Youth Confronts the System
CALIFANO, JOSEPH A. Jr.
Thinking Aloud YOUTH CONFRONTS THE SYSTEM BY JOSEPH A. CALIFANO JR. There are as many views on student unrest as there are parents, alumni, professors, school administrators, and students...
...In short, they feel the ease of life in America has led too many of its citizens to believe its difficulties will be solved without pain by someone else, or will perhaps simply vanish...
...A roll call of governors and mayors who have raised taxes and then promptly lost elections is read to illustrate the point, and for further proof, the shocking loss of revenue needed to get relatively modest tax reforms through Congress last year is cited...
...And when I myself brought it up, the listener was quick to dismiss it and contend that the issue is not whether there are some Communists among the students, but rather why so many bright young people turn to Mao, Trotsky or Marcuse rather than Jefferson, Lincoln or de Tocqueville...
...They see it in professors more interested in consulting the government and corporations than in teaching...
...This is what our youth instinctively senses, and articulates inadequately through slogans about the military-industrial complex, the Black revolution and "power to the people...
...It even goes beyond the validity of existing political and social institutions...
...Surely it must be stopped—but there is little gold at the end of that rainbow...
...Perhaps more important, the psychological and spiritual impact of prosperity on their parents—especially its failure to satisfy the purpose of their parents' lives?provides one of the key points of attack and frustration for the young...
...Its stated purpose was to provide "financial and technical assistance to enable cities of all sizes...
...on boards of university trustees that fail to understand the complex problems facing their college presidents...
...This disorder of philosophy is more profoundly disturbing to them than the physical violence they witness on the streets, to which some are willing to resort...
...The Cities...
...We must begin to establish four- fiveor 10-year plans to tackle some of our most urgent problems at home, and commit the funds necessary to make these programs more than marginal...
...The Federal budget of some $200 billion represents only about 20 per cent of this figure, and the defense budget, even at the current level of roughly $75 billion, is less than 10 per cent...
...in the Defense Department research contracts of universities and professors...
...One of the central problems with the vicarious revolutionary is the ease with which he leaves the mainstream of society...
...Third, the ubiquitous Vietnam issue is not aggravated abroad by an unfair draft which, in our country, alienates the students and contributes significantly to the reluctance of university administrators to expel violent radicals...
...Crime Control...
...And youth's charge of indifference and hypocrisy has greater merit than most adults would like to admit...
...The crisis stems in many ways from the confusion students behold in the minds of their parents and teachers...
...of a decent home and suitable living environment for every American family...
...A small group of hard-core radical students constantly probes for an issue to broaden its base of support...
...of those, 12,000 were relatively old-line Communists, and only 8,000 qualified as Maoists or anarchists...
...This is usually dismissed as impossible by our political leaders, who insist the American people are so fed up with taxes they will not pay any more...
...The median age—that national demographic benchmark—was 16.7 years in 1820...
...agitators, owing to their penchant for confrontation...
...The Act made it "the declared policy of the Congress to assist state and local governments in strengthening and improving law enforcement at every level by national assistance...
...First and foremost, I think, we must recognize that young Americans are experiencing a profound crisis of belief—a crisis many adults share, and for which they are at least partly responsible...
...Finally, there is no marked tendency among adults abroad—whether parents or politicians—to look upon their student unrest as part of some international (or even national) conspiracy...
...There are only so many protest marches, and petitions signed by hundreds of thousands...
...2. The radicals' objectives were fuzzy and ill-defined, but their energies were directed at the whole fabric of modern society, not merely the university...
...To begin with, there were no black-white racial questions at the universities I visited abroad, largely due to the absence of a significant number of black students...
...The student movement is at a high emotional pitch, but it is also at an ambivalent crossroads...
...Radical students the world over firmly believe the Establishment is involved in some sort of plot against the individual...
...In this connection, we should be clear that "youth" alone is not what is happening to our own country...
