Student Protest

The Sixties and After

Gerard J.De Groot

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781138165946
• eBook ISBN: 9781317880486
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

This topical new study takes a new look at the causes, course and consequences of student activism across the world since its heyday in the 1960s. It starts with analyses of some of the most familiar - and romanticised - Sixties protests themselves, in the US, France, Germany, Mexico and Great Britain. It then goes on to examine more recent, and hazardous, examples of student activism, particularly in China, Korea and Iran. Throughout, the tone is hard-headed and analytical, rather than celebratory, exploring the similarities and differences across these protests and asking what they achieved. The contributors to the volume are: Ingo Cornils; Gerard J. DeGroot; Sylvia Ellis; Sandra Hollin Flowers; Behrooz Ghamari-Tabrizi; Bertram M. Gordon; J. Angus Johnston; Alan R. Kluver; Donald J. Mabry; Gunter Minnerup; A.D. Moses; Frank Pieke; Julie Reuben; Barbara Tischler; Nella Van Dyke; Clare White; James L. Wood; Eric Zolov.

PART ONE

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Introduction

CHAPTER ONE

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The Culture of Protest: An Introductory Essay

GERARD J. DEGROOT

On 25 August 1992, Rosebud Abigail Denovo broke into the campus home of Chang-Lin Tien, Chancellor of the University of California. Denovo, aged 19, a some-time student and member of the People’s Will Direct Action Committee, was the self-appointed judge, jury and executioner of Tien – enemy of the people. An Oakland police officer, called to the scene, intervened before she could carry out her mission. She lunged at him, and he shot her dead.

On Denovo’s body was a note which read: ‘We are willing to die for this land. Are you?’ By ‘land’, she meant specifically People’s Park in Berkeley, first ‘seized’ by students from the University in 1969, and the scene of sporadic protest ever since. Denovo’s revolutionary career began in the summer of 1991, in response to the decision by the University to build volleyball courts on the park. At the time of her death she was awaiting trial for possession of explosives, which were found with a hit list of campus officials responsible for the decision to build the volleyball courts. On news of her death, 150 supporters rioted in the park. It is fair to say that Denovo, born in 1973, died in the 1960s.¹

On my first trip to Berkeley during the summer of 1991,1 shared a seat on the train with a woman burdened with leaflets rallying comrades to ‘the defence of People’s Park’. One had to be impressed by her dedication. Not more than 20 years old, she shared the ideals, if not the psychotic self-destructiveness, of Denovo. Memories of the 1969 struggle would have come to both young women as secondhand myth, perhaps handed down by activist parents. Though my acquaintance has probably since graduated and perhaps even joined the ‘establishment’, a new generation of students now defend the park. Each year, recruits are drawn from the pimply-faced first-year students who listen to ‘Maggie’s Farm’ on CD. In the words of Bob Dylan, ‘they keep on keepin’ on’, clinging to the tawdry symbols of an era which exists only in their imagination. They still march and sit-in, but have added to their armoury some decidedly modern weapons: a website and writs filed in California law courts. When history repeats itself, it does so in stereo and living colour.

The People’s Park saga illustrates a central theme of this book. Student protest is not an isolated phenomenon which occurs in diverse locations at distinct times. It is instead a culture, with all the attendant accoutrements: myths, martyrs, ritual, language, costume and formalized behaviour. In her article examining the location of protest, Nella Van Dyke demonstrates that activism which occurred during the 1960s usually took place at institutions which had a tradition of protest sometimes dating back to the nineteenth century. Experience is passed from generation to generation; protesters of the present imitate heroes of the past. This inheritance is passed spatially (across cultures) as well as temporally. As this anthology reveals, students in Mexico, Iran, Korea, China, France, Britain, Germany and the United States borrowed tactics freely from each other. Chinese students in Tian’anmen Square wore headbands copied from earlier Korean and Japanese protests. When protest modes are borrowed, they are grafted onto existing cultural patterns, producing a sometimes strange hybrid. Thus, British students copied American anti-war protests in the 1960s, but did so in a peculiarly British (i.e. moderate) fashion. Students who copy each other often also duplicate each other’s failures and disappointments. Though issues might differ, what is most striking about the panoply of student protest is the resonances between movements.

‘For as long as there have been colleges there have been students who resisted institutional authority, and times when that resistance has flared into protest’, writes Angus Johnston in his chapter. The 1960s are by no means a unique period of activism. Instead, what was unique was the period of quiescence on campus in the two decades before 1960. Students are often at the cutting edge of social radicalism, since they alone possess the sometimes volatile combination of youthful dynamism, naive utopianism, disrespect for authority, buoyant optimism and attraction to adventure, not to mention a surplus of spare time. They perceive themselves as the leaders of a future generation and are often over-eager to thrust themselves into the task of reshaping their society. As Günter Minnerup contends, student protest sometimes signals a Vast tectonic shift’ in the structure of society or politics, even if, when the dust settles, the changes which result are not what they intended.

