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From The Nation - America's Longest Running Weekly Magazine.
Volume: 216 • Issue #: 0025 • Date: June 18, 1973
Original URL: http://www.nationarchive.com/Summaries/v216i0025_08.htm
No Retreat from Commitment
Open the article in The Nation Digital Archive
Abstract:
Reports that university students maintain a high level of critical social and political consciousness in the United States. Enrolment of a number of students in Stanford Workshops on Political and Social Issues; Profusion of student-conceived courses on alternative vocations; Research by students on practical health-care alternatives for farm workers.
Selections from Full Text:
...Why, then, has the largest mass mobilization this year been a quiet rally of 800 in January, following Nixon's decision to bomb for peace in North Vietnam...
...I found out some even prayed for me when I blew an exam or my mom was mad at me...
...That significant minority which was more or less "radicalized" by the.activism of recent years-has-become even more deeply committed to the struggle for major social changes...
...But its program, a hybrid of Milton .Priedman economic liberalism and New Left anti-militarism, would give cold comfort to Richard Nixon or David Packard...
...Asst...
...For instance, a small demonstration against fraternity sexism, is said to have dominated dinner conversations in some dorms for weeks...
...For most of the women organizers with whom I spoke, liberation goes beyond careerism to the redefinition of alienating occupations, and institutions...
...Student leaders of varying political persuasions characterize the present phase as one of "high consciousness and low mobilization...
...He detects "no decrease in social consciousness" in the last two or three years...
...With other McGovern workers and veterans of the, Movement he formed SCOPE (Stanford Committee on Political Education) which recently presented a four-day conference focusing on domestic repression...
...But the reigning ideology is liberal...
...I don't think there are indications that they're moving down and turning in...
...There's even some breathing space for such conservative side phenomena as a mini-revival of fraternities and the flowering of the Jesus movement...
...But, as events in France and the United States have shown, they can be the cutting edge of a troubled society...
...Synergy Center, devoted to the integration of new, socially meaningful vocations and life styles, is training twenty-five counselors through a SWOPSI course...
...Far from being disillusioned, they are in general better organized and less millenarian, more strategy-oriented and less contaminated by the excesses of counter-culture "spontaneity...
...The forms of political action do challenge the system, although they are less violent than those of an earlier period...
...People are looking for new tactics...
...Many have come to the Jesus movement after experiences with drugs or Eastern religions...
...However inwardly turning arid apolitical, the Jesus movement is no return to the values of the 1950s...
...Perhaps the largest and most rapidly growing group on campus is the amorphous "Jesus movement...
...Student government co-president Kevin O'Grady, a first-year medical student, headed the local McGoverri campaign which involved more than 400 people...
...Previously based mainly in Western high schools, it ran a highly success...
...Its characteristic activities are Bible study sessions, which have incorporated some aspects of encounter groups...
...No matter where I go I have a peace about my decision...
...are interpreting this as a retreat from social concerns and radical commitments...
...This year only fourteen fraternities remain...
...it was, in Appel's phrase, "a symbol of government coercion at your back door...
...A majority of^he^e voted, in special referenda, for the demilitarization of the university, American withdrawal from Southeast Asia, the Panther demand for liberation of all political prisoners, and the reinstatement of radical Prof...
...Ward Watt, who teaches introductory biology, observed that his students are more persevering and "less distracted by mass excitation" than three years ago, but adds, "They are quite interested in social problems...
...It stands for many of the old tenets of fundamentalist morality but has imparted a new flexibility toward youthful indiscretions, clothing styles and even women's lib...
...According to Dan Brenner, a junior who is opinions editor of the Daily, "Students today are less prone to go out on the Embarcadero and get arrested because they feel it is not an effective technique...
...Freshman Carol Sawyer expressed some themes which recurred in my conversations with Jesus people: I was hung up on decisions, relations with people, how I was going to change things-I haven't such control...
...According to the university's placement counselors, most Stanford students are sorely tempted to spend their lives, in whatever capacity, amid the enticing and distracting lushness of Palo Alto, Los Altos Hills and Portola Valley...
...There is widespread agreement with Appel's judgment that "the number of people who really commit a substantial part of their lives to social change is increasing...
...Anthony Amsterdam believes that .the "marked change" in law student activism that resulted from the 1960s has persisted in this less noisy era...
...H. Bruce Franklin who was fired in a cause celebre of academic freedom for such alleged incidents as encouraging students to shut down a Computation Center where a war-related program was being run off...
...They had something...
...Bob Saunders, another, fifth-year student who is also an alternative vocations counselor, thinks: "People's expectations got to be higher than their tactics, which couldn't themselves change society...
...The new campus movement uses the gains of the 1960s-the institutionalizing of a critical opposition 'in the educational sphere, the opportunity to relate to oil-campus political groups-to involve a large minority in a multitude of social issues...
...Having spent the past year as a research associate...
...For the fairly conservative young people who embrace it (a good many are athletes), it seems to provide an antidote to competitive personal relations, selfdoubt, indecision and institutional impersonality that they do not find in "good works" Christianity...