...As a nation, we must face the fact that a four-year university education is not appropriate, necessary, or fulfilling for every American boy and girl...
...And where immature behavior is reciprocal, it leads too often to superficial concerns and slogans on both sides...
...The proximate, if not ideal, catalyst for this effort could well be the faculties of our universities, particularly the younger faculty members...
...In a relatively short time he is aloof from the real battle, involved only to the extent of the words he spoke or wrote, or the encouragement he gave, to the young student...
...Since the problems we now face at home present no less a peril to our very existence, it is time for America to turn once again to the tools of commitment that brought it through the two largest conflicts in the history of mankind...
...in the correspondence files they rifle...
...Recent events may make it difficult to find students willing to be associated with the current Administration, but I believe a real effort should be made to get them involved...
...With youthful energy as his main weapon, he begins?sometimes quite literally—to tear down many of the institutions and ideals that are critical to the functioning of a free society...
...If the similarities between the student situation in the United States and the other postindustrial countries are hardly surprising, the differences are certainly striking...
...But for years and years ahead, the peace-and-growth dividend is dwarfed by the magnitude of these needs...
...only so many lobbying and political education efforts that well-educated young America will produce before its energetic impatience turns to significantly worse violence than we have seen to date...
...Bureaucracy is everywhere—in big government, big business, big labor—and most adults are as offended as the young by its dehumanizing and often humiliating impact...
...The 1966 Model Cities legislation affirmed that "improving the quality of urban life is the most critical domestic problem facing the United States...
...There are as many views on student unrest as there are parents, alumni, professors, school administrators, and students themselves...
...The generally well-to-do society provides greater freedom from work for the young...
...The crisis of belief goes far beyond radical students, questions about the relevancy of universities and their courses, or arguments on the legitimacy of individual professors to teach and of higher education institutions to continue in their present form...
...These are the vicarious revolutionaries, who allow their healthy skepticism about society and its institutions as they now exist to degenerate into indiscriminate attacks devoid of proposals for constructive change...
...As one professor recently explained it, "We have destroyed as myths the political, moral and religious doctrines of Western civilization, and we have failed to provide any substitute...
...in the power elite popularized by C. Wright Mills...
...They feel that the students' rhetorical determination to eliminate poverty, bring peace to the world, and accord justice to all Americans is rarely matched with the kind of personal involvement necessary to accomplish these aims...
...In that case, we have to create, at least on a temporary basis, national and regional powers and institutions that will not be inhibited by artificial state boundaries drawn by settlers of another age...
...A few turn to bizarre life styles revolving around witchcraft, astrology, sorcery, Zen, and Teilhard de Chardin's Omega point...
...The key lies in the comments of one of his students: "They really believe what they say is true...
...Without that, it is perhaps possible through shrewd tactics to achieve temporary amelioration, but nothing more...
...The Housing Act of 1949 declared that the "general welfare and security of the nation require the elimination of substandard and other inadequate housing through the clearance of slums and blighted areas, and the realization...
...anarchist revolutionaries, with respect to politics...
...And never have we hesitated to provide the resources or make the sacrifices considered necessary to protect our national security from foreign dangers...
...To tell our youth and our older citizens that anything short of considerable sacrifice will suffice is to toy with the very survival of our democratic system...
...In Japan, for example, with 1.5 million college students, no more than 20,000 could be called radicals...
...And recent events have, if anything, validated the verdict...
...But year after year the crime rate continues its persistent rise, while the Safe Streets Act is funded at 50 per cent of its programmed level and the American public is presented with a series of preposterous assurances that preventive detention, no-knock laws and increased wire-tapping will help reduce street crime...
...State and local governments, for their part, spend around $100 billion in the public sector...
...Clearly, young America has good reason to believe our national security is at stake in our domestic problems...
...In its own cacaphonic style, America's protesting young are beginning to sound this simple theme: The paramount danger we face today is from within, not without...
