Student Unrest... The Search for Values

...For one thing teachers today are doing less and less teaching...

...It sounds good and noble, and the requisite support has been forthcoming...

...Professor Roszak states that "...their number grows and the counter-culture makes a generous place for them...

...They know no past except through the books most of them do not read...

...like .. . what I mean to say is...

...It is not concerned with answering real questions or solving real problems...

...This consideration aside, however, the fact remains that a real "gap" does exist...

...That was the world Aldous Huxley foresaw in the 1930s when he wrote Brave New World...

...Many of them have the wild gleam in their Great American Series "Uh...

...That violence is the solution to our current difficulties is, observing the historical record, very unlikely...

...Young people did not live through the optimistic days of the New Deal when many believed that if you created enough government agencies arid spent enough federal money, all problems-poverty, social inequality, poor housing or whatever-could be solved...

...Yet, on the whole, the young man or woman coming of age in America at this time has perhaps a greater freedom to choose his pattern of living than any individual in history...

...Irving Kristol has noted that ". . .in the . overwhelming majority of universities liberal education is extinct...

...What many young people are seeking is a perspective on life which is no longer presented by the traditional institutions...

...It doesn't have to be significant...

...No one should offer a podium or audience to those who have committed violent acts...

...Crusades which initially seek to throw off the fetters of an old order have simply replaced them with new fetters...

...It is also essential that society show some concern for their Great American Series We did not choose to be the guardians at the gate, but there is no one else...

...Many existing standards and values do, indeed, need criticism...

...The role of the academician rose in prestige, leading to a change in the university...

...It is essential that young people be made aware of the real nature and intentions of the New Left activitists...

...If his father were a tailor or butcher, the son would also live his life in this manner...

...At one time the family, the school and the church spent a good deal of time pointing young people in particular directions which they considered to be valid and time-tested...

...It noted that at the convention P. L. delegates "continually pushed the idea that students should ally with the traditional working class in a common 'struggle' against the ruling class...

...Fischer places much of the student restlessness in this perspective: "II believe it is the beginning of a counted revolution by students-liberal arts un-dergraduates in particular-against a quiet, almost unremarked revolution which has changed the whole structure of American higher education within the last two or three decades...

...The student protest movement is asking the very "ultimate questions" to which Tillich referred and which modern theologians say have disappeared...

...Jane Fonda eyes-for them the "revolution" is more of a personal obsession than a public necessity...

...The majority of those who advocate violence either to change the system or to improve it are unaware of the historical consequences of violent upheavals...

...At best it was slightly ornamental...

...But man has a spiritual nature which must be nourished, and this spirituality has been virtually ignored...

...in days of yore A young man growing up in Europe one or two hundred years ago would have faced a situation in which the major decisions in his life were pre-ordained...

...For him, the correct political attitude is one of "intolerance against movements from the right and toleration of movements from the left...

...The fact that young people have many valid questions does not diminish the danger of many of the activities, leaders anfl organizations which have in many instances been blindly entered by students who were not aware of the long-run implications of their actions...

...Today man's situation is far different...

...Too many churches have turned their backs upon the metaphysical questions which he says that man is no longer asking, and have become political...

...Certainly there are restrictions...

...Instead, he argues, it should enter the social and political arena: "...in secular society politics does what metaphysics once did...

...Urging sabotage as "the next logical step toward obstruction and disruption of the U.S...

...The mood of modern religion was captured by Evelyn Waugh when he wrote in Brideshead Revisited: "I had no religion...

...In 1965 it eliminated from its constitution clauses barring "advocates and apologists of totalitarianism" and opposing "authoritarianism of both communism and the domestic right...

...Cox declares "...they are obviousry not questions which occur to everyone, or indeed to the vast majority of the people...

...Today the family is in a state of disarray, the school pursues a "value-free" curriculum and the church being swept away in the modern tide of relativism-doubts its own message...

...The New Left's advocacy of violence is, however, not its only danger...

...It must be remembered that there are many legitimate grievances with regard to the university and the educational process...

...Young Americans have almost unlimited choices with regard to career, location, marriage and other basic elements of lifestyle...

...Revolutionary leaders have always managed to gather followers not by promising them tyranny, but by associating themselves with the deepest aspirations of the group they seek to use...

...A physics student was killed as a bomb exploded at the University of Wisconsin, and the United States Capitol itself was shaken by a blast allegedly planted by militant antiwar groups...

