Between Father and Son

...Its tactics of civil disobedience—shared at that point with people drawn from age groups and strata of society other than the affluent white middle class to which most student protesters belonged—seemed justified by the conditions they aimed to change, and far less corrupted by the search for power than most political activities...

...But probably the most important article in the whole collection is the one by Irving Kristol, who gets down to fundamentals and argues that the change the activists have not achieved is urgently necessary...

...As in earlier similar revolts, he discovered in the rebellion against a discredited and deauthorized Establishment a deep-rooted psychological urge, which he identified by using Freudian concepts relating to the primal conflict between father and son...

...To those of us who watched from outside, it seemed as though in these young people, who were willing to abandon their affluence and suffer great physical hardships, the conscience of America had been reborn and purified...

...Confrontation is an ephemeral collection of essays on contemporary university issues...

...Men who recalled the '30s recognized ominous echoes sounding out of the European past...

...A close comparative study of the two forms of student movement would certainly be timely, and might suggest why in certain societies youth movements are condemned to pursue the course Feuer has traced, and in others they are not...

...What is more, sustained by the benevolent interest of the Kennedy Administration, the civil rights movement brought about substantial changes for which the early student activists must be given a great deal of the credit...

...Antiwar demonstrations ceased-except in name—to live up to their overt intents...

...One suspected the whole argument as a rationale to support a basically conservative attack upon a reawakening and healthy radicalism...

...Even more regrettable is the fact that Feuer has been able to give only passing attention to those student movements in which, because of special conditions, the elitist element does not develop in a negative way...

...And in the actions of the student radicals, whether they operated in the United States or France or Germany, the ends began to seem vague and unrealistic, so that one was often not at all sure what a particular demonstration really sought to achieve...

...When in the early stages it was linked with civil rights agitations, one could envisage it as an idealistic and libertarian movement genuinely directed toward ending economic and social inequalities...

...Student revolt, as he and history show it, is essentially a phenomenon of the middle and, more rarely, upper classes...

...it would throw on students the responsibility of using borrowed money to the best advantage...

...The means, however, became sharp and defined, with violence practiced and justified, and an elitist preoccupation with power as an end in itself taking recognizable shape...

...In comparison with The Conflict of Generations, a major work of social history unlikely to be superseded until after the present wave of student rebellion has been submerged in the conservative reaction it is in the process of arousing...

...Martin Luther King and Mohandas Gandhi, Henry Thor-eau and A. J. Muste were replaced by Che Guevara and Frantz Fanon, their mouths shouting of violence, by Fidel Castro and Mao Tse-tung, their eyes speaking of power...

...In Russia, the assassination of Alexander II by student activists postponed indefinitely the plans the Tsar had made for political changes that would almost certainly have led to constitutional government and a general liberalization of imperial rule...

...Reviewed by GEORGE WOODCOCK Editor, "Canadian Literature...

...As far as one can see, these movements have not yet been tainted with the lust for power...

...But gradually, from 1964 onward, I think genuine libertarian observers started to notice a series of ominous shifts in the moods and methods of student movements, wherever in the world they took place...

...We tend to forget, with the twilight of Fascism most vividly in our memory," remarked Roy Fuller in his inaugural lecture as Oxford Professor of Poetry, "how that movement originated in extreme breakaways from the mass political parties of the Left...

...But temperamental conservatism, as the case of George Orwell showed, can often be an asset in allowing an historian to stand away from the currents of his time and regard them with at least a reasonable measure of sane objectivity...

...This may not be the best solution, but at least it represents an attempt to consider honestly and directly a situation in which university education and the university degree have become largely meaningless because neither has any longer a true relation to social needs...

...The German student movement of the early 19th century, the Russian movement that began with the going to the people in 1860s, the Bosnian student revolt that indirectly set off World War I when Gavrilo Prinsep assassinated the Grand Duke, and contemporary American movements, occupy the greater part of Feuer's book...

...One of the ways this might be done, he suggests, is through Federal subsidies, not to universities, but—in the form of loans—to students...

...Feuer never denies the idealism that is part of all youth movements, or that the causes they adopt are often valid...

...Now that The Conflict of Generations is complete and published, it stands out as the best analysis written so far of the movements that have swept over our world from end to end and have already changed the outlook of our times to an extent we cannot yet calculate...

...Many who now look with distrust upon student agitations in North America and Western Europe, find that at the same time their respect increases for the students of Prague and Warsaw and Madrid who are fighting, not for personal power, but for freedom...

...Feuer sought the real motivating forces beneath the overt aims of the Berkeley movement...

...Nathan Glazer's piece on Berkeley is undoubtedly the best of these, developing intelligently the thesis that "the radical students have not really been primarily interested in educational reform," and that for this reason the universities —as universities—have been surprisingly little changed by the dramas for which they have provided stages...

...in particular, the role of the discontented student under the Weimar Republic would have repaid a closer study...

...For there does seem at least this amount of truth in the arguments of the student rebels: It is something disjointed in the society that breeds their rebellion...

...When we are all, at times, students, and all workers, the elitist mentality will no longer emerge as a by-product of educational frustrations, and student movements, if they appear, will be directed toward the purer goals of social amelioration...

