Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-gbm5v Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-26T18:06:07.609Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The Politics of Knowledge in 1960s America

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 January 2016

Andrew Jewett
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This article offers a broad sketch of claims regarding the university’s public purpose in the 1960s while noting that a vision of the university as an autonomous forum for moral debate cut across the seemingly insurmountable divide between young radicals and their liberal elders. Read through the lens of educational philosophies, the era's clashes did not simply pit liberal advocates of political neutrality against radical exponents of political commitment. Rather, many radical activists—and some liberals— believed that the university should cut off many of its ties to the wider society to gain a more critical purchase on it. Indeed, critics of Clark Kerr's bureaucratic “multiversity” often hewed to a surprisingly traditional conception of higher education.

Type
Special Section: The Uses of the University: After Fifty Years
Information
Social Science History , Volume 36 , Issue 4 , Winter 2012 , pp. 551 - 581
Copyright
Copyright © Social Science History Association 2012 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Barzun, Jacques (1964) Science: The Glorious Entertainment. New York: Harper and Row.Google Scholar
Barzun, Jacques (1966) “Science as a social institution.” Proceedings of the Academy of Political Science 28 (2): 3–14.Google Scholar
Bloland, Harland G.Bloland, Sue M. (1974) American Learned Societies in Transition: The Impact of Dissent and Recession. New York: McGraw-Hill.Google Scholar
Brick, Howard (1998) Age of Contradiction: American Thought and Culture in the 1960s. New York: Twayne.Google Scholar
Brick, Howard (2006) Transcending Capitalism: Visions of a New Society in Modern American Thought. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.Google Scholar
Brown, David S. (2006) Richard Hofstadter: An Intellectual Biography. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Brubacher, John S.Rudy, Willis (1997) Higher Education in Transition: A History of American Colleges and Universities, 4th ed. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction.Google Scholar
Calvert, Greg (1970 [1967]) “In white America: Radical consciousness and social change,” in Teodori, Massimo (ed.) The New Left: A Documentary History. London: Cape: 412–18.Google Scholar
Chomsky, Noam (1968 [1967]) “The responsibility of intellectuals,” in Roszak, Theodore (ed.) The Dissenting Academy. New York: Pantheon: 254–98.Google Scholar
Columbia Students (1971 [1969]) “A dialogue on classroom disruption,” in Wallerstein, ImmanuelStarr, Paul (eds.) The University Crisis Reader. Vol. 2, Confrontation and Counterattack. New York: Vintage: 57–61.Google Scholar
Cusset, François (2008) French Theory: How Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, and Co. Transformed the Intellectual Life of the United States, trans. Fort, JeffBerganza, JosephineJones, Marlon. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.Google Scholar
Davidson, Carl (1971 [1967]) “Toward institutional resistance,” in Wallerstein, ImmanuelStarr, Paul (eds.) The University Crisis Reader. Vol. 2, Confrontation and Counterattack. New York: Vintage: 129–38.Google Scholar
Evans, M. Stanton (1961) Revolt on the Campus. Chicago: Regnery.Google Scholar
Farber, Jerry (1970 [1967]) “The student as nigger,” in The Student as Nigger: Essays and Stories. New York: Pocket: 90–100.Google Scholar
Free Speech Movement (1965) “We want a university,” in Lipset, Seymour MartinWolin, Sheldon S. (eds.) The Berkeley Student Revolt: Facts and Interpretations. Garden City, NY: Anchor: 208–16.Google Scholar
Freeland, Richard M. (1992) Academia’s Golden Age: Universities in Massachusetts, 1945–1970. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Freeman, Jo (2004) “The Berkeley Free Speech Movement,” in Ness, Immanuel (ed.) Encyclopedia of American Social Movements. Armonk, NY: Sharpe: 1178–82.Google Scholar
