(5 of 10)
In one sense, the Harvard drama is still an isolated phenomenon. More than 6,700,000 students attend the nation's 2,500 colleges and universities. Fewer than 2% of those millions are destructive radicals, and only a handful of campuses have erupted so far. Still, that 2% amounts to perhaps 100,000 activists, quite enough for a sizable guerrilla war. Over the past year, in fact, disorders have leaped like firebrands from campus to campus—Berkeley, Brandeis, Chicago, Columbia and Howard, to name a few. At Duke and Wisconsin, the turmoil required the National Guard. Black militants and striking teachers closed San Francisco State College for five months, a shutdown punctuated by police raids, arson attempts and bomb explosions.
If perspective helps, student violence has been a recurrent problem throughout history. The college years are those of peak physical energy, a search for identity, freedom and power—all reasons to lash out at frustrating restrictions. Medieval students often scorned learning in favor of brawling and thieving; early American collegians were equally unruly. In 1825, the University of Virginia faculty requested police protection against "personal danger" from belligerent students. Professors at other 19th century U.S. campuses were shouted down, pelted with refuse. Not only have students frequently rioted against one another; they have also started quite a few revolutions.
Happily, there is an antidote for student violence. It is intellectual fulfillment —the discovery of fascinating knowledge under the guidance of a teacher one truly admires. Such was the formula at England's 14th century colleges, the seeds of Oxford and Cambridge, where a mere dozen students lived and learned together with a single master. In the early 20th century, U.S. colleges forestalled violence by offering elective courses and extravagant athletics. The consequent peace was enforced by colleges' acting in loco parentis and the growing national canon that education was salvation. Only a few years ago, U.S. collegians were widely lamented as "apathetic."
Faceless Factory
Today's bewildering change from apathy to anger is partly caused by the fact that most students are now physically (if not always emotionally) about two years older than their chronological ages. Huston Smith, an M.I.T. philosophy professor, believes that the campus discipline system, "designed for adolescents, is now appropriate for high schools and needs to be superseded by a new system befitting adults." Alternatively, many freshmen could enter college two years earlier.