An American college student looked out at a sea of protesters and spoke of a machine that had grown so “odious” that it had left people of good will little choice. There must be protest.
“You’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop,” he said. Soon the students would flood into a campus administration building.
That scene played out 60 years ago at the University of California, Berkeley. The words were directed at the university leadership, and referring to its restrictions on campus political activity. But the speech, from the student leader Mario Savio, and the sit-in that followed could have happened yesterday.
The protests against Israel’s war in Gaza that have erupted on college campuses around the United States are merely the latest in a tradition of student-led, left-leaning activism dating back at least to the civil rights and anti-Vietnam War protests of the 1960s.
Often, the protests have played out on college campuses, and sometimes in the same building as previous years: Hamilton Hall at Columbia University, was taken over by students in the protests of 1968 as well as this past week and at least four times in between. Sometimes the protests have seemed to be off-campus adaptations, like the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations of 2011 or the racial justice demonstrations of recent years.
Like today’s protests, most of the older movements were highly polarizing. Some observers at the time praised protesters for their courage and idealism, while others criticized them for being misguided, self-indulgent or guilty of flirting with — or embracing — irresponsible and even dangerous rhetoric and ideas.
A high propensity to offend can seem inextricably intertwined with the fresh thinking that college-age students often bring to the world’s most difficult questions. “When you’re talking about college students, you are talking about people who are barely out of childhood,” said Rick Perlstein, the historian and author, in an interview this week. “People who are barely out of childhood and basically on their own for the first time, and exploring ideas for the first time, sometimes say crazy things.”
Some of the student protests, like the Civil Rights and anti-apartheid movements, helped achieve tangible goals that have become broadly accepted over time. Others continue to stir debate about their wisdom and efficacy. The current movement is notable for the way it has divided not only Americans in general, but Americans who identify as liberal, over the thorny question of when criticism of Israel veers into antisemitism.
Like the older movements, the current one is likely to be the subject of decades of research into its origins, its aims and its aftereffects. In the short term, politicians, including the presumptive Republican and Democratic presidential nominees, are implicitly acknowledging its potential power to sway elections in the way the demonstrations of 1968 are often credited with helping to doom the Democratic presidential candidacy of Hubert H. Humphrey and elect Richard M. Nixon.
Former President Donald J. Trump has called the protests a “disgrace to our country.” On Thursday, after protesters and the police clashed dramatically at the University of California, Los Angeles, and other campuses, President Biden sought a middle ground. “There’s the right to protest,” he said, “but not the right to cause chaos.”
1960s
The Civil Rights Movement
The idea of the progressive college student as a force in public life is a relatively recent development.
“Universities from the medieval era probably up to the 1930s were supposed to be sanctuaries from politics and society,” said Kenneth Heineman, a historian at Angelo State University in Texas. Though student protesters made waves in the earlier part of the 20th century, the template for student protest coalesced in the 1960s, as Baby…
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