...war machine," the leaflet says that it is ludicrous to think that demonstrations closing down induction centers for a few hours will really hurt Selective Service...

...Leading protests is often all they do...

...Harvey Cox's insights into the nature of the modern world and of modern man should by no means be deprecated...

...The generations need interpreters to understand one another and there are few...

...Describing this spiritual vacuum and spiritual search, the English poet, Stephen Spendor, wrote The Year of The Young Rebels: "They are not primarily concerned with seizing power, and it is difficult to see how they eoo Mbe, unless they were to merge their identity as students into some longer term revolutionary movement...

...Those who lived through the Depression or through World War II have been frozen by the dramatic and intense experience of those days...

...Its blindness to totalitarianism and its hostility to the traditional American concept of free speech is of equal significance...

...ya know...

...A leaflet prepared in Toronto, Canada and distributed in early 1968 to S. D. S. chapters throughout the country contains instructions on how to make Molotov cocktails and incendiary time bombs...

...George Bernard Shaw wrote that "Revolution never lightens the burden of tyranny, it simply shifts it from one shoulder to another...

...they turn it into "an instrument for absolving servitude," so "that which is radically evil now appears as good...

...teaching small groups of lower level students, reading papers and examinations and the like...

...While many young people are asking al the valid and important questions to which we have alluded, the fact remains,that there is a serious dichotomy between the leaders of the New Left-the Tom Haydens, the Jerry Rubins, the Rennie Davises-and the young people who form the core of the movement-the ones who attend protests and demonstrations, the ones who, in the privacy of their own contemplation, feel depressed and disillusioned and wonder what the future may hold...

...They have seen students become the least important commodity at the university as government and private foundations lure professors into writing and research projects...

...On the one hand, there are many honest young people with valid grievances, asking important questions...

...On the other hand, there are disingenuous leaders attempting to use this idealism for their own ends-many of which are totalitarian and dedicated to the destruction of American society...

...The leaders are, in many instances, at least ten years older than the followers...

...But too much of his advice has been taken at face value...

...In his important study, The Making Of a Counter-Culture, Roszak points out that "...we may have been decidedly wrong in what we long expected to follow the death of the Christian God...

...Not too long ago The New Yorker featured a cartoon in which one Priest said to another: "I would not be so presumptuous as to tell the congregation what was right and what was wrong...

...Since those early days the nation has witnessed a mounting campaign of domestic violence...

...the beauty of the bomb Many of the leaders of such militant organizations as Students for a Democratic Society do not hesitate to support the use of violence...

...at worst...

...Those who are willing to accept the excesses, as many college administrators seem surprisingly willing to do, are doing themselves and the society a disservice...

...No longer are students considered the most vital part of a university...

...He would pursue the same vocation as did his father...

...The generation gap we do have is perhaps the key to understanding today's youthful rebellion and student unrest...

...If there is a generation gap it is of this nature...

...Where they will find answers to such questions in what they view as a materialistic and dehumanized age is difficult to say, touch me where...

...research...

...Though all of us young, middle-aged and old live in the mid-twentieth century, only the young -those who have come of age since the conclusion of World War II-are truly of this period...

...Peter Fonda "Like they're killing peeople I mean ya know...

...it was the province of 'complexes' and 'inhibitions'-catchwords of the decade-and of the intolerance, hypocrisy and sheer stupidity attributed to it for centuries...

...It brings unity and meaning to human life and thought...

...In one of the most important volumes advocating the new variety of Protestant theology, The Secular City, Professor Harvey Cox of the Havard Divinity School notes that man in the modern world is no longer concerned with what theologian Paul Tillich called the "ultimate questions," namely those concerning life, death and meaning...

...Thus it stopped the thought of most of them as an earthquake stops a lock...

...As a result many communists have flocked to the ranks of S. D. S. Commenting on the group's last real convention, The New Republic observed that the Progressive Labor Party-the Peking-oriented Communist organization-"is heavily represented within S. D. S. because the party sees S. D. S. as a recruiting ground for new members...

...They do not disturb the newly-emergent urban-secular man very frequently...

...But no grievances which students wish to discuss peacefully should be considered out of the bounds of discourse...

...Jencks' and Riesman note that 'until World War II even senior scholars at leading universities did a good deal of what they defined as scut work...

...If one scans the underground press, one is apt to find their pages swarming with Christ and the prophets, Zen, Sufism, Hinduism, primitive shamanism, theosophy and the Left-Handed Tantra...

