In the wake of this spring’s sudden spurt of campus protests, some student leaders are talking cautiously of a revival of the spirit of activism that swept American colleges in the sixties. But are U.S. students actually on the verge of launching another nationwide student movement, or are they merely acting out the traditional rites of spring? As schools let out for the long hot summer, that was the question many student leaders were privately asking themselves.
The student uprisings of the 1960’s had their roots in the civil rights movement that blossomed during President John Kennedy’s “New Frontier.” Again today, the U.S. has a new Democratic president pushing human rights. A rising chorus of students appears to be picking up the cry.
But, as today’s student activists are well aware, there have been false alarms before.
In the spring of 1975, a ripple of student unrest spread across more than two dozen campuses from New York to California. Hundreds of angry students picketed, sat-in and rallied over such economic concerns as skyrocketing tuitions and reduced budgets for ethnic studies and minority recruiting.
There were more student demonstrations this spring than in any year since 1970, when some 400 campuses were shut down or disrupted in the wake of the U.S. invasion into Cambodia.
Student leaders claimed the movement was being reborn and that the protests would spread in the fall. They didn’t.
The same student rumblings were repeated in the spring of 1976. But, come fall, all was quiet again.
Street protests, mass rallies and building occupations had become exclusively the product of spring, when students like everyone else needed a tension release.
“We’re very concerned about keeping the momentum going,” admits Ann Henkels, co-student body president at Stanford University where 204 morenne War arrested during a recent sit-in against the school’s investments in South Africa. “Our administration keeps saying it’s just spring fever. They think they can sit back and we’ll go away. But students don’t get arrested just for fun. They’re risking their futures.”
The number of students arrested this spring since 1970 is interpreted by some as a sign of significant escalation of interest in protest politics. They also note that the interests of students appear to be broadening again. After several years of concentrating on “bread and butter” issues (tuition and fees) or other local concerns (supporting a fired instructor), most of the protests in recent months have involved national and international political issues that relate to university life.
Berkeley sociologist Franz Schurmann describes the mood as “similar to the very early ’60s, before the Vietnam War, when you had the Peace Corps, active politicking, and the civil rights struggle.”
Aside from protests at Columbia and the University of Pennsylvania against Henry Kissinger as a “war criminal,” the major issue this spring has been university investments in corporations doing business in racially separatist South Africa.