A Vote for Student Protest
In preparing this supplement, the ATLANTIC invited student activists on several campuses to comment on the issues and temperament of student radicalism as they knew it. Some refused the invitation; many tried to express their feelings. The most compelling reply came from Mary Nichols Gonzales, a senior and a moving force in campus politics at Cornell University. Mrs. Gonzales is an honors student, a former editor of the TROJAN HORSE, Cornell's literary magazine, and co-author of STEP BY STEP, a book about civil rights work in Fayette County, Tennessee, where she spent the summer of 1964 helping to register Negro voters.
by Mary N. Gonzales
IN THE present era university students and their professors, who are, it must be immediately established, only older students paying their debt to scholarship by inducting a new generation, have been passionately involved in debating and protesting the political and social events of their time.
The students who demonstrated on campuses across the country last year against the U.S. position in Vietnam were acting within their rights as citizens. Where they infringed the constitutional rights of others — by breaking up assemblies of fellow students or inhibiting the free speech of others — they deserved to be, and were, punished. But the fact that some of the students who demonstrated were rowdy (or dirty or bearded or wrong) is no more logical as an argument against demonstrations than the fact that Americans have often elected incompetent men to office can be considered a reason for abandoning democratic elections.
The human fact is that a student of any age cannot read analytically the works of Locke, Jefferson, Ortega, Shaw, Ibsen (much less Sartre, Osborne, or Baldwin) without recognizing much that is stupid and evil in our society. In the way of people who are young, free, and relatively innocent of the adult world’s experience, he believes that there’s no point arguing because no one listens to him anyway, so he makes his anger known in other ways. His righteous wrath and insistence that society take steps to improve itself immediately are not the products of inflammatory texts or teachers; they are the inevitable concomitants of the intelligent student’s attempt to relate what he hears in class to himself and his world.
No pat on the head for youthful idealism is intended here. Youthful idealism is widely known to curdle into middle-aged cynicism, and both are diffuse, unproductive ways of meeting social problems. The past year’s crop of demonstrators made it clear that they were not claiming to have answers to problems that have required years of persistent effort and will require many more to produce results. They wanted to express their attitude on issues of the greatest importance — war and peace, and foreign intervention, the rights of small nations and defenseless citizens — and to communicate these attitudes as widely as possible.
Any student who can sit through four years of college without once getting excited enough about the war in Vietnam or Communism in Cuba, voting discrimination in the South or the plight of the Jews in Russia to investigate the problem (study) and find others who agree with him and make some public protest — any student so dense or just plain selfish that he has not perceived the relation between his university education and the pressing questions of his society has undoubtedly been wasting his time.