Fromm, Erich (1965a) “Introduction,” in Socialist Humanism: An International Symposium. Garden City, NY: Doubleday: vi–xiii.Google Scholar
Fromm, Erich (1965b) Socialist Humanism: An International Symposium. Garden City, NY: Doubleday.Google Scholar
Geary, Daniel (2009) Radical Ambition: C. Wright Mills, the Left, and American Social Thought. Berkeley: University of California Press.10.1525/9780520943445Google Scholar
Genovese, Eugene D.Lasch, Christopher (1969) “The education and the university we need now.” New York Review of Books, October 9.Google Scholar
Gitlin, Todd (1993) The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage. New York: Bantam.Google Scholar
Goodman, Paul (1962) The Community of Scholars. New York: Random House.Google Scholar
Gitlin, Todd (1964) Compulsory Mis-education. New York: Horizon.Google Scholar
Gitlin, Todd (1965) “Thoughts on Berkeley.” New York Review of Books, January 14.Google Scholar
Gitlin, Todd (1970) New Reformation: Notes of a Neolithic Conservative. New York: Random House.Google Scholar
Harding, Sandra G. (1986) The Science Question in Feminism. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.Google Scholar
Harrington, Michael (1997 [1962]) The Other America: Poverty in the United States. New York: Simon and Schuster.Google Scholar
Hayden, Tom (2005a) The Port Huron Statement. New York: Thunder’s Mouth.Google Scholar
Hayden, Tom (2005b) “The way we were and the future of the Port Huron Statement,” in The Port Huron Statement. New York: Thunder’s Mouth: 1–42.Google Scholar
Herberg, Will (2008) “Prologue: What is the moral crisis of our time?” in Henrie, Mark C. (ed.) Arguing Conservatism: Four Decades of the Intercollegiate Review. Wilmington, DE: Intercollegiate Studies Institute: 1–7.Google Scholar
Herman, Ellen (1995) The Romance of American Psychology: Political Culture in the Age of Experts. Berkeley: University of California Press.10.1525/9780520310315Google Scholar
Hofstadter, Richard (1968) “The 214th Columbia University commencement address.” American Scholar 37 (4): 583–89.Google Scholar
Hollinger, David A. (2001) “The Enlightenment and the genealogy of cultural conflict in the United States,” in Baker, Keith MichaelReill, Peter Hanns (eds.) What’s Left of Enlightenment? A Postmodern Question. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press: 7–18.Google Scholar
Horowitz, Daniel (2004) The Anxieties of Affluence: Critiques of American Consumer Culture, 1939–1979. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press.Google Scholar
Hutchins, Robert M. (1967) “The issues,” in The University in America. Santa Barbara, CA: Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions: 4–8.Google Scholar
Hutchins, Robert M. (1970) “U.S. Universities Don’t Know What They’re Doing or Why, Robert M. Hutchins Says.” Chronicle of Higher Education, March 9.Google Scholar
Isserman, MauriceKazin, Michael (2008) America Divided: The Civil War of the 1960s, 3rd ed. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Jacoby, Russell (1987) The Last Intellectuals: American Culture in the Age of Academe. New York: Basic Books.Google Scholar
Jamison, AndrewEyerman, Ron (1994) Seeds of the Sixties. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Kazin, Michael (1969) “Some notes on S.D.S.” American Scholar 38 (4): 644–55.Google Scholar
Kazin, Michael (1998) The Populist Persuasion: An American History, rev. ed. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.Google Scholar
Kerr, Clark (1963) The Uses of the University. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Kerr, Clark (1964) “Society and the status quo: The individual and the innovative society.” Science, n.s., 144 (3615): 164–65.Google Scholar
Kristol, Irving (1966) “The troublesome intellectuals.” Public Interest (2): 3–6.Google Scholar
Lapp, Ralph E. (1965) The New Priesthood: The Scientific Elite and the Uses of Power. New York: Harper and Row.Google Scholar
Leslie, Stuart W. (1993) The Cold War and American Science: The Military-Industrial-Academic Complex at MIT and Stanford. New York: Columbia University Press.Google Scholar
