John R. Searle, The Campus War, 1971.

1

THE ANATOMY OF STUDENT REVOLTS

The series of student revolts that spread across the United States and Western Europe, beginning at Berkeley in 1964, constitutes one of the most remarkable social phenomena of our time. Not the least of its remarkable features is that it was not predicted by the leading social scientists and prognosticators of society of only a decade ago. Indeed, the orthodox view of social commentators in the late 50's and early 60's was that such a thing was impossible, for we had come to "the End of Ideology,"1 and the problems of industrial democracy were in large measure solved in such a way as to exclude the possibility of any genuine revolutionary movements.2 Students in [2] particular, far from being radical, were, or seemed to be, eager to join in the benefits of a "technetronic" age. A rationally organized, meritocratic society, with university education as the ladder to success, excluded such "counterproductive" behavior as student demonstrations.

Now, a survey across the country would reveal that there is hardly a major university in the United States which has not been through at least one sizable student revolt. Sit-ins, strikes, marches, the systematic disruption of classes, bombings of university buildings, the counter-use of police, tear gas, mass arrests, the closure, sometimes for weeks on end, of the entire university -- all have become quite common. In the 1968-69 academic year, I cannot recall a week during which a major student upheaval was not taking place somewhere in the United States. The Cambodian "incursion" of May 1970, sparked major disturbances on approximately seven hundred campuses. Not only are the newspapers full of blow-by-blow accounts of the latest crises, but analysts and scrutinizers of the "now generation" offer us a bewildering variety of explanations, interpretations, and proposals. Some regard current student activism as the rise of a new Nazism, others as the greatest hope for the survival of democracy. It is clearly one of those social phenomena in which authors may find what they are looking for.

When it comes to offering causal explanations of the phenomena there is an even wider divergence of opinion. One expert will tell us that student revolt is an Oedipal response of hatred for father symbols, another that it is the product of a loving and permissive family life, still another that it is the result of the Vietnam War and the race crisis, yet another that it is a Luddite's dying gasp of the technologically backward against the electronic computerized era now aborning; another that it arises from the feeling of being redundant in an advanced economy; [3] others that it results from the fact that college teachers spend too much time doing research; another that it springs from fear of nuclear destruction, still others that it comes from not giving students enough say in the running of universities. There is simply no end of explanations, but the fact that the most expert explainers seem unable to agree ought at least to arouse our suspicions. I find many of the now available accounts of current student unrest very unsatisfactory, if only because of their simplistic approach. No one, two, or three "causes" are likely to explain phenomena of this complexity. Furthermore, many of the accounts read as if the authors had made the stuff up as they went along. A Yale psychologist, for example, bases general conclusions about student radicals on interviews with exactly fourteen students -- eleven men and three women.3 Reading his few chummy interviews one is not surprised to find that he fails to note one of the most salient, if not the most salient, psychological traits of student radicals: their hatred, hostility, and urges to violence. One (only one) of my motives for writing this book is my dissatisfaction with the prevailing accounts. Another striking feature of student revolts has been the failure of many of the most respected and able university presidents and other administrators to cope with them successfully: Kerr in California, Kirk at Columbia, Perkins at Cornell, Pusey and Franklin Ford at Harvard, Summerskill and Smith at San Francisco State, Gallagher at CCNY -- not to mention Roche and De Gaulle in Paris -- all have been seriously damaged, some run out of office altogether, by their failure to deal successfully with the upheavals that have rent their universities. Most of these men are professional experts at the problems of administering large [4] universities and dealing with thousands of young people; and unlike the Whiz Kids in Washington who failed so miserably in Vietnam, they were not dealing with an alien population of Vietnamese peasants whom they only imperfectly understood, or did not understand at all, but were dealing with a population of mostly white, middle-class Americans (or Frenchmen, or Englishmen), people like themselves, and their children, or so they believed. Why have they not been successful?

How, in short, is one to explain these extraordinary events? When I have given public lectures on student revolts I have found that adult audiences want to know three things above all else: What caused it (or better, who is responsible)? Is it a good thing or a bad thing? What should we do about it?4 In the course of this book, I shall have things to say about these questions. Superficially simple though they seem, they require complex responses. Instead of attempting to answer them directly, I must begin by considering a prior question: What is happening? That is, what is it that actually happens on a campus which undergoes a full-scale student revolt? Surprisingly most people assume that they know the answer; that the answer can be found in any daily newspaper, that campuses have blowups over particular issues, which for one reason or another the authorities are unable to solve. Just as Tolstoy says at the beginning of Anna Karenina that happy families are always happy in the same way and unhappy families unhappy in different ways, so many people believe happy universities are all happy in the same way and unhappy universities are unhappy in different ways. I believe, on the contrary, that the different specific issues which form the subject matter of [5] student protest -- be they ROTC, black studies, government-financed research, "reconstitution" of the university, or what have you -- are often of only secondary importance, and that in fact unhappy universities are right now unhappy in pretty much the same ways and for the same reasons.

One of the basic "methodological assumptions" behind this book is that student revolts exhibit certain formal mechanisms in exactly the same way that trade cycles, or the pattern of successful political revolutions, or the industrial development of traditional societies all exhibit formal mechanisms. The assumption, in short, is that we are dealing not with a series of isolated incidents but with a comprehensible and more or less discrete social phenomenon.

§1. THE SEARCH FOR THE SACRED

No one can understand contemporary student unrest who fails to perceive the extent to which it is a religious movement. Now, by religious I do not mean that it has any necessary connection with any church or with a belief in the supernatural. Rather, I mean that it involves a search for the sacred. People in general, but especially young people, have a need to believe in something and to act on behalf of something that they regard as larger than themselves. They need goals that they can regard as somehow transcending their own immediate needs and desires; these goals make more tolerable the mediocrity and insignificance of their daily lives. It is this phenomenon, this search for the sacred, which many commentators, both among the students and their critics, have alluded to when they remark on the extraordinary sense of community that springs up among activists in a student revolt; and [6] it is, I believe, the same phenomenon that the commentators are alluding to when they speak of the remarkable idealism and romanticism of this generation of students. It is a centrally important fact, crucial to understanding the international student revolt, that the official institutions of the United States and other advanced Western democracies do not provide adequate outlets for these religious impulses. ,

I shall have more to say about this search for the sacred and how it manifests itself, but at present I want only to note that the models of explanation for human behavior now most in vogue fail to account for it satisfactorily. Neither the Freudian model nor its derivatives offer, for example, a very plausible account of religion; nor for that matter do Marxian and subsequent technological-cum-economic explanations of social behavior. Is it not reasonable to assume that human beings have a basic need for something sacred, which need is quite independent of whatever sexual frustrations they may feel and whatever economic security or insecurity they may have? At any rate, such have been my observations, and another of the "methodological assumptions" of this work is that the religious impulse -- the search for the sacred -- is primary, and is not to be explained as a derivation from some other motive or set of motives.

