. They are the children of professional men or more than usually successful businessmen, bankers and ministers. In fact, the Communist Party in America seems to be such a highly educated, non-manual laboring group that at times there would seem to be more rejoicing in its headquarters over the recruiting of one common laborer than over ten Ph.D.'s.

The Communists also resembled the current student activists in "that a large proportion of its members were of Jewish origin." Parenthetically it may be noted that attitude surveys among college students during the 1930's which sought to locate the correlates of liberal-left to conservative beliefs generally reported comparable results to those of the 1960's. The more liberal students tended to come from relatively well-educated professional families disproportionately Jewish or irreligious, and who were majoring in the social sciences. "A definite linkage with father's and mother's political attitudes was established, not supporting the view that student radicalism is primarily a protest against parental conservatism. . . The most striking factor. . . was the rather high correlation between college scholarship and radicalism. . . " The strength of the

Nathan Glazer, *The Social Basis of American Communism* (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1961), pp. 114-118.

Ernst and Loth, op.cit., p. 3.

Glazer, op.cit., p. 130.

Gardner Murphy and Rensis Likert, *Public Opinion and the Individual* (New York: Harper and Bros., 1938), pp. 71-87.

Ibid., pp. 110-111.

56

The concept of the "New Negro" who would stand up and demand his rights emerged. Black nationalism which called on the Negro to "reject whiteness, to see the beauty of his own skin" became a major tendency. Marcus Garvey, who totally rejected white culture, became the head of the largest Negro political organization that had yet appeared, the Universal Negro Improvement Association, one which was much bigger than any of the current black power groups. He proposed that Negroes leave the corrupt white civilization and go to their homeland in Africa. Negro writers gave voice to the new militancy in novels, plays, poetry, and belligerent anti-white articles. It is not surprising, therefore, that Negro students also exhibited some of the aggressiveness. Contemporary description of Negro unrest in the twenties points up the relationship between economic security and the potential for campus disturbances.

The recurrence of disorders ranging from summary expulsions of individual students to wholesale student strikes in Negro colleges will tell even the most casual observer that something is radically wrong.... One thing is certain: The Negro student is not what he used to be.

... [S]tudent strikes have come to be regarded as an unavoidable and periodic liability of the white college. Not so the Negro college.... Economically bound by almost impregnable fetters, the Negro student had no time for anything but the acquisition of a meager education.... [H]e was generally so poor that what leisure time was his had to be spent working at odd hours.... Then came the War. With it came a tremendous betterment of the economic conditions in the southern Negro home. More students came to college.

S. P. Fullinwider, The Mind and Mood of Black America (Homewood, Illinois: The Dorsey Press, 1969), p.128.

Edmund D. Cronon, Black Moses: The Story of Marcus Garvey and the Universal Negro Improvement Association (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1955).

57

Fewer found it necessary to work their way through school.
The radio, the newspaper, the moving picture, the spread of
liberal ideas, and the *clan vital* of the Negro Renaissance
developing into the concept of the "New Negro," all conspired
to send to the threshold of the Negro college a new type of
student, wholly unprecedented.

to send to the threshold of the Negro college a new type of
student, wholly unprecedented.
There were strikes at Fisk, at Hampton Institute,
three] at Howard/./.!/ at Kittrell, at St. Augustine, and
at Knoxville College. There have been revolts almost
equivalent to strikes in nearly every Negro college in the
South. These were obviated in many instances only by whole-
sale expulsion of large parts of the student body. 06/03

A recent study of the 1927 Hampton Institute
strike basically agrees with the earlier account. Edward
Graham notes that by the winter of 1927, "Student strikes
had already reached epidemic proportions at Fisk, Shaw,
Howard, Lincoln (in Missouri), Florida Agricultural and
Industrial Institute and elsewhere." The Hampton strike,
which demanded a better faculty and a relaxation of parietal
rules, was broken and many students were expelled. Those
most deeply involved serving on the Protest Committee were
drawn heavily from among the superior students in intellectual
and leadership ability terms. Success at other schools
and in subsequent careers indicated that those who had led
the strike were "probably one of the most talented groups
ever to leave a college or university campus."

