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In the U.S., a significant facet of the phenomenon is that more students are moving away from alienation and toward highly political activism. While the hippie movement is waning, student power has shifted from passive protest to specific action aimed at accomplishing practical goals. Some youngsters who had despaired of the whole political system, and doubted that they could ever accomplish real change by working inside it, were given a new sense of hope and power by the crusade for Eugene McCarthy in New Hampshire. Following a romantic cause to a remote state, a few thousand students used old-fashioned ward politics to help bring out the vote. The result brought Robert Kennedy into the presidential race. And that—plus student protests against the Administration's Viet Nam policies—had something to do with Lyndon Johnson dropping out.
The latest worldwide wave of student activism started in the U.S. several years ago, partly as a demand for more freedom and power of decision on campuses. It was stimulated by two larger emotional issues. The first was civil rights. In their demonstrations in the early 1960s, U.S. students discovered that they had the power to move legislators to action. And while they would be horrified at the thought, the students—says Harvard Professor Seymour Lipset—learned their tactics from the white Southerners who used civil disobedience to protest the 1954 Supreme Court decision for desegregation of schools. Out of this developed the pattern of sit-ins, lie-ins, marches and some violence. After civil rights, the second issue was Viet Nam. This was not merely a question of sticking up for somebody else; the draft made it a highly personal issue for many students. They did not like the prospect of getting shot at in a war that many of them considered to be unjust and immoral.
Privilege & Permissiveness
The U.S. protests have clearly had an international impact. In Berlin, Rio de Janeiro and Tokyo, student activists study the sit-in and seizure tactics that U.S. students used to protest the war, to desegregate Southern lunch counters and to immobilize the University of California in 1964. When television carries pictures of students demonstrating in London or Manhattan, students in Amsterdam and Prague start marching.
For all their differences of nationality, mood or cause, student activists around the world have many common traits and habits. They tend to read the same authors, particularly the U.S.'s C. Wright Mills, Norman Mailer and Paul Goodman. Their favorite is California Professor Herbert Marcuse, 69, who argues that individuals are dominated and manipulated by big institutions of government and business, and that man has the obligation to oppose them. And they tend to have the same heroes; among them are such disparate Americans as Martin Luther King, Stokely Carmichael and Robert Kennedy, who is now much more popular with students abroad than at home. The far-out radicals idolize not the old leaders of Eastern Europe but such revolutionaries as Ho Chi Minh, Regis Debray and, above all, Che Guevara, around whom grows the martyr's myth.