The Atlantic | July 1969 | Student Politics and the University

More on politics and society from The Atlantic Monthly.

From the archives:

The Organization Kid (April 2001)
The young men and women of America's future elite work their laptops to the bone, rarely question authority, and happily accept their positions at the top of the heap as part of the natural order of life. By David Brooks

The Class of '43 Is Puzzled (October 1968)
While the rebels in the present college generation raised their voices and their barricades, men and women of earlier generations traveled back to campuses to raise their glasses in that long-standing late spring rite, the class reunion. By Nicholas Von Hoffman The Atlantic Monthly | July 1969

Student Politics and the University

"The university now suffers from the consequences of an untempered and irrational attack on American society, government, and university, one to which we as academics have contributed, and on which we have failed to give much light."

by Nathan Glazer

.....

t is scarcely possible to write anything about students and the university crisis now without looking back at what one has written over the past five years—and I began to write on this subject in December, 1964, reviewing the first climax of the Berkeley student crisis.

This has the usual sobering effect on human presumption. It turns out one was about half wrong and half right. Both the areas where one was wrong and the areas where one was right are of some interest.

Where I was right: at the beginning I, and others, argued that the issue at Berkeley (and elsewhere) was not one of free speech. Free speech existed at Berkeley, and we argued that very early in the first crisis two other issues had in effect replaced it. One was, would the university become the protected recruiting and launching ground for radical political activity directed to various ends, among them the overthrow of the basic system of operation of a democratic society? And second, would the student tactics of disruption, mild as they appear now in the perspective of four and a half years of increasing escalation, be applied to the basic concerns of the university itself (teaching and research), as well as to such peripheral matters as the political activities permitted on campus?

Those of us who by December, 1964, had decided the free-speech issue was solved, and was then spurious, considered these two issues the dominant ones; those who opposed us thought we were ridiculously exaggerating the most distant possible dangers to free speech, free research, and free teaching. They emphasized on the contrary the facts (with which we all agreed) that the student rebels themselves strongly resisted any tendency toward totalitarianism or even central control in their own movement; that the student leaders had found their political orientation in fighting for the rights of Negroes in the South, and for job opportunities for them in the Bay Area; and that young radical civil libertarians, not Communists, were the center of the radical movement. And they pointed out—and this was a very powerful argument indeed —that the young rebels had brought a refreshing sense of community, one that joined students and faculty as well as student with student, into an institution that had been marked by a far too strong concern simply with professional and academic standards, and which had done almost nothing to feed essential needs for close sharing with others, participation, joint action, and common facing of dangers.

These were certainly serious arguments in those distant days, and I doubt that those who in the end voted against a faculty resolution which sanctioned the student revolution felt at all easy with their position. Could one really believe that these attractive young people, many of whom had risked their lives in the South, who had taken up so many causes without concern for their own personal future, themselves carried any possible danger to free speech, free teaching, free research? In the end, both sides consulted their feelings—those who had felt the chill of a conformity flowing from an ostensible commitment to freedom voted one way; those who felt the warmth of a community united in common action voted the other. (This is extravagant, of course; there were many other reasons for going one way or another.)

After these chaotic four and a half years, I have no doubt that on this point my friends and I were right. The Free Speech Movement, which stands at the beginning of the student rebellion in this country, seems now almost to mock its subsequent course. In recent years, the issue has been how to defend the speech, and the necessary associated actions, of others. The right of unpopular political figures to speak without disruption on campus; the right of professors to give courses and lectures without disruption that makes it impossible for others to listen or to engage in open discussion; the right of professors to engage in research they have freely chosen; the right of government and the corporations to come onto the campus to give information and to recruit personnel; the right of students to prepare themselves as officers on the campus: all these have been attacked by the young apostles of freedom and their heirs.

The organizations that defend academic freedom, the AAUP and the ACLU, and the others, which have so long pointed their heavy guns toward the outside—for defense against conservative trustees, newspapers, legislators, and vigilante communities—are now with some reluctance swinging them around so they face inward. Anyone who has experienced the concrete situation in American universities knows that the threat to free speech, free teaching, free research, comes from radical white students, from militant black students, and from their faculty defenders. The trustees of the University of California may deny credit to a course in which Eldridge Cleaver is the chief lecturer, but radical students in many places (including campuses of the University of California) have effectively intimidated professors so they cannot give courses they were prepared to give. It is a peculiar sign of the times that the denial of credit seems to many a more monstrous act than the denial of freedom to teach.