On the campus this rejection of the pre-war past was
most widely expressed through new forms of personal behavior,
short skirts, freer relations with those of the opposite sex,

8. John Davis, "Unrest in Negro Colleges," *The New Student*, 8 (January, 1929), pp. 13-14.

20. Edward K. Graham, "The Hampton Institute Strike of 1927. *A Case Study in Student Protest*," *The American Scholar*, 38 (Autumn, 1969), pp. 673,677.

58

violations of the law banning alcoholic beverages. Kinsey
has documented one aspect of the break in statistical terms
in his report that a big jump in the proportion of females with
premarital sexual experiences occurred in the 1920's.
Seemingly, the proportion did not increase again, at least
among college students, until the 1960's. Earnest, in his
history of college life, concludes that this period witnessed
a general break with the conventional verities even among
the large apolitical and unintellectual majority.

Thus without intellectualizing it, a host of boys and girls in the early 1920's instinctively knew that the platitudes about honesty, democracy, chastity and religion did not represent the truth about American life. They knew that kikes and wops and niggers were outside the pale, in fact, many of the college students agreed that they should be.... With the coming of prohibition they knew of the liquor in country-club locker rooms or in the family cellar.... What the defenders of the established order overlooked was that the youth has an instinctive hatred of bunk.

The result was a revolution in manners and morals.
This was evidenced by new dress styles, the open flaunting of
sex and liquor, and the strong objections voiced to conven-
tional religion. But the avant-garde elements among intellectuals
and students not only rejected the traditional mores, the renunciatory, tend-
ency was also expressed through their opposition to rational political society.
not just the pathology but its very concept. This is sometimes difficult to
perceive, because the range of expression was so broad. There was nihilism,
sheer Bohemianism, Dadaism, whose motto was: "I do not wish to know whether
there have been men before me."

58-

A...revulsion against civilization broke out...in the black humor of the Dadaist movement....Dadaists gave lectures from within diving helmets to the sound of clanging booms and held exhibits in public urinals. Their assaults on a victim-public were exactly like the "happenings" reinvented here in the mid-sixties....Dadaism took its slogan "destruction is also creation" from Bakunin, and its poetics from Rimbaud.

In reviewing campus culture during this period, Oscar T and Mary Handlin conclude that rebellion "became a conventional student posture." They also describe the dominant mood of reflecting a radical rejection of the past in terms both of ideology and personal behavior.

Intellectually, it took the form of a call for liberation "from the entanglement of mere traditional authority and provincial prejudice" and for the discard of the millstones of "dead formalism in religion, and narrow thinking in social relations." The demands were peremptory: "Saccharine Sunday-school religion, blatant Fourth-of-July Patriotism, inherited class bias - all must fall." A pronounced shift in patterns of personal behavior expressed the same impatience with institutional restraints. The lost generation - self-proclaimed - flaunted its interest in sex and whiskey in defiance of the Puritans and of the prohibition laws and provided a compelling model for college youth.

But though their elders who had gone through the war often referred to themselves as the "lost generation," the students of the twenties went far beyond them in rejecting tradition. For the first time in America, the concept of the generation gap, of the sharp difference in values between the young, particularly the college students and their elders appeared as a general notion. And interestingly, then as during the late 1960's, age 30 was taken as the dividing point.

The greatest gulf, however, was that between generations. Parents, and faculty members over thirty, found the younger generation incomprehensible, while youth regarded their elders as either hopelessly incompetent or as pious hypocrites. Probably never in American history had two generations found it harder to communicate. One of the characteristic lacunae in the work of F. Scott Fitzgerald is the absence of characters over thirty.... In an introduction to a collection of Fitzgerald's short stories, Malcolm Cowley explains this gulf on the ground that "the elders were discredited in their [the younger generation's] eyes by the war, prohibition, by the Red scare of 1919-1920, and by the scandals like that of Teapot Dome."

