The new student radicalism
Scheuerman, W.E.
Students remain active in a variety of left-liberal causes. Students have marched with unionists at Yale and Harvard, staged anti-contra sit-ins in congressional offices in upstate New York,...
...It would be absurd to deny that much of campus life is still segregated, or that campus racial relations are often tense...
...Consequently, the precipitous decline of reform-minded liberalism within the past ten years has made our task on campus all the more difficult...
...In a society in which student radicalism is immediately associated with the activities and achievements of that decade, how do young people today go about developing their own identity...
...Today's radical students need to develop an indigenous cultural and political identity, an identity FALL • 1988 • 481 Notebook that both integrates what is best about our predecessors and goes beyond them...
...The antiapartheid movement showed that "pragmatic" political demands can generate a combative movement...
...Still, this is only one side of the coin...
...It may be premature to talk about a "student movement," but it is myopic to see today's students as apolitical and inactive...
...It's hard to believe in "the revolution" when you're growing up in a country ruled by a man who believes in astrology...
...and in a nation as racist as our own, that is no easy task...
...Isn't the gap between the ideal of democracy and the harsh realities of American society as large as it was twenty years ago...
...And it is the sixties student movement that most clearly embodies these features...
...Although such experiences remain the exception, for the first time white, black, and Hispanic students are developing close and even long-term working political relationships...
...A mythologized vision of Abbie Hoffman has become a bogeyman of sorts: it is assumed that political radicalism necessarily means buying into a Yippie conception of the good life...
...Students have marched with unionists at Yale and Harvard, staged anti-contra sit-ins in congressional offices in upstate New York, registered voters in Kentucky, protested campus racism in Michigan and Massachusetts, and staffed the Simon and Jackson campaigns across the country...
...Indeed, in a world in which the democratic left, even in its social democratic West European variant, seems incapable of showing us a way out of the impasse of late capitalism, it's obviously difficult to accept the possibility of a humane postcapitalist order, especially when one hasn't experienced a time when people thought otherwise...
...We study Marx with sixties radicals-turned-college-professors, rely on radical democratic and feminist organizational methods developed during the sixties, and sometimes just depend on sixties cultural icons—John Lennon, for example—to remind ourselves that things could be different...
...Predictably, those of us who are socialists strike our peers as something odd, even benignly anachronistic...
...As long as one doesn't equate pragmatism with a lack of principles or militancy, this is probably correct...
...Admittedly, this has probably always been true of modern American politics...
...On the other hand, what youth movement can flourish without a hearty dose of generational pride, youthful exuberance, and, yes, utopianism...
...It's just that we have a difficult time believing in the broad emancipatory projects of our predecessors...
...Indeed, a dose of heterogeneity may be precisely what the doctor ordered for the American left: We all need to learn to listen and work with those who don't always talk and look like us...
...After all, many of its leaders came from elite all-male institutions...
...Perhaps more important, so many of the political issues raised most eloquently by the sixties student movement remain relevant...
...As many have noted, American liberalism and socialism have always had a symbiotic relationship...
...Reform-minded liberals, let alone democratic socialists, are too often a curiosity on today's campus...
...We're learning to understand and even get along with each other...
...We can't find enough liberal allies anymore...
...For a bunch of kids who had the tough luck to grow up during the dreary days of Reaganism, that may not be a bad start...
...Our "socialism" appears as a strange but harmless illness we've probably contracted from our parents...
...Whereas our sixties predecessors were oftentimes products of a highly segregated university environment, our experience has been quite different...
...It is precisely for this reason that the sixties remain so problematic for us...
...Similarly, the fact that virtually all educational institutions have opened their doors to women is significant...
...Our clearest political memories are of Jimmy Carter, periodic economic recessions, hostages in Iran, Jerry Falwell, military adventurism in Grenada, and the drivel of Ronald Reagan...
...The fact that left politics on campus today is often based on consensus-building and participation and not macho posturing and pseudo-confrontation can only be understood as a consequence of the increasingly important role of women in campus politics...
...For better or worse, we need each other...
...Not only are the 1960s student revolts in numerous respects an inspiration, but the sixties still manage to provide us with a lifeline to a more just future...
...How could it be otherwise...
...We often live in the shadows of the 1960s...
...If only tentatively, the anti-apartheid movement—still very much alive, as recent protests at Wesleyan and Harvard suggest—has made the most progress in this direction...
...Many commentators have described us as a pragmatic, even cautious generation...
...It is no accident that the sixties movement was deeply sexist...
...In some respects, this is an advantage...
...Student radicalism can only gain from the greater pluralism characteristic of contemporary campus life...
...in others, it's a tremendous burden...
...For many of us, the belief in the possibility of any progressive political change, let alone radical change, has often seemed like an act of faith...
...Admittedly, this reputation probably attracts as many people as it repels, but it remains true that there are more effective and certainly more acceptable outlets for egotistical hedonism on American campuses—four years in a fraternity or sorority, for example, followed by a career, if only imagined, in investment banking...
...Yet this seems more true today than ever before...
...Even the most elite of private universities have opened their doors, if only halfway, to blacks, Hispanics, and women, and the American university system is a very different place than it was twenty years ago...
...The recurring outbreaks of racist attacks on black students nationwide all too clearly remind us of the depths of campus racism...
...On the campus left today there may at least be an intimation of what America could be—a pluralistic community of equals, democratically pursuing common goals...
...spite of the impediments young people on the left face in building a broad movement, there is still much in our history that leaves room for hope and even optimism...
...But in other respects, the legacy of the sixties is oppressive...
...At least on some campuses, student radicals began developing a multiracial "rainbow" politics even before the Jackson campaign...
...After all, there are features of the sixties movement that aren't useful for us, e.g., its much-discussed sexism...
...Our peers' antipathy to student radicalism often stems from the perception, rightly or wrongly, that campus radicalism is somehow tied to hedonistic selfishness and irresponsibility...
Vol. 35 • September 1988 • No. 4
