Most of the excitement and action regarding the “From the River to the Sea” college student encampment movement has petered out as attention has shifted to other matters. The 20-year-old cultural revolutionaries behind it have gone home to their upper middle-class neighborhoods and are enjoying a relaxing summer of poolside reading of the collected works of Edward Said.
For the rest of us, it is time to probe the causes and consequences and to figure out what needs to be done to ensure their ideas have minimal impact on anything important.
Since the middle of the sixties, there has been significant media and scholarly interest in radical student activism. But very typically it has consisted more of cheerleading for it, or despair over its absence, rather than any concentrated effort to objectively understand, profile, and explain it.
There are some exceptions. A classic sociological study that I have used in the classroom, Lewis Feuer’s The Conflict of Generations, which was written right in the midst of the shenanigans of the sixties campus protesters, gives us solid baseline principles for understanding why student radicalism happens and which kinds of students in which contexts are most likely to become radical activists.
Feuer notes that the United States had for a long time not had much of the main ingredient for massive student agitation that was present in abundance in some other countries, notably Russia. Generational equilibrium is the state in which all generations have the sense that they occupy their proper place in society, and there is minimal intergenerational conflict. It was a consistent feature of American society all the way into the thirties. Massive student radicalism had to wait until the tumultuous events of the sixties to develop here. Feuer argues that it was a combination of the liberal transformation of college curricula and the messianic narcissism of the Baby Boom generation that led to the emergence of a serious student radical wave in that decade.
Today, we are in some ways quite far from the situation Feuer chronicles, but in others, we are right next door to it. It turns out that, with respect to the most important elements of an understanding of student radicals, the more things change, the more they stay the same.
The Baby Boom and the Sixties Radical Student Movement
Feuer’s study is dedicated to student revolt across history, and he finds common elements in virtually all of them. He classes student movements as a “sickness…in society,” characterized fundamentally by “a breakdown in the generational equilibrium of the society.” The radicals who lead such movements come to understand themselves as the bearers of “a special historical mission to fulfill where the older generation, other elites, and other classes have failed.” What is seen as an entrenched gerontocracy that has failed to deliver becomes a target for ideological assault, and perceived crises in the experience of the young are the spur to the crystallization of the movement.
There are two chapters in Feuer’s massive study that deal specifically with the American student revolution of the sixties. These are the parts of the book most relevant to our attempt to understand the kids jeering Israel and cheering Hamas on campuses today. The first deals with the New Student Left of the sixties generally, and the second looks closely at the ludicrously misnamed Berkeley “Free Speech Movement,” which Feuer saw up close as a member of the Berkeley faculty at the time.
There are several basic take home findings in these chapters on the characteristics of the student radicals of the sixties. They could be distinguished from the earlier American Left of the thirties by a plainly elitist and intellectualist element. That is, the sixties youth radicals rejected the social group—the working class—that the Old Left championed as the agent of revolution. Instead, they substituted intellectuals, and especially…students, that is, themselves. They believed they were the vanguard of the revolution, more conscious and knowledgeable about what needed to be done than any other group in American society, uniquely moral and righteous, and therefore meriting leadership. Their rejection of the working class was mirrored by the disdain most working-class Americans felt for their movement. The history of the period is marked by the classic image of a cigar chomping, flag-waving blue collar worker confronting an unwashed hippie kid in a street demonstration. There are hilarious stories of the radical Students for a Democratic Society briefly attempting to organize in urban working-class communities and finding those populations less than eager to submit themselves to rule by effete upper-middle class college students.
The sixties radical students “search[ed] for a foreign identification.” They were tremendously attracted to revolutions and revolutionaries in other countries, and especially in those outside of the West, as heroes to worship and models for organization. The Fidel Castro and the Ho Chi Minh regimes were the centerpieces of a hero cult for the sixties radical students. These student radicals became vigorously anti-American, seeing in the United States the agent of virtually all evil in the world. This extended to a conspiratorial frame of mind that blamed the U.S. government for every problem that a more reflective Left would have had to recognize as limiting their own ideology. The Cuban Missile Crisis, for example, was presented by student radicals as entirely a CIA machination.
