[Peace-discuss] Training students for apathy

[C. G. Estabrook]

Bordering or not, they have the unfortunate characteristic of being true.  I 
watched it happen with my alma mater, which I attended in the 1960s and 1970s 
and my children in the 1980s and 1990s.  In the same years I was teaching at 
(and being fired from) universities of various types, in various parts of the 
country.

No one who was there then could miss the hysterical movement by university 
authorities against student activism, in everything from screening admissions 
(don't be involved in secondary school demos) to providing the modern equivalent 
of bread and circuses (alcohol and parties).   (Even university calendars were 
changed, to prevent students' being in school late into the spring, the time of 
year when the protests at Berkeley, Columbia, et al. in the 1960s occurred.) 
For university people, though, it was one of those things that as Orwell says, 
"It wouldn't do to mention."

(In the suppressed preface to ANIMAL FARM, Orwell discussed the process of 
socialization by which -- particularly in the elite educational system -- you 
internalize values, as he put it: you learn that there are certain things that 
it just wouldn't do to say. That's part of a good education.)

I think Chomsky knows what he's talking about -- and has known for a while. See, 
e.g., from a generation ago, "The Carter Administration: Myth and Reality" 
<http://www.chomsky.info/books/priorities01.htm>.   By the mid-1970s, as the 
neoliberal counterattack was being mounted in US society in general, the schemes 
for quiescent campuses could be talked about openly, as in THE CRISIS OF 
DEMOCRACY: REPORT ON THE GOVERNABILITY OF DEMOCRACIES TO THE TRILATERAL 
COMMISSION (1975) by Michel Crozier, Samuel P. Huntington, and Joji Watanuki. 
 From that point on, the "excesses of the Sixties" had to be denounced by the 
bien-pensant -- left, right, and center -- as in the important political tract 
THE AUDACITY OF HOPE.


Brussel Morton K. wrote:
> A pretty weak set of propositions/assertions.  Some highly questionable 
> ones are outlined in red. The last two outlined seem to border on paranoia. 
> --mkb
> 
> On Sep 10, 2009, at 3:39 AM, C. G. Estabrook wrote:
> 
>> [What happened to the sixties student, from a student newspaper's talk 
>> with Noam Chomsky, September 8, 2009.  I think this is right about the 
>> universities of the 1960s and forty years later -- and rarely said. 
>>  --CGE]
>>
>>
>> When people talk about “the ‘60s,” what they are thinking of is about 
>> two years: 1968-1969, roughly -- a little bit before, a little bit 
>> later. And it’s true that student activism today is not like those two 
>> years. But, on the whole, I think it’s grown since the 1960s. So, take 
>> the feminist and the environmental movements -- they’re from the ‘70s; 
>> take the International Solidarity Movement -— that’s from the ‘80s; 
>> take the Global Justice Movement (which just had another huge meeting 
>> in Brazil) -- that’s from this century.
>>
>> Plenty of students are involved in these things. In fact, the total 
>> level of student involvement in various things is probably as huge as 
>> it’s ever been, except for maybe the very peak in the 1960s when the 
>> war was a huge issue. Or the Civil Rights Movement in the South that 
>> trained many students -— that was the early ‘60s. It’s not what I 
>> would like it to be, but it’s far more than it’s been.
>>
>> *I** think [the current talk about passivity among students is] an 
>> effort to induce passivity.* The standard picture of the ‘60s that’s 
>> presented is that it was a terrible time. It was what’s called “the 
>> time of troubles” -- students were going crazy, everything was falling 
>> apart, and so on. That’s not what was happening.  It was a time when 
>> the country was starting to become more civilized -- thanks largely to 
>> the impetus of the activist students.
>>
>> Elite sectors and centers of power don’t like that lesson. They don’t 
>> want that lesson to be learned. They want students to be passive and 
>> apathetic. In fact, there was a pretty big backlash to the ‘60s. *One 
>> of the reasons for the very sharp rise in tuition is to kind of 
>> capture students. ** *If you come out of college with a huge debt, 
>> you’re going to have to work it off -- you’re going to have to become 
>> a corporate lawyer or go into business or something. And you won’t 
>> have time for engaged activism.
>>
>> The students of the ‘60s were [in college] at that time when the 
>> society -- the culture -- was much more open. I mean that a student 
>> could take off a year or two and devote it to activism and think, 
>> "Okay, I’ll get back into my career later on."  That’s much harder 
>> today.  *And not by accident.*  These are disciplinary techniques.
>>
>> http://wildcat.arizona.edu/opinions/i-applaud-your-protest-1.436185