Student Politics in the Quiet Seventies

...In the same way, it may be useful to look at the recent decline in student radicalism as an example of "defeat in victory...

...This article is adapted from the Introduction to the Phoenix Edition of his book Rebellion in the University, to be published this fall by the University of Chicago Press...

...in various Southern states, legislation outlawing the teaching of evolution meant victory for the fundamentalists...

...Eleven percent of the seniors described their political views as "far left," as great a percentage as in the late 1960s, while a majority placed themselves on the moderate left...

...A variety of surveys of people engaged in intellectually-related work show that the more socially critical among them are more likely to be regarded by their peers as the most creative, and are generally more successful within the university world...

...The implications of the demographic analysis presented by Moller and others clearly suggest .such a trend...

...Republican support among college students dropped from 26 percent in 1966 to 21 percent in 1972 and 15 percent in the most recent survey...

...They are responding to different political questions, and even more importantly, to a period of economic uncertainty in a depressed labor market...

...An identical percentage, 88, agreed in both years that "our foreign policy is based on our own narrow economic and power interests...

...As far as can be judged from limited evidence, the "adversary culture" continues to inform the values of college professors, especially those most prestigious and creative...

...This is especially true because the numbers, prestige, and influence of those involved in intellectually-related work are increasing sharply, and because the economic system is becoming more and more dependent on facilities and trained manpower able to operate complex technology and to innovate in research and development...

...Gilbert Youth Research reports comparable findings in its survey conducted in May 1975...

...Young people, especially students, find themselves "marginal men," no longer completely under their parents' aegis nor yet fully active in the professional world...

...retains its subversive thrust however much it is absorbed by the system...

...A Michigan political scientist, Ronald Inglehart, analyzing opinion data from Europe and America, suggests that the basis of political cleavage in the emerging post-industrial society differs from that of industrial society...

...Thus 67 percent disagreed with the statement, "There is no reason for people to get married today...

...And he notes that both the President's Commission on Law Enforcement and the President's Commission on Population Growth and the American Future "agree that much of the recent increase in crime is traceable to the larger relative number of young persons...

...American political and judicial institutions have once again proved to be responsive...

...Less than half, 49 percent, gave a comparable rating to journalists, while the favorable vote for lawyers was only 40, for business executives 19, and for political office-holders 9. It is difficult to reach a conclusion about future developments in student attitudes and behavior from these analyses...

...Vietnam and Kent State are part of history...

...many spoke of the need for a new noncapitalist social order...

...Less than half, 42 percent, told interviewers that chances they would "have at least one child" are almost certain or very likely, about the same percentage as those who said there was a slight chance or no chance they would have a child...

...Those who believe "this is a 'sick' society" declined from 45 to 35 percent of the campus population...

...In spite of all the affirmative-action measures taken in recent years, belief that "most American colleges and universities are racist whether they mean to be or not" moved up from 38 to 43 percent...

...In the twentieth century, both the decade before World War I and the era of the Great Depression experienced relatively high levels of student activism...

...The growing opposition among intellectuals to functional rationality has become a source of increasing strain and instability in modern society...

...In 1969, half the students surveyed felt that most senior faculty were "hardly" or "not at all concerned," a figure which jumped to 70 percent by 1974...

...Historical studies of universities in a number of countries agree that periods of stability or decline in numbers of students have been periods of intellectual stagnation and political quiescence...

...Their most recent survey, conducted in the spring of 1973, indicated that the proportion critical of American society and its institutions was still high, although the evidence as to direction of change in the campus mood was somewhat contradictory...

...And he notes that since restless, footloose young people contribute disproportionately to all forms of social turbulence, the "impression that lawlessness is on the rise among the young population of the United States can to a considerable extent be attributed to the continually enlarging proportion of the younger age groups in recent years...

...The market for college graduates began to decline even before the general economic recession, and now students seem to have turned from politics...

...Their presence The Alternative: An American Spectator August/ September 1976 11 contributed decisively to the revolutionary unrest in city and country...

...a third were for government ownership of the telephone industry...

...The post-industrial left reflecting these values draws its support from those employed in the knowledge-related and opinion-forming occupations and from the better-educated young...

