The Student Revolt against Liberalism

Abstract

During its evolution from the sit-ins and picket lines of 1960, student protest in the universities broadened its base and became more politically active. Increasingly, students became aware of the logical interrelationships between issues being protested within and outside of the universities, and of the stifling effect exerted upon all dissent by the politi cal institutions of the Establishment. Stimulated by the ideas of men like Paul Goodman, Robert Nisbet, C. Wright Mills, Erich Fromm, and Edgar Z. Friedenberg, students rebelled against the Establishment philosophy of "corporate liberal ism," best exemplified, in their view, by the idea of the uni versity delineated in Clark Kerr's The Uses of the University. The students counterposed their own concept of "participatory democracy," as embodied in Tom Hayden's Port Huron State ment of 1962, against corporate liberalism in the university. The revolt at the University of California at Berkeley in 1964, the widespread, and often successful, student protests against university dismissals of faculty members, the "free university movement" which began at San Francisco State College in 1965, and, most recently, the rebellion at Columbia University in 1968—all reflect both the ideology and the activism of the educational protest movement.—Ed.