Thus, we were right in pointing to the dangers. Where were we wrong? Our gravest mistake was that we did not see what strength and plausibility would soon be attached to the argument that this country was ruled by a cruel and selfish oligarchy devoted to the extension of the power and privileges of the few and denying liberty and even life to the many; and to the further assertion that the university was an integral part of this evil system. It was not possible to predict, in December, 1964, that the spring of 1965 would see an enormous expansion of the American role in Vietnam, and would involve us in a large-scale war that was to be fought by this country with unparalleled, one-sided devastation of an innocent civilian population and its land. We had never been in this position before. Where we were overwhelmingly powerful—as against Spain in 1898—there was no occasion or opportunity or capacity to engage in such horrible destruction; where we were horribly destructive—as in Europe and Japan in 1944 and 1945—it was against powerful opponents who had, in the eyes of most Americans, well merited destruction. There were some excuses even for the atom bombs of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. There were some mitigating circumstances. There were hardly any in Vietnam, unfortunately, except for the arguments, which became less and less impressive over time, that we were after all a democratic society, and had gotten involved in such a war through democratic processes; and the further arguments that our strategy was designed to save a small nation from subversion, and our tactics were intended to save American lives.

The split between liberals and radicals

e have to examine this moment in American history with the greatest care if we are ever to understand what happened afterward, why Berkeley 1964 did not remain an isolated incident, and why the nascent split that appeared there between liberals and radicals became a chasm which has divided American intellectuals more severely even than the issue of Stalinism and Communism in the thirties and forties. What happened to professors at Berkeley happened to liberals and radicals everywhere. And since intellectuals, including professors, played a far larger role in American society in the sixties than in the thirties and forties, this split became far more important than any possible argument among the intellectuals and their associated professors twenty-five years earlier. (One of the differences between the two periods was that so many intellectuals of the sixties, as against the earlier period, were in the universities. Compare the writers, circulation, and influence of Partisan Review with that of the New York Review of Books.)

It may be argued that no split really developed in 1964; that the intellectuals who approved of the United States were ambushed by new events that did not fit into their approach, and by an uprising of suppressed intellectuals who had been silenced by McCarthy, who had harbored for a long while some version of the Marxist view of the United States, and who now—by a series of disasters, mistakes, or demonstrations of the country's basic character and tendencies, take your pick—had been given their chance. This is in large measure true. But we forget how closely those who were to become so divided were linked before 1964.

Some political events of those days now seem so unlikely as to be hallucinatory; thus Paul Jacobs (who was to run in 1968 as a candidate for the Peace and Freedom Party), S. M. Lipset (the liberal sociologist of pluralism, now at Harvard), and Philip Selznick (the Berkeley sociologist who was to become one of the strong defenders of student protest at Berkeley) were linked in defending dissident members of Harry Bridges' union in San Francisco and in attacking what they considered the Communist proclivities of various groups in the Bay Area. Lewis Feuer, who became one of the most forceful critics of student radicalism (in his article in the Atlantic and in his book The Conflict of Generations), was in 1960 the chairman of a committee to defend the students who had put on a vocal (and, it was charged, a disruptive) demonstration against the House Un-American Activities Committee in San Francisco—this event is considered one of the important precursors of the Berkeley student rebellion. Or, if we want to mount a larger stage, consider who wrote for the New York Review of Books in its trial issues of 1963, and consider how many of them now see each other as political enemies.

Thus, to my mind, if we are to understand the student rebellion, we must go back to 1965 and reconstruct the enormous impact of Vietnam, and we will see that the same lines that began to divide friends on student rebellion reappeared to divide them on Vietnam.

Among all those who were horrified by the beginning of the bombing of the North, and by the increasingly destructive tactics in the South—the heavy bombing, the burning of villages, the defoliation of the countryside—a fissure rapidly developed. It could be seen when, for example, Berkeley radicals sat down in front of trains bringing recruits to the Oakland induction station. Those of us who opposed such tactics argued they would alienate the moderate potential opponents of the war, whose support was needed to bring a change in policy. We argued that to equate Johnson with Hitler and America with Nazi Germany would make it impossible to develop a wide alliance against the war. But actually, the principled basis of our opposition was more important. We did believe there were profound differences between this country and Nazi Germany, Johnson and Hitler, that we lived in a democracy, and that the authority of a democratic government, despite what it was engaged in in Vietnam, should not be undermined because only worse would follow: from the right, most likely, but also possibly from a general anarchy. Perhaps we were wrong. The reaction from the right was remarkably moderate. The radical tactics did reach large numbers and played finally a major role in changing American policy in Vietnam. But all the returns are not yet in: conceivably the erosion of the legitimacy of a democratic government is a greater loss than what was gained. Conceivably, too, a movement oriented to gaining wide support—along the lines of early SANE—might have been even more effective.

At Berkeley, the liberal split on Vietnam replicated the liberal split on student rebellion in the university and was paralleled by splits on the question of the summer riots and the whole problem of black violence. Again and again the issues were posed in terms of tactics—yes, we are for university reform of political rules, but we are against sit-ins and the degradation of university authorities; yes, we are against the war in Vietnam, but we will not attack or undermine the legitimacy of a democratic government; yes, we are for expanded opportunities and increased power and wealth for Negroes, but we are against violence and destruction to get them. But of course the split was not really over tactics.