Besides this search for the sacred, there are two other recurring themes in student unrest, the creation of an adversary relationship and the rejection of authority. Both the creation of intense feelings of community within the student movement and the pursuit of the sacred goals require an adversary. Someone must play the role of the enemy. Indeed, lacking a coherent ideology, the ingroup of US is defined by our shared hostility to the outgroup of THEM. In this respect, the style of this particular generation of student reformers contrasts sharply with that of [7] previous reformers. I can recall, for example, that when I was an activist student leader, we were constantly seeking the cooperation of other groups, even though they did not share our general outlook, and were even seeking the cooperation of campus administrators. It is one thing for groups within a university, recognizing their diverse and even competing interests, to attempt to cooperate in their resolution; it is quite another for relations of hostility to be permanently established within the university. Adult liberal commentators often misunderstand this feature of the style of student radicals. They tend to see the demands of student radicals as being presented in the style they were accustomed to in their own student days, and they cannot understand why the authorities don't come forward with some reasonable compromise. What they fail to perceive is that, in general, efforts at compromise are doomed to failure simply because any compromise with the evil enemy is regarded by the militants as morally unacceptable, a sellout to the enemy.

The adversary relationship requires an adversary, and the candidate is obvious: whoever is in authority. Most contemporary student revolts consist in challenges to and attacks on university authorities. Again, there are obvious contrasts to earlier styles of student unrest. The general pattern of panty raids, riots after football games, riots between competing groups of students, attacks by student groups on the outside community -- all of these have been replaced by forms of unrest that constitute challenges to the authority of the campus administration. In what follows, we shall see these three factors -- the search for the sacred, the creation of adversary relationships, and the rejection of all authority -- at work again and again.

In order to describe how student revolts work I find it useful to construct an idealized model, a model, which though it does not attempt to summarize all of the features [8] of the major student revolts, will nonetheless reveal the workings of the various mechanisms that have been common to a surprisingly large number of university upheavals. The model applies in its simplest form to what we might call the classical period of student revolts, the period beginning in Berkeley in 1964 and continuing through the Harvard revolt of the spring of 1969. The major revolts in this period (with the exception of Paris) were essentially one-campus affairs. Even in France, where the revolt spread throughout the entire French university system, it began in response to local issues and not as a protest against the national government -- though it soon developed into that. In the United States, the People's Park episode in Berkeley of 1969 began to show the possibilities of multicampus revolts, as it sparked protests on several campuses in California; but it remained for the Cambodian invasion of 1970 to produce a nationwide student upheaval. At the conclusion of my exposition of the classical model, I shall show how it applies to the post-Cambodian events. In addition to describing the mechanisms by which successful student revolts work, the model should help us to answer one of the most puzzling questions about student upheavals, how is it possible that a group of disaffected students and a few faculty members can defeat, and in some cases destroy, the legally constituted administration of major universities?

Student revolts characteristically occur in three separately identifiable phases or stages.

§2. STAGE ONE: THE CREATION OF THE ISSUE

Classical student revolts were, or at least appeared to be, about some local campus issue. In Berkeley in 1964 it was about the campus rules on political activity; in Columbia [9] in 1968 about the location of a gym and the university's relation with the Institute for Defense Analysis; in Harvard in 1969 the presence of ROTC on campus; in Paris about the prosecution of some six students at Nanterre for an attack on the offices of the Chase Manhattan Bank, the Bank of America, and TWA; at San Francisco State College the demand for the creation and control of a "black studies" program; at Exeter in England a visitor from the Ministry of Defense; again at Berkeley in 1969, it was about the People's Park. What a bewildering variety of issues! Notice that there seems to be no feature common to all these issues, and perhaps even more surprisingly, few student revolts seem to involve such traditional student grievances as degree requirements, quality of the food and living arrangements, or the cost of education. The widespread student revolts seem to lack any common platform, and indeed they often appear to concern matters only marginally related to the vital interests of students as students. Still, if we look closely enough I think we can discern certain structural features common to all these widely different issues.

First, each issue involves a demand which is a direct challenge to the local administration, and which the administration cannot grant without a major sacrifice of its authority and prestige. At Berkeley in the Free Speech Movement crisis, the administration had just enacted new campus political rules. How could they back down on these rules in the face of the first direct challenge to their enforcement? At Columbia the administration had been planning the gym for years. How could they sacrifice the integrity of their procedures in response to a strident minority opposition? The various demands concerning black studies programs have included student control over faculty appointments and curricula. No normal administration feels it can concede such authority to students, [10] even where it has the final power over these matters itself. Some of the demands the administration simply has no power to grant. In Berkeley, for example, in the People's Park crisis local hippies and radicals demanded that Chancellor Heyns turn over university property to them, something he does not have the power to do. In short, the first feature of the demand is that it should seem at least to the authorities to be ungrantable, something on which the authorities cannot give in. If they do give in, as the Oxford authorities did in the face of massive rule violations in 1968, that tends to be the end of that particular issue, and the radical leaders are forced to cast about for some other issue on which to make a demand.

The second common feature of the various issues is that they relate to what I shall call some Sacred Topic. That is, they connect campus or university phenomena with some major issue off the campus which students are deeply concerned about. In the United States the most common Sacred Topics are race and the war in Vietnam. It is perhaps depressing that civil liberties and academic freedom are not Sacred Topics. Notice the combination of factors emerging in this first stage of student revolt: a demand is made which is a challenge to the authorities and which relates campus issues to a few larger issues in the outside world. This combination of factors is crucial to the subsequent development of the revolt. The way the issues are structured, like the early development of pieces in a chess game, will determine much of the subsequent development of the conflict.

