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The 1960s and the Transformation of Campus Cultures

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 February 2017

Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz
Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz*
Affiliation:
Scripps College
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Extract

The time has come to take stock of the 1960s on college campuses, to examine the decade, and to assess its impact. As the offspring of undergraduates of the 1960s themselves now enter college, they remind us that what was once the immediate present has receded into history. My own concerns as a historian lead me to focus on the impact of the events and processes of the 1960s on student cultures. The 1960s profoundly reshaped undergraduate worlds. Because the unnaturally calm campus of the 1970s and early 1980s was the paradoxical outcome of that turbulent decade, we are still living within its ironic consequences.

Type
Articles
Information
History of Education Quarterly , Volume 26 , Issue 1 , Spring 1986 , pp. 1 - 38
Copyright
Copyright © 1986 by the History of Education Society 

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References

1 A general word is in order about this paper and its documentation. This paper has two parts, treated differently. Sections I and II summarize chapters of a forthcoming book on undergraduate cultures, to be published by Knopf in 1986–1987. These sections are undocumented, except for direct quotations or where I have relied heavily on the works of others. I must ask the indulgence of my readers, who will be rewarded with adequate documentation in the work to come. Section III, which will be Chapter 10 of the forthcoming book, contains more leisurely exposition and thus can be documented appropriately.Google Scholar

2 Many who are or have been college students may find themselves located not in one undergraduate subculture but in several. How can this be? Two explanations are essential to understanding what follows. First of all, in examining college men and women and rebels, I am looking at subcultures, not individuals. That is, I am exploring the complex of values, attitudes, and behavior held by undergraduate groups and transmitted to those entering them. Individual students vary in the degree to which they assume a collegiate subculture. Outsiders remain immune from them all. To simplify language, I adopt common parlance to write of college culture, rather than employing the more technical word subculture, but I remain aware that students in American colleges exist within the broader national culture. Secondly, in delineating these subcultures and in describing the outsider, I am simplifying and organizing characteristics to create ideal types. An ideal type has no objective existence but is a mental construction that strives to represent reality. While an ideal type may approach truth, it invariably is far too clean and uncomplicated for the messy world of actual historical phenomena.Google Scholar

3 The term college life has conventionally been used to denote the undergraduate subculture presumably shared by all students. My study clarifies that college life, in fact, is and has been the world of only a minority of students. I have therefore reserved the terms college life and college men and college women to a particular undergraduate subculture and its female variant and to those students who partake in it.Google Scholar

4 Novak, Steven J., Rights of Youth: American Colleges and Student Revolt, 1798–1815 (Cambridge, Mass., 1977). I do not, however, accept Novak's central argument that the rebellions were externally caused by a generation that needed to prove its manhood by repeating the battles of the Revolution within the college context.Google Scholar

5 Greven, Philip J., The Protestant Temperament: Patterns of Child-Rearing, Religious Experience, and the Self in Early America (New York, 1977). I have found useful Greven's three categories—genteel, evangelical, and moderate.Google Scholar

6 Canby, Henry Seidel, Alma Mater: The Gothic Age of the American College (New York, 1936), 23–25.Google Scholar

7 Allmendinger, David F. Jr., Paupers and Scholars: The Transformation of Student Life in Nineteenth-Century New England (New York, 1975).Google Scholar

8 As I draw here both on others' writings and on my own reflections as I lived through and came to terms with these years on campus, I am aware of the limited nature of my concerns. Protest in the 1960s called into question basic American assumptions and challenged its institutions. As a liberal, I never identified myself directly with the New Left Movement, but I was deeply stirred by the questions radicals posed and the information they revealed. Both my belief in civil rights and my opposition to the Vietnam War meant my support of certain ends, if not of means. My concern here, however, is with the culture of college students, not with the nature of American politics or with elemental justice. What I want to understand is the dynamics of the 1960s within the specific context of student life, before and after. The danger is that I may trivialize what were profound statements about American society. The other side, however, is that this narrow approach may reveal aspects of college experience in the 1960s. Moreover, because I am looking at college students and the worlds that they create, not at the nature of American politics and society in the 1960s, much that was important to the decade gets truncated in these pages. The cultural revolution critically affected student attitudes about dress, sex, drugs, and the future. Protest against racial discrimination and American foreign policy occurred in many contexts. In both cases, I am concerned only with the way they came on campus.Google Scholar