...and amoral, in terms of sexual behavior...
...It was 29.2 in 1960, and the Census Bureau does not expect a sharp change following this year's count...
...Our troubles at home represent a greater danger to the survival of the system than any peril from abroad, and it will take more than another repetition of the rhetoric of the past to help us survive...
...For years our students have been subjected in school and at home to a relentless and not always healthy skepticism...
...Congress has literally legislated that judgment in the bills it has passed...
...Second, there is little or no drug problem at the universities abroad, and no significant hippie movement...
...This crisis of belief is a chord politically radical students can strike with great effectiveness...
...to plan, develop and carry out locally-prepared . . . programs...
...among college alumni who threaten to withdraw financial support unless "something is done" about radical students...
...The Economic Opportunity Act of 1964 declared it "the policy of the United States to eliminate the paradox of poverty in the midst of plenty in this nation by opening to everyone the opportunity for education and training, the opportunity to work and the opportunity to live in decency and dignity...
...5. In asserting the need for more individual freedom from the complexities of technological, urbanized life, the students have struck an immensely appealing chord across postindustrial societies around the world...
...There are commitments to our neighbors, commitment for Spanish bases, seato commitments, commitments to the United Nations, commitments involving the Organization of American States...
...Our most solemn commitments are found in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, the Proclamations and Executive Orders of our Presidents, and the preambles and sections of the legislative programs of the late 1960s—for housing, education, manpower training, health, and a host of other urgent domestic problems...
...Yet there is no other reasonable alternative, no cheap and easy way to solve our problems and replace the dream evoked by our national rhetoric with the reality of a national commitment...
...But what does this mean for the survival of the system...
...Finally, I believe the government—Federal, state and local?must provide the resources necessary to finance the burdens placed on universities, high schools and elementary schools by the current student population explosion...
...A Czechoslovakian student in England put it another way: "I cannot understand what the ferment in the Western world is all about...
...Perhaps the greatest mistake our leaders can make is to continue to imply that there are cheap and easy ways to solve our financially and socially costly difficulties in housing, health, poverty, the environment, and transportation...
...The two world wars provide classic examples of how economic and human resources and institutional innovation can be harnessed to meet the task of survival...
...to rebuild and revitalize large slums and blighted areas...
...Furthermore, our youth has equally sound cause to believe the Establishment does not mean what it has said, since Congress and the Executive have repeatedly refused to furnish the resources needed to take the decisive action required for solving our troubles at home...
...So many responsible leaders in both political parties have talked about the inadequacy of funds devoted to urgent domestic problems that I hesitate to repeat their findings here...
...they seem to be abusing the liberty they have...
...in businessmen and labor leaders who do not live up to policies they publicly urge on others...
...3. While radicals verbally reflect the influence of the romantic notions of Mao, Castro, Guevara, and Mar-cuse, they are, in a very real sense, undergoing a crisis of belief...
...I do contend, though, that they sense that affluent America has become short-sighted and selfish, that general prosperity has somehow debilitated our willingness to sacrifice where our own problems are involved...
...History is on their side...
...Rendering harsh but subjectively sure judgments on everything from the university to the world to God, the radicals feel they know what is morally right and are acting sincerely, according to what their consciences dictate as the only acceptable course...
...Father Andrew Greeley at the University of Chicago was surprised to learn that they are respected by their peers...
...more interested in the esteem of their colleagues than the respect of their students...
...They really believe that they do have the answer and that they know what is ideologically right and ideologically wrong...
...from Edward Gibbon to Arnold Toynbee, historians have warned of the internal doom of great civilizations...
...4. Affluence is unquestionably a significant factor in student unrest...
...In increasing numbers, they recognize that failure to deal with domestic questions of survival is not due to lack of wealth...
...The end of the Vietnam war will not provide sufficient funds to cure our material domestic ills...
...6. University conditions are generally abominable in Western Europe and Japan...
