Why Students Want Power
ROBERTS, STEVEN V.
A COMMITMENT TO CHANGE Why Students Want Power By Steven V. Roberts The call for "student power" is primarily a protest rather than an appeal for a program. It is a protest against the adult...
...The essential complaint of the student power advocates is that learning is not exciting...
...It happened in the '30s, when the failure of free enterprise to deal with social and economic problems could no longer be ignored...
...Many of the students who established the experimental institutions are heavily influenced by "sensitivity training" and other psychological methods in which small groups try to facilitate "communication" by criticizing each other's inhibitions in intimate detail...
...The hippies spring from the same root as the New Left...
...Self-determination does not mean accepting laws only you make, but participating in the process of making laws...
...The movement asserts that the promise of democracy should be fulfilled, that people should really control their own lives...
...America is not the world's policeman...
...The problem is that workable democracy was defined not by Rousseau but by James Madison in Federalist 10...
...Their most important emotional, even spiritual, experiences come through personal relationships...
...It is no accident that the Free Speech Movement at the University of California was started by students who had just returned from a summer registering Negroes to vote in Mississippi...
...In the long run, control is best left with the university itself, yet universities would benefit from giving students a much larger advisory role...
...But it is a grievous error for them not to listen when their children point out such embarrassing oversights...
...Opposition to Communist expansion should not dominate our foreign policy...
...These experiments are so suspicious of authority that they often dispense with formal courses, teachers, and even reading...
...foreign adventures and space travel are not as important as the cities...
...Yet when Dr...
...For despite the escalation in rhetoric regarding student power in the university, it remains invaluable...
...or, as a former nsa president put it, "students are the sole consumers of the product education...
...It has happened in the '60s, as young people have seen that the country is still not keeping its promises: not to a vast underclass that wants a share of affluence, and not to a restless middle class that has affluence but no influence in an era of big universities, big businesses, big governments, and even big foundations...
...Most of the student leaders, though, felt it was Leary who was copping out by withdrawing from the world and not trying to improve it...
...Domestically, the Black Power movement has been deeply upsetting to the large majority of white liberals...
...every generation rebels, but few have had such good reason...
...For that same heritage is in many respects a bulwark against threats to the serenity and detachment of university life that breeds "education by conversation...
...On campus, students are a more effective constituency...
...Still, the country's invaluable capacity for self-criticism would have been far poorer without them...
...They feel they are too passive in large lectures, that their professors care more about research than teaching, that there is a minimum amount of "personal involvement" in the educational process today...
...Washington should not follow mistake after mistake in Vietnam with a blind insistence that more of what did not work in the past will now work in the future...
...they do not have equal opportunities to get a job or an education...
...All communication is oral and personal...
...But within the university the small core of activists has focused on two broad areas: social life and the academic experience...
...Even these students will acknowledge that there can be a serious conflict in education between "freedom and quality...
...The problem of the academic life of the university is more complicated...
...They organized other communities and suddenly realized their own was virtually helpless...
...But they voted down every resolution that offered an alternative...
...In the last year or two student political activity has run into enormous roadblocks...
...It is often immature, self-righteous, filled more with rhetoric than substance??yet it is essential to the political and social health of the nation...
...It is a protest against the adult world's conception of personal relationships, intellectual development, social justice, and national priorities...
...Perhaps more important, the students who want "control" over their education, as opposed to the right to advise, see only one side of a double-bladed sword...
...Internationally, the hopes that flourished in the Kennedy era have been crushed...
...Clearly, most students do not worry about anything more momentous than football weekends, and if the nsa was truly representative of American students its "codification of policy would be 100 blank pages...
...It is a reaction against over-centralization, against bureaucracy, against the New Deal assumption that Federal power can solve all problems...
...Timothy Leary came to the National Student Association (nsa) congress in August??where a militant "student power" resolution was overwhelmingly approved??he was greeted with disdain...
...In the process they have displayed, as one former student leader put it, "an enormous resistance to official truth...
...Many students are attracted to the action, and the hard problems of the ghetto are hardly as glamorous as freedom-riding...
...The call for student power is part of a large movement in American politics...
...it was students who said universities were getting so large that the individual was getting lost, if not mutilated...
...Student power is a commitment to change, if not always to consistency...
...In fact, student power is really used in two senses...
...The experimental schools are frequently too disdainful of substantive knowledge, and can easily degenerate into navelgazing bull sessions...
...they usually do what works, not what is prescribed by dogma...
...The myths enshrouding academia are as dense as any in Foggy Bottom, and even hot air helps dispel them...
...The nsa congress and the National New Politics Convention have both been riven in recent months by militant blacks threatening to walk out if the meetings would not accept their full programs...
...Lyndon Johnson is universally despised by liberal activists, but few delegates to the student congress or the new politics convention could see a way to work against him effectively in 1968...
...In the case of social life, part of the students' argument is legal...
...Administrators insist the university has certain legal and financial responsibilities that it cannot turn over to students...
...It is ironic that students criticize so vituperatively the heritage of monasticism in the university because it leads to restrictions on social life...
...Sometimes the overwhelming concern for "honesty" becomes its own barrier to free exchange...
...The resolution of the student association, which is fairly representative of this small core, demanded student control, through student government, of such issues as dormitory hours, social and housing regulations, and discipline...
...They want to find out for themselves...
...The students reply that the administrators have a responsibility to educate them, and that the only way they can learn how to handle freedom is to have it...
...The essence of democracy is not always having your own way, but compromising...
...they no longer believe that mass demonstrations backing legitimate demands can have an effect on policy...