The radical students of the sixties were overwhelmingly white and middle class. Yet, they adopted, as part of a programmatic ideology, non-whites as the only groups who truly fathomed the depravity of American power and understood how to successfully challenge it. Southern blacks were the first such group to be taken up by the student radicals. In short order, indigenous revolutionary groups around the world came to occupy this place in their political pantheon. Feuer noted how a position of martyrdom became widespread among these students. This was fostered in the climate of the summer of 1964, when significant numbers of Northern white student radicals went South to participate in anti-segregation efforts there and faced aggressive pushback by Southern police and segregationists. The idea was that total self-sacrifice, up to and including “dying for the cause,” was the only way to prove one’s true commitment to the political program.
“Participatory democracy” became a buzzword for the student radicals. The claim was that this enlarged the number of voices in the democratic dialogue, but Feuer shows that the reality was quite different. Just like the Bolsheviks, from whom the sixties radicals had taken the term, they used “participatory democracy” as a devious tool for the assertion of an autocratic and singular perspective. Despite its name, the Berkeley “Free Speech Movement” never embraced wide-ranging freedom of expression. In fact, even at the time of Berkeley student radical demagogue Mario Savio’s rise to prominence, some positions were already presented as beyond the pale, to be shouted down and excluded by the morally righteous radicals.
Lenin had argued that even the parliamentary process was necessarily and structurally consonant with the bourgeois worldview that the revolution was to destroy. The masses would therefore need to supersede it through the assertive expression of the revolutionary view and its instantiation through spontaneous direct action. This was the meaning in Bolshevism of “participatory democracy,” and the sixties student radicals embraced it fully, in theory and in practice. The task was not to arrive at a generally agreeable position after hearing fully from all sides. It was to impose the will of an elite on a fickle and indecisive mass, while at the same time mendaciously purporting to adhere to a basically democratic model of decision-making.
The “teach-in” was another radical student invention that corrupted the very terms of its name in practice. No real teaching—as in, careful and even-handed exploration of a topic with the goal of enhancing knowledge—ever took place at any of the radical teach-ins during the movement. The purpose of these events was to function as intensive ideological crash courses. The autocratic view of the radicals could be imposed by this means, again with the cover of faux allegiance to a basic value of the old higher educational system that was to be dismantled and replaced.
Feuer deftly shows too how the “Free Speech Movement” relied fundamentally on emotional appeal rather than rational debate and discussion. Dispassionate argument was too distant from the experience of “the people,” whose suffering had to be directly transfused into the movement. The Berkeley radicals used language tinged with mysticism to describe their experiences. They borrowed from the civil rights activists and called themselves a “blessed community” in the process of constructing a new form of society in which the alienation of the existing social system would be melted away by embracing a visionary and mystical perspective. Sexual deviancy and the use of hallucinogenic drugs quickly became tools in the creation of this heightened emotional state of authenticity.
The Pro-Hamas Student Radicals and the New Campus Environment
Go down that list of attributes Feuer found in the sixties student radicals and you will see all of them present in abundance in the current crop of student revolutionaries.
Their sense of messianism is palpable. They frequently have been unable even to mildly mask their disdain for dialogue with their administrations regarding their demands. They easily let slip, as radicals at SUNY New Paltz did in conversation with that school’s president, that it is not compromise they seek, but that the administration “fold to our demands.” How could it be otherwise, given the clear moral authority of the young and the backwards adherence to reactionary principles by the elders? There are interesting data indicating that the protests were most vigorous on elite campuses, while students from more modest material backgrounds were less prone to engage in aggressive activism justified by a sense of elite standing.
These recent student radicals are also fundamentally and explicitly anti-American and anti-Western. Posters and placards with demands for “decolonization” and the like were everywhere at campus encampments. Other foreign enemies of America have taken the place of Castro and Ho Chi Minh for this generation as heroes to worship. Many of these protestors have lionized the October 7 Hamas terrorist attack as, in the words of Students for Justice in Palestine, “a historic win for Palestinian resistance…[and a] glory to our martyrs.” The anti-white prejudices of these student radicals are in abundant evidence. “We don’t like white people!” UCLA radicals calmly informed reporters.
There have been “teach-ins” with no teaching content, just like in the good old days of Berkeley. The sexual deviancy of these radicals is visibly evident, as many of the leaders of the movement are of indistinguishable gender and foreground their attachment to extremist LGBTQ politics. The media have noted and discussed an obvious contradiction here. The radicals themselves have made some effort to counter this obvious difficulty (humorously summarized as “Chickens for KFC”) in outrageously queer American student activists cheerleading for an Islamist terrorist group with little love for the LGBTQ world.
