AMERICA « In Which 1969 Lurks Dangerously Close to the Surface »
Wednesday, June 16, 2010 at 11:28PM The following appeared in the Dec. 12, 1969 issue of Life magazine.
Campus '69: The Quiet Year - So Far
"The radicals are suffering from a case of the blahs, the liberals are frustrated, and there seems to be no movement in any direction except back toward oneself." No one voice can speak for America's eight million college students, but this comment by a University of Colorado undergraduate comes very close to summing up the mood on campus. A stillness has moved across a scene which as recently as last spring was loud with noisy confrontations.
Yet the stillness is hardly serenity. The hard issues - the draft, Vietnam, drugs - are still deeply felt. Concern is too ingrained for a return to the cool detachment of the 1950s: "My education," complains one Smith girl typically, "is impinging on my learning." And if most students are pulling back to reexamine their commitments and tactics, at a few campuses, the fire is still dangerously close to the surface.
Possibly the change in temper is mostly one of form. The strategy of head-on dissent, however successful, proved to be too painful to sustain. But there will be new strategies. Black separatism has been so widely accepted by students (and administrations) that its attraction as a cause has waned, but there are already new issues - local politics, ecology ("If we don't solve our environmental crisis today," says a Stanford student, "we won't be here to solve anything in 30 years").
For a look at the complex mood of America's campuses, Life asked student writers and photographers at a variety of colleges to interpret the scene for themselves. Their reports are necessarily personal, and arguable, but at the same time they are honest and revealing about their generation.
Some enterprising University of Wisconsin students are getting away from it all by renting tumbledown farmhouses. Even large houses rent for as little as $75 a month.
University of Wisconsin
Unlike Berkeley or Columbia, the Madison campus is a cloud-cuckoo land comfortably distant from noisy, dirty reality. Here life magically transforms itself into allegory. The geography of the place supplies a delicious irony all its own, for the state mental hospital lies directly across the lake from the Student Union.
The central meeting area is the Rathskeller, a vibrating, fetid, womblike place. Despite the unseen but verified presence of police informers masquerading in bell-bottoms and faint traces of beard, the Rathskeller is the Aquarian utopia. One learns very quickly how to study in it, how to luxuriate under the blanket of noise and body heat without disturbing the contemplative peace. Though the silverware is made of plastic and the coffee cups are Styrofoam, the atmosphere is congenial.
Still, even in this ideal society, there are hierarchies of a sort. Black students tend to gather in a little corner next to the cash register, and once a student who refused to pay for an undersized piece of pie was threatened with arrest by the manager, who flashed the badge of a university policeman.
Sometimes things are disturbing in more subtle ways. Moral schizophrenia manifests itself when students call policemen "pigs" but take umbrage when a legislator calls welfare mothers "swine." Guilt seems to be a campus disease, as evidence by the fact that fraternities and sororities feel a need to justify their activities by involving themselves in conspicuous charities.
Much of the hypertension on campus stems from the university's use of city riot police to break up a sit-in against Dow Chemical two years ago. Since then, the police and the National Guardsmen have appeared at the slightest provocation. Small wonder that there is a growing exodus by couples and groups to farmhouses in the lovely rural communities around Madison where living is both cheap and peaceful. JOSEPH McBRIDE
After participating in a Moratorium rally, a girl at the University of Chicago goes off to be by herself.
University of Chicago
Chicago considers itself the last outpost of the life of the mind. The students study a lot, partly because there isn't much else to do. The radicals say the students are apathetic, but they're not; they're just students, in a somewhat otherworldly, alienated way. University of Chicago students tend to be islands in themselves.
One reason the football games this fall - the first since Robert Maynard Hutchens banned the game in 1939 - meant a great deal to us is that they were the first glimmer we have seen of a real community. We felt very comfortable together. We have a lot in common and we came to feel, as a crowd, that there are a great number of other people in the country who have a lot in common with us.
We share a large degree of outrage - outrage at the hypocrisies of an older generation that outlaws marijuana while drinking and smoking itself to the grave; outrage at politicians who try to enforce order by approving laws that plant the seeds of a police state; outrage at an educational structure that makes people blind and mindless functionaries in a system which they don't understand and which, as a result, is out of control; outrage at the race to build instruments of destruction when we already have enough arms to kill every man, flower and bug on earth a hundred times over; outrage at the fact that we have so befouled our environment that even if we aren't blown up we may all be poisoned or suffocated to death; outrage most of all at the war that goes on and on, killing men for a cause that is now an admitted mistake, spending billions of dollars on the other side of the globe while millions of our people are hungry or cold or so desperate that they have taken to rioting in the streets.
But because of the outrage we also share a conviction that people must love each other not only to be happy, but to survive. This is so obvious to us it is a cliche. But it is not obvious to everyone or we would not be in the fix we are in. ROGER BLACK
A student at San Francisco State mans a sign-up table at the Commons, the scene of bloody action last spring. Sign-up tables are far less busy than they used to be; most students have already signed up.
Oberlin College
Oberlin in 1969 is not the busily activist Oberlin of 1968. The campus is quiet, the library is crowded as never before, and student power, at least for the time being, is dead. "Student politics is unreal," says one student. "Maybe we're just tired of hitting our heads against a wall."
If indeed the old battles are no longer important, the mood at Oberlin may be a precursor to a new student mood across the country - "a privatism," as Assistant Professor of Sociology James Walsh calls it, "a realization that you don't change the attitudes of the working class through demonstrations."