...An example of the disregard for the totalitarian nature of Communism may be found in the proceedings of the Students for a Democratic Society, largest of the New Left organizations...

...They also are concerned with the university, where most of them are now students...

...Having established this premise, Marcuse recommends "the withdrawal of toleration of speech and assembly from groups which promote aggressive policies, armament, chauvinism, racial and religious discrimination or which oppose the ex tension of public services...

...are the names...

...The French Revolution led to the Reign of Terror, the Russian Revolution to Stalin, the Chinese Revolution to Mao Tse-tung...

...Cox urges the modern church to turn away from metaphysical questions...

...Society, however, must defend itself from those who advocate its destructions...

...the professoriat soon began to reshape the university to serve its own: desires rather than those of the students or their parents...

...One person with a fair knowledge of chemistry could build such a device easily and cheaply and could plant it with almost no chance of being detected...

...Hopefully, this is not the case...

...They are beneficiaries only of the results...

...and yet, as ghosts in a play, they held the stage...

...More than likely, he would have been born in the same house in which his father had been born, almost surely in the same town...

...Much of it, at least in the social' sciences and humanities tends to resemble finger exercises for the piano...

...he has, indeed, broken much new ground...

...The view implicit in my education was that the basic narrative of Christianity had long been exposed as myth, and that opinion was now divided as to whether its ethical teaching was of present value, a division in which the main weight went against it...

...Student unrest is complex and difficult to understand...

...It is proper to be concerned about open housing, the war in Vietnam, hunger and poverty...

...Life was circumscribed by religious faith and communal custom...

...It was as if he had suddenly seen the possibility emerge: what lay beyond the Christian era and 'wasteland' that was its immediate successor might be a new, eclectic religious revival...

...No antiwar demonstration would be complete without a hirsuite, be-cowbelled contingent of holy men, bearing hoss sticks and intoning the Hare Krishna...

...Only recently have these students begun to understand how they an victimized-and their protest is likely to swell at least until some of the results of the earlier revolution are reversed...

...vision through a file cabinet As many of them see it, our government has become bureaucratically inert and unresponsive to the needs of the people...

...well...

...But in the 1950s, as Huxley detected the rising spirit of a new generation, his Utopian image brightened to the forecast he offers us in Island, where a non-violent culture elaborated out of Buddhism and psychedelic drugs prevails...

...Research, of course, is what he had better be committed to, for that alone pays off in money and] reputation...

...The Southern writer, Walter Hines Page, wrote this with regard to the generation which lived during the Civil War in the South: "It (the Civil War) gave every one of them the intensest experience of his life and ever afterwards he referred every other experience to this...

...College administrators and legislators who condemn all young people for the excesses of a few simply compound the problem...

...The fierce blow of battle paralyzed the mind...

...More important, they are professionals...

...The practical result of such a philosophy was seen when former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara had to enter a police wagon to avoid crowds at Harvard, when Henry Cabot Lodge was not permitted to speak at Stanford, when students charged the podium at Brown University as General Earle Wheeler spoke, and when New York Times editor James Reston was unable to finish his talk at New York University...

...What disturbs many students, therefore, is the fact that their own education has suffered...

...His reponsibility was more that of playing out his role than grasping life as a horseman at the reigns and riding in whatever direction he willed...

...This generation must come to grips with a complicated world, and all of us must plan for a future in which our traditional view of the dignity of man, free speech and orderly procedure will be maintained...

...Much of the questioning from young people, not only in the spiritual and ethical field but in other fields, is good...

...Such provisions, they explained, were "negative and exclusionary" and "smacked of red baiting...

...They live in the present and wonder what future they may hope for in so transient and unstable a world...

...The victims were the liberal arts undergraduates...

...The complexity of the mass technological society required many more university-) trained specialists...

...Their speech was the vocabulary of war...they were dead men, most of them, moving among the living as ghosts...

...No one ever suggested to me that these quaint observances expressed a coherent philosophic system and intransigent historical claims...

...The tyrannies which follow violent revolutions have been infinitely more brutal than the autocracies they replaced...

...The main beneficiaries of that revolution were the faculty...

...In fact, a basic element in student protest is the rejection of society, rather than one of traditional values...

...The draft claims two years out of the lives of many young men...

...Lyndon Johnson valid grievances...

...Castro promised the Cubans constitutional democracy, not Communism...

...So it is with today's young who are, in a sense, frozen with the dramatic and intense experience of these days...

