The American Campus: 1962
Harrington, Michael
I am writing this from New Haven. Last night I debated a retired general on the House Un-American Activities Committee before about two hundred students. The meeting was sponsored by...
...In general, though, the young conservatives are the product of some good copy writers, not of the campus scene...
...The initial sympathy for Castro came more from Sartre's version of him as a revolutionary existentialist than from the apologetics of Huberman and Sweezy...
...The campus has awakened in recent years and is continuing to do so...
...The SPU is particularly important in view of the vague, almost moody character of the peace sentiment...
...A contingent from the local Young Americans for Freedom showed up, though they were not in costume (sometimes they come to peace meetings in ROTC uniform...
...I simply want to emphasize that there is a complex feeling here and that it cannot be dealt with through a recital of the old categories or by a magisterial act...
...Yet the tremendous gains of the Southern students poses a problem...
...They were younger, less sophisticated, new to political life...
...MICHAEL HARRINGTON'S new book, The Other America (Macmillan, $4) will be reviewed in our next issue...
...But it would be a mistake to think that one is confronting a finished ideology of support to totali tarian capital accumulation, a resurrection of that discredited sociology which sees the breaking of eggs to make an omelette as a guiding po litical analogy...
...The normal reception to a debate over Operation Abolition at a big school has one third of the audience in favor of the House Committee and at least two thirds vociferously opposed (I might add that the Committee's film fantasy on San Francisco has done more to promote campus discussion of the issue, and to create sentiment for the abolition of the Committee, than anything in years...
...At Earlham College in Indiana not too long ago, students told me that some of those who went from small, mid-Western schools were under heavy administration pressure to stay home...
...the departure of a few key students can change the look of a college within the span of a summer vacation...
...As a result, there is a freshness and elan and more than a little ignorance born of innocence...
...And often, the break with the hypocrisy of American society generates a suspicion of anyone who comes down hard on Communist totalitarianism...
...It is quite often uninterested in the problems of the economy...
...The change on the campus began around 1956 or 1957, it was enormously accelerated by the sit-ins and the sympathy demonstrations they evoked, and it is still moving forward...
...They are radical, bent on working out their own ideas...
...At the Catholic colleges I found the proportions reversed...
...Yet there is one source of conservative politics that is important: the Catholic college...
...now, alas, students sometimes call me "Sir...
...When I went to the meeting of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee in Atlanta in the fall of 1960, I was convinced that the initial force had been spent...
...Still, the accomplishment of these students is already the greatest achievement of the youth movement in decades...
...Precisely because they were living in a generally conservative milieu and come from a tradition historically hostile to the left, their views seem to have more intellectual substance than those of their non-Catholic similars...
...They work through to their convictions and they must be prepared to defend them...
...For that matter, one of the characteristics of the reawakening on campus is a sort of frenzy of introspection and self-consciousness, with groups spending almost as much time in front of a mirror as on the picket line...
...Several hundred pickets demon strated silently as the legionnaires marched past (the dignitaries in open automobiles didn't know what to do when they saw us: some waved...
...Sometimes I get the feeling that part of the conservative student reaction, limited as it is, involves an emotion quite similar to that of the democratic radicals...
...The young people there were not the seasoned pickets of the "Berkeley Zenga kuren," that informal group which had developed out of the Chessman walks, the House Committee demonstrations and Civil Rights projects...
...Students today distrust adult leaders and organizations (and par ticularly the Liberal Establishment...
...There are, of course, the prematurely old YAFniks with vests and a measured arrogance...
...Otherwise, one would be as declasse as a virgin in a street gang...
...Ten years ago when I first came here to speak, the meeting was held in a student's apartment off campus...
...At Harvard, several YAF students helped raise money for the Southern students (they were, it seemed, opposed to the state in Mississippi as well as in Washington—and even though their own organization has smeared groups like CORE...
...From reading the journals one might think that there is a wave of campus conservatism...
...This experience has convinced me that it is next to useless to propose some general theory of the campus...
...The improvised, irreverent mood of the barbudos having been replaced by the hard maneuvers of the aparatchik, there is little basis for student sympathy...
...At Chicago, the center of a conservative radical wing, at least one leader has joined SANE (how else get the state out of the military sector...
...on their last outing everyone wore dark glasses...
...It is very difficult to convey the flavor of the student movement in the South...
...One gets the impression that some adults, probably the Goldwater people, have decided to build a sort of Stevenson movement on the Right...
...Experience has taught them that the older, established spokesmen are prone to conciliation and compromise...
...There is a spirit of debate and concern working among the students...
...That inevitably means the development of a broader movement, of bringing adults together with the youth...
...On the one hand, the bulk of the Catholic students are much more conservative on civil liberties than the youth of the secular colleges...
...Our mood was that of catechumens...
...To veterans of the radical movement, student attitudes on Cuba, or Russia, seem to have a familiar fuzziness...
...As far as I can tell, that is simply not true...
...Yet the Cuba sentiment is still worth a comment or two...
...At times there are glimpses of a new status order based on how long one has been in jail...
...Its leadership contains a fair number of politically astute young people...
...That is a bare minimum...
...In Berkeley last November, I went down to the "Veterans' Day" demonstration...
...As will HARVEY SWADOS' new book, A Radical America (Little—Brown, $5...
...I have been traveling the country throughout this period (for several years, I thought I should have been billed as the "oldest young socialist" alive...
...But they cannot be done by regaling the newly radical students with the facts of the past...
...If the adult reaction is one of preaching, it will simply reinforce all of the hostilities to the Establishment, and no one will listen...
...The Washington peace demonstrations were probably the most spontaneous expression of student feeling since the thirties...