...Seymour Martin Lipset Student Politics in the Quiet Seventies • • As we pass mid-decade, the campus in the United States and most other Western democracies seems much quieter than in the late 1960s...

...No radical party of any substance emerged...

...The small core of political radicals, though never more than 10-15 percent of the college population, took the lead in interpreting the war in terms that were harshly critical of the United States, its motives, its institutions, and its moral impulses...

...Not surprisingly, 21 percent indicated that they had moved to a more liberal or left position as a result of professorial influence, as contrasted to 7 percent who said their teachers had influenced them in a conservative or rightward direction...

...The emergence in the educated class of a powerful "adversary culture," to use Lionel Trilling's trenchant phrase, is linked, as Daniel Bell has pointed out, to the preference of culture creators for antinomian attitudes reflecting their desire to abolish restraints in order "to attain some form of ecstasy...

...Johnstone has shown, the more prestigious a newspaper or broadcast outlet, the more socially critical are its editors, culture critics, and reporters...

...The passage of the immigration restriction and quota legislation of 1924 represented the final triumph of the Protestant nativist crusade...

...The social and political values of faculty members clearly affect their students...

...His latest book, The Divided Academy: Professors and Politics (written with Everett Ladd), was reviewed in our June /July issue...

...Three national surveys of college students, also taken during the calm of the 1970s, reiterate the findings of the Haryard study...

...More significant perhaps is the fact that 18 percent answered that they were "very liberal" or "radical," while only 4 percent described themselves as "ultra conservative" or "very conservative...

...But as with students, faculty members are looking more to traditional democratic methods as ways of achieving social change...

...the effort to take the United States into the League of Nations and the World Court opposed by the provincial nationalists had failed...

...Such sentiments increase with the length of attendance in college: "college seniors," Gallup reported, "are far more likely than are freshmen to take a position to the left of center...

...we can never be free until we are rid of it" went up slightly from 46 to 50 percent...

...We explained the quick drop-off in support of such movements as a consequence in part of the flexibility of the American party system "to respond to extremist movements and tendencies when they appeared substantial...

...In both 1971 and 1973, 85 percent agreed that "business is entitled to make a profit...

...As new entrants to the political scene, they have few explicit political commitments and little identification with prevailing institutions, and most importantly, they are not subject to the constraints of a full-time occupation or family responsibilities...

...Yankelovich is also correct, however, when he notes that, "Apart from the impact of the war...

...Similar analyses of the divisions within the elites of post-industrial society have been presented by two radical scholars, British Marxist E. J. Hobsbawm and University of California sociologist Richard Flacks...

...Yet it should be noted that 59 percent of the students interviewed by Gallup believed that "almost everyone in America today can get ahead if he wants to," hardly a left-wing view Indeed, the findings of Yankelovich, Gallup, Gilbert, and other polls indicate that the great majority of students were neither alienated from American institutions nor committed to radical causes even at the height of the major, well-publicized demonstrations...

...shaped by the principle of calculation, the rationalization of work and of time...

...The Gilbert 1975 study indicated that about two-thirds of the students support some traditional familial values, a figure which some may interpret as high, while others see it as indicating a great change...

...Thus professors have become more accepting of equalitarian and countercultural values,more critical of the university, but less supportive of militant or illegal tactics to achieve political ends...

...Protest in the early nineteenth century, largely about intramural issues, was perhaps more violent than in recent years...

...porters "seem to have been settled in their favor or to have lost saliency...

...Dealing with recent events in the United States, Moller emphasizes that "the new mood of social activism coincided with the rise of the more numerous cohorts of the 1940s and 1950s reaching late adolescence and college age in the 1960s...

...The antinomian tendencies fostered by the intellectuals and students are absorbed within the market economy, but, as Bell remarks, "the cultural chic of 'modernism...

...For example, over three-fifths of the respondents favored "a government 12 The Alternative: An American Spectator August/ September 1976 policy of breaking up the big companies of the nation into smaller companies" ; almost half supported nationalization of the oil industry...

...Those who "have no doubts about being as successful as desired" climbed from 64 to 76 percent...

...Gilbert indicates that 57 percent of college youth identified themselves as liberal politically, as contrasted to 17 percent who said they were conservative...

...The student activists of the 1960s and their adult co-ideologists had many other victories as well...