...The Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1968 recognized the urgency of the nation's crime problem, calling it a matter that threatens "the peace, security and general welfare of its citizens...
...1. The number of hard-core radicals was invariably quite small, rarely exceeding 1-2 per cent...
...As Toynbee noted: "In all the cases reviewed the most that an alien enemy has achieved has been to give an expiring suicide his coup de grace...
...The result is backlash, a kind of adult adolescence...
...By action and sacrifice, the Establishment must demonstrate that it believes its own words, for the youth of our nation will no longer be assuaged merely by platitudes and crisis amelioration...
...This feeling was reinforced by my observations last year in 10 foreign countries...
...There is no room in our nation today for the vicarious revolutionary—whether he is on the campus as a young instructor, or on television as a racist demagogue...
...However magnificent the Establishment's rhetoric of commitment, it is not the language of American reality...
...For a first-class donnybrook, it helps to have a few radical professors bring the university's decisionmaking machinery to a state of indecision...
...Conceivably, institutional changes will be impossible under traditional, jealous bureaucracies, operating on a business-as-usual basis...
...The nation's total commitment for its public needs, therefore, is approximately 30 per cent of the gnp, which is not only far less than we require, but also way below what most European countries expend...
...I would place a young American on every draft board in the country, place students on boards of college trustees, and turn all parietal and disciplinary rules over to student bodies, short of a large demonstration or disorder (where the universities should reserve the right to move in, just as the Federal government does with the states...
...The First Amendment protects them legally (as it should...
...We are fighting for liberty...
...On the whole, though, I find the revolutionary trend, particularly where it touches large numbers of young people, to be a healthy force...
...A few—small in number, but potent in impact—have failed grievously in this respect...
...Applying tax and other economic measures approaching those we use in periods of war may well be the only way to liberate the genius of American science, medicine, industry, labor, agriculture, and all the myriad skills we have developed, on the scale required to solve our problems before it is too late...
...It means, above all else, that the rhetorical commitment of the American Establishment must be made real...
...The President's Commission on Rural Poverty said we must increase present expenditures by $40 billion if we are to eliminate the condition...
...At the same time, they are called the most idealistic youth of the century...
...As for those who argue that the university is the place to socialize our young, they are distorting its purpose as grossly as parents who believe the university should do for their children what they themselves failed to do over the first 17-18 years of their children's lives...
...Students arc much more nationalistic, and activism is directed toward traditional concepts of constructive change...
...For many of our young people it goes to the very purpose of life...
...There may of course be other, less drastic means to deal with our problems, but I have yet to come across any...
...Even in France, where many blacks study, they are mostly from Africa and are not pressing to become a part of French society...
...Still, some brief illustrations are in order...
...I am not suggesting any large segment of our youth knows, with even the rough precision I have used here, the amount of money required to deal with our public problems...
...Thus the first step toward improving the situation may be to identify some basic level of values the generations can share—a recognition by each, for example, that the other is at least in part finally seeking honest answers and is entitled to some measure of respect...
...It is surely ironic that the only total commitments our nation has been able to make have been in times of war...
...Despite the obvious contradictions, there is some truth in virtually all of these comments...
...With some intelligence, a wise measure of understanding from the adult Establishment, and a good dose of staying power from the energetic young, it can become one of the most progressive and enduring catalysts in the last quarter of the century...
...Now adolescence is understandable in teenagers...
...For they bear a high responsibility in this area and must fulfill it with a special wisdom...
...Yet time after time, we have failed to provide the resources and make the sacrifices that are necessary for all Americans to live at a minimal level of human dignity and spiritual tranquility...
...they intend to return to their own countries, armed with the skills they have acquired at the Sorbonne...
...Abroad, the subject virtually never arises...
...In many cases it can be counterproductive for the student, not to mention destructive for society...
...Too much vital work remains to be done for men of talent to stand aside, egging on others to an essentially nihilist fray...