Behind that there was a more basic disagreement. What kind of society, government, and university did we have? what was owed to them? to what extent were they capable of reform and change without resort to civil disobedience, disruption, and violence? The history and analysis of this basic division have scarcely been begun. But there is hardly any question as to which side has won among intellectual youth. We have witnessed in the past four or five years one of the greatest and most rapid intellectual victories in history. In the press addressed to the young (whether that press is elite or mass or agitational) a single view of the society and what is needed to change it is presented. Violence is extolled in the New York Review of Books, which began with only literary ambitions; Tom Hayden, who urges his audiences to kill policemen, is treated as a hero by Esquire; Eldridge Cleaver merits an adulatory Playboy interview; and so it goes, all the way, I imagine, down to Eye.

The power of radical thinking

hen I say we were wrong, I mean that we never dreamed that a radical critique of American society and government could develop such enormous power, to the point where it becomes simply the new convention. Even in the fraternities and sororities, conservative opinion has gone underground; the formerly hip conservatism of the National Review is as unfashionable on the campus as the intellectualism of Commentary. We were not only wrong in totally underestimating the power of radical thinking to seize large masses again; we were also in the position of William Phillips sputtering to Kenneth Tynan, "I know the answer to that, but I've forgotten it." We had forgotten the answers, it was so long ago. When the questions came up again—imperialism, capitalism, exploitation, alienation—those of us who believed that the Marxist and anarchist critiques of contemporary society were fundamentally wrong could not, it seems, find the answers—at least the ones that worked.

Of course, some of the intellectuals of the forties and fifties had never forgotten the old questions (Paul Goodman, Hannah Arendt), and while they looked with some distance, even from the beginning, at the new recruits to their old concerns, they managed with amazing intellectual success the precarious task of combining basic criticism of a liberal society with basic support of the liberal values of free development, human variety, and protection for the individual. Those who had really forgotten nothing, neither the problems nor the answers, such as Herbert Marcuse, have been, of course, even more successful in relating to radical youth.

But were we wrong only in underestimating the appeal of old and outworn political ideologies, or were we wrong in considering them outworn, inadequate explanations of the world? In other words, was the issue really some fundamental bent in American society that added up to military adventurism abroad, lack of concern with the rights or lives of those of other skin color, the overwhelming dominance of mindless bureaucracies in determining economic and political policies, the human meaninglessness of the roles these bureaucracies prescribed for people, and the inability of the society and the state to correct these bents under any pressures short of violence, destruction, and rebellion?

The university as part of society

ne must begin, I am afraid, with these larger questions in speaking about the university today. One's attitude toward it, the role of students within it, and the danger of its possible destruction, as a collection of physical facilities and as an institution, can scarcely be determined without attention to these larger questions. For the university is implicated in the society. It is a rare university that can for any period of time stand aside from a society, following a totally independent and critical course. Universities are almost always to some extent independent (one wonders, though, about Russia, China, and Cuba), but their insatiable demands for resources inevitably impose on them the need to relate themselves to the major concerns and interests of the society.

Yet at the same time a university's work is in large measure quite independent of the faults or characteristics of any state or government. There is a realm of scholarship beyond political stands and divisions. The science that is taught in the United States is not very different from the science that is taught in the Soviet Union, or in Cuba, or even in China—though at that point we reach the limits of my generalization. Even the scholarship of the humanities bears a great deal in common. I have often been surprised by the degree to which the work of the universities is common across radically different political frontiers. The passion of the Russians and Chinese, under Communism, for archaeology, for the exact restoration of early buildings and structures, and for early philology is evidence of the scholarly and scientific validity and usefulness of archaeology, linguistic reconstruction, art history.

It is only when one approaches the social sciences that the cross-political scientific validity of research and teaching can successfully be challenged, for we do find enormous variations between social science under one political outlook and another. History is perhaps worst off. Consider how Russians or Americans, and among Americans, established or revisionist historians, interpret our past. Sociology is almost as badly off. Yet some parts of it (for example, the statistical methodology opinion research) seem to have developed wide acceptance across disparate political and cultural frontiers. Economics seems to share some of the universal acceptance of the natural sciences.

I record these truisms to emphasize that the university is not simply the creature of social and political systems, and that scientific and scholarly investigation and teaching have some general value divorced from politics, since totally opposed and distinct social systems accept its importance and give it support and prestige. (China is the once great society to break with this general acceptance, and we don't know whether this is only the alteration of a few years.) But certainly the university is in large measure the creature of distinct social and political systems. The degree to which higher education is considered a right of all; the degree to which its credentials are considered essential for jobs and positions of all kinds; the degree to which its research is affected by state determination and the availability of state support; the degree to which university education is seen as part of a service to the state, and to which it is integrated with other kinds of service, such as military service: all these show considerable variation between states, but most modern states tend to converge in answering these questions, and the convergence is in the form of a closer and more complex relationship between university, society, and state. And if one is impressed by fatal flaws in the society and state, one may not be overly impressed with whatever measure of university function is independent of deep involvement with a given society and a given political system. At that point, one may well see the university as only the soft underbelly of the society.

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