It is commonly but mistakenly supposed that the variety of issues in student revolts derives from a very general sensitivity to injustice which this unusually idealistic generation of students possesses. But a closer scrutiny will reveal that the sense of injustice, far from being general, tends to focus on a tiny handful of Sacred Topics. The [11] average large university commits literally dozens of injustices a month. Many of these are minor and insignificant: a student is given an unfair grade, a faculty member is promoted more rapidly than his intellectual achievement warrants, but they are no more minor and insignificant than the location of a gym. or the presence of ROTC as an extracurricular activity. It is because these latter matters can be related to and because they can come to symbolize deep anxieties and aspirations on one of the few crucial Sacred Topics that they are capable of being exploited by competent radical student leaders, and that they and not other administrative injustices and mistakes become the focus of titanic struggles. It is absolutely essential to understand this point: student revolts are not produced by any generalized sense of injustice but by concern over a limited set of Sacred Topics. It is also essential to understand that the formal structure of a well-managed Stage One requires that

  1. the demand must be regarded by the administration as ungrantable;
  2. the demand must relate a campus issue to a national or international issue. It must particularize some larger anxiety.
  3. The larger issue must concern a Sacred Topic.

Radical student behavior in Stage One is always such as to maximize the adversary relationship with the authorities. What the radicals want from the authorities is always presented as a demand and never as a request, suggestion, or proposal. Often the presentation of the demands involves a series of rule violations as, for example, when the demands are presented to the authorities at the conclusion of an illegal march through the campus, or during a sit-in at the president's office. The behavior is precisely not designed to produce cooperation or manifest a spirit of conciliation and compromise, but is rather an expression of hostility, and generally elicits hostility. Stage One ends when the administration refuses the demands, admonishes [12] the demonstrators to behave better in the future and, ideally, brings some of the leaders to university discipline for rule violations in the demonstrations. Berkeley 1964 and Paris 1968 are still the models of a well-managed Stage One.

§3. STAGE TWO: THE CREATION OF A RHETORICAL CLIMATE

In Stage Two the original issue is transformed so that the structure of authority in the university becomes itself the target. This is achieved by the following method. The fact that the university rejected the original demands, and even more so the fact that the university brought people before disciplinary proceedings for rule violations in making those demands are taken as conclusive proof that the university is the real enemy of the cause of truth and justice on the Sacred Topic. Suppose, for example, that the original Stage One demand was that ROTC should be removed from the campus, or that the university should sever research contracts with the federal government; then the fact that the university rejects the demands is proof that the administration is really part of the military-industrial complex, that it is working in favor of the war. Furthermore, the fact that a student is disciplined for violating rules in the presentation of the demand, say because he was involved in a sit-in at the dean's office, is offered as conclusive proof that the university administration is attempting to "crush dissent" in its efforts to support the cause of militarism, warmongering, oppression, and the values of the establishment generally. Similarly, the fact that the university refuses to allow the black student association to appoint the faculty of the black studies program, or worse yet that a black student is expelled for his part in some disruption, is taken as proof [13] that the administration is really racist. In the rhetoric of this stage, no one. is ever expelled for disrupting a class or engaging in a sit-in; much less is he expelled for violating Rule 12B; rather he is expelled for fighting against racism or trying to end the war in Vietnam.

The most striking tactical device of this generation of student activists is the conversion of student anxieties and aspirations on national and international moral questions into hostility against universities and university authorities. A student is worried about the war in Vietnam or the continuation of racial discrimination. What can he do about it? Not much, or so it would first appear. But suppose you can convince him that the enemy is here at home on the campus, that the president of Columbia is the local repository of racism, or that Harvard administration is actively supporting the napalming of Vietnamese peasants. And suppose, further, that as "proof" of this you can offer the fact that the university refused a demand that was designed to fight racism or militarism, and worse yet that it is expelling from the university the most effective fighters against racism and militarism. Then the indignation is not only further aroused but is particularized against a visible and vulnerable enemy. Large numbers of students who will not demonstrate illegally against the war in Vietnam will demonstrate illegally if they can demonstrate against someone's being disciplined for demonstrating illegally against the war in Vietnam. The original issue is made more personal and "relevant" to their life as students, and above all easier to act on by being redefined with the university authorities as the main enemy. The war in Vietnam is a long way off, and racism in the abstract is an elusive target, but the dean's office is just across the campus.

One of the hardest things for outsiders to understand about student upheavals is how it is possible for an otherwise [14] intelligent young person to believe that he is taking a meaningful action against racism or militarism by throwing a brick through the window of the office of a college administrator. One sees him now, brick in hand, hirsute and unkempt, his face contorted in anger, not yet two years out of Darien, Shaker Heights, or Beverly Hills. How did he get there? What does he think he is doing? What should we do about him? The full answer to these questions will occupy much of this book and goes beyond the scope of this chapter; but a major part of the explanation for his immediate behavior is that he has particularized his general frustrations and anxieties about the war, the draft, and racism against the university and its authorities. This redefinition of the issue so that the university authorities become the main target of the aspirations on the Sacred Topic is crucial to the success of the entire operation and is the essential characteristic of a successful Stage Two.

Again, the contrast with the earlier generations of student activists is quite striking. As an undergraduate at the University of Wisconsin in the early 50's, I was the secretary of an organization called "Students against McCarthy." Our purpose was to fight against the junior senator from Wisconsin in his witch-hunts of that period. It never occurred to us at the time that we might hold the president of the university responsible for McCarthyism; the idea simply never crossed our minds. Rather, we regarded him as quite irrelevant, and indeed, the university as an institution we tended to see either as irrelevant, occasionally as a victim of McCarthyism, or sometimes even as a valued ally in our fight. Similar student activist movements today have treated the university as a primary enemy. And this is a major source of their effectiveness, since universities are far more vulnerable than other candidates as targets. In general, previous student activist [15] movements have not treated the university as an enemy but rather either as irrelevant to the struggles or as a sanctuary and therefore an ally, if only unintentionally, in their struggle with the larger society.

The treatment of the university as the immediate enemy gives an enormous tactical advantage to the militants, but I do not wish to suggest that it is just a cynical maneuver designed to have an easier target than the Pentagon or the governor of Mississippi. Rather, the identification of the university as a source of evil is part of a holistic ideology that goes as follows: the structure of power in America is a seamless fabric. Within this fabric the tentacles (mixed metaphors are common in radical rhetoric) of the military-industrial-educational complex spread from the Pentagon through the White House and right down to the dean of students' office. The university is not just an adjunct or assistant to the forces of evil, but is part of the very fabric of the power structure that governs America and is responsible for the evils we are fighting against. Does the university not do contract research for the federal government? Are not many members of its board of trustees themselves rich businessmen? Does it not have an ROTC program on the very campus? Indeed, do not many of its graduates actually go into -- hideous thought -- business? What more proof could one ask that its policies are determined by the forces we are fighting and that a blow struck at the university is a blow at the very heart of racism (militarism, imperialism, oppression) in American life?