...The impression which comes from this experience has been curiously contradictory...
...In the ensuing year and a half the Southern students have produced a fulltime, dedicated cadre, and all the old theories about "professional revolutionists" seem to have found a somewhat curious practical incarnation...
...Its mood has been more radical than liberal, oriented toward single "issues" rather than finished ideologies (but conscious politicals have often played a decisive organization role...
...Perhaps the most hopeful sign in the South is the way in which the students have committed themselves to voter registration...
...The very fact that these schools, so long out of the student mainstream, were involved at all is a sign of how powerful is the emotion produced by the Bomb and the issue of testing...
...I have been North, South, East and West, and I have yet to find a chapter of Young Americans for Freedom which is playing a really vital role on campus...
...What the adult radical must do is attempt to bridge the gap between the generations, to understand that the students need political advice, that they must become part of a larger, post-college community —and to understand that, with all their problems, they bring to us a gift of freshness, enthusiasm and elan...
...In that time, I have been privy to an endless number of bull sessions about the nature of the "student movement...
...Now student politics is becoming more indigenous, less of a New York graft...
...I would guess that the audience was at least two thirds on my side and rather demonstratively so...
...The meeting was sponsored by "Challenge," an organization at Yale which brings controversial speakers to the campus...
...Throughout the darkest days of McCarthy there were always the predictable colleges of the New York underground where a few sophisticates held the line...
...I was mistaken...
...Rather, the persuasion must come from someone who is actually involved in changing the status quo here, and from someone who has a sympathy for the genuine and good emotions which are just behind the bad theories...
...As one student at Howard told me, "Sitting in has become like going out and getting a pack of cigarettes...
...In the first radical flush, these students fail to distinguish between the official Anti-Communist slogans of the status quo and the critique of a democratic Left...
...Yet the Catholic liberals and radicals I met were, as a group, much better than their secular counterparts...
...Last night I debated a retired general on the House Un-American Activities Committee before about two hundred students...
...This contrast in New Haven could be extended all over the country, for during the past decade the campus has opened up...
...the Northern students have, in many cases, gone back to the books or to other causes...
...If the year 1960-61 was under the sign of the Civil Rights movement on campus, 1961-62 was dominated by the reaction to the Bomb...
...But there is also a kind of student who has a genuine hatred of the rottenness of the Establishment...
...Thus, the Washington project had a clarity often lacking in student actions today...
...This reflects in part a disillusionment brought about by the obvious growth of the Communist apparatus in that island...
...So it is that one finds students motivated by religious considera tions, students from small schools, students who have never belonged to any group, working together...
...It all seemed to be marked by a sort of amiable, parliamentary chaos, and there seemed to be no basis for the emergence of a concerted, organized drive...
...Not at all...
...In the course of the past few months I have had a fair amount of encounters with Catholic college students (at Albertus Magnus, Manhattan, Notre Dame, Fairfield and before a regional meeting of the National Federation of Catholic College Students...
...Yet it would be a terrible mistake if the adult radical concentrated on what seems to be the classic repetition of old errors...
...The generations succeed one another with a rapidity almost like that of the tsetse fly...
...The dominant emotion is good, it is a witness to the idealism and courage of the young...
...They come to their conclusions, not as a matter of accepting dominant values as the New York liberals do, nor even by sharing in a widespread mood...
...So let me set down a few impressions...
...If peace has come to the fore during the last year, the question of Cuba has receded...
...There is, rather, a radical mood in the midst of a semiaffluent society, and the key terms are the Bomb, the racist, the executioner...
...Its tone is moral, focusing on questions like peace, capital punishment and human equality, ignoring economic conflict and social planning...
...and their theoretical journal has attacked the House Un-American Activities Committee in the name of libertarian values...
...and one beauty queen took an SPU button...
...It cannot be done from a lecture platform, from a distance...
...Generally speaking, YAF is less of a force on the big campuses than the Young Peoples Socialist League—and no one has been writing about a socialist sweep among the young...
...That event set off sympathy pickets, conferences and Freedom Rides...
...The young conservative publications are slickly edited and expensive...
...I thank God for my one comfortable night as a guest of the New York City police...
...Events like the Madison Square Garden rally are created by professionals like Marvin Liebman, the defender of Tshombe and Chiang, and have all the spontaneity of the Komsomols marching in Red Square...
...Yet, it is precisely the political diffuseness of the rank and file which gives the organization a broader appeal than any student group of recent memory...
...The point is, these attitudes must be faced and changed...
...Here at Yale (the YAF National Chairman is a student in New Haven), the group might have fifty dues payers and far fewer activists...
...However, they are certainly not leaving the direction of it to the young...
...In any case, one now meets the full time activist from the South...
...These attitudes have a different basis and once again they are more mood than program...
...some froze...
...As a result, there is a mood of the youth "vanguard" which has serious consequences (youth alone cannot transform society or even a region of it) but which also corresponds to the immediate reality (youth, in fact, is the vanguard in the South...
...One of the main impulses for the present student surge came from the sit-ins in the winter of 1960...
...Indeed, the most striking recent development has been the growth of the Student Peace Union...
...The revolt is not, as in the thirties, a product of sympathy with mass union struggles...
...There are student bodies with a fair amount of right-wing opinion—Nixon did fairly well in the polls in 1960—but most of the young fogies are too busy with pan-Hellenic affairs to worry about "I Like Nike" picket signs...
...Since then, the Southern Negro students have made tremendous advances...
...These youth share the distrust of adult leadership with their counterparts in the North...
...I do not want to give the impression that there is a wave of pro-Communism in the student movement...
Vol. 9 • April 1962 • No. 2