...Adherence to the norms of the "counterculture" which emerged in the 1960s with respect to sex, use of drugs, dress, and equality for women, homosexuals, and blacks, remained in 1973 at the very high point it had reached earlier...

...Marshall Meyer suggests that the shift in responses to the faculty reflects an increased career consciousness produced by the depressed labor market of the mid-seventies...

...And as might be expected, anti-system politics and counter-cultural values among students are concentrated in the same environments as among professors—that is, in the more distinguished, academically selective institutions, and in the liberal arts, particularly the social sciences and humanities, as distinct from more vocationally oriented schools and subjects whose faculty and students are relatively conservative...

...Studies of undergraduate opinion at a variety of leading schools, such as Wisconsin, Stanford, and Harvard, continue to indicate that conservatives and Republicans are in a very small minority...

...In this, Bell notes, they sharply oppose the pragmatic and materialist orientation of the workaday world of industrial society, which "is rooted in functional rationality and efficiency...

...Gallup asked his student respondents to comment on people in 11 fields by replying to the question: "How would you rate the honesty and ethical standards of the people in these different fields—very high, high, average, low, or very low...

...For today's students...

...For example, he relates the upheavals in Europe in the late eighteenth century to a great increase in the number of young people...

...The overwhelming proportion who agreed that "basically we are a racist nation" remained almost the same, 81 percent in 1971, 79 in 1973...

...However calm the campuses have become, there is little evidence to suggest that students have become more conservative...

...The 1974 group revealed less enthusiasm for militant or violent methods, a shift to support for gradualist or moderate policies...

...A concern for grades, for admission to medical and law school, dominates campuses only recently torn by mass protest, and popular articles on student behavior emphasize the "calm...

...The five-year interval had not made Harvard students friendlier to the University...

...The percentage agreeing that "where de facto segregation exists, black people should be assured control over their own schools" increased from 63 percent in 1969 to 72 in 1975...

...For student protest comes in cycles: American higher education had witnessed many previous waves of campus rebellion, some of which involved proportions of the student body as large as or larger than that of the late 1960s, all of which quickly subsided...

...The latter commission explicitly predicted a decline in various forms of unrest as "the present youth generation matures and is followed by a smaller youth group, reflecting recent declines in the birthrate...

...At Harvard, for example, in 1974, only 9 percent of students registered to vote were Republican, an astonishingly low figure when one considers that in every Presidential election from 1860 to 1956, the Republican nominee won the straw-votes of Harvard students...

...College-age populations in the 1980s and 1990s will be smaller than-those they succeed...

...In this connection, it is useful to note Stanford political scientist Gabriel Almond's observation that in 1960 the youth cohort "constituted 13 percent of the total population, while in 1970 it had risen to 17 percent, an increase of almost one-third...

...The Alternative: An American Spectator August/September 1976 13 Similar findings have been reported for other groups whose self-image and professional activities link them to the intellectual and university community...

...The 1920s and 1950s, on the other hand, were comparatively tranquil...

...These values did not grow solely out of the moral opposition to the Vietnam war...

...In the 1770s and 1780s France had a higher proportion of late adolescents and young adults under 30 than at any time thereafter...

...College teachers placed first with 70 percent rating them very high or high...

...Gallup noted particularly that a "strong anti-business mood is prevalent on the college campuses of America today...

...This generalization has held up in most societies and within most groups...

...A number of factors indicate a more conservative future...

...Those more engaged in transmitting culture, that is, teaching, as distinct from creating, tend to be more conservative, even though they are found disproportionately at the less distinguished institutions, though they receive less pay, and though they experience more onerous working conditions...

...To begin with, the emotional disposition of youth has not significantly changed since Aristotle wrote in the Rhetoric that they do "things excessively and vehemently," that they "have exalted notions, because they have not yet been humbled by life or learnt its necessary limitations...

...14 The Alternative: An American Spectator August/ September 1976...

...Faculty members who are most involved in research activities, who publish more, who are in the more prestigious universities, and who are best paid, are more disposed to critical social views...

...In a talk discussing the results of his survey, George Gallup noted correctly: "The era of student activism—the so-called youth rebellion of the 60s has collapsed...