The real difference between the student radicals Feuer discussed and the ones we face today has to do with the structural environment on campus. The faculty and administrative orientation has been significantly transformed over the decades. Feuer vividly describes a few faculty sympathizers with the radicals, but they were a minority with relatively little power to shift the ground for the radicals. Today, whole departments and academic divisions are on the side of the radicals, and administrations typically harbor significant numbers of sympathizers as well. Indeed, some presidents of elite schools have made clear their partisanship on this. For decades now, and in an accelerated way since the George Floyd Revolution of 2020, faculty and administration radicals have been endeavoring to change the mission of their institutions from a central focus on the discovery of knowledge to an imperative for social justice action, and these efforts have borne much fruit.
This has obviously mattered in a fundamental way. Student radicals attempting to disrupt campus business by setting up tents on the main quad, badgering their fellows about their cause, and threatening the school they attend to change its investment strategy can be anticipated to have a greater effect when they receive tacit and sometimes active support from the people who run the institution than when they do not receive such support.
Feuer described another actor in student radicalism, the “non-student.” This was a kind of permanent campus radical, often a former student who has just stayed around after graduating or dropping out in order to dissolutely dedicate his life to whatever emerges in the way of radical activist opportunity there. In a sense, the class consisting of that kind of actor has become an even more permanent part of the student radical scene today. Today, that perennial class of radical “non-students” have frequently found a place in the bloated administrative structure of the contemporary university.
You can see the effect of the change in the environment on campus on student radicalism even in situations where the student radicals are much less numerous and aggressive than in the cases that made national news. At the small liberal arts school where I am employed, for example, there was only slight evidence of student radicalism in the wake of October 7. A few editorials and articles blaming Israel in the student newspaper, a small group of extremist students who attempted to disrupt an open forum of the school’s president with the student body, and a few posters on campus from a student group for “Justince [sic] in Palestine” were happily the extent of the radical student response here. But select faculty took it upon themselves to attempt to cheerlead for more activism and disruption. Under the aegis of the local “advocacy chapter of the American Association of University Professors,” some professors championed an anti-Israel student radical group that publicly called for disruption of university business, including the holding of final exams, and encouraged university employees to commit “time theft,” that is, lie about their hours. They were unsuccessful at ginning up any significant campus anarchy. Yet the very fact that faculty support for student radicalism now routinely includes such features as this marks a pronounced difference from the world of higher education which Feuer was describing.
Comparing the Causes of Then and Now
Ironically, a good deal of the world against which the Zoomers are in revolt, and much of the tenor of precisely who among the Zoomers is on the barricades, is the product of the victory of Boomer ideals. Look at the leaders of the pro-Hamas student movement. They are disproportionately female and non-white, and frequently recent immigrants as well. They are fervent adherents to every woke belief, seemingly all wearing anti-COVID masks in perpetuity, a simultaneous strategy of anonymity and evidence of their adherence to fringe beliefs about the virus. They proudly and assertively display their pronouns, and many of them are majors in the activist “Studies” departments. They are the products of the cultural revolution that began with the sixties radicals. That revolution has by now metastasized in ways that the earlier generation could not have predicted, with aggressively negative consequences for the very individuals the Boomers told us would set us all and themselves free. The Boomers worked to create a university system fundamentally directed toward social activism and disruption of the status quo. The result is a youth generation that wants to sweep them into the dustbin of history along with all the other elements of the intolerably traditional America.
These are people who have been in preparation for protest and rebellion for the entirety of their college careers. They learned early on from their professors that the very purpose of education in the fields in which they are being educated is activism, social justice, and revolution. Entire universities embrace the social justice ethos and preach to students the necessity of “speaking out” against “injustice” as an official pedagogical element of their mission.
The likely trajectory of this movement can be predicted by reference to the phenomenon Feuer studied. By the time he was writing his account of the events at Berkeley, some student radicals from the sixties generation had already become full-blown anti-American terrorists. By the end of the decade, the Weathermen were plotting bomb attacks on police stations and military barracks. They would go on the FBI’s Most Wanted List and disappear underground in short order.
It perhaps will not be long before some of today’s radicals are following suit. Lest the comparison seem inapt, note that the pro-Hamas student radicals have explicitly adopted the threatening and disturbing “Bring the War Home” rhetoric of the most violent and extremist elements of the anti-Vietnam War student radicals of their day. Their ideology becomes more openly pro-terrorist daily, if in a bizarrely quasi-Islamist vein rather than in the Sacco and Vanzetti anarchist language of the Weathermen. We should be watching carefully and studying student radicalism historically for clues as to how to face this possibility.