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Student Opposition in the United States

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2014

Seymour Martin Lipset
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Extract

The emergence of a student opposition movement in the United States in the past few years has received world-wide attention. During the last year, American students have made headlines for their organized opposition to the Vietnam war, and for the now celebrated Berkeley Student Revolt. For perhaps the fist time in American history, the politics of university students has become a major topic of national political discussion. Many articles have been written in newspapers and magazines discussing the nature and sigmlicance of this movement.

Any analysis of the American student movement must attempt to answer the question why student politics in the mid-1960s should be so much more noteworthy than any preceding set of such activities. Before turning to a discussion of this issue, I would like to summarize briefly some of the earlier radical activities of American university students.

Type
Students and Politics
Information
Government and Opposition , Volume 1 , Issue 3 , 01 April 1966 , pp. 351 - 374
Copyright
Copyright © Government and Opposition Ltd 1966

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References

1 For accounts of student protest organizations and activities see Iversen, R. W., The Communists and the Schools, New York, 1959, and Wechsler, James A., The Age of Suspicion, New York, 1953 Google Scholar.

2 See Lyonns, Glen, ‘The Police Car Demonstration. A Survey of Participants’ in Lipset, S.M. and Wolin, S.S. (eds), The Berkeley Student Revolt. Facts and Interpretations, Garden City, 1965, p. 522 Google Scholar.

3 Matza, David, ‘Position and Behavior Patterns of Youth,’ in Faris, Robert E. L., (ed.), Handbook of Modern Sociology, Chicago, 1964, p. 210 Google Scholar.

4 Martin Meyerson, the Acting Chancellor at Berkeley during the spring 1965 semester, noted in a speech to the faculty, that in his twenty years at three major private schools, he had never detected anything approaching the degree of hostility and criticism of the university by the faculty as existed at Berkeley prior to the FSM protests. He commented that when the Berkeley faculty said ‘we’ they did not mean their university.

5 The numbers admitted, however, mean that the range of competence among students at these schools is far greater than at the high level private schools. Thus Berkeley has over 400 graduate students in physics, around 200 in sociology and 350 in political science. Harvard admits around 10 to 15 graduates in sociology per year; Yale takes in fewer than 25 in political science.

6 The pattern of intellectual heterogeneity on the student level at the state universities, as contrasted with greater qualitative homogeneity in the best private institutions, has been documented statistically through the use of Scholastic Aptitude Tests (SAT) which are given to all American entrants to universities: ‘At [Harvard, Stanford, Cal Tech and MIT]… between 70 and go per cent of their entering Freshmen had SAT Verbal scores of over 600. At Berkeley the comparable figure was 30 per cent. At the other end of the scale, none of the private universities had more than two per cent of their entering students with Verbal scores of under 500 or below…. But these distributions, interesting as they are, conceal the fact that Berkeley's very large entering classes ensure that we have as many highly able students as these other selective private universities. In 1960 Berkeley admitted…. 40 students with SAT Verbals of over 650, and almost a thousand with SAT scores of over 600, more than entered MIT and Amherst combined. On the other hand, in that same year we admitted over 500 students with SAT (V) scores of under 450, and over a thousand with scores of under 500, three times as many with scores that low as entered Kutztown State College in Pennsylvania.’ ( Trow, Martin, ‘Some Lessons from Berkeley’, paper presented to Trow the Annual Meeting of the American Council on Education, Washington, D.C., 7 October, 1965, pp. 2–3 Google Scholar.) An analysis of the Berkeley faculty would reveal comparable variations in scholarly quality, more first‐rate scholars than many smaller private schools, and more mediocre ones than many low‐ranking institutions.

7 Lyonns, , op. cit., p. 521 Google Scholar.

8 See ‘Poll Contradicts Students’ Image,’ New York Times, 16 January 1966, p. 66 Google ScholarPubMed. The data from the Playboy Poll were secured from a mimeographed copy of a nm release sent out by the magazine.

9 ‘Campus “1965”,’ Newsweek, 22 March 1965, p. 45 Google ScholarPubMed.

10 Katz, Joseph, ‘The Learning Environment: Social Expectations and In‐ fluences’, paper presented to the Annual Meeting of the American Council on Education, Washington, D.C., 6–8 10 1965, p. 4 Google Scholar.

11 I have discussed many of the factors which affect the politics of students generally in my article. ‘University Students and Politics in Underdeveloped Countries,’Minera, Vol. III, Autumn, 1964, pp. 15–56, and I do not, therefore, repeat them here.

12 Katz, , op. cit., p. 4. A sharply different estimate has been made by Kenneth Little, ‘Academic Protest in the United States,’The Listener, 74, 12 08 1965 , pp. 219–20, 249 Google Scholar.

13 Ukai, Nobushige, ‘Whither Students of Today’, Contemporary Japan, 25, 1960, pp. 702–3Google Scholar.