9 Becker, Howard S., Geer, Blanche, and Hughes, Everett C., Making the Grade: The Academic Side of College Life (New York, 1968). This important study, long in progress, had the misfortune to appear at a time when few seemed interested in the academic pressure undergraduates faced and in the ways they coped with it.Google Scholar

10 Peterson, Richard E., “The National Campus Reaction to Cambodia and Kent State: Themes and Variations,” in Peterson, Richard E. and Bilorusky, John A., May 1970: The Campus Aftermath of Cambodia and Kent State (Berkeley, 1971), 15,17.Google Scholar

11 Levine, Arthur, When Dreams and Heroes Died: A Portrait of Today's College Student (San Francisco, 1980), 4–5. The number rose to roughly one-half in the spring of 1970. Lipset, Seymour Martin, Rebellion in the University (Chicago, 1976), 90.Google Scholar

12 Flacks, Richard, “Who Protests: The Social Bases of the Student Movement,” in Protest! Student Activism in America, ed. Foster, Julian and Long, Durward (New York, 1970), 134–57; and Flacks, Richard, Youth and Social Change (Chicago, 1971). Flacks has influenced my thinking far more than this single note suggests; I am indebted to his discussions for reminding me of the importance of music and dress and for his sensitive discussion of the interplay between events and the process of radicalization.Google Scholar

13 Goodman, Paul, Growing Up Absurd: Problems of Youth in the Organized System (New York, 1960), 159–60, original in italics, and 161. Goodman's Appendix, D, “The Freedom to Be Academic,” contains an impassioned plea for academic freedom, the right of professors to be enthusiasts rather than strive for a false neutrality, and the value of John Dewey's reconstruction of education. It also expresses Goodman's hostility to the Big University (256–79).Google Scholar

14 Wright Mills, C., The Power Elite (New York, 1956), passim, quotes from 296.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

15 Wright Mills, C., “Letter to the New Left,” New Left Review 5 (Sept.-Oct. 1960): 18–23.Google Scholar

16 Schiffrin, While André emphasizes the weakness of the radical student movement in the 1950s, he nonetheless testifies to its existence. Schiffrin, André, “The Student Movement in the 1950's: A Reminiscence,” Radical America 2 (May-June 1968): 26–41.Google Scholar

17 Flacks, , “Who Protests,” 152.Google Scholar

18 Flacks, , Youth and Social Change, 60–73.Google Scholar

19 Sale, Kirkpatrick, SDS (New York, 1973) deals not only with the organization of its title, but with student radicalism and protest in the 1960s. Here I drew on pages 35–36. As this account makes clear, radical alumni—not students—formed the leadership of SDS.Google Scholar

20 Students for a Democratic Society, The Port Huron Statement (New York, 1964), quotes from 3, 4, 9, 63.Google Scholar

21 Sale, SDS, is the indispensible source.Google Scholar

22 An excellent introduction to the vast literature on the 1960s is the balanced account in Matusow, Allen J., The Unraveling of America: A History of Liberalism in the 1960s (New York, 1984), Chapter 11 “Rise and Fall of the New Left,” 308–44. I have drawn extensively on these pages.Google Scholar

23 Seventeen percent of those surrounding the police car had taken part in at least seven demonstrations. Lipset, , Rebellion in the University, 98.Google Scholar

24 Matusow, , Unraveling of America, 317. A full account is Heirich, Max, The Beginning: Berkeley, 1964 (New York, 1970). Useful is Unger, Irwin, The Movement: A History of the American New Left, 1959–1972 (New York, 1974), 62–79.Google Scholar

25 Savio, Mario, “An End to History,” in The New Student Left: An Anthology, ed. Cohen, Mitchell and Hall, Dennis (Boston, 1966), 253–57, quotes from 257. The essay was an edited version of Savio's taped speech during the Sproul Hall sit-in at Berkeley, 1964.Google Scholar

26 Levine, Arthur, Handbook on Undergraduate Curriculum (San Francisco, 1978), 376–78.Google Scholar

27 Flacks, , “Who Protests,” 153; Sale sympathetically chronicles the calculated actions of SDS and other radical groups on campus.Google Scholar

28 poll, Gallup, reported in Lipset, , Rebellion in the University, 43. One survey of student opinion found that alongside the intense idealism of 1960s college youth was an even deeper commitment to privatism. The draft, administrative directives, and police response to building take-overs thus felt like personal violations. Hadden, Jeffrey K., “The Private Generation,” Psychology Today 3 (Oct. 1969): 32–35, 68–69.Google Scholar

