On a new student movement

...and the Rutgers organizers became so unnerved that one finally broke into a folk song a cappella—before breaking into tears...

...One of the most healthy reasons to try to form a single national organization seemed to be to overcome the shadow of the 1960s by revealing some visible strength now...

...Even as these moments were the most dispiriting, they also, finally, revealed some true passion, and thus some potential...

...An ad-hoc studentsofcolor caucus demanded that any consideration of a formal constitution be delayed until the group could re-form itself as more truly multiracial...

...But come bleary-eyed morning, none of this would apply...

...Can the disparate groups that exist now really hope to effect significant social change...

...If this is a new New Left, it's certainly distinguished in disdaining the brash, Oedipal adolescence that 1960s activists had shown toward their predecessors...

...To compete with a Young Communist League banner, somebody had hung a second one saying, "This is not a Communist Party convention...

...Should they exclude the "alphabet sectarians"?—an echo of the anticommunist/ anti-anticommunist debate...

...And the absence of significant numbers of people of color clearly showed that the organizers had not adequately responded to criticisms on this point made as early as a year ago...

...Newsday in particular ran a photograph of a barefoot activist with frizzy hair and a tie-dyed bandana encircling her fedora, and a silly caption made the trivialization complete...

...But the organizers had invited some of that shadow themselves...

...A number of 1960s ghosts were there, smiling and trim...

...Of course, a number of national and strong regional organizations already exist, and activists from the Democratic Socialists of America, the Progressive Student Network, and the United States Student Association complained that the conception of this nascent organization as the national student group discredited their work...

...More derailing, a member of the Red Balloon collective took over a seminar on ideas of a left vision and got his audience to writing a joint poem on postrevolutionary leisure time...

...The immediate acceptance of the two caucuses' proposal was not a result of white guilt, as Ross suggested, but rather of a multiracial hopefulness that would be the best legacy from the early 1960s...

...These questions were not answered at Rutgers, but at least they were raised...

...The gay, lesbian, and bisexual caucus echoed that demand for more adequate representation and more sympathy with their concerns...

...This points to the real question about the 1960s legacy that the conference raised but ultimately was too disorganized to work through...

...Unfortunately, although the turnout of nearly seven hundred students from over a hundred schools exceeded by three times the number expected, it seemed after the first day and a half that these students felt more comradeship with historical memory than they did with each other...

...Saturday was exhausting, not because the real debate was hard to follow but because it was hard to find...

...Would a national organization, or a national umbrella, in fact be stronger...

...The obligatory allusions to the 1960s in press reports about the national student convention held at Rutgers University the first weekend in February were as disappointing as they were relevant...

...Most frizzy and visible of all was the familiar figure of Abbie Hoffman, on a first-name basis with the host organizers, a cosigner to fund-raising appeals for the conference and generally considered to be the real force behind it...

...The dissident caucuses huddled amid confusion on the floor...

...a black Progressive Labor activist jumped on a bench to speechify and was bodily removed...

...The questions of what to do about the racial imbalance, the constitution, and the 230 • DISSENT Notebook rest of the day became so muddled that a hurried voice vote served to resolve little but that it was time for lunch...

...When those seven hundred activists get over their disappointment and their midterms, this should be the first topic on their agenda...

...That's when the drama really began...

...ill, there was work to be done, with issues caucuses considering platform planks from antiintervention to antidiscrimination...

...Combined with these divisions was the confusing theater surrounding the sectarian groups...

...By not calling on these groups for help, the Rutgers people had spurned existing resources...

...The MIT and Berkeley groups caucused late into the night, "boycotting" the evening's entertainment with Elder Abbie and Little Stevie van Zandt (which was actually pretty good) to put form to their constitutional complaints...

...The student activists themselves were quite open about exploring their relationship to that heralded time, making frequent analytical references to the problems that had plagued SDS and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in terms of organizational structure, program direction, racial rifts, and historical moment...

...Barbara Haber was there, along with her husband, Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) cofounder Al, wearing a nice turquoise cap over his frizzy hair, advising and socializing...

...There was Bob Ross, a veteran of the Port Huron weekend that this one clearly sought to repeat, covering the event for the Village Voice but, it seemed, as often interviewed as conducting interviews himself...

...opposite a third, which announced, "We are not Redbaiting...

...Together they proposed regional outreach networks to work on this as steps toward assembling the next convention...

...But another legacy of the time is the myriad grass-roots organizations developed since, which are small enough to maintain coherence and strength to sustain them for the long run...

...And the perennial question for activist groups was also considered with historical backlighting: how could they balance direct-action campaigns with sustained local organizing...

...They wondered what the significance was for their mostly white gathering that the momentum for SDS had originally come from SNCC...

...The one thing everyone knows about that decade is that it exploded the movement it created...

...The eloquence of Raynard Davis, of the Student Coalition Against Racism, served to remind how much this organization needed a leader, though he became discouraged and sat down...

...From a structural standpoint, the regional outreach networks that were established created the kind of decentralized, organic structure that the MIT-Berkeley group had favored (though it may be too loose to convene another convention...