I honestly wish I were exaggerating or parodying this style of argument, but if anything, I have not fully exposed its intellectual poverty. A fairly typical example of radical inference patterns in Stage Two is the following: there are X percentage of black people in the population at large, but there are only Y percentage of blacks in [16] the university (where X is greater than Y). Therefore, the university is a racist university. This particular argument is not some rare little gem that I mined from an atypical leftist pamphlet; it is, rather, the orthodox radical position on the subject of racism in the university.

In Stage Two speeches, leaflets, meetings, rallies, and articles in student newspapers all serve to create a certain rhetorical climate in which charges that would normally be thought to verge on the preposterous can gain currency and acceptability. It is in this stage that serious attempts are made to undermine trust and confidence in the authorities by a combination of wild accusations and expressions of contempt. Thus, for example, in the Columbia upheavals in the spring of 1968 Grayson Kirk, the president of Columbia, was accused of racism and simultaneously ridiculed by Mark Rudd and other SDS leaders. The first of these stratagems says to the uncommitted student, "See, these men are really evil, for they are racists, warmongers, etc." The second says, "You have nothing to fear from them, they are contemptible creatures.." The process of undermining confidence and trust in the authorities is an essential preparation for the eventual radicalization of large numbers of students simply because it enables all of the subsequent actions and utterances of the authorities to be treated in the most unfavorable light. Just as it is necessary to reinterpret the rejection of the Stage One demands as part of a sinister plot, and not, as the administrators themselves saw it, as the rejection of some harebrained demand, so it is necessary to prepare the ground in order that subsequent exercises of authority will serve to destroy that authority. In general, people's perceptions, in politics as elsewhere, are a function of their expectations. Stage Two rhetoric creates a set of expectations, hostile and mistrustful, about administrators that will have [17] spectacular effects on how the administrators are perceived in the course of the ensuing struggle.

It is tempting, and I think rewarding, to compare this style of rhetoric with the McCarthyite witch-hunts of the 1950's. In both cases, there are extreme accusations against those in authority: they are out to get us (loyal Americans/ students); they are working in a conspiracy with our enemy (the Communist Party/the military-industrial complex), all their (liberal/liberal) talk is really a mask to disguise their real aims of (treason/oppression), they are really running this (government/university) not for the benefit of us, the (loyal citizens/idealistic students), but for the benefit of them (the international Communist conspiracy/the corporations and the Defense Department).

Even more striking than the similarities in the formal structure of the rhetoric are the similarities in the style in which the arguments are presented; both are presented with the passionate conviction that our side is right and the other side not only wrong but evil, both eschew detailed argument and analysis in favor of the punchy slogan and the gut-feel emotional response. Both, in short, come on with a kind of populist religiosity. I have been attacked by both the House Un-American Activities Committee and the California State Un-American Activities Committee on the one hand and by several radical polemicists on the other. Stylistically, the attacks are interestingly similar. Both rely heavily on insinuation and innuendo, and both display a hatred -- one might almost say terror -- of close analysis and dissection of argument.

To accuse a professor of conducting secret war research for the Defense Department nowadays has the same delicious impact that accusations of secret Communist Party membership did a decade ago. And one even reads the same sort of nervous apologetic prose on the part of [18] the accused:" 'I was consultant [to the Institute for Defense Analysis] from 1964-67 when I went to meetings and listened and offered comments; however, you will not find my name on the reports,' he said."5 What, one wonders, is a consultant supposed to do if not go to meetings and offer comments? And notice that he does not say, "Yes, I was proud to serve my country working for the IDA." The author of these remarks is a Nobel prize-winning physicist. The ultimate in such accusations -- leaving out such horrendous charges as "He worked for the CIA" -- are "He is in favor of the war," and "He is a racist." Unpopular and dissenting views, such as support of the war or racism, have, in recent years, become impossible to express publicly on the major college campuses, and I fear this condition will continue. I shall discuss this point further in Chapter 6.

§4. THE ROLE OF THE FACULTY

In this Second Stage, two new and crucial elements enter the fray -- the faculty and the television crews. The faculty members who participate in the events of Stage Two are of two kinds, allies of the rebels and mediators between rebels and the administration. It is very important that a few faculty members side with the demonstrators "on the issues." Not many faculty members will actively support rule violations or violence, but by supporting the overall goals of the radical movement they indirectly add a stamp of approval to the activities of the movement and thus implicitly condone rule violations. A fairly common rhetorical gambit at this point is the following: "While no one can endorse the invasion of the president's office (the [19] disruption of Professor X's class, the destruction of the library card catalog, etc.) let us remind ourselves that as we stand here people are dying in Vietnam, children are starving in ghettos. Which is worse: that the papers of some irrelevant professor should be destroyed or that women and children should be napalmed?" The logical form of this argument is that since act A is worse than act B, B is excusable. Again, I can only warn the reader that I am not exaggerating, that such arguments are very commonly used by faculty supporters of radical activity, and in fact the above argument is from a speech I heard by a professor of philosophy. The students themselves often argue: "You object to the violence of the demonstration? What about the violence in Vietnam?" The intellectual weakness of this form of argument is so obvious that one is never quite sure how seriously it is intended. It seems to be: two, three, many wrongs make a right.

Quite apart from conferring a degree of respectability on the radical's image in the university community, the few faculty allies bolster the students' own commitment. One of the most common illusions about student unrest is that student rebels regard the opinions of older people as of no importance. My own experience has been that student activists desperately crave the approval of older people whom they can respect. An undergraduate engaging in a disruption of university operations may be in some sense acting out a role, but it is a role that is afflicted with agonizing self-doubt and is as yet ill-defined. The stridency of his rhetoric should not conceal from us the depth of his insecurity. The apparently passionate convictions of most university demonstrators are in fact terribly fragile, and when away from the crowd many of them are fairly easily talked out of their wilder fantasies. The support of a few faculty members can provide security and reinforcement of a kind that is crucial to recruiting and maintaining [20] a large movement. It is desperately important that students feel that "Professor So-and-So is on our side; he agrees with us."

Since the slogan, "Never trust anybody over thirty" has received such wide publicity it is worth having a close look at it. To begin with, I have never heard it actually said, as opposed to quoted or cited, by anyone over or under thirty. Even its supposed author, Jack Weinberg, a former Berkeley student now over thirty, was quoted, in the news story which first gave this slogan currency, as mentioning this slogan as something that was said; as a saying in the movement. Why, then, is it so frequently mentioned? Aside from the natural journahstic tendency to fasten onto anything that makes good copy, I think that much of its fame derives from guilt feelings on the part of many people over thirty. In many intellectuals, the compromises and adjustments that one naturally makes as one grows older -- by way of getting married, raising children, pursuing a career -- breed a sense of guilt. Such people are troubled by the question, "Have I really abandoned the principles of my youthful enthusiasms?" "Have I perhaps even sold out?" These are the people who seem to be fondest of quoting the slogan, Never trust anybody over thirty, and perhaps its fame derives from their own worry that they are not to be trusted.