...At the time, many were unwilling to accept the Berkeley uprising at less than face value—I confess that I was one of them—and therefore regarded Feuer's thesis not only with distrust but a certain indignation...

...In my view it is-at least in our North American society—the unplanned development of education that has produced a situation where 40 per cent of young men and women who have reached physical maturity are sheltered until the age of 22 or 23 from the responsibility of work...

...For those who specifically want professional training, the degree should clearly remain...

...While one has to admit that, used with caution, the particular Freudian myth of generational conflict does provide a convenient framework for studying past and present youth movements, I find the insights Turgenev developed in his great novel Fathers and Sons (and Feuer does not neglect to turn them to his purpose) more convincing and adequate...

...The movement's heroes, too, began to change...

...I still feel that Feuer places too direct a reliance on Freudian concepts...

...Even later, during the tumultous free speech agitations at Berkeley and the protests against the Vietnam war, one was inclined to thrill at the thought of all that juvenile rectitude, to warm to accounts of the march on Sproul Hall led by the beautiful and legendary Joan Baez...

...Student revolt follows a cycle that has known many repetitions, commencing with a going to the people that brings a rejection by the peasant or the worker, followed by a sadomasochistic drama of violence and suffering that frequently—as in the classic case of the Russian students during the Tsarist era—leads to active terrorism...

...A teacher at Berkeley during the celebrated events of 1964, his perceptive reports from that particular generational battlefield aroused much heated discussion when they were published in The New Leader...

...Above all, the student protesters appeared to be moving toward proximate and attainable goals...

...More often they end by setting back the course of progress...

...Berkeley, San Francisco State, Columbia, and Cornell are all the subjects of studies having some use in documenting episodes for the benefit of future historians...

...Like all intellectual activism, it is elitist, which is why it coalesced so harmoniously with Fascism in the troubled years between the two world wars...

...None of this is very new to Lewis Feuer, whose The Conflict of Generations is a massive study of student movements from the time of the Bourbon Restoration in France a century and a half ago up to 1968...

...This would force colleges to consider the needs of the kind of students they wished to attract...

...One would have welcomed a closer study of the movements that were overtly rather than covertly elitist...

...In addition, he presents shorter studies of student movements as different (and as strangely similar on some levels) as the Zengakuren in Japan and the anti-Communist upsurge in the Indonesian universities, the Great Cultural Revolution in China and the 1968 movement in France...

...Events during the past five years, though, have strikingly justified much that Feuer said earlier in the decade...

...It is, in fact, the sanity and the essential fairness of The Conflict of Generations that impress one most...

...As late as the summer of 1968, there were many who could still shout with joy as rebelling students in Nanterre and Paris shook le grand Charles on his lofty pinnacle and led France in the latest reenactment of 1789, 1848, 1871, and all the other festival years of that nation's revolutionary politics...

...I still also suspect that, in temperament if not in opinions, Feuer is a conservative...

...Certainly anyone who lived through the '20s and '30s must feel unease, even dread, to see how many features of pre-Fascist Germany are reappearing in Europe and America—features some of which are actually taken to be progressive or liberatory...

...For more than 40 years, he has been connected with youth revolt movements, first as a participant and later as a critical observer...

...While academic liberals remained largely hypnotized by what was happening around them, and Left-wing personalities like Norman Mailer and Dwight Macdonald did not see the warning light even during the 1968 Columbia riots, a number of older radicals, Jurgen Habermas in Germany for one, began to talk of the dangers of a linken Fascisinus, a Left-wing Fascism...

...Nor does he end his book without suggesting that one day the generational conflict, "disenthralled of its demonry," may become "a drama of sustenance and renewal which remains the historical bearer of humanity's highest hopes...

...author, "The Writer and Politics" I was one of those who initially welcomed the student revolt that has been characteristic of the 1960s...

...Those flowers that were supposed to "make love not war" began to harden and grow rigid, so that looking into their corollas was like staring down the barrel of a Maoist gun...

...He studies them all in depth and detail...

...The final result of such movements is rarely the gaining of substantial social goals...

...There are omissions, and variations of stress, which make The Conflict of Generations a less complete book than it might have been...

...For those who want to be educated and nothing more, an open-ended pattern might be evolved that would abandon rigid timetables and curricula in favor of patterns that positively encouraged students to interweave, perhaps for the rest of their lives, education and work...

...How much more than a pious hope this is actually meant to be one can only speculate, for the logic of facts does give a rather relentless gait to Feuer's narrative...

...He calls for a "huge injection of pluralism" into the university system, so that, with many smaller institutions arising to meet the needs of special constituencies of students, the multiversity may become unessential...

...What they share is not an overt philosophy, but a hidden urge for elitist power and a tendency toward increasing violence...

...they became in reality war demonstrations in favor of the other side, the Vietcong, with its cold-blooded rule by terror...

...As often as not—this becomes evident as Feuer studies the reactionary nationalistic character of French student activity prior to 1939 and the role of generational revolt in the rise of Nazism—such movements can turn to the Right instead of the Left...

...There are times, indeed, when the New Left begins to look disturbingly like a New Right...