...They think they would improve things by controlling the hiring of teachers or the curricula...
...This is the part of the present generation gap that is not merely fashion...
...Moreover, they add, many students are not mature enough to handle freedom...
...It comes from a college generation with a remarkable propensity to overestimate its own insight, and ignore the goodwill and real achievements of its elders...
...Many of them, as Paul Potter, former president of Students for a Democratic Society (sds), once said, had "found a home" in the civil rights movement...
...Thus American radicals are not born when a generation becomes imbued with a new ideology...
...But the university should also be a refuge from the constant demand to be relevant...
...And not every group at every stage of its development is capable of self-rule...
...No more than a handful of the 1,200 delegates to the student congress approved wholeheartedly of United States policy in Asia...
...Freedom to pursue these relationships is as essential as the freedom to write an article in the school newspaper or to go to church...
...anti-poverty programs run from Washington or by the municipal power structure do not recognize the real needs of the poor or give them a sense of controlling their own destiny...
...It was students who challenged the idea of "publish or perish...
...it was students who often got involved in the problems of surrounding slums and dragged their universities kicking and screaming behind them...
...The most significant issue advanced by the student experimenters is that education, particularly in the gigantic multiversities, is too closely tied to the formal structure of classrooms, libraries and lectures...
...Students, of course, have not been the only ones to challenge these homilies, nor have they always been right...
...In the university it means that students should have more actual control over their social lives and academic experience...
...Some students have rejected established institutions completely and set up experimental colleges as extra-curricular activities...
...Demanding full control can also unsettle the balance of power in favor of the militants...
...There will be time enough for that...
...But the same rationale could be used by a governor to fire a Left-wing professor or ban certain books...
...Americans are pragmatic...
...But if some balance is not ultimately retained, society itself is threatened...
...Everyone cheered when he called the United States a "madhouse...
...Students should be allowed to have girls in their rooms at all hours, or to study sociology by working in a ghetto...
...Students no longer feel there is a man in the White House who will listen...
...Since the sit-ins swept across the South in 1960, student power advocates (the slogan is new, not the idea) have concentrated on political issues...
...Delegates who organized a peace march at the congress readily admitted that it would have no effect, that it was merely "a nice thing to do...
...They feel they have been subjected to searches without warrants, arbitrary administrative edicts, double jeopardy, and discipline systems where the administration acts as both prosecutor and judge...
...It has seldom benefitted either in the past, and having power is the only way to learn how to use it...
...Their parents are products of another age, another set of assumptions, another mythology, so it is perhaps understandable if they can't see that the emperor is stripped to his bvds...
...Education cannot be personal in a university of 20,000 students unless new institutions??houses, or colleges, or whatever??are created to give students smaller units to identify with, units pervaded by the people and the spirit that make personal education possible...
...It is in the light of these political frustrations that student power has turned increasingly to university life...
...it was students who said grades were stupid (although this is probably a minority view among students...
...They have been shaped, perhaps scarred, not only by the post-World War II world but by the post-Cold War world...
...It asked for joint control of course requirements, admissions policies, standards for tenure, and grading systems...
...For a significant number of students political ideologies or formal religious creeds have little meaning...
...I am not simply patting students on the head and telling them it is a good thing they care about politics...
...If education does not become personal, if students are not made to realize that learning comes primarily from other people, they will not be equipped to continue their education once they leave the campus...
...Negroes do not have their rightful place in the democracy...
...One reaction to the chasm of understanding is to drop out...
...In addition, the experimenters tend to underestimate the desire of the regular faculty to improve the learning process, and to overestimate the willingness of their fellow students to participate in it??no matter how exciting...
...They arise when a generation takes a fresh look at traditional methods, when it sees the gap between myth and reality, when it understands with new clarity the misassumptions, the miscalculations, and outright dishonesty which have tyrannized the political process...
...They feel their courses are often irrelevant to such critical problems as life in the ghetto or how foreign policy is really made...
...On many campuses students have demanded, and often received, a larger voice on faculty committees that hire and dismiss teachers, evaluate curricula, and decide grading systems and course requirements...
...The situation has been compounded by the fact that when the patina of legal rights was chipped away, a much more difficult and intractable set of problems was revealed beneath...
...As Philip Werdell, a recent Yale graduate, observed: "The key thing that students are doing is forming an identity, and that has a great deal to do with their social and sexual development...
...Reactions have taken several forms...
...They fought for the legal rights of the poor and found they had few within the university...
...In politics it means that students should use their influence and organize like-minded groups to press for change...
...The whites, moved both by guilt feelings and a genuine desire to continue to work for civil rights, approved the black program on both occasions...
...Steven V. Roberts, who graduated from Harvard in '64, is a New York Times reporter and a contributor to Esquire as well as other magazines...
...It is hard to tell students, and much harder to tell Negroes, to accept the concept of compromise...
...More importantly, students feel that freedom in their personal lives is essential to their growth and education...
...Now they are being thrown out...
...Students have also been made more aware of their own community by their involvement in the civil rights movement...
...Some students certainly use such arguments as an excuse for irresponsible behavior...
...But the way many educators quiver at the thought of increased student freedom is one indication that the generation gap operates here as well as in politics...
...Nevertheless, resentment and confusion are rising steadily among whites...
...They don't feel ideas should be handed to them...
...The resolution mandated the association's national staff to establish an office to help students bring civil actions against their administrations...
...The important point is that they are very much of the present...
...The hope that turned to anger when the war in Vietnam escalated has now changed to a sullen weariness...
Vol. 50 • October 1967 • No. 20