...Mao Tse-tung promised the Chinese agrarian reform, not Communism...

...In The Academic Revolution, Christopher Jencks and David Riesman point out that this revolution began at the end of World War II when the demand for higher education began to grow with explosive speed...

...A student strike at the University of California brought a significant statement from Charles Susskind, a professor of electrical engineering and a man who had seen at first hand how in the thirties the Nazis created "political universities" in Germany...

...What is more, it has become coercive...

...For too long society has accepted the idea that through government, all problems could be solved...

...Professor Theodore Roszak also expresses the view that those who declared that "God is dead" and that young people were no longer concerned with spiritual questions were wrong...

...Today, however, few well-known scholars teach more than six hours a week, and in leading universities many bargain for less...

...There's no conversation between us and the C. I. A. We're on different sides...

...This group included in its 1962 Port Huron statement a denunciation of "colonialism, communism, and anti-communism...

...routine problems of mass higher education have therefore fallen by default to graduate students...

...In his A Critique of Pure Tolerance, Professor Herbert Marcuse states that people who are confused about politics really don't know how to use freedom of speech correctly...

...This may be the case on one level, for when we discuss the attitudes of the "young" we generally refer not to the majority of those below the age of twenty- five, but only to that small percentage of affluent young people residing on college campuses...

...Freedom to choose, however, becomes a very difficult task when no one provides any knowledge about the basis upon which such choices may beneficially be made...

...As a result, a diploma became an almost indispensable document...

...He said the New Left at Berkeley reminded him very much of "the young Nazis of the thirties...

...The essential is that they regard the society against which they are rebelling as intolerable to their sense of lfe, for which 'spontaneity,' 'participation,' etc...

...It compels workers to pay unwanted social security, it even compels Americans under penalty of fine and jail to answer personal questions on census forms...

...In today's world, we unify the various scholarly and scientific specialties by focusing them on specific human issues...Theology today must be that reflection-in-action by which the church finds out what this politician God is up to and moves into work along with him...

...His own range of choice was very slight...

...We have, of course, seen this before...

...Which is precisely what confronts us now as one of the massive facts of the counter-culture...

...Some start life in humbler surroundings than others...

...religion was a hobby which some people professed and others did not...

...They do not consider the aim of their revolution to be victory over the current establishment, followed by the setting up of a dictatorship...Their revolutionary idea is...moral passion...

...I was taken to church weekly as a child, and at school attended chapel daily, but, as though in compensation, from the time I went to my public school I was excused from church on the holidays...

...I hope people will now see that force is a part of the world...

...The dissenting young have indeed got religion...

...On the other hand," the leaflet says, "is there anyone who doubts that a small tome-made incendiary device with a timing mechanism planted in a broom closet at the Oakland induction center could result in fire and smoke damage to the entire building, thus making it unusable for weeks or months...

...S. D. S. spokesman, Steve Weissman, feels the time for rational discourse has ended and the time for violence has arrived: "What the University has done is to get us to think for a number of years that social problems can be solved by rational discussion...

...They do not relate the upheavals of today with the past...

...Lenin promised the Russian people bread, peace and land, not Communism...

...Harper's Magazine editor, John Fischer, has remarked about the nature of this change...

...His marriage would be arranged...

...Young people see that such coercion has not solved our problems but has, in many respects, compounded them...

...What is most significant about the students' revolution is that it is directed against all existing forms of industrial society...

...Likewise, the New Left leaders promise college students alcohol and girls in dormitory rooms, an end to the draft and a "purpose" for life, namely the liberation of the "oppressed...

...Many in the New Left are intolerant of viewpoints other than their own...

...namely, a thoroughly secularized, thoroughly positivistic culture, dismal and spiritless in its obsession with technological prowess...

...They arise, in fact, not from the structure of existence at all but from the erosion of inherited world views and cultural meanings...We have found technopolitan man to be pragmatic and profane...

...The individual was part of the community, of the group...

...Yet, once in power, the promises were forgotten and the revolutionary leaders proceeded with their long-established blueprint...

...There is not only a gap between this group of students and their parents but there is an equal and perhaps greater gap between them and their own contemporaries who have not gone to college...

...In the epoch of the secular city, politics replaces metaphysics as the language of theology...

...If society will not defend itself, if the university will not defend itself, it is an indication that the S. D. S. and other revolutionaries are right, that America has lost the will to endure, that the intellectual community believes nothing is worth preserving...