Students and Academic Unrest

Abstract

A relative calm has settled on university campuses in the last two years. Since the wave of protest following the invasion of Cambodia in the spring of 1970, campuses have been strangely quiet. Have the students and protestors been chastened and silenced or just temporarily repressed? Only the most euphoric observer would have dared to frame such a conservative question in 1970. Today, some pundits predict a return to the quietude and apathy of the Nineteen Fifties. Predictably, a caseload of books have appeared claiming to understand the genesis of the protest movement of the Nineteen Sixties. In a seeming vindication of Mario Savio's famous warning at Berkeley in 1964, "Never trust anyone over thirty," the value of the new books varies inversely with the age of the author. The most ill-tempered and unedifying volumes are Penned by middle-aged professors who refuse to study the phenomenon of Youth rebellion with the seriousness it deserves. I touch on two of these works because, unfortunately, they are typical of a host of similar writings. William O'Neill, a professor of history at Rutgers University, dismisses Peremptorily any value or content in the student movement. His book, Coming Apart: An Informal History of America in the Nineteen Sixties, at best is a Frederick Lewis Allen-style treatment of the recent past. O'Neill's original title was "Good Riddance" which reveals his essential contempt