...Prohibition was firmly in the saddle, enforced by federal agents...

...The proportion agreeing increased from 28 percent in 1969 to 46 in 1975...

...Only 22 percent saw their parents as liberal, 5 percent very liberal or radical...

...The strong liberalizing influence of professors on students is not solely a result of close contact inside and outside the classroom...

...For example, on both occasions over half those polled agreed that "more radical courses are needed...

...The rapid change in campus mood generally came as a surprise to both friends and foes of student radicalism, but not to those who know something of the history of student activism...

...Whether this interpretation is valid or not, the decline in overt activism clearly reflects neither a significant movement to the right nor greater educational satisfaction...

...the enduring heritage of the 1960s is the new social values that grew on the nation's campuses during that same fateful period and now have grown stronger and more powerful...

...Many hundreds of thousands of persons—possibly millions —identified with the various militant protests...

...Insofar as the predominant political issue has been the existing distribution of privileges, the redistributionist or egalitarian movements have been supported by the poorer strata and by those subject to discrimination because of ascriptive traits...

...The war and the draftforged an intensely personal link between the students and a far-off war which inspired loathing, fear and revulsion on campus...

...Moreover, the academic environment nurtures idealism in students, developing, as Max Weber noted, an ethic of "absolute ends" rather than of "responsibility...

...One that I advanced suggests that youth have certain characteristics which make them more responsive to political trends and more inclined toward activism than any other group, except possibly intellectuals...

...The relationship is reversed, however, within the intellectual community, and more generally with respect to the support base of movements and tendencies that reflect antinomian values, seeking to break down restraint and to reject functional rationality...

...Thus the percentage of students who "believe this country is a democracy in name only and that special interests run things" increased between 1971 and 1973 from 57 to 63 percent...

...About one-fifth in both surveys placed themselves in the two furthest left positions on a nine-point leftto-right scale...

...Thirty-five percent in 1974, almost identical to the proportion in 1969, believed that "morale among students is very low...

...The movement of the 1960s differed substantially from most earlier ones on the Left and Right in the absence of a single radical group or coalition around which activity was centered...

...The two surveys revealed a remarkably similar distribution of responses to a number of specific political and educational questions...

...And in addition to these motivations, young people have a greater facility for political activism...

...Well over half, 57 percent, of this predominantly liberal student group described their parents' views as conservative, 21 percent ultra or very conservative...

...If these students reported accurately on their own and their parents' attitudes, the calm of the 1970s is still witnessing a dramatic generational shift to the left within the families of those who are able to send their children to college...

...For example, the Ku Klux Klan, which in the early 1920s crested on the most massive wave of right-wing extremism and repressive politics in American history, declined quickly by the middle of the decade, thus illustrating the principle of "defeat in victory...

...In the myriad of theories and interpretations which sought to explain the outbreaks of the 1960s, a few still hold up...

...Ten percent fewer felt this way in 1974...

...In its aftermath has come increased distrust of our political institutions and our economic system...

...The particular set of political events, Vietnam, Watergate, and accompanying exposes, which have contributed heavily to delegitimating traditional authority, institutions, and values are not likely to be repeated in the foreseeable future...

...Solid majorities of "media leaders" supported the youth rebellion and lacked confidence in the leaders of major institutions and in the operation of the political system...

...Agreement that use of marijuana should be legalized jumped from 33 percent in 1969 to 57 six years later...

...These studies support Daniel Bell's generalization that the "new class, which dominates the media and the culture, thinks of itself less as radical than `liberal,' yet its values, centered on `personal freedom,' are profoundly anti-bourgeois...

...At such times, Moller argues, youth have been able to overwhelm society with their propensity to look for new values and orientations...

...Surprisingly, though the first study was completed during the general strike which had followed the occupation of Harvard's administration building and the arrests of hundreds of students, andthe second was made in the middle of the calm 1970s, there was little difference in the response pattern...

...The latter concludes that the critical opposition to dominant institutions comes to a considerable extent from "those whose social position is already post-industrial--who have been able to aspire to be able to make a life outside of the producing sector—i.e., in the production and distribution of knowledge, culture and human services...—and those whose needs in a material sense have been satiated by the existing system...

...as such they share a restlessness...

