Humanistic Judaism June 1968
Student power is the new rage. From the primaries of New Hampshire to the austere halls of Columbia, from the computer- campus of Berkeley to the venerable site of the Sorbonne, a new force has been unleashed. Strong enough to retire presidents and to topple governments, it seems like no conventional exercise of castrated academia. It resembles neither panty raids nor football hysteria, neither childish impudence nor pleasurable anarchy. American society is witnessing the emergence of a new and formidable power which cannot be explained away by patronizing cliches.
Incongruity seems the order of the day. The mythology of revolution suggests that the economically underprivileged are the stuff out of which rebellions are made. Lumpen – blacks and unemployed proletarians, who have no vested interest in the established law and order, seem the logical candidates for violence. But the children of the affluent middle-class who derive their status from bourgeois money and bourgeois values and who are trained to sublimate their aggression through verbal argument seem the least likely participants in massive rioting. If students have been pushed to reject their traditional role, the provocation must be extreme.
So what provoked them? The “answers” are legion. Some experts suggest that the long dependence of student life is the irritant. While modern American middle-class children become socially and scientifically sophisticated at an early age, they often remain financial clients of their parents until thirty. Although they are encouraged to think like adults, they are forced to feel like children. The internal tension becomes unbearable and they explode. Others suggest that Benjamin Spock is the villain. His post-war permissive directions for the rearing of children have produced young adults who are contemptuous of all authority and who are unable to endure frustration – some even propose that affluence is the criminal. Raised in an economy of abundance, contemporary children take their material comforts for granted and prefer to be irresponsible.
Most of these critiques are pointless and superfluous. They arise from an uncritical acceptance of the value system of middle-class America. Bourgeois notions of responsibility and maturity depend on a work-oriented success-entered culture. If the values of the culture are bad, then to be responsible and mature within the framework of this society are equally bad. The childishness of one social system may turn out to be the wisdom of another. The goal of life is neither work nor status; it is human happiness.
Perhaps, the cause of the problem lies in the dilemma of a modern industrial society. In an economy of abundance the technology that makes prosperity possible requires intense centralization. It demands the concentration of power in large corporate structures, whether public or private, and the establishment of a managerial glite to run the system efficiently. Available to the new ruling class are the mass media of communication by which they can stimulate and control the desires and needs of the people. The advertising and propaganda assaults of the newspapers and television are intended not only to satisfy old desires but also to arouse new desires. Each new unfulfilled desire is a prod to the citizen to work harder to succeed. The irony of the situation is clear. It is not always the case In our industrial affluence that people work hard in order to satisfy essential needs. The reverse is often true. Citizens are persuaded to need what they don’t really need in order to motivate them to work. Where abundance exists, the tables are turned. The system does not exist to promote the happiness of the individual; the individual exists to justify.
But one “flaw” exists. A culture of science and technology requires vast numbers of educated personnel to staff its operations. It demands institutions of higher learning which sharpen the skills of critical inquiry and analysis. While it “brainwashes” its victims to conform to the success values of the prevailing morality, and subjects them to the impersonal dictation of a centralized economy, it simultaneously elevates their sense of individuality through university training. Frustration and skepticism are inevitable. A college education produces a kind of schizophrenia. On the one hand, it prepares people for a life of middle-class achievement; on the other hand, it promotes the sophisticated outlook that sees this achievement as less than desirable. A system that strengthens personal judgment at the same time that it maximizes impersonal control lives with a social contradiction. Violence and rebellion are the inevitable results.
The university is one of the power centers of our urban culture. As the training ground of our managerial elite, and as the arbiter of high status behavior, it is indispensable to the smooth running of our expanding economy. The college has long since replaced the church as the shrine of American civilization and as the symbol of useful wisdom. Its teachers are the new priesthood; and its buildings are the new cathedrals. Without its graduates and research, our technology would grind to a halt; and without its passionate cooperation, corporate industry would collapse. By its grades and certificates it can grant status and withhold influence. If it used to be true that you had to be rich in order to be educated, it is now true that you have to be educated in order to be rich.
Student rebellion is the result of the power and nature of the university. It is the ironic consequence of encouraging free inquiry in the classroom and forbidding it in the operation of the institution. While it supports the aristocratic cult of individualism in professional discussion, it ruthlessly imposes an impersonal grading and testing system that turns the under-graduate school into a regimented army and the graduate departments into schools for power games and ulcers. While it stimulates the student’s mind to challenge intellectual authorities and think for itself, it subjects the young adult .to a regime of social regulations he never helped to fraie and a roster of academic requirements he is unable to resist. Although the modern college waxes eloquent on the virtues of democracy and exposes the student to all the relevant political literature, it runs its system with the dictatorial aplomb of a high-powered corporation dealing with a mass of illiterate and docile peasants. Education is a penalty for those who are powerless; it only makes institutional hypocrisy more painful.
Because of its monopoly of training, the university has the power to change the corporate structure it serves. But it prefers to be bullied by public opinion. Instead of bold social leadership, it offers fearful compliance. Instead of a genuine cosmopolitan outlook, it suffers from a stuffy provincialism. After all is said and done, the products of prestige colleges all look and talk the same. They are molded for survival in the narrow world of bourgeois success. Other styles of living, whether mystic, contemplative, or aesthetic become only bizarre deviations. Although we have entered the automated economy of abundance, where only the Negro knows-real deprivation, we are trapped by the psychology of scarcity. A technological world that has the power to free man for comfortable leisure is subjected to the propaganda of work, property-possession, and governmental conscription. The task of a modern university is not only to train people for useful jobs; it is especially to give men self-insight into their real desires while helping them cultivate the pleasures of pure learning and open friendship. In a society where the struggle for survival is no longer necessary, the virtues of thrift, hard work, and group loyalty are less important than compassion and freedom.
Most middle-aged Americans are too hung up on the prevailing value system, too caught up with memories of depression and scarcity, to view the. A present student rebellion as anything more than the lawless destruction of property by an undisciplined rabble. While it is true that many of the student agitators are aggressive, power-hungry demagogues, their success would not be possible if they did not articulate a widespread grievance. This complaint is distinct from that of black militants. Negro violence is the result of poverty and destitution, the anger of rejection and deprivation. Student violence is the product of overwhelming abundance, the frustration of wealth without freedom. For the ghetto black who is striving for group survival and power, the need is nationalism and ethnic loyalty. For the middle-class student, who, since the Vietnam war, has had quite enough of the clichés of patriotism, his need is an honest individualism and personal freedom.
It is often said that young people are too immature and confused to really understand what they want and require, while their successful parents are stable proponents of sensible virtue. However, the contrary is often the case. Men and women who have already invested their lives in a particular value system and cannot turn back, have a great need to justify what they do. The greater the doubt, the more passionate is their desire to rationalize their irreversible step. Most middle-class parents are unable to see that their defense of the status quo has less to do with evidence than with the honor of confronting the bankruptcy of their choice. Students, who still have an option, can often see the problem more clearly than older people who do not have the privilege of changing.
The issue of student rebellion is the issue of how the university will use its power. Will the administrators of our colleges be the agents of parents who wish to mold their children to succeed in the existing value system? Or will they open real channels of communication to the students and respond to their articulated desires? Will the university be the sponsor of only one life style, viewing with distaste any deviation from middle-class morality, or will it be an institution of genuine freedom, allowing and encouraging a wide variety of behavior? Most important of all, will the operators and faculty of our institutions of higher learning be passive observers and compliant tools of any regime that pays them, or will they awaken to their real power and use it to maximize the freedom of the society outside?