The Changing Social Base of the American Student Movement

Abstract

A major finding of the pioneering empirical research on the American student movement of the 1960's was that students who engaged in campus protest were pri marily raised in "humanistic," liberal, middle-class families. Based upon these data, the development of student activism was seen as growing from the almost unique aspirations and values of a small proportion of college and university youth who were particularly sensitive to and unable to accept authoritarian institutional structures and social injustice be cause of their family backgrounds. More recently, with the enormous growth of campus unrest, this theory of student activism has been challenged. A study conducted at the University of Wisconsin in 1968 by one of the authors indi cates that there has been a significant change in the social base of the student movement since the early and mid-sixties. This evidence, together with other research findings which are consistent with the thesis of a changing social base of activism, suggest that the "family socialization" theory is becoming less adequate as an explanation of what has become a mass student movement. The extension of student protest to larger sectors of the student population is indicative of a growing "class" consciousness among students which has its basis in a general cultural and political crisis combined with the growing segre gation, "proletarianization," and repression of youth. The implications of these emerging social sources of the student movement for the radicalization of a "new" working class and the "territorialization" of youth revolt are considered.

Generation Units and the Student Protest Movement in the United States: An Intra‐ and Intergenerational Analysis

“…To the extent that parental characteristics weighed in at all, the activists more often came from liberal-leaning and politically active homes (e.g., Block, Haan, & Smith, 1969;Flacks, 1967;Lewis & Kraut, 1972). Over time, as the movement expanded, the social origins expanded somewhat so that more instances of dissonance between parents and children probably appeared (Mankoff & Flacks, 1971). …”

Measuring Social Values: A Content Analysis of Sunday Comics and Underground Comix

“…Adherents of the counterculture were typically from families that took material well-being for granted. Leaders and activists were disproportionately from well-to-do upper-middle class families (Mankoff and Flacks 1971). And compared with previous generations of young adults, this was a disproportionately large group and concentrated on college campuses.…”

“…The counterculture's critique of the dominant society centered around materialism: the pursuit of wealth and material well-being as personal goals, the use of material objects as sources of identity, and an economy geared toward the production of "unneeded" consumer goods whose sales require the manipulative commercial messages of advertising (Flacks 1970;Howard 1969;Mankoff and Flacks 1971;Roszak 1969). The counterculture's critique of materialism is, then, multifaceted, as are the conceptual and operational definitions of materialism employed by consumer researchers.…”

Left-wing radicalism at a canadian university: The inapplicability of an american model

“…Firstly, the initial left-wing radicals may have been a "liberated urban middle-class generation" but, over time, the movement increasingly became more institutionalized, spreading to conventional youth of various class origins and backgrounds and to a greater variety of colleges and universities (Flacks, 1967b, p. 61;Peterson, 1%8;Dunlap, 1970, p. t80;Lipset, 1971, p. 83;Mankoff and Flacks, 1971;Gergen, 1973, p. 315). Secondly, by 1973, the New Left movement in North America had weakened considerably, partly for demographic and historical reasons.…”