Recognition that an important part of the college population had rejected the traditional values of the society resulted, in each affected period, in an analytical literature which tried to specify what went wrong. "Why is the Younger Generation so different?" One such effort by a journalist resembles both earlier and later writings in stressing social changes which reduced the "sense of parental responsibility." Urbanization, John Gavit argued, brought about a sharp reduction in time spent by parents with children, a reduction in "the sense of responsibility to neighborhood public opinion and standards," and a greater involvement in formal pleasure-seeking activities by the parents. In addition, many of the older generation who advocated "law and order" condemned sexual immorality and radicalism, were engaged during the decade in "openly flouting the Constitution and the law in the matter of Prohibition." And Gavit concluded:

Ibid. p.249

181

People, young and old, whose home experience
has given them no standards, or no self-control with which
to enforce such as they have, always go to pieces when
superimposed restraints are lifted.... There is no absurdity
more futile than that of saying to a young person: "Do not
follow my example; do what I say..."

Whose fault is it if the young people are coming
to college with the most casual ideas of purpose and respon-
sibility? The lamentable characteristic of the typical
college student is not that he has "radical" convictions,
but rather that he has so poor an outfit of convictions on
any subject.

Writing at the end of the twenties, Christian Gauss, Dean of the College at Princeton, pointed to the general pattern of protest "against restraints - against all rules and regulations", and the widespread demand that "the colleges be turned over to the students and be run by undergraduates committees." He argued that such behavior could be found around the country on highly different campuses, that the explanation could not be "merely collegiate", but that student DEMOCRAT must be found the reflections of some underlying condition in the country at large. And he found the answer in the rapid rate of social change which produced what a writer in 1970 would call "future shock." The youth of the twenties were faced with a long list of "inventions and conceptions which began to affect our way of life after 1900."

We can repeat only a few of them here - such as the long-distance
telephone, wireless, jazz, bobbed hair, brim storm, the bootlegger, the
hijacker, the airplane, the airship, antitoxins, the flapper, camouflage, propaganda,
the automobile.... The most popular amusement to-day is the cinema; it,
too, has had its effect. The boy or girl who comes to the college, and who
has been attending the movies for the past six or eight years, has seen far
more life than the ordinary undergraduate of 1895 ever dreamed of....

We have changed our world from top to bottom, and where things have
changed so rapidly, society is usually in for a long and often painful process
of adjustment.

Much of the efforts by those concerned with higher education, both
academics and students, to explain the campus discontent in the twenties, however,
like those of the sixties and early seventies, did not focus on extra-mural
social tensions and technological changes, but rather placed the
failings of the educational system, itself, to do a good job of teaching and
relating to undergraduates.

181 b

A committee of Dartmouth Seniors submitted a report to the President of the College in 1924 informing him of needed changes. They objected strongly to "the impersonal relationship between teacher and student, the present classroom, lecture-hall, and final examination system of education...." They proposed to replace classroom activities by freeing the students to learn through independent reading in all subjects, such as the social sciences and humanities, in which there are a variety of points of view. The professor's role should be to discuss the books after the students have read them, not to lecture at the students giving him an integrated course point of view.

61

Attacks on teaching methods and the lack of close relations between faculty and students tended, then as in more recent years, to be linked to the growth of universities. Thus the _Daily Nebraskan_ complained that "the University has grown immensely" and "classes are now so cumbersome!..! that personal contact is impossible." The Editors of _The Vagabond_ of Indiana University noted with dismay: "In all our institutions of higher learning there is a tendency toward Gigantism, the worship of Bigness, which regards the success of the school as proportionate to its enrollment, the acreage of the campus../. and number of men on the faculty." A Wisconsin professor eloquently portrayed the grievous lot of the undergraduate in the large state university of 1920, in terms which sound like Mario Savio talking of Berkeley in 1964.