29 Sale, , SDS, 430–41; Matusow, , Unraveling of America, 325–31.Google Scholar

30 Matusow, , Unraveling of America, 331–35. For a full narrative by the staff of the Columbia Daily Spectator, see Avorn, Jerry L. et al., Up against the Ivy Wall: A History of the Columbia Crisis, ed. with intro. by Friedman, Robert (New York, 1969).Google Scholar

31 Sale, , SDS, 444, 632–33, 713.Google Scholar

32 By the final demonstrations, 1969–70, participants came as well from farther down the economic spectrum, but remained always proportionately wealthier than nonparticipants. Lipset summarizes studies of protest participants and left-wing students in Rebellion in the University, 80–123.Google Scholar

33 Baird, Leonard R., “Who Protests: A Study of Student Activists,” in Protest!, ed. Long, , 123–33.Google Scholar

34 My problem with so many of the studies of student protests is that they failed to consider the role of undergraduate culture. Protest did not simply occur if a campus contained a given number of students of certain socioeconomic characteristics. Those students entered an undergraduate world that profoundly reshaped them. Socioeconomic position did help determine how students located themselves in that world.Google Scholar

35 Leading spokesmen for the positive assessment of radicals were Flacks, Richard and Keniston, Kenneth who published articles and books repeatedly during the period. Youth and Dissent: The Rise of a New Opposition (New York, 1971), contains a collection of Keniston's articles. The opposition included Feuer, Lewis S., The Conflict of Generations: The Character and Significance of Student Movements (New York, 1969).Google Scholar

36 In 1863 Edward Hitchcock stated that he had adopted a principle that he came at times to believe—that college students were “deranged.” College exposed them to “the influence of views, feelings, and prejudices, so different from those of men in common life” that they were best treated as “men under strong hallucination, if not partial insanity.” How else could one explain how men, who later became quite reasonable, could “abuse one another, oppose the Faculty, justify convivial excesses, and sympathize strongly with those disciplined for gross immoralities, so as even to organize rebellion against lawful authority.” Hitchcock, Edward, Reminiscences of Amherst College… (Northampton, Mass., 1863), 320.Google Scholar

37 To focus on the triumph of the culture of collegiate rebellion is not meant to deflate the issues that college radicals raised about the nature of American society and the war in Vietnam or to deny that campus unrest may have hastened the withdrawal of American troops from Southeast Asia. The justice or injustice of a cause and its relative effectiveness do not spring from the abstinence of its adherents from the pollution of culture.Google Scholar

38 Newcomb, Theodore M., Personality and Social Change: Attitude Formation in a Student Community (New York, 1943).Google Scholar

39 Kunen, James Simon, The Strawberry Statement—Notes of a College Revolutionary (New York, 1969), 19–20, 27.Google Scholar

40 Ibid., 36, 71–72.Google Scholar

41 Ibid., 89.Google Scholar

42 Ibid., 108, 109, 151.Google Scholar

43 Astin, Alexander W. et al., The Power of Protest (San Francisco, 1975), 50–53. This team did find protestors to be from less affluent families than counterprotestors, to see themselves as differing from others in beliefs, and to be pessimistic about the future. The data base of the groups surveyed by the Astin team was made up of freshmen, followed up a year later; and were composed of two distinct groups treated as one—blacks involved in demonstrations against discrimination and white antiwar protestors.Google Scholar

44 Avorn, et al., Up against the Ivy Wall, passim.Google Scholar

45 Kelman, Steven, Push Comes to Shove: The Escalation of Student Protest (Boston, 1970).Google Scholar

46 Studies of the New Left or black protest do not generally consider the black movement on campus. A useful source for a specific campus is Eichel, Lawrence E. et al., The Harvard Strike (Boston, 1970), 261–88. Blacks who participated in demonstrations did not share the socioeconomic profile or aspirations of whites: blacks tended to be poorer, of parents who had not been to college, and clearer about future careers. Lipset, , Rebellion in the University, 88.Google Scholar

47 Anthony Lukas, J., Don't Shoot—We Are Your Children! (New York, 1971), 65–113.Google Scholar

48 Evans, Sara, Personal Politics: The Roots of Women's Liberation in the Civil Rights Movement and the New Left (New York, 1979).Google Scholar

49 Ibid., quote from 98–99.Google Scholar

50 Here I draw not only on interviews and my experience, but also on Becker, et al., Making the Grade, which remains contemporary.Google Scholar

51 Cooper, Rand, “Confessions of a Pre-med Dropout,” Amherst (June 1980): 28–32, quotes from 28, 31, 32.Google Scholar