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Activists are often economically liberated. They take their own prosperity for granted; affluence has become so common and scholarships so plentiful that few students have to work their way through. The youngsters may criticize their parents for devoting too much time to making money, but they like the freedom that money gives them. Describing student activists, the University of Michigan daily said: "They took their tactics from Gandhi, their idealism from philosophy class and their money from Daddy."
Wanted: Relevance & Involvement
Around the world, the first target of the student activists is the university. They feel, with some reason, that their education is not sufficiently existential, that it is not relevant to today's life. They want a larger voice in choosing professors and framing courses. Particularly in Europe and Latin America, student radicals view the university as a microcosm of society, with its lack of class mobility, its numerous bureaucracies, its concentration on material goals. Their aim is to transform the university from a personnel agency for the economy to a more vocal force for social protest and reform. They want it to take over the role once held by such recently tamed institutions as Britain's Labor Party, West Germany's Social Democrats, and U.S. trade unions.
In the U.S., this viewpoint has taken several directions: protests by Boston University students against acceptance of a $500,000 gift from a landlord who once had slum properties (he withdrew the gift); protests by Princeton students against the university's work for the Pentagon-allied Institute for Defense Analyses (trustees are considering disassociating from the institute). In the current uprising at Columbia, extremists forced the university to stop construction of a gymnasium on a location considered offensive to some people in neighboring Harlem (see EDUCATION).
Closely related to the student protests is the growing movement for black student power. From Yale to San Francisco State, Negro activists and some white supporters have sought to make the university become more active in uplift drives in the slum community, to introduce more courses in Afro-American history, and to recruit more Negro students, professors and administrators. In most cases, the administration has quickly acceded to the demands. Last week the trustees of California's 18 state colleges voted to increase, from 2% to 4% of the entering class, the number of Negro, Mexican-American and other minority-group students to be admitted under special standards—that is, not by grades alone.
Needed: Tolerance & Participation
The students have taught the university administration two lessons: 1) some of the changes that they want are really improvements, and 2) the way to deal with student power is to anticipate it, to initiate changes before the students demand them. Administrators who have permitted students to participate in some policy areas applaud the results, say that it prevents protest and often raises standards. Students should be permitted to voice their opinions on dormitory rules, on the performance of professors, and on what courses should be added or dropped.