> The student is admitted by thousands, registered by a vast clerical machine, assigned to courses, divided into sections, lectured to, quizzed, tested, examined; he is warned by his instructor, warned through his parents'!..! he) his is limited in the number of his semester hours, limited in his elections, limited in his "student activities," limited in his social life; he is recorded, card-indexed, filed, questionnaires, statisticized, and his documentation is kept in a safe. 37

27. "Too Big' Our Higher Education is Overgrown--And End of Student Influx is Not in Sight," _The New Student_, 5 (November 11, 1925), p. 1.

83. The Editors of _The Vagabond_, "Gigantism and the University, The New Student_, 4 (January 24, 1925), p. 7.

88. Grant Showerman, "Intellect and the Undergraduate," _School and Society_, 13 (February 26, 1921), pp. 241-242.

62

The concern for better teaching and more
personal contact between faculty and students was not
limited to criticism about the size of the universities or
classes. The discussion begun in the latter decades of the
nineteenth century about the effect of increased emphasis
on research on teaching filled many pages in the 1920's.
Essentially the specific arguments and proposed solutions
were much the same as those advanced earlier and which
continue to be proposed today. Thus Frank Spaulding
argued that "great teachers" have almost totally disappeared
because in "appointments and promotions the primary question
is not how successful the man is as a teacher, but what has
he done in research in his subject, what has he published?"
In his 1925 presidential address to the Modern Languages
Association, William Neilson complained that graduate
education is planned "for the production of scholars,
hardly at all for the training of teachers." Writing in
1928, Addison Hubbard reported that "probably at no time
since the beginning of higher education in America has the
criticism of our colleges and universities been so general
and so bitter as it is today." This was largely because
of the lack of interest in teaching, which he not only blamed
on the greater rewards for research, but on the considerable

Frank E. Spaulding, "The Passing-of-Great-College Teachers," The Forum, 75(March 1926), p. 447.

See the report of his speech in the *Bulletin of the A.A.U.P.* 11(March-April, 1925), p. 156.

Hibbard

63

growth in rewards in terms of publicity and outside income:
"extra-curricular service--popular lectures given by faculty
members, field research, help of one kind or another to
outside organizations."

Professors are great makers of textbooks in or
out of their field¹ and students in their classes keep on
buying them. Teachers of science serve the State and
private corporations in countless ways: the psychologist
and penologist are advisors to State departments; sanitary
and civil engineers give advice to one commission or another;
the geologist and forester advise on conservation and mineral
deposits; public health measures take the time of the univer-
sity medical staff; the United States government now and
then calls for a man to serve in one capacity or another;
this corporation or that asks for chemical analyses of some
of its by-products; State legislatures ask that surveys be
made; . . . [p]rofessors gain a reputation in a field
and are called upon for commercial lecturing; magazines,
newspapers, publishing houses urge men to write of their
specialities. 40

The President of Hibbard's university, Harry W. Chase, who had earlier
presided over two other universities, argued persuasively in terms that had
been used a generation before him, and which were to be used half a century
later, that the emergence of a national research oriented professoriate had
created a "new" problem of loyalty for the university.

[D]it seems to me that individual faculty members today are less deeply
rooted in the soil of the institution they serve, less complete in the identifi-
cation of their interests with its development, less concerned about it as an
institution, than were the men who came into university faculties a genera-
tion ago.... [N]e have lost something of the deep sense of personal attachment
of an earlier day. And this loss seems to me to constitute an important prob-
lem for those who are concerned about the most effective functioning of universities.

63 a

The solution to the problem of the "truant
professors" was to enhance the status of teaching as such,
in particular by creating new highly paid "superprofessors
not for research competence but for men proven "preeminent
as a teacher." The young Robert Hutchins in his inaugural
address as president of the University of Chicago in 1929
addressed himself to the same dilemma, how to get first-
rate teachers who stuck to the classroom. He, too, advocated
higher salaries. He also proposed, however, that the graduate
departments of his university undertake "to devise the best
methods for preparing men for teaching." He intended to
place "a new responsibility upon the departments, that of
developing ideas in college education."

Inaugural

By Robert M. Hutchins, "Training Professors and Paying Them,"
The Review of Reviews, 81 (February, 1930), p.99.

185
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