...Both can issue exculpatory statements after the fact, but both must live with whatever they said to help make the fact...
...in their own liberal white parents, who preach equality for all and yet live in white suburbia and oppose any tax increases...
...The point is an important one, however much we might like to ignore it...
...Most universities bear a closer resemblance to our dilapidated and filthy metropolitan high schools than to our institutions of higher learning...
...Our history indicates that after both world wars and Korea, the assets devoted to the hostilities were promptly returned to the beer and lipstick sector of the economy, not applied to pressing public needs at home...
...We repeatedly hear in the halls of Congress and in the White House how the United States must fulfill its military obligations, and of the need for this or that weapons system, for some base or other here or overseas, for an extra division to make certain that we can meet the "commitments" we have made around the world...
...9. I found no international conspiracy among the students...
...I believe students must be given a greater measure of real control over their lives...
...We have no time for such nonsense...
...we care about ideals," because adults have made society so affluent the youthful idealists will be able to eat and drink no matter what they do...
...Adults, in turn, detect at least as much hypocrisy in the young as the young attribute to the Establishment...
...Unlike many of their parents, who have abandoned the search, the students are desperately seeking answers to provide meaning to their existence...
...To turn our declared commitments into de facto achievements—the only way we will make them real to the sophisticated young—we must divert literally scores of billions of dollars from the private to the public sector, and react to our domestic needs as we have in the past reacted to foreign threats to our national security...
...but the few instances of drug abuse are mostly attributed to the influence of American students...
...Their confrontation tactics, argued the radical hard core, merely served to bring that violence into the open...
...There were, of course, the occasional assertions that Red Chinese funds are working then-way into student movements, but I was unable to find any strong evidence of this...
...in the lack of ideologically dominated and divergent political parties...
...It then becomes a relatively short step for the student to follow this reasoning to its logical conclusion...
...Let me cite a few examples, taken from laws enacted by Congress...
...This brings me to several brief suggestions concerning America's youth...
...These are not idle comments or the concerns of an alarmist group of young people...
...it does not, however, offer moral absolution...
...My greatest hope for young Americans is that as they take the reins of power, and become makers rather than victims of history, they will muster the courage to face our problems with realism, abandoning at last the mere rhetoric we have known...
...Were we to do the same, we would have an additional $80 billion a year at our disposal for domestic needs...
...adolescent children, for their endless bickering...
...That means we must begin seriously to consider not only wage and price controls, but also sharp tax increases...
...Housing...
...Instant communications, at least within the relevant geographical area, provide a big assist once this is found...
...They note that the young can say, "We don't care about careers...
...Too often, they deflect the disorder the student feels in his own mind onto the problems of society as a whole...
...8. The immediate conditions which precipitate riots are remarkably similar...
...Most radicals oppose representative democracy and Communism as inherently violent systems, insisting that both are more or less equally sophisticated in disguising this fact...
...Six years later, some 25 million Americans are still locked in poverty...
...The Federal government estimates the cost of implementing the Kerner Commission proposals on crime to be at least $30 billion a year more than is now being spent...
...The enormous similarity in their tactics is striking, but I believe it is attributable to the mass media, particularly television, and to the increase in student travel...
...They have virtually abandoned the student as an object of serious political interest, and they have refused to give the universities the resources needed to meet the demands of the population explosion...
...This is not a projection of dreamers, but a careful calculation contained in a December 1968 report to the President, signed by the then Secretaries of the Treasury, Defense, Commerce, and Labor, the Director of the Budget, and the Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers—the very men who made up the Presidential Committee on Post-Vietnam Planning...
...7. The traditional Left, Center and Right parties have failed grievously in two respects...
...We hear campus activists characterized as nymphomaniacs, because of their appetite for reform...
...Although England is beginning to have its racial problems, black and white students, including South African radicals of both races, are working side by side for change at the London School of Economics...
...While it must be stressed that my study was impressionistic rather than scientific, I found several common elements among students in the postindustrial countries...