Marcuse, Herbert (1969 [1965]) “Repressive tolerance,” in Wolff, Robert PaulMoore, Barrington Jr.Marcuse, Herbert, A Critique of Pure Tolerance. Boston: Beacon: 81–117.Google Scholar
Marcuse, Herbert (2002 [1964]) One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Matson, Floyd W. (1964) The Broken Image: Man, Science, and Society. New York: Braziller.Google Scholar
Maxwell, W. David (1969) “Some dimensions of relevance.” AAUP Bulletin 55 (3): 337–41.10.2307/40223831Google Scholar
McCaughey, Robert A. (2003) Stand, Columbia: A History of Columbia University in the City of New York, 1754–2004. New York: Columbia University Press.10.7312/mcca13008Google Scholar
McCumber, John (2001) Time in the Ditch: American Philosophy and the McCarthy Era. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.Google Scholar
Miller, James (1994) Democracy Is in the Streets: From Port Huron to the Siege of Chicago. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Mills, C. Wright (1956) The Power Elite. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Mills, C. Wright (1959) The Sociological Imagination. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Moore, Kelly (2008) Disrupting Science: Social Movements, American Scientists, and the Politics of the Military, 1945–1975. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
New York Times (1965) “Sociology for what?,” September 21.Google Scholar
Reisch, George A. (2005) How the Cold War Transformed Philosophy of Science: To the Icy Slopes of Logic. New York: Cambridge University Press.10.1017/CBO9780511610318Google Scholar
Reuben, Julie A. (2000) “The university and its discontents.” Hedgehog Review 2 (3): 72–91.Google Scholar
Reuben, Julie A. (2002) “The limits of freedom: Student activists and educational reform at Berkeley in the 1960s,” in Cohen, RobertZelnik, Reginald E. (eds.) The Free Speech Movement: Reflections on Berkeley in the 1960s. Berkeley: University of California Press: 485–510.Google Scholar
Riesman, DavidDenney, ReuelGlazer, Nathan (1950) The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing American Character. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.Google Scholar
Roberts, Jason Daniel (2007) “Disillusioned radicals: The intellectual odyssey of Todd Gitlin, Ronald Radosh, and David Horowitz.” PhD diss., George Washington University.Google Scholar
Rodgers, Daniel T. (2011) Age of Fracture. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Rossinow, Doug (1998) The Politics of Authenticity: Liberalism, Christianity, and the New Left in America. New York: Columbia University Press.Google Scholar
Rossinow, Doug (2002) “Mario Savio and the politics of authenticity,” in Cohen, RobertZelnik, Reginald E. (eds.) The Free Speech Movement: Reflections on Berkeley in the 1960s. Berkeley: University of California Press: 533–51.Google Scholar
Roszak, Theodore (1968) “On academic delinquency,” in Roszak, Theodore (ed.) The Dissenting Academy. New York: Pantheon: 3–42.Google Scholar
Schaar, John H.Wolin, Richard (1969) “Education and the technological society.” New York Review of Books, October 9.Google Scholar
Schrecker, Ellen (1986) No Ivory Tower: McCarthyism and the Universities. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Searle, John R. (1968) “A foolproof scenario for student revolts.” New York Times, December 29.Google Scholar
Searle, John R. (1971) The Campus War: A Sympathetic Look at the University in Agony. New York: World.Google Scholar
Wang, Jessica (1999) American Science in an Age of Anxiety: Scientists, Anticommunism, and the Cold War. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.Google Scholar
Whyte, William H. (1956) The Organization Man. New York: Simon and Schuster.Google Scholar
Zammito, John H. (2004) A Nice Derangement of Epistemes: Post-positivism in the Study of Science from Quine to Latour. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Zimmerman, BillRadinsky, LenRothenberg, MelMeyers, Bart (1972) “Towards a science for the people,” istsocrates.berkeley.edu/~schwrtz/SftP/Towards.html (accessed July 7, 2009).Google Scholar