...Yet, with the exception of the short-lived conglomerative antiwar organizations, no national group recruited more than a few thousand members...

...At the center of the movements for change, which reject much of the traditional ethos of industrial society, has been a growing intelligentsia, which increasingly takes its lead from creative intellectuals, including scientists, inside and outside of the university...

...Moreover, as Everett Ladd and I have discovered by comparing the results of surveys taken in 1969 and 1975, professors seem to be moving in the same direction as their students...

...Belief that "hard work always pays off' increased from 39 to 44 percent...

...The only real change in political attitudes occurred with respect to tactics...

...It is interesting to note that Max Weber, writing soon after World War I, anticipated the desire of many intellectuals to find some sort of ecstasy in a period characterized "by rationalization and intellectualization and, above all, by the 'disenchantment of the world.' " Faced with "disenchantment," some will shift their value emphasis "into the transcendental realm of mystic life or into the brotherliness of direct and personal human relations...

...Yet if, as Bell, Inglehart, and others have convincingly suggested, we are moving to a post-industrial society, the critical values fostered by the university and intellectualdom generally should have increasing impact on the orientations of students and the rest of society...

...A more recent national survey of college students, conducted by the Gallup Poll in the spring of 1975, also found considerable disillusionment with American institutions...

...Gallup's 1975 survey found that 27 percent of those interviewed reported their political views had been influenced by their college teachers...

...and 30 percent favored the same policy for banking...

...Political cycles take on a more volatile character in universities because the student population turns over almost completely within half a decade...

...The percentage saying that, "depending on how much strength and character a person has, he can pretty well control what happens to him" moved from 60 percent in 1971 to 65 in 1973...

...Columbia professor of industrial relations James Kuhn suggests that increased numbers resulted in a rapidly expanding educational system, whose disproportionately young and untrained teaching staff proved inadequate at the job of socialization at all levels...

...The movement's basis on college students contributed to its organizational instability...

...Like students, professors became more cynical about university life: the proportion agreeing that "Many of the highest paid university professors get where they are by being `operators' rather than by their scholarly or scientific contributions" climbed from 48 to 69 percent...

...Another cause for this influence is that students respect the integrity of their teachers more than that of other adults...

...The rebels of the 1960s who hoped to build a new radical movement may have been unable to institutionalize their protest, but they were "coopted" into a major party...

...Thus, five years after the occupation of University Hall, only 24 percent of the students identified their politics as center or right of center, as contrasted to 23 percent in the earlier period...

...Only 15 percent of the total student body indicated they were Republicans, compared with 21 percent among the public at large and 27 percent among college-educated persons...

...The proportion of self-identified radicals at major American universities remains at close to 10 percent, about what it was in the late 1960s...

...Call the conduciveness of America's political parties to absorb new directions "cooption" or call it "responsiveness," but it has always helped to draw the bulk of extra-partisan protestors back into their ranks...

...The proportion moving to the left as a result of faculty influence was higher among juniors and seniors: 28 percent...

...Traditional class theory, congruent with Marxist analysis, suggests that opposition to the status quo comes primarily from the ranks of the less privileged...

...participation in Vietnam, to nominate an antiwar leader, George McGovern, for the Presidency, and to elect a host of its participants to Congress in 1972 and 1974...

...The percentage who disagreed with the statement: "Meaningful social change cannot be achieved through traditional American politics" went up from 67 in 1969 to 74 in 1975...

...Because they were so disturbed by the war, the great mass of college students accepted the radical critique and, especially in the Ivy League colleges, joined with the New Left in its attack on the universities and other institutions that were interpreted as being part of the web of immorality and misuse of power that students associated with the war...

...Any examination of the history of university life must, therefore, lead to a reaffirmation during the "calm" of the mid-seventies of the conclusion enunciated by historian Ernest Earnest, during the "quiet" of the early 1950s, that "unless history fails to repeat itself, there will be another revolt of youth...

...The economic slowdown deriving from a decline in available natural resources and population should press young people to work hard and compete for scarcer rewards...

...And as J .W...

...While junior faculty were rated as more concerned than their elders, fully 40 percent of the respondents complained of their lack of interest, as contrasted to 19 percent five years earlier...