The second group of faculty that enters the fray in Stage Two are the mediators. Usually senior professors of liberal persuasion, they are genuinely concerned about the welfare of the university, and fearing an explosion, they attempt to interpose themselves between the militants and the administration. They try to work out some compromise on the issues. The effects of their efforts are almost invariably disastrous. Since the militants are not interested in negotiation and compromise, the mediators [21] are naturally forced to devote most of their efforts to trying to get the administration to back down on some of its stands. And the administration is in a poor position to refuse their requests, imbecilie as these may seem, both because it is reluctant to offend distinguished professors and because in the crisis that is shaping up it cannot afford to offend any sizable portion of the faculty. But often, and indeed usually, concessions made at the behest of liberal mediators do not solve the problems; they merely undermine the authority of the administration further and make Stage Three a messier affair than it might otherwise have been. From the administration's point of view the interposition of the mediators just means they have two adversaries instead of one; from the radicals' point of view the mediators seem a bunch of tiresome old fogies who may, nonetheless, prove useful. The mediators see themselves as saving the university by rescuing it from the impending collision of a pigheaded administration and an overly enthusiastic but idealistic younger generation.

The purest case of the mediators, the textbook case as it were of all the fallacies, was the Ad Hoc Faculty Group at Columbia. Though sincerely attempting to mediate between students and administration, its net effect was to undermine further the administration and strengthen the hands of the demonstrators. As the Cox Commission report, in its wonderfully leaden prose, comments, "In retrospect therefore the intervention of the Ad Hoc Faculty Group, despite its gallantry and high motivation, appears to have had unfortunate consequences. Its initial proffer of a faculty strike and threats of physical intervention to bar the entry of police lent an air of legitimacy to the students' use of physical power as a way of influencing university policy and administration. The delay of police [22] intervention from Friday to Tuesday at AHFG's request increased the risk of violence and the shock of the administration's decision to call the police."6

In all of the university struggles there is no more touching spectacle than the sight of senior liberal professors in the full cry of mediation. Mostly sociologists, historians, and political scientists, they bring to bear on the problems of the university a lifetime of study of human conflict, a sincere commitment to the values of the institution, and a nearly complete lack of intellectual grip on what is happening. When one reads their publications, such as the resolution of the AHFG or the majority report of the student-faculty commission on university governance at Berkeley, one would have to have -- to paraphrase Oscar Wilde -- a heart of stone not to burst out laughing. Still, they are a greater long-range threat to the movement than they are to the administration. Their whole mode of sensibility is such as to blunt the naked edges of all conflict, to sponge up all real confrontation into their resolutions and committee reports and in-depth studies. When they get through with you, the fierce cry of your radical rage has been analyzed, dissected, diagnosed, sympathized with, and ultimately buried in the bowels of some musty report.

§5. TELEVISION

In watching the interaction of television and student uprisings it seems to me clear that television has at least the following three identifiable effects: it helps choose the leader of the movement, it dignifies the proceedings, and it spreads the phenomena. [23]

The mechanisms by which television -- and the media generally -- help to select the leader of a revolt are not generally well understood. What most people suppose is that the militants get together and vote for a leader, and then the person so selected becomes the spokesman of that particular student movement; he addresses the television cameras on their behalf. But that almost never happens; in fact, I know of no radical student leader who was selected by any such procedure.

What happens is that among the many speakers who speak out at rallies and meetings, some are more telegenic than others; and the TV reporters and cameramen are professional experts at picking the one who will make the most interesting news shots. Remember, they can use only a small amount of footage anyway, and the basic constraint on all television news programs is that they must provide dramatic entertainment. The man the television people pick for the news shot will normally become the leader or spokesman or symbol of the movement. Of course, his selection has to be approved by the movement, so any TV selection is subject to subsequent ratification by the crowds. If they don't like him, the TV people have to find somebody else, but among the many leaders who are acceptable to the demonstrators television plays an important role in the elevation of one or another.

The three most striking examples of this are Mario Savio in Berkeley, Daniel Cohn-Bendit in Paris, and Mark Rudd at Columbia. All of these people had relatively little leadership position prior to Stage One, but, as a result of their own qualities and the fact that the media chose to present them to the world as leaders, they were elevated to the status of leaders, at least symbolically. Both Savio and Rudd, to their credit, have complained of this television exaggeration. Actually, I think the purest case of mass publicity as a factor in the selection of a leader is [24] Cohn-Bendit. Both Jacques Sauvageot, the leader of the National Union of French Students (UNEF), and Alain Geismar, the head of the university teachers' union (SNESup), were authentic university leaders well before Stage One ever got going, but neither is much good on TV, so neither ever attained Cohn-Bendit's symbolic stature. Their case is the more interesting because they did at least have considerable television exposure, along with "Danny le Rouge"; the three of them appeared together on television on several occasions. Nancy Mitford, living in Paris at the time, referred to the trio as they appeared on TV as "Fat Boy, the Savage, and Cohn Bandit." Of the three, Cohn-Bendit was easily the star of the show. Another interesting comparison is with Alain Krivine, founding member and head of the JCR (Jeunesse Communiste Revolutionnaire), an extreme Trotskyite outfit, and by some accounts the most able, effective, and intelligent revolutionary leader in Paris in May of 1968. Unless you live in France or make a hobby of student revolts, you have probably never heard of him. Why not? The media simply never picked him up, as they did Cohn-Bendit. Berkeley and Columbia also had their Krivines -- hard-working, intelligent, dedicated student revolutionaries, but they never made it big on television.

Television also dignifies -- one might almost say, glamorizes -- the proceedings in the following way. If a student who demonstrates at noon can go home and watch himself on the six o'clock news, it suddenly means that the noon behavior is lifted out of the realm of juvenile shenanigans and becomes genuine historical stuff. If you are there on the box, it must be pretty serious, an authentic revolutionary event. And indeed in the United States, the ultimate in certification of any student revolt is that it should make one of the national news broadcasts, either NBC news or Walter Cronkite. Because the participants often judge the [25] success or failure of a campaign by the amount of publicity it receives, many student demonstrations are staged at least in part for the benefit of the television cameras. I can recall several occasions in Berkeley on which radical students had informed television stations prior to performing some act of defiance, for example, a violation of the university's time, place, and manner rules, so that the authorities arrived on the scene to find the cameras at the ready for the confrontation.