But some people have noticed an uneasiness among this year's freshman class. As sophomore Karen Buck puts it, "They came here with a definite image of Oberlin as an activist place. They didn't find it nor did they find the type of leadership they were expecting. It might not be long before they start bringing up all the 'old' issues again." DAVID ELSNER
Smith freshman Alison Quoyeser puts the emphasis on studying rather than demonstrating. Last year Smith students struck over curriculum change; this year, protest remains in committee.
Smith College
Music is a kind of emotional shorthand and if you would understand what is going on today on the campuses, you could hardly do better than to pay attention to the music now being played there.
To walk down a hall at Smith College, for example, is to find the plaintive notes of Segovia's guitar suggesting a peaceful gentleness; or the words of Hair ringing out an innocent defiance of social convention. "Come on, baby, light my fire" is a challenge - sexual, emotional - that is both very ancient and very immediate.
Laura Nyro cries, "Save the people, save the country," and for some student this meant: Go to Washington on Nov. 15; be there, in peace, to do what you can for your country.
Classical music has not been abandoned. "Bach fulfills a need for order, precision, clarity of tone," says one student. "I impose control on myself by listening to controlled music."
While music of today's music is personal, much also expresses an attitude that is distinctly social in its application. Music, in a way, is holding us together today. RHODA MICCOCI
University of California
One local columnist claims that "the freaks rule the campus." A spokesman for the Young American for Freedom, a right-wing organization, says the silent majority runs the campus But the only apparent ruler is the Frisbee. On any day, sometimes even rainy ones, both Sproul and Lower Sproul plazas abound with Frisbee aficionados. Frisbees are so ubiquitous that they have been banned on campus by police as "dangerous and lethal weapons."
That's the kind of place Berkeley is right now. The campus is calm. But the scars of last year's violence are still apparent and much of the calm, though partially the result of apathy and studies, is also the result of a kind of fear stemming from last year. Students are afraid of another cycle of gassing by helicopter, afraid of clubbing, afraid of arrests and another 22 days of National Guard occupation.
Some students are becoming involved with the community surrounding the campus. They have formed several tenant unions to combat rising rents, poor living conditions and inadequate apartment management. A rent strike is in the offing. As one optimistic student, surveying the oddly quiet campus, remarked, "The revolution is coming to an end and it's time to rebuild."
A black man and a white girl walk arm in arm through Sproul Plaza, but no one looks up. People are too involved listening to bluegrass bands and folk singers on the steps of buildings that surround the fountain. Frisbee, anyone? KATHY WHITE
University of Texas
The average student here is still the well-scrubbed adolescent he is expected to be, and the University of Texas still offers as dominant images football, beer and Saturday night fraternity dances. Few innovative radical leaders are to be found here because they have long since migrated to centers of social change like New York and California. For this reason, student-initiated conflict on a really large scale is not likely to come to U.T.
One flare-up occurred recently when architecture students found that plans to enlarge the stadium included the unnecessary removed of many fine old trees and that the campus' only waterway was to become a concrete drainage ditch. Faculty and students immediately came up with alternative plans and went through proper channels with them. Too late, they were told; the contract had already been signed. They went to court to seek an injunction, but at 8 o'clock on Oct. 22 the bulldozers arrived to remove the trees. The court was to convene at 10 o'clock, so opponents of the project tried to stop the bulldozers. Twenty-seven of them were arrested. The injunction arrived an hour after the trees had been cut down.
As on many other large campuses, the mood here is anxious. But barring any major administrative blunders, the biggest concern of the students is likely to remain whether or not the Longhorns can hold their number one national ranking in football. D. KIRK HAMILTON
At Ole Miss girl-watching is second only to football. The best view is from the Student Union steps.
University of Mississippi
Football, good looks, and social life - those are the things Ole Miss students say are most important. And in exactly that order.
"The whole school revolves around football," observes one senior without exaggeration. The second prime concern, good looks, means early rising for most coeds. "I hate hearing my alarm sound at 6:15," sighs one. "But it takes that long to get ready for my 8 o'clock class." The third thing on everyone's mind, social life, is reflected in the strong system of sororities and fraternities. "If you're not in one," someone said the other day, "you miss half of what's going on on campus."
But these are not the only things Ole Miss thinks about. There are also, from time to time, political concerns. Only last year a large demonstration erupted after the defeat of a referendum to legalize beer. PATSY BRUMFELD
San Francisco State
We've been learning a lot more lately. Before the violence last winter, we had not been familiar with tactics frequently used by those who want to prevent change in the social order. We have learned that powerful arguments need not be expressed in words, that arguments can take whatever form is necessary for repression. The form of the argument at State was hundreds of police impatiently twisting their clubs in gloved hands, stomping their feet, waiting to be released on miniskirted girls and defenseless young men who were supporting the minority students' demands for a School of Ethnic Studies.
So we became students of reality. After two years of student effort, politicians and administrators demanded that changed in the curriculum be effected only through due process. Although the strike has passed, we do not consider the events surrounding it to be just history. Between classes we sit on the lawn in the sun and on the benches in front of the campus, knowing that insights, like life, will continue to grow. And not least among those insights is the fact that the fear of change far exceeds the fear felt by those who want change. We learned who was afraid of whom. DAVID NOARD
"Girl From the North Country" - Bob Dylan & Johnny Cash (mp3)
"Big River" - Bob Dylan & Johnny Cash (mp3)
"That's All Right Mama" - Bob Dylan & Johnny Cash (mp3)
By God, this is America, and I'm a human being. I'm not a piece of property. I'm not a consignment of goods.
- Curt Flood
life and stuff
Reader Comments (4)
Great article. It's fascinating how many of these themes still ring true for young people today.
I found some pictures my pop took at UT in '67, various protests, mad-dog eyeing brothers & such.
UT, 1967
I have an Esquire from '69 that is just like this, I should find it and type it up.