...At Harvard, sociologist Marshall Meyer repeated in the spring of 1974 a survey he had taken of the student body in 1969...

...A comparable change was recorded in reaction to the proposition: "Mar.y of the best students can no longer find meaning in science and scholarship...

...Similarly, the proportion who voiced "strong agreement" that "in the United States today there can be no justification for using violence to achieve political goals" grew over the six-year interval from 47 to 61 percent...

...Those saying that "the Establishment unfairly controls every aspect of our lives...

...Similar majorities in both instances (56 and 58 percent) located their politics on the moderate left...

...Yankelovich offers a useful explanation for the widespread unrest: "It is possible to see now, in retrospect, that the spurt of political radicalism on the campus was inextricably interrelated with student response to the war in Southeast Asia...

...Professors involved in disciplines concerned with "basic" research or with the creative arts are much more disposed to foster the "adversary culture" than faculty members dealing with the more applied professional fields...

...The former notes that "the research and development types, the laboratory and design departments and the communicators" tend to be on the left, as contrasted to "the administrators, executives, sales departments, etc...

...Immediately after the "bust" in 1969, 68 percent agreed that "there are times when it almost seems better for people to take the law into their own hands rather than wait for the machinery of government to do it...

...Skipping over a number of his nineteenth-century examples, we may note that youth cohorts increased strikingly in Germany in the late 1920s, reaching their high point in the fateful year 1933...

...One reason that the Klan declined, as Raab and I noted, was that the issues which concerned its supSeymour Martin Lipset is Professor of Political Science and Sociology, and Senior Fellow of the Hoover Institution, Stanford University...

...Opposition to the basic values and institutions of the owners and controllers of industry is inherent in the nature of intellectual work, which emphasizes creativity, originality, a qd "breakthroughs...

...they can be just as committed living together," while 66 percent disagreed that "It is all right for people to have children without being married...

...A second, more historical hypothesis has been suggested by Herbert Moller, Boston University historian, who notes that periods of revolutionary change from the sixteenth century down to the present have been ones in which the size of the youth cohort coming to political consciousness (generally the late teens) has been considerably greater than in the period preceding them...

...the fears that Negro war veterans would upset the status quo vanished...

...and as World War I receded into memory, the emphasis on 100 percent Americanism and alien plots declined...

...Few in 1965 anticipated the changes which would occur within the succeeding decade with respect to the status of women, homosexuals, and blacks, the strength of government, and judicial intervention to foster the principle of "equality of results" through emphasis on affirmative action and numerical targets or quotas, the legalization of abortion, the shift in norms of sexual morality, the increasing support for decriminalizing the use of marijuana, the declining prestige and authority of federal security and intelligence agencies, the opening to China, detente, and the refusal of Congressional majorities to permit American aid to anti-Communist forces in Angola and other countries...

...Such self-descriptions by these students were dramatically different from their reports on their parents' attitudes...

...The extent to which these cultural contradictions have become the source of social change in advanced industrial or post-industrial society may be seen in the inversion of past class relationships with respect to the propensity to protest...

...In a period in which support for busing to achieve racial integration declined heavily among the general public, it increased slightly among faculty, from 45 to 48 percent...

...On questions dealing with professors' concern "with personal problems of students," responses became less favorable...

...The Daniel Yankelovich organization interviewed samples of students five times between 1967 and 1973...

...As noted earlier, factors in the social situation of students predispose them to participate in social protest whenever extramural events create crises...

...A sense of alienation was widely diffused...

...there seemed to be a rejection of authority...

...In The Politics of Unreason, Earl Raab and I noted that right-wing extremist movements, which have recurred periodically in this country, rise quickly and then decline, usually within four years...

...A survey of 500 leading Americans by Allen H. Barton found that the top publishers, editors, TV executives, and columnists were the most liberal...

...The campus-based antiwar movement was able to realize its goal of ending all U.S...

...The latter has emphasized economic or interest conflict linked to social class, while the emerging type stresses the more intangible values of "the self-development of individuals," participation, and freedom from restraint and reveals "a relative aversion to traditional bureaucratic institutions...

...On the other hand, just as in surveys taken during the late 1960s, large majorities continued to believe in many traditional American values, and the proportions holding such views sometimes increased...