A couple of examples will illustrate these points. I once heard a brilliant speech by Noam Chomsky on the war in Vietnam; in a large hall and well attended, it received an enthusiastic response from the audience. But in the question period one young man rose in a state of high indignation. The whole thing, he said, had been a waste of time. Why? Because no one had summoned the television crews. Without the presence of TV it simply did not count. It lacked the highest form of reality. Again, when Jerry Rubin was to be subpoenaed by the House Un-American Activities Committee he arranged, with the cooperation of the committee, to have the whole scene televised on the Berkeley campus. He was not a student, the committee had nothing to do with the university, and the TV stations are not under his direction. This case also illustrates a symbiotic relationship among the extreme right, the extreme left, and the media -- all at the expense of the university -- which we have seen over and over again in California. In Rubin's career, this incident is only one among dozens; and indeed he and Abbie Hoffman are the purest cases of radicalism as showbiz. In Rubin's first appearance before the House Committee he wore a uniform of the American Revolutionary Army rented from theatrical outfitters, in his second he was stripped to the waist and carried a toy rifle and bandolier of ammunition. On both occasions he stole the show. [26]

Not since the era of Joe McCarthy has a group of extremists exploited the media so effectively as the current generation of student radicals. What is the basis of their success? The first point is that campus demonstrations are ideal telegenic events. A successful television news program is one which makes visually dramatic entertainment out of current events; but the trouble with this requirement is that most important current events are not visually dramatic or entertaining. How, for example, does one dramatize the bank rate? But campus demonstrations are perfect for television: they are dramatic, colorful, often violent, and in slack moments the cameras can rest on the bearded barefoot hippies in wild clothes or the good-looking longhaired girls. Even at their most boring, the young make better TV than the old or middle-aged. For sheer telegenic material, student unrest is hard to beat, and there is no problem in getting the television crews to attend the demonstrations.

But the second point is more subtle, and, I think, more important. Television news shots are watched by the viewer on the unconscious assumption that he is a spectator at events which occur independently of the act of televising them. The camera, he supposes, is an observer, not a participant; it records, but plays no causal role in the scenes recorded. Now this unconscious assumption can be and is exploited in the following way. An event can be staged for the media which will then be reported as if it would have occurred in precisely that form independently of the presence of the media. The dramatic impact is provided by the combination of the visual quality of the scene plus the sense of reality, the viewer's assumption that he is seeing real life. All the organizer has to do, then, is provide the visually dramatic, and the media and the viewer will supply the rest. If we stage an event with an eye to its telegenic qualities, it will succeed [27] precisely to the extent that it is (a) visually dramatic and (b) not perceived as having been staged with an eye to its telegenic qualities. And it is in the interest of the TV news teams to conceal from the viewer (and from themselves, if possible) the extent to which the scenes are staged for the cameras. For their task is not to provide a comprehensive picture of an independently existing reality -- if they did that they would produce the most boring TV show in the world and no one would watch -- but to provide dramatic entertainment based on current events. So certain structural features of the communication situation -- the viewer's belief that he is seeing unadulterated reality, and the need of the media to encourage him in this belief -- enable the sophisticated radical organizer to shape the public's perception of events in ways that go far beyond the abilities of the campus administration to present its side of the story.

The widespread television publicity and the glamorized television version of student demonstrations has, I believe, been one of the main factors in the spread, nationally and internationally, of student revolt. Young people almost everywhere watch these television programs. The desire to imitate these great goings-on spreads to the most obscure colleges and even infects the high schools and junior high schools.

§6. STAGE THREE: THE COLLAPSE OF AUTHORITY

The elements of the scenario have now been assembled for the transition to Stage Three: we have a local issue that ties in with a Sacred Topic, a rejection by the administration of non-negotiable demands, the discipline of a few leaders, an escalation of rhetoric against authorities, a few small groups of faculty members becoming active [28] in the conflict, and television stations regularly filming large outdoor demonstrations. The campus, in short, is seething, it is ready to explode. At this point there is a large-scale illegal demonstration against the university on the issue of Stage One as transformed by the rhetorical impact of Stage Two. In the mid-60's in the United States this demonstration took the form of a peaceful sit-in, but in later years, Columbia, 1968, and after, it evolved into the seizure ("liberation") of a building, complete with barricaded doors and windows, and in several cases it consisted of roving bands of militants smashing windows and disrupting classrooms and libraries. (In Paris it was also a matter of building street barricades. This puzzled me at the time, for we do not build street barricades in Berkeley; it seemed to me a messy aspect of what was otherwise a beautifully managed revolt. However, one must remember that street barricades are an old French tradition. In spite of Haussman's widening of the boulevards, when a Frenchman wants to revolt he builds a street barricade. He is aided in this endeavor by the presence of lots of small cars that can be used as barricade building material.) When the sit-in or seizure occurs, the university authorities are strongly inclined to and often do call in the police to arrest the demonstrators. When that happens, if all has gone according to plan, we enter Stage Three and we enter it with a vengeance. The first characteristic of Stage Three is an enormous and exhilarating feeling of revulsion against the calling of the police. The introduction of hundreds of policemen on the campus is regarded as the ultimate crime that any university administration can commit, and a properly led and well-organized student movement will, therefore, direct its efforts in Stages One and Two into creating a situation in which the authorities feel they have no choice but to call the police. Large numbers of faculty members [29] who have so far watched nervously from the sidelines, vaguely sympathetic with the students' rhetoric but unwilling to condone the rule violations, are suddenly liberated. They are rejuvenated by being able to side with the forces of progress against the forces of authority: the anxieties of Stages One and Two are releasedjn a wonderful surge of exhilaration. We can hate the administration for calling the cops instead of having to tut-tut at the students for their bad behavior.