...Toward the end of this year, the nation is expected to have a Gross National Product (gnp) of $1 trillion...
...As the report expressed it: "The end of the struggle in Vietnam, together with increased tax revenues resulting from economic growth, will make a sizable, volume of real resources available to deal with these [domestic] problems...
...the most dedicated to the public good, and offended at the superficial materialism of modern-day society...
...In any event, substantially more funds than those available from Vietnam, or from cuts of a few billion dollars in the defense budget, are urgently required...
...They are particularly horrified at what they look upon as hypocrisy in the lives of the adults around them...
...it is difficult to justify in an adult...
...most 16-year-olds were already at work...
...In the 1968 Housing and Urban Development Act, Congress recognized that for 20 years the promise had not been kept, noted the failure "a matter of grave national concern," and rededicated itself to "the elimination of all substandard housing in a decade...
...What is worse, it creates an enormous area of mutual suspicion far exceeding anything I found abroad...
...Indeed, both major political parties need to focus more energy and attention on the students...
...The vicious transformation of his utterances into violent action is something he can greet with a Pontius Pilate attitude...
...It is even apparent among university professors who begin to question their own legitimacy, their own authority to teach, merely because their fallible human nature—their very humanity—makes them realize they cannot live up to every single precept they are teaching...
...Mod dress, long hair, dungarees, and fatigue jackets are common, to be sure...
...We have a country to build and defend," explained one Israeli student...
...Contrast this attitude with the Establishment's reaction when our security is threatened from abroad...
...They see it everywhere: in the military-industrial complex...
...The Violence Commission, merely as a start, recommended that $20 billion be transferred promptly from the Defense Department's budget to the domestic public sector...
...Outside the university, they see it in political leaders who state that cities must be rebuilt or that law and order must be maintained, but fail to serve up humane programs or sufficient resources to do the job...
...England, for example, disburses about 38 per cent of its gnp in the public sector...
...Then the established authorities make a mistake, usually involving unfair discipline...
...Under such circumstances, the trust essential for the resolution of any difficult problem between students and the Establishment is simply not present...
...But it is evident in legislative proposals to outlaw demonstrations or withdraw funds from students who engage in them...
...But in 1820 the United States did not have 7 million college students...
...Traveling from the postindustrial countries to such preindustrial countries as Kenya, Tanzania and, to a large degree, India—or, for that matter, to preoccupied nations like Israel and Czechoslovakia—one is struck by how little student unrest there is as we know it in the United States, Europe and Japan...
...Yet the professor who becomes a vicarious revolutionary can no more wash his hands of responsibility for the student who dynamites a corporate office that he has been taught is a symbol of corrupt capitalism, than the Vice President of the United States can wash his hands of the brutal attack on black school children in Lamar, South Carolina...
...Antipoverty...
...It is hard to avoid being affected by their enthusiasm after you have been in a school which really isn't sure what is right or what is wrong...
...I would also appoint student assistants to the Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare and the Commissioner of Education, as has been done in France, and I would give students a chance to run at least one or two government programs, such as vista...
...the most intelligent, informed and politically aware generation in our nation's history...
...Nevertheless, we continue to stand by while the physical plant of most of our cities further decays or moves toward obsolescence and the postwar suburbs of the '40s enter the first stages of severe deterioration...
...To provide funds for the full development of only the domestic programs in existence at the end of the Johnson Administration, plus a few modest new ones, would cost $37.7 billion by the next fiscal year—more than twice the real savings anticipated through ending the Vietnam war...
...On the adult side of the equation, it is difficult to discuss student rebels in America at a suburban cocktail party without becoming involved in a discussion of conspiracy and Communism...
...Yet what has been done to fulfill that commitment to the 26 million Americans who still live in housing unfit for human habitation...
...more interested in writing books and articles than spending time with individual students...
Vol. 53 • June 1970 • No. 12