...There has been an increase in the number of students choosing to live in fraternities, but nothing very spectacular...
...Campus resocialization carries a large minority of privileged white students to Left-liberal or radical positions, either through direct involvement in issues or by a less tangible cultural osmosis...
...The principal manifestation of conservative political thought is the Radical Libertarian organization which has about sixty members...
...Senior Elaine Wong, who started some of the first women's study groups at Stanford, estimates, that up to 200 women are actively involved in SWOPSI and...
...Through policy research and direct practice, many students are learning about such structural experiments as free clinics and migrant labor health centers, free schools, law communes ;and the alternative media...
...Furthermore, as Daily columnist Bill Evers points out, "The new New Left is more organized, less hedonistic and politically crazy...
...While the forms of involvement have responded to changing external conditions, the critical thrust seems firmly established...
...I've never found as much interest in the connections between science and these other questions...
...As a result of the 4 960s, these universities are even more open to political thought and practice than they were in the 1950s...
...ful canvassing operation in the freshman dorms this year...
...Needless to say, college students of the industrialized Western nations can never by themselves be a decisive revolutionary force...
...With the end of the shattering mass mobilizations of the late 1960s, conservative groupings have picked up a bit...
...I noticed they were like little lights-so happy, joyful, had a peace, weren't upset...
...Brent Appel, a former student union co-president who is in his fifth year at Stanford, explains, "The, issue is what I can do...
...THE LESS MILITANT CAMPUS NO RETREAT FROM COMMITMENT STEPHEN R. WEISSMAN Stanford The students at the country's major .universities have stopped seizing buildings and breaking windows, and the mass, media...
...Most of this activity is publicized in the Daily and has some influence on general student consciousness...
...It is sponsored by evangelical Protestant organizations and appears to have a few hundred followers...
...All research will'be made available to the farm workers and their appropriate community organizations...
...Demonstrations are not seen as viable-all has been heard before, it's not novel now, the average Middle American won't be reached...
...At the moment, according to black student union president Charles Ogletree, "The emphasis is on acquiring the best resources available to achieve educational success...
...Moreover, a number of students plan to join a larger group from Stanford which will work with the United Farm Workers this summer in their battle against the Teamster-grower alliance...
...mobilization...
...And they have been refreshed by troops from new movements, particularly women and Chicanes, whose specific . grievances often lead- to more critical social perspectives...
...It is, if anything, more , "bourgeois" and "suburban" than Harvard, Columbia, Berkeley and Comell...
...But while the shift away from mass mobilization has left some of the more casual former participants feeling frustrated, powerless, and occasionally cynical, that ''has not been the general reaction, of those who were more deeply touched...
...When I came to Stanford I knew some Christians...
...Bruce Franklin, now laboring off campus'as a member of the Central Committee of Venceremos, a Marxist-Leninist organization, speaks of the "apparent paradox" of "a low level of militant activity and high consciousness": "Because people have a high level of consciousness they don't see what they can do about [oppression...
...In the context of Vietnam, conscription was more than a personal threat...
...Former black student leader Mike Dawson, who graduated last year and now works for Stanford Linear Accelerator, confirms that "As of a year ago, one trend was to more interest in the classical professions and a, decrease in community involvement...
...Earlier there was more talk of the university as a laboratory'to practice skills in the community...
...Its followers are critical of the competitive insecurity'and empty materialism of American life, and disillusioned by the failure of national power, science and sometimes the student movement to solve these problems...
...Black students have always been chary of joining the white movement at Stanford...
...Indeed, the combined number of students, doing such things as investigating prison conditions and responding to prisoners' legal and educational needs, organizing support for the United Farm Workers Union in its battle with the Teamsters and growers, studying and experimenting with curricula for free schools, working for McGovern as a step toward pushing the country to the Left, and setting up a coun.seling center on alternative, socially relevant vocations, is probably larger than the number who sat-in during 1969 and 1970...
...Another important factor in the subsidence .of large eruptions has been the removal of draft pressures...
...Recently there has been less interest in political and more in cultural issues...
...Although there are exceptions, this seems to portray the general drift...
...The less firmly established Chicanos, who can look to the example of Cesar Chavez, have been somewhat more active...
...Perhaps it is an inevitable characteristic of first-generation-in-college, upwardly mobile ethnics, but some think that rising admissions requirements for blacks and the .withdrawal of the Panthers from the campuses have also played a role...
...The most prominent of eight Left-liberal and radical speakers was Daniel Ellsberg, who attracted 1,60Q spectators...
...other student-initiated courses focusing on women's liberation...
...Women's caucuses are active in the Law and Medical Schools as well as in some undergraduate departments...
...It's much more serious and long range," In organizing students, the new New Left has emphasized both consciousness raising and meaningful action...
...Here follow some examples of current activity...
...Through SWOPSI, a group of students 'is researching practical health-care alternatives for farm workers, in response to "an agricultural and economic system which values profits and productivity more than people, combined with a health-care system which creates barriers to accessibility and acceptability of health services...
