Jerry Lembcke: The Times, They Changed
School's out. That was the news in early May 1970, when hundreds of colleges and universities across the country canceled classes, exams, and graduation exercises, fearing violent student protests against the war in Vietnam. Campus demonstrations and strikes escalated following President Richard Nixon's announcement on April 30 that U.S. ground troops would cross the border from Vietnam into Cambodia. The military's mission was to find and destroy sanctuaries the North Vietnamese army used to support its forces fighting on the South Vietnamese side of the border.
The next day, Friday, May 1, students at Kent State University in Ohio joined thousands of others across the country to mount protests against the invasion that would eventually grow into what news reports called a national student strike. When demonstrations spilled from the campus into downtown Kent in the early hours of Saturday, May 2, Mayor Leroy Satrom requested National Guard troops from Gov. James Rhodes of Ohio. Confrontations between students and guardsmen ensued over the next 36 hours, culminating just after noon on Monday, May 4, when the soldiers fired their rifles at students, killing four and wounding nine. Two of the dead were passers-by who had not been protesting.
Within days, students at other colleges and universities responded with rage at the Kent State shootings. Many campuses closed temporarily in order to dampen the student anger, and some didn't reopen until the fall.
The approaching 40th anniversary of the spring 1970 events invites comparisons with the placid political climate on campuses today, a quietness that prevails even though the nation remains mired in wars as controversial as Vietnam was. "Where's the outrage?" is a common retort of radical elders to the lethargy they see on campuses today. Guardsmen on campus were a problem in 1970; but this spring the problem for antiwar activists is a student culture so quiescent that troops are unnecessary....
The fact is that student culture today is formed in institutional settings that have changed since the 1960s and 1970s.
The higher cost of education, for one thing, defines two paths to an undergraduate degree, and both curtail campus political culture. One path, typical of private colleges and universities, dictates a lock-step progression through liberal-arts curricula preset to move students from matriculation to graduation in four years. Students' packed schedules allow little time for such frivolity as political activism. The other path, typical of public colleges and universities, harnesses many students to full- and part-time jobs in order to pay for their educations, which might extend far beyond four years. Mediating institutions like neighborhood schools and churches, labor unions, or even extended families that may once have helped students integrate their on- and off-campus lives are now frayed by cost-saving consolidations, plant closings, and the greater mobility required for job searches.
And unlike the paths leading beyond bachelor's degrees to careers in the expanding post-World War II economy, those walked by many students today merely lead to unpaid internships and their parents' basement apartments.
The very effectiveness of the student movement's mobilizations in the 60s against the war in Vietnam wrought other changes that mitigate a repeat of that era's radicalism. Disasters like Kent State taught administrators to "never say never" to student demands. Their own ham-handedness having led them to the tactic of "repressive tolerance," presidents and deans put liberal wrappings around innocuous initiatives like "community service" and "experiential learning" and handed them back to students as the new "activism." Want an organization for human/labor/abortion/housing rights? Sure. Want an office and budget with that? No problem. Course credits? We can do that, too.
The proliferation of minor sports and the Title IX decision in 1972 that opened athletics programs to women filled the discretionary hours in college life for still more students. The image of students and faculty members engaged in after-hours plotting to change the world is hopelessly nostalgic. Offers to meet students after class for coffee and conversation about a lecture are rebuffed with "I've got practice" or I've got a meeting."...
Most detrimental to the kind of student mobilizations that closed campuses 40 years ago are the junior-year-abroad programs that began to expand after Kent State. For most students, their first term on the campus is an orientation to college life; the second term is a time to sample some organizational involvements. Those interests deepen during the early months of the second year, and a new generation of leaders begins to emerge. Then, the enticements of study abroad wash over the class: Oxford for poets, Rome for artists, and Oaxaca for anthropologists. Who can resist?
It's the best and brightest who get the tickets, of course, and by spring break of sophomore year, the class leaders, the ones who might have gone to Port Huron in 1962, set their sights ahead and begin withdrawing their commitments to the campus community. On an annual basis, the friendship networks and organizational connections that might have grown into a Free Speech Movement in 1964 are fractured and left for the next year's first-term sophomores to rebuild. Seniors returning from overseas have majors to complete, LSAT's and GRE's to master, and the next round of application forms to fill out—little time to make a better campus, let alone end a war....
Better than questions about the lethargy of student activism in 2010 are inquiries into the times. Where are the 60s? It's the times that have changed, not the students. It's the administrative practices and economic circumstances incubating campus culture that have changed. Those conditions didn't change on their own, however, and they won't change themselves again.