In the West, a sense of responsibility to society appears to be widely felt among students, but seldom overtly manifested. In contrast, in Asian societies, as Frank Pieke and Alan R. Kluver discuss, the student’s duty to act as a moral guardian for society is deeply enshrined in Confucian tradition. Students are, in other words, expected to protest. They see themselves to an extent as actors, fulfilling their role on a cosmic, historical stage. The passion which fuels their activism even leads to a willingness to sacrifice their lives for the cause. Suicide, often by self-immolation, constitutes the ultimate act of remonstration against the state or leader, and at the same time demonstrates the moral legitimacy of the student activist. While some students in the West have been willing to sacrifice their lives for their cause (Denovo being a prime example), they have been rare. This unwillingness to make the ultimate sacrifice has necessarily constrained the impact of protests in the West. Thus, when members of the Vietnam Day Committee (VDC) vowed to block troop trains by lying across ,the tracks they brought scorn upon themselves because they were quick to remove themselves as soon as a train appeared. On the other hand, those students in the West who have made the ultimate sacrifice have often been judged mentally unbalanced by an intolerant public. When American students set fire to themselves in protest against the Vietnam War, they were not able to lay claim to the same philosophical justification for their act of sacrifice as a Korean student might have.²

But the great weakness of student protest is that it is conducted by students. They are, almost by definition, young, reckless and prone to immaturity. They often espouse a naive vision of the world and employ tactics which, due to their lack of experience, fail to take account of the cruel realities of institutional power. As Bertram Gordon discovered through his interviews with some of the Paris marchers of 1968, hindsight is a unflattering mirror. Though many of the participants in the May demonstrations looked back fondly on their experience, they still admitted to naivety and youthful self-indulgence. Ideals which seemed sublime back then, and tactics which seemed brilliant, now appear embarrassingly immature. Gordon’s findings have resonance for the participants in almost any student movement. Those able to see through the mist of nostalgia often ask: ‘How could we have been so silly?’

Much as students would like to believe otherwise, they are very seldom treated with reverence or respect by wider society. Even in countries with a very high rate of participation in higher education, the university-educated are an elite minority often treated with contempt by those denied the university experience. If education is publicly funded, contempt is all the greater. Thus, as nearly every article in the collection demonstrates, it is extremely difficult for students to gain the support and sympathy of the wider public. They have, admittedly, tried. During the Iranian Revolution, student militants worked assiduously to take their movement to the masses, by going into factories to help oppressed workers – often at enormous personal risk. Similar attempts were made by students in France, Germany and Mexico in the 1960s, but with little success. No matter how determined their effort, the students could not shed their elitist image.

But students have done much to widen the gulf between themselves and the rest of the society and, in so doing, have rendered themselves even more deserving of contempt. Few movements have exhibited the mature self-control necessary to resist childish pranks. Granted, these pranks have sometimes had a serious political message, such as when VDC activists mischievously drew attention to trucks carrying napalm shipments to Bay Area docks, or when Mexican students offered government soldiers free literacy tuition. But all it takes is one protester to claim in jest, before the eyes of the world, that he is more interested in an orgasm than peace in Vietnam, and the credibility of the entire movement is jeopardized. Chants of ‘DISEMBOWEL ENOCH POWELL!’, heard at the University of St Andrews in 1969, must have left bystanders in some doubt about the virtue of the student protesters’ anti-racist cause.³ Too often the pranks are intentionally designed to divide; as if the students feel that the best way to change their world is to emphasize their detachment from it. But, as the VDC experience demonstrates, it is impossible to build a mass movement by thumbing one’s nose at the masses.

Pranks and assorted misbehaviour have left student protesters open to manipulation by their arch-enemies, the establishment. As Clare White demonstrates in her comparison of Robert Kennedy’s and Ronald Reagan’s approaches to 1960s student protest, there is a great deal more advantage to be gained from attacking students than in presenting oneself as their friend. They are an easy group to attack. By playing upon the Berkeley bogey, Reagan built himself a populist constituency which remained loyal to him in every subsequent political contest he entered. Kennedy, on the other hand, tried to attach himself to the student movement, the political equivalent of trying to mount a bucking horse. Had he lived, he would undoubtedly have discovered that the great problem with students is that they do not remain students forever. After graduation, the transformation from dynamic idealist to selfish cynic is, in many cases, rapid. Political affiliations forged on campus are discarded along with flared trousers and love beads.

