Students: A Chorus of Whimpers

Since the 1964 Free Speech riots at Berkeley, student protests have upset life at dozens of campuses across the nation. Yet one eminent educator firmly believes that the California protest signified not so much a wave of the future as the beginning of an end. He should know; he is Clark Kerr, former president of the University of California.

Speaking to a conference on student political movements in Puerto Rico last week, Kerr argued that campus revolts have their own limitations and, even when successful, carry “the seeds of their own destruction.” To have any effect, a revolt needs an issue to galvanize action, a leader to capitalize on that issue, and a tactic to exploit it. But even finding a focus for rebellion, said Kerr, can be a “wearying process.” Compared with the strongly ideological political activism of the 1930s, the “issue-by-issue protest movement” of the 1960s will prove to be more immediately dramatic and troublesome, but not permanent in the long run.

Kerr believes that student attitudes should sooner or later come to reflect what he feels is the “more conservative direction” of U.S. society as a whole. Moreover, “the basic fact is that the U.S. is not a country given to revolts.” While militant protests will not disappear tomorrow—”it is more likely that there will be a long-drawn-out chorus of whimpers”—Kerr believes that political activism on campus may eventually take on a more peaceable form. “The sit-in,” he concludes, “will gradually join the coonskin coat as an interesting symbol of a student age retreating into history.”