The Quiet Campus

...Essentially, the new approach is a reflection of the unwillingness of students to content themselves any longer with simplistic answers to complicated problems...

...Still another reason for the decline of the student movement is inherent in what is also one of its real gains: the new awareness...

...New University Thought—perhaps the best known, most highly regarded and, with its circulation of 10,000, certainly the most widely read of these publications—has not appeared for more than eight months...

...As for the rank and file, the majority are, to understate the case, somewhat less than fully committed...

...For some students, this has bred strong enough frustration to cause them to give up any political effort whatsoever...

...In short, in many areas of student political activity, the process of maturation appears to have set in...

...The Young Peoples Socialist League (YPSL), an organization which has been around a good many years and which took an active part in organizing the Northern civil rights and students peace movements, has hit a remarkably slack period...

...But even in the area of serious conservative thought things are on the wane...

...Such ordinarily radical student centers as Chicago, New York and Berkeley are today hard pressed to maintain active YPSL chapters...

...Last year, backed by such notables as William F. Buckley Jr...

...The brunt of the work, therefore, falls to those who have made a broader commitment to social change—Pacifists, Socialists, Christian dissenters and the like, none of whom are in great supply to begin with...

...Once students recognize that serious problems do not admit of simplistic solutions, there is a tendency to quit in the face of the complexity of the effort required to exert any kind of change in society...

...But they, too, have seen a decline in their membership and in the intensity of their activities...

...Through its local chapters around the country...

...Why has this spontaneous bloom of college political life on hundreds of campuses, involving thousands of students, suddenly lilted...

...The Northern Student Movement indicates an awareness that it is necessary "to do something" about racial problems in the North, that picketing alone is not enough...

...The drab yet necessary spade work of getting the issues to the people is a task that is currently being undertaken by an increasing number of students...

...From all that has gone on in the past few years, then, one inescapable fact emerges: If the student movement is ever to make a genuine impact on American life, it will have to marshal a large number of students who are able to combine a firm intellectual grasp of political problems with a sense of moral urgency to act upon them...

...Probably the most intellectually respectable of the right-wing publications, it featured articles of substantial scholarship that frequently were far to the right of Senator Goldwater...

...While many students are highly critical of President Kennedy's handling of the Cuban crisis and disappointed with his leadership in the field of civil rights, by and large their criticism remains muted...

...This approach to peace has had the additional effect of bringing many back into the peace movement many who left it because they felt a well-developed program was lacking...

...This summer, the national YMCA is also sponsoring a voter-registration program in the South, a pioneering effort which, hopefully, will attract a large number of new faces into the civil rights movement...

...THERE is no denying, however, that the general feeling among American college students is one of isolation, of a sense that they have no real base in the adult community...

...A project approaching the scope of last year's march on Washington is today unthinkable...

...But perhaps the most pressing problem for the student movement is that of leadership...

...Other "young fogy" outfits have similarly retreated into the woodwork...

...The youth of the nation, as the old movie newsreels had it, was on the move...

...Still others, too numerous and obscure to mention, have gone the same route...

...What happened...

...Even in the San Francisco Bay area, not long ago the scene of riots against the House Un-American Activities Committee, student activity has come to a virtual halt...

...Across the country, as well as across the political spectrum, student magazines devoted to political analysis began publishing, demonstrations became a more regular feature of campus life than football rallies, and college political organizations were mushrooming...

...Two summers ago, YAF threatened to gain control of the 2 million-member, liberal-oriented National Student Association...

...And what is true of civil rights and civil liberties is also true of the student peace movement...

...Well-financed and impressively printed right-wing student publications have largely folded, apparently for lack of interest...

...It has, in addition, spread to schools hitherto untouched by student political action—to such schools as Park College in Missouri, Purdue University in Indiana, the universities of Kansas, Kentucky, Texas, and North Carolina as well as to Catholic and Negro colleges...

...Instead, they look for sustenance to the sonorous rhetoric of programs like the Alliance for Progress and tend to ignore the fact that few of the President's liberal programs have been put into effect...

...After more than two decades of apathy, students appeared vitally concerned with politics and more than willing to exert themselves for a cause—be it unilateral disarmament or Senator Barry Goldwater...

...Clearly, for all its recent setbacks, college political activity is today very much more lively than it was before the sit-ins in 1959...

...Among the other left-liberal publications that have folded are: Venture, published by Students for a Democratic Society...

...A veritable renaissance of student activity seemed to be in the offing...

...For others, it has only served as a goal to build the kind of community base that is vital if their efforts are to have any meaningful results...

...Now, on most campuses YAF chapters no longer exist...

...The fortunes of Young Americans for Freedom (YAF), the largest student organization on the right, are in many ways symptomatic...

...No less significant, there is now a more patently liberal tone to student life...

...Similarly, the so-called "dissent forums," whose function it was to bring controversial and lively speakers to the campus, have faded out...

...Philip Altbach, a graduate student at the University of Chicago and national president of the Student Peace Union, has long been active in campus political life...

...New Freedom, published at Cornell University...

...Even last autumn's Cuban crisis failed to stir students as much as, say, the Soviet Union's resumption of nuclear testing two years ago...

...There is, for instance, no longer any conservative organization at such schools as Harvard, Chicago and New Mexico, to mention only three large universities...

...The idea has caught on well and is currently being expanded...

...Serious papers on the subject have been published by the SPU and the Students for a Democratic Society, and a few have also appeared in some of the larger circulation journals...

...In the North, where in 1959 thousands of college students were inspired to rally to the support of the first sit-ins in Greensboro, North Carolina, the much uglier Birmingham situation of a few months ago elicited what can only generously be termed a disappointing response...

...The New Individualist Review, a quarterly put out by a group of graduate students at the University of Chicago, is now defunct...

