Culture and Rebellion: Dilemmas of Radical Teachers

STUDENT ACTIVISM still looms as the foremost fact of life in schools everywhere. In the past year demands have escalated, tactics have become more disruptive and abrasive, countermeasures more harsh and angry. While it is too early to say what forms both protest and repression will take this year, it is apparent that the character of the student movement has already undergone a decisive change since its beginnings in the civil rights and free speech campaign of the early 1960s. It has become more inclusive in its aims and its membership, more assured that the university is the proper battleground on which to engage a variety of enemies it sees as interconnected: imperialism, racism, corporate liberalism.

The movement seems impatient with nice distinctions: if the university behaves as a servant to militarism even in the smallest way, as a buttress to racism, as a slum landlord, then it has lost its immunity. Its practices expose its ideals of rationality as fraudulent. If the...