Education: Campus Conservatives

In the 1950s, U.S. college students were deemed to be a "silent generation" of "apathetes" who burrowed in "privatism" like gophers with tired blood. Looking at their "closed, watchful" faces, one professor howled: "My God, feel something! Get enthusiastic about something, plunge, go boom, look alive!"

Last year they went boom. Fueled by the spark of Southern Negro sit-in strikers, Northern students picketed Woolworth stores and "marched" on Washington. Others denounced everything from dull teaching and nuclear testing to compulsory R.O.T.C. and the House Un-American Activities Committee. Last fall both presidential candidates drew...

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