Students have also learned that the power of the state can be formidable. In Kwangju, Tlatelolco, Tian’anmen Square and on the campus of Tehran University, student activists learned that there are strict limits to the state’s tolerance of their militancy. The massacres of students which occurred in South Korea, China, Iran and Mexico make the actions of the Ohio National Guard at Kent State, or Reagan’s little war in Berkeley, pale into insignificance. Those massacres suggest that while students talking of revolution might be tolerated, threatening real revolution always provokes a massive response by established authority. All four incidents occurred under conditions which defied the usual pattern of protest: in other words, students had begun forming alliances with the wider community. The crucial revolutionary mass was coalescing. But all four examples also demonstrate another cruel truth: guns and blood do put a stop to demonstrations. Around the world, leaders have discovered that the best way to kill a protest is to kill protesters. And, as White, Donald Mabry and A.D. Moses have discovered, the public is strikingly tolerant of retribution meted out against students – rather in the way spanking a spoiled child seems to make sense.

A striking feature of student protest is the apparent inevitability of failure. Most movements do not extend their influence beyond the confines of the campus. If miscreant students are safely quarantined within the university precinct, they can be labelled aberrant, naive, misguided or elitist. When protesters succeed in breaking out of the campus, they are brutally crushed. The lesson which Behrooz Ghamari-Tabrizi derives from his study of Iranian student militants is that it is a mistake for students to engage in the politics of the wider world, that they should confine their attention to their own subculture. Yet there is a paradox in this prescription: if students retreat to their ivory tower they merely exacerbate their separation from wider society and run the risk of being held in even greater contempt. Students who agitate only for the improvement of the campus environment, which the public already views as excessively comfortable and exclusive, are not likely to garner respect outside their community. In all societies, young people are sent to university to prepare for positions of leadership and responsibility which they will assume after graduation. It would seem excessively self-centred for students to confine their agitation to issues relating to campus life – the quality of teaching, the range of courses, or the inadequacies of residence hall provision. Thus, in Korean and Chinese tradition, students who try, through protest, to improve their own lives are scorned for their selfishness. And, as Mabry argues with regard to student protest in Mexico, protests which are confined to campus issues are more easily controlled by the government.

Nor have students been conspicuously successful in agitating for change within the university. On campus, they encounter another form of authority which, though usually more tolerant of their excesses, is just as capable of cynical manipulation. This is ably demonstrated by Julie Reuben, who studied the long-term effects of the 1960s agitation for curriculum reform. The demand for a ‘relevant’ curriculum led students to demand not only new degree programmes (ethnic and women’s studies, for instance) but also new methods of teaching. The success of this protest seems profound. New degree programmes were established and remain a prominent part of the curriculum at many universities to this day. But changes in the methods of assessment, recruitment, teaching, and staff selection were short-lived. American university authorities proved remarkably adept at containing, manipulating and re-directing the tide of change, so much so that, when the shouting ceased and the sit-ins ended, status returned resolutely to quo.

The protest experience, in other words, provides hard lessons. In the 1960s, the times were a’changing, but not quite in the way Dylan predicted. In France, Britain, Mexico, Germany and the United States, it was the students’ opponents who were most successful at shaping subsequent decades. The political right, dominant in the late 1970s and 1980s, made much of the threat of militancy and the dangerous hedonism of 1960s counterculture. This conservative counter-revolution certainly taught students lessons about the character and strength of authority, not to mention the power of tradition. But students also learned some hard lessons about the flaws in their own revolutionary idiom. Contradiction and hypocrisy were not the exclusive preserve of the right-wing establishment. The German SDS preached about an anti-authoritarian culture, but could not survive the departure of its leader Rudi Dutschke. The disenchanted of the Vietnam Day Committee learned that participatory democracy is often a glorified term for anarchy. Women in almost every movement learned that a man can be both a revolutionary and a pig. ‘Guess Who Does the Dishes in the Red Brigade?’ a feature in The Guardian asked in 1983. Noble causes do not make people pure.

A fervent desire to change the world does not automatically mean an ability to do so. Some student activists learned this lesson through experience, some at the barrel of a gun. Others learned the lesson over time, when the ideals of student life refused to take hold in the rocky soil of adult life. A die-hard few continue to live the dream by blocking out reality with incense and cannabis...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Part One: Introduction
• Part Two: The International Student Movement of the 1960s
• Part Three: Reaction
• Part Four: Reverberations
• Part Five: The Ongoing Battle
• Notes on the Contributors
• Index