But the euphoria of the mass of the faculty is as nothing compared with the feelings of student activists and those few faculty who have been involved from the early days of Stage One. Not only do they feel an enormous sense of achievement but, as is characteristic of genuinely revolutionary situations, there is a tremendous sense of possibility, a sense that with the collapse of authority the slate has been wiped clean, and they can build a completely new university; a sense that, as the newspapers invariably remark of every university that ever reached Stage Three, "The university will never be the same again." Life offers few feelings as intense as those of having fought and won a holy war. A young philosophy professor at Columbia remarked afterward about their Stage Three: "One judged people not by the question, 'Which side were you on?' but simply, 'Were you there?' "

And this euphoria spreads throughout the great mass of students. At Paris, "In that first unforgettable week the most striking quality of the student explosion was joy . . . it all seemed wild youthful exhilaration, full of a crazy utopian hope. There was a spontaneous surge of the spirit, expressed in the marvelous claim scrawled on the faculty wall: 'Here imagination rules!' "7 "At Columbia more than [30] a few students saw the barricading of the buildings in April as the moment when they began meaningful lives. They liberated buildings and flew the Red flag. Men and women shared alike without restraint. The marriage ceremony performed in a liberated building by a chaplain attached to the university symbolized the glorious moments of truth. . . . The mixture of political and social romanticism varied widely from individual to individual. Many took part without political motivation."8

At Berkeley at the climax of the FSM the same touching enthusiasm prevailed. Faculty members wept with joy -- I among them -- and students spontaneously embraced on the plaza. And, as one of the surest indices of Stage Three, the student health service reported a sharp decline in the number of students seeking psychiatric help. Whatever else the revolution may be, it is excellent therapy. At the end of the great December 8 meeting of the Academic Senate, the thousands of students waiting outside the auditorium formed a corridor flanking each side of the entranceway, and as the professors emerged they surged into a tunnel of wildly cheering enthusiasts in an orgiastic union of students and faculty. One distinguished intellectual historian, tears streaming down his face, told me that it was the most moving thing he had ever seen in his life.

All of this is pure Stage Three; it is also, as we shall have occasion to examine later on, a quasi-religious phenomenon; perhaps above all, it is enormous fun. The modern university, and indeed modern society generally, offers the young middle-class student nothing that can compare with it by way of fulfillment, meaning, excitement, and sheer all-round good times. [31]

§7. THE POLICE

The men who make all this possible are the local police forces (and on occasion the National Guard). Their behavior, and indeed their very presence on the campus in large numbers, serves as does no other single factor to undermine the authority of the administration, which is held responsible both for the police presence and for their actions. The real collapse of authority comes when authority is most vigorously exercised in the form of large numbers of uniformed policemen coming onto the campus to arrest hundreds of student demonstrators. In the United States, at least, the mere physical appearance of the police is so profoundly alien to the entire faculty mode of sensibility as to send a frisson of horror through almost any faculty member when he sees them on the campus. Their garish uniforms give them the appearance of armed astronauts. Their glossy plastic helmets are done up in motel bathroom colors, electric blue or speckled orange. Their waists are festooned with the paraphernalia of organized violence: guns, clubs, gas masks, walkie-talkies, and Mace. Plastic face masks, motorcycle jackboots, and leather jackets or coveralls complete the outfit, and physically they all appear to be built like interior linemen for the Green Bay Packers. The shock effect of all this in an academic environment is really quite remarkable; outrage seems the only appropriate emotion.

In England the effect of the appearance of the police is somewhat different, because like most things in England, the police uniforms are about a century out of date. Unarmed British police in large numbers got up in the traditional Bobby uniform look like nothing so much as musical comedy actors, and the sight of them charging about does not produce the same exhilarating sense of [32] horror as does the sight of American police, or the French CRS, who are perhaps the most sinister-looking of all.

In the transition to Stage Three the more police brutality you can elicit by baiting and taunting (or the more the police are able to provide by themselves in the absence of such incitement) the better. However, as any competent leader knows, police brutality is not strictly speaking necessary, because any large-scale mass arrest will produce accusations of police brutality no matter what happened. Furthermore, much of the academic community regards the mere presence of the police on the campus as a form of atrocity. The police do not know how to behave in a campus environment. They come on the campus nervous, frightened, confused, and ill-trained. Almost everything they do serves to aggravate an already disastrous situation.

In the face of the sheer horror of the police on the campus, the opposition to the movement, especially the opposition among the liberal and moderate students becomes enfeebled and usually collapses altogether. This was most strikingly evident at the great Harvard demonstrations of 1969: before the arrival of the police fairly large numbers of students had rather vigorously expressed disapproval of the occupation of the buildings. The police raid silenced this opposition.

After the occupation by the police there is a general student strike and quite often the campus will be completely shut down. Furthermore, the original demands of Stage One are now only a small part of a marvelously escalated series of demands. Sometimes, as in Paris, the original demands may be pretty much forgotten; who, for example, could remember on the barricades what Cohn-Bendit had agitated for back in Stage One? A typical list of Stage Three demands would comprise the following: [33]

The president must be fired. (If you can reach a fullblown Stage Three, he may well be fired, in fact.)

There must be amnesty for all. (Sometimes, as at Columbia, this becomes the main demand, and we have the paradoxical situation of people demonstrating for the right not to be punished for their demonstration.)

The university must be restructured so as to give the students a major share in all decision-making.

The administration has to be abolished, or at any rate confined to sweeping sidewalks and such.

The university must cease all cooperation with the Defense Department and other such pernicious official agencies in the outside community. Further, in a few cases the demands will be escalated to encompass the entire society, as at Paris, where it was also demanded that

Capitalism must end now,

and

Society must be reorganized.

§8. THE FACULTY MEETING

The presence and the activities of the police create a vacuum of authority on the campus; that vacuum is filled by the faculty. It is no exaggeration to say that a student revolt can only reach final success in Stage Three with the support of the faculty, and normally that support will be expressed in massive meetings of the faculty after the arrival of the police.

Whereas in Stages One and Two only small numbers of faculty militants and mediators were active, Stage Three sees a large-scale frenzy of faculty activity, even on the part of many who have never been politically active in their lives. My observation has been that among the politically inexperienced, mathematicians and natural [34] scientists are particularly susceptible to the charms of Stage Three. They embrace it with the same elephantine enthusiasm as a middle-aged man falling in love for the first time with an adolescent girl. Ad hoc committees spring up in profusion. They are sometimes quite large; I was once a member of an outfit called the "Committee of Two Hundred." Alliances are formed and petitions circulated. The faculty government, by tradition a sleepy and ill-attended body that gently hassles about parking and bylaws is suddenly packed with record numbers of passionate and eloquent debaters. There are endless amendments and fights over the symbolism of a whereas clause. Great victories are won and symbolic defeats sustained. Also in the general unhinging of Stage Three, many faculty members unearth all sorts of long dormant grievances they have against the administration.