...In 1969-71 several hundred among Stanford's 11,000 students were willing, at appropriate moments, to become involved in high-risk, forceful action against the university's military research arid ROTC programs...
...Radical organizers today have not found a similar cross-cutting incentive for campus mobilization...
...the newly installed student government is every bit as activist and Left-leaning as its recent predecessors, although thef Stanford Daily has acquired a less militant (but liberal) staff...
...By the mid-1960s, things had changed somewhat...
...The dean of undergraduate admissions, Fred Hargadon, flatly states that "a large majority of candidates .accepted are socially conscious and concerned with issues...
...Stanford University, and after interviewing dozens of students, faculty members and administrators, I'm skeptical of these analyses: In fact, the students here maintain a . high level of critical social and political consciousness, although its manifestations are less dramatic, - disruptive of academic routines, and'fall-pervasive than they'were in the days of mass...
...There is, to be sure, less opportunity for casual participation, as by attending a mass rally, than there was in the apocalyptic days...
...In the Law School, Prof...
...David Harris returned from Mississippi summer, became student union president by appealing to . students in the dorms rather than those in the fraternities, and started the Resistance...
...It seems more connected to the social strains that gave rise to the counter-culture of the 1960s...
...Even if you got the Defense Department off campus [which largely occurred], the capitalist structure and imperialism survived...
...at 'Stephen Weissmah, a political science research associate in the Stanford University Community Development Study, is ,the, author of American Foreign Policy, in the Congo, 1960-64, to be published by the Corhell University Press...
...A group of white women joined their Chicana sisters in picketing a department store which was selling Farah slacks...
...See "The Discontents of Stanford" by Sherman B. Chickering, The Nation, March, 13, 1972...
...80 per cent of student voters went for George McGovem...
...The number of students enrolled in Stanford Workshops on Political and Social Issues (SWOPSI), a sort of countercurriculum for credit which resulted from Movement agitation, has .doubled in the past year...
...Now there's better organization, more solid ties...
...Past mobilizations also created an ideological momentum, which was bound to undermine the logic of the initial tactics...
...Finally, the labor market and graduate school gluts have undoubtedly taken some toll of activism even at a prestige school like Stanford...
...John Mollenkopf, an assistant professor of political science, has noted that his classes are "shot through with a large number of people who were permanently changed by anti-war stuff, the Movement, who talk of intellectual issues but are sometimes confused about current directions...
...The Lord has special timing for me...
...The movement offers peace and joy through a personal relationship with Jesus, who is considered to be an active force shaping people's lives...
...K their movements are marked by the impermanence of their educational experience, it is also true that the young, by their self-definitions, have shaped "political generations...
...I wanted their peace and joy...
...At the end of that decade Stanford had twenty-six fraternities and, an overwhelming preference for Richard Nixon as the next President of the United States...
...The president of Columbia University may have set the tone for countless commencement speeches by noting on his campus this year's "nostalgic rediscovery" of the "half-forgotten joys" and "golden optimism" of the 1950s...
...Nearly all the Stanford student leaders of the 1960s are now in "alternative vocations" which permit them to continue their work for political change...
...I can get along better with some, have understanding and love for them, through my relation with Christ...
...And it has made good use of the post-1960s educational revolution: greater openness of the campus to outside social change groups and the incorporation of a significant number of student-initiated, action-oriented courses...
...One of the most important indications of deepening commitment has been the profusion of student-conceived courses on alternative vocations...
...They related to me on a very personal, interested basis...
...joint prayer, and summer retreats...
...No matter which way I go I don't get hung up on it...
...Ten years ago major universities did not countenance public appearances by individuals under indictment...
...Approximately fifty law students are active in prison, civil liberties and rights, or legal aid work...
...Achievement Orientation has come back more and there's a more sensible time horizon-" Leslie Rabine, a graduate student who has been active organizing women's groups remarks, "At the point where the Movement was generally at its height there was a lot of reliance on spontaneity...
...Several thousand others rallied to support these demands and heard far-reaching criticisms of American society...
...Although Hargadon is skeptical as to the depth of their commitment and regards the rapid succession of issues as a symptom of "media other-direction," he has become accustomed to application essays on Vietnam, racism and ecology, rather than "My Experiences Fishing with Maine Lobstermen...
...Now that I have Christ, He guides me in my decision...
...I'm less self-centered-He's helped me...
...In the academic sphere, future professors of leftist bent have formed study groups in at least the following departments: History, Political Science and Economics...
...Kenneth Keniston and others have shown that .the contradictions of our society have produced large numbers of "committed" or "alienated" young people who come together in many of our best univer. sities...
...On examination, the notion of a return to the 1950s seems illusory...
...Faculty members with whom I spoke tended to agree...
...And Stanford may not be untypical of the current situation on America's "elite" campuses, from which the movement of the 1960s sprang...
...Fifteen undergraduates are getting a first-hand look at prison through a SWOPSI project, teaching black and Chicano studies and general education to inmates at Soledad...
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