...In Washington, 8,000 students marched on the capitol in a concerted lobby for peace...

...Nor is the New Individualist alone among magazines and journals of this kind that have knuckled under in recent years...

...In much the same fashion, the intellectual roots of the liberal student movement have become badly withered...

...Despite all this, the SPU, like other student peace groups, has come upon a period of staggering insouciance...

...and Fulton Lewis III, the student group, which claimed a membership of 20,000, was able to fill Madison Square Garden for a conservative rally...

...A REPORT ON THE DECLINING STUDENT MOVEMENTS The Quiet Campus By Philip Altbach As recently as two years ago, observers of the American campus scene were heralding the advent of a new young generation...

...Still, there are a number of hopeful signs...

...The University of Chicago, Oberlin, Antioch, Swarthmore, Grinnell, all schools that could once be counted on to provide a solid core of activists, have recently lost much of their momentum...

...At the University of Illinois, for example, the local Y serves as a hub of intellectual and political discussion, and has opened its doors to a peace group, the campus NAACP chapter, and almost any other organization with a legitimate interest in exploring controversial issues...

...Initiated by a Harvard University group known as Tocsin, which takes a more academic approach than is common in the mainstream of the peace movement, it centers around what is usually called "peace research...

...Until this occurs, the exact direction of the American student movement is hard to predict—and it is even harder to be optimistic about...

...One finds less and less serious discussion issuing from the student disciples of such laissez-faire economists as Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman...

...Yet today, a scant 24 months later, most of the student magazines have ceased publication, demonstrations (with the exception of those in the South on behalf of civil rights) have become a good deal less common, and the college political organizations have quietly melted away...

...Attempting to break the stranglehold of inferior segregated education in Northern cities, students work as tutors and part-time social workers...

...Now, though, they are very much concerned about losing whatever tenuous contact they have with the intellectuals and academics who make up the Kennedy Administration...

...As a result, after becoming increasingly discouraged by what they consider to be the Administration's failures, they simply leave the student movement with a feeling of betrayal...

...Where student activity has been maintained, it has been of a greatly reduced intensity, a shadow of its former self...

...Campus CORE and NAACP chapters in the North—in contrast to their sister chapters in the South —have run on to dormant days and are seeing their membership rolls diminish appreciably...

...And the old hard core of campus conservatives who could once be counted on to heckle any meeting of liberals is now glumly silent...

...An interesting new twist has also been given to student peace activities...

...This is little cause for rejoicing in the liberal student community, however, for the casualties there have also been serious...

...Yet more and more students seem unwilling to take on leadership roles on their campuses...

...The result is a movement which falters when the original adherents become bored or discouraged...

...This involves delving into such issues as the psychological aspects of the cold war and the technical problems of nuclear test bans...

...The development of the Student Peace Union (SPU) is a case in point...

...A constructive effort in this direction is the recent interest of many students in voter registration campaigns in the South...

...Where conservative groups still exist, they tend to be more interested in research and debate than in picketing and political maneuvering...

...They are generally attracted to the movement by a fear of nuclear destruction, a crude sense of the injustice suffered by the Negro, or, where this still obtains, a desire to be fashionable...

...Under Eisenhower liberal students, who constitute the bulk of the campus community, felt so far removed from the centers of power that they could afford to present radical alternatives...

...These campaigns have been rigorously promoted by such organizations as the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, and have involved both Northern and Southern students...

...The more traditional groups, of course, have been better able to weather the storm...

...As often happens, also, while some groups have perished, others have come in and at least partially filled the void...

...Organized in the flush of student activity in 1959-60, the spu has grown to the point where it now has over 200 local chapters, a substantial feat for a relatively radical campus organization...

...Besides the Y, Methodist and Unitarian groups and some chapters of the Young Christian Students, a Catholic organization, have become more open to liberal political action...

...Demonstrations, which used to occur almost weekly, are now rare and do not arouse anything like the support they once did...

...Where issues of academic freedom were once hotly argued and howls of protest went up at the mere mention of a Congressional investigating committee, there is now little more than subterranean mumbling on these subjects...

...and Root and Branch, published at Berkeley...

...Perhaps not so strangely, one of the consequences of the students' fear of isolation, has been an upsurge in political timidity...

...While the decline has been general and has hit all groups, perhaps the most devastating collapse has been that of the conservative student movement...

...The civilliberties movement, an old oriflamme for student liberals, has practically disappeared from the campus...

...That peace research has exerted an influence on the campus is demonstrated by the fact that other, more militant student peace organizations are now taking it up...

...Its publications, which ran the gamut from typo-ridden, mimeographed handouts to slick, rather sophisticated magazines, have practically vanished...

...One of the chief among these is the Y movement...

...These new trends augur well for future student political activity...

...Then there are a few organizations that are succeeding in bucking the tide, like the Northern Student Movement...

...The emergence of peace research is evidence that students have decided to think seriously about alternatives to the arms race, that they place a value on originality, and that they recognize one cannot simply ignore the conduct of the Soviet Union when protesting about American nuclear testing...

...Without dedicated and intelligent leadership any sort of sustained activity is, of course, impossible...

...This has been glaringly true in the case of the relationship of today's college students to the current Administration...

...This has partly to do with the composition of the present Administration itself...

...But the lack of support in the peace campaigns in 1960-62 has shown there is still a long way to go...

...It is no longer easy to find the sort of student who will neglect his studies for weeks at a time in order to devote himself to planning a major demonstration...

...Unfortunately, these motives cannot sustain the day-to-day organizational work so necessary to keep the movement vital...

...Aided by several foundation grants, it has instituted a number of projects that involve college students working with Negro children in depressed urban areas...

...it has begun to reassert itself as a center of intellectual activity...