The typical climax of a successful Stage Three is a large meeting of the entire faculty that ratifies the student demands and more or less ambiguously condemns the administration. In the purest cases, these meetings acquire an almost ritualistic or ceremonial quality, with the resolutions, the order of the speakers, the amendments, indeed, everything but the final vote count, worked out in advance. In order to avoid chaos in a faculty meeting of several hundred, the meeting has to be rigged in advance. In Chapter 4 I shall explain how these meetings are rigged. To the extent that the militants have been successful in structuring the issues and mobilizing support, and to the extent that the meeting has been properly rigged, the final vote should be in the nature of a pro forma plebiscite. In Berkeley in 1964 we voted the great free speech resolution by a margin of over seven to one.

An unfortunate by-product of all these goings-on is that very deep and abiding hatreds and hostilities grow up among various factions in the faculty. Those who are [35] active find that their political role is more important to their standing in the community than their scholarly achievement. No matter what the issues, more energy is expended on hostilities within the faculty than on any battle with nonfaculty targets, and the passionate feelings usually go far beyond those found in the democratic politics of the real world. Like nuns struggling for power in a convent, many university professors seem to lack the distance and detachment to see Stage Three university politics for the engagingly preposterous affair it usually is.

With the ratification by the faculty of the militants' demands, when they "side with the students," the cycle is complete. From the original selection of an issue by a small minority in Stage One, we have reached the fullblown revolutionary ecstasy of Stage Three. The place is shut down, the president is looking for a new job, commissions are being set up to discover how it all happened, other commissions to reform the university, the newspapers are saying the university "will never be the same again," and for the moment at least the effective authorities are a handful of fairly scruffy-looking and unplausible-sounding student leaders. How does it work? What are the fuels on which the mechanism functions? What does it tell us about our universities that it has worked so well and so often? And what changes have occurred in the operation of the model in the many years of student revolt?

These and other questions will occupy us in the ensuing chapters. Before attacking them, I need to make the usual academic qualifications about the model. It is intended only as an analytic framework and not a complete empirical generalization. Certainly not all successful student revolts go through these three stages, and I can think of many counter-examples (one of the reasons for the administration's success in Berkeley in 1966 is that by [36] calling the police on the first day it went directly from Stage One to Stage Three without an intervening Stage Two, and thus caught everybody off balance). Furthermore, the degree to which militant leaders are actually conscious of the mechanisms I have described varies greatly from university to university and individual to individual. In order for intelligent people to behave really badly over a prolonged period of time a great deal of idealism is necessary, and nothing in the above should be taken as discounting the idealism of the militants and their followers. The purpose of the model is to describe a common pattern of events that has occurred in many places and with quite different issues; it is intended as an "ideal type" model for social phenomena.

§9. CAMBODIA AND AFTER

During the late 60's there were several crucial changes that occurred affecting the operation of this model. First and most obvious was the steady increase in the level of violence in student demonstrations (I shall discuss violence in more detail in Chapter 2); second was the growth of a national climate of rhetoric, mostly due to the Vietnam War, that made hostility to and mistrust of both university and national institutions and leaders commonplace on college campuses, and third was a growing class-consciousness on the part of students all over the country. All three of these were manifest in the response to the Cambodian invasion of the spring of 1970, and it is to a discussion of these events that I now turn.

Almost all of the mechanisms that operate in classical one-campus revolts operated in the national upheaval following the Cambodian invasion. Just as the behavior of the police on various campuses has undermined authority, [37] so the killings at Kent State, and to a lesser extent those at Jackson State, had a spectacular nationwide effect; the ultimate exercise of police authority on two campuses discredited campus authority almost everywhere. Notice that the events at Kent State and Jackson State are both logically and empirically unrelated to military operations in Cambodia; the Nixon Administration was rightly dismayed at being blamed for them, but somehow in these moments of great emotion, everything becomes mushed together, and the national government can get blamed for police excesses just as campus administration is blamed for national policy -- as well as police excesses.

The Sacred Topic was particularized on apparently dozens, perhaps hundreds of campuses in the following way. Just as the construction of a gym was once made to appear as a form of racism, and the presence of ROTC as support for the war in Vietnam, so merely carrying on education, conducting "business as usual" was made to appear as somehow condoning the Cambodian invasion and even the Kent State and Jackson State killings. Note also that the brunt of the attack by the radicals was still directed at the universities, not at the national government, where policy might actually be influenced. When I worked in Washington in the summer of 1970 the many students I met who were also working to end the war -- in the Committee for an Effective Congress, or in lobbying efforts on the Hill, or in Allard Lowenstein's office -- were not "radicals." The most militant elements in several places, notably Berkeley, used the occasion of the Cambodian invasion to attack the very citadel of the university, the classroom. Their main efforts were directed at "reconstitution" of the classroom into a political action group to be controlled by the radicals.

One feature of the classical model requires special emphasis. Successful student revolts undermine authority [38] by provoking exercises of authority. The strategy which makes this possible is to unite existing mistrust of authority on the part of large masses of students, as well as the frustrations and anxieties that afflict these students, with genuinely idealistic impulses on one of the Sacred Topics in such a way that assaults on university authority become a method of expressing that idealism. Each new exercise of authority then becomes further proof that the administration is an enemy of the idealism, and this serves to undermine authority even more. The transition from each stage to the next, remember, is produced by the exercise of authority; and eventually, with the behavior of the police agencies, if all has gone according to plan, campus authority collapses altogether. The strategy, in short, is to pit "the students" (the semantics are important: it has to be "the students" and not "the radicals" or "the small minority") against "the administration" in a fight that appears to concern a Sacred Topic and then to undermine the administration by provoking exercises of authority of a sort that will serve to discredit it. The three stages, then, should be seen as a continuous progression beginning with the creation of an issue (or issues) and ending with the collapse of authority.


Notes

1 Daniel Bell, The End of Ideology; or the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties (New York: Free Press, 1965).

2 Seymour Martin Lipset, Political Man: the Social Bases of Politics (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1960), p. 406.

3 Kenneth Keniston, Young Radicals (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1968).

4 These audiences are more sophisticated than audiences of student activists. Activists only want to know the answer to one question: "Are you for us or against us?" 5 The Daily Californian, November 5, 1968, p. 1.

6 Cox Commission Report, Crisis at Columbia (New York: Random House, 1968), pp. 152-153.

7 Patrick Seale and Maureen McConville, Red Flag/Black Flag (New York: Ballantine Books, Inc., 1968), pp. 71-72.

8 Cox Commission Report, Crisis at Columbia (New York: Random House, 1968), p. 9 [italics mine].