Student Power

The script is, by now, drearily familiar. SDSers and their allies scratch around for an issue, stage a demonstration and force a confrontation with police. Mobs of students throw bricks, destroy property, and another college president flees to Addis Ababa. A tired script, yet it always seems to work, and many people must wonder why small groups of campus radicals can at the crucial moment muster sufficient non-ideological student support to carry off these confrontations.

There are numerous answers, of course, ranging from faculty-inspired disgust with what the professors like to call “middle-class values” to loneliness and tension brought on by a pack of punched cards or a rude form letter from the library threatening terrible reprisals if an overdue book is not returned. But perhaps the most convincing explanation for student alienation is the one that only a few men such as Russell Kirk choose to discuss: the American college student, especially the undergraduate, gets gypped. Most undergraduates, at least at the outset, are not potential rioters who want to overturn the whole academic structure just for the hell of it. But, somewhere along the collegiate assembly line, something happens to too many of them. They find they are not being educated.

JR

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John R. Coyne Jr.

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The script is, by now, drearily familiar. SDSers and their allies scratch around for an issue, stage a demonstration and force a confrontation with police. Mobs of students throw bricks, destroy property, and another college president flees to Addis Ababa. A tired script, yet it always seems to work, and many people must wonder why small groups of campus radicals can at the crucial moment muster sufficient non-ideological student support to carry off these confrontations.

There are numerous answers, of course, ranging from faculty-inspired disgust with what the professors like to call “middle-class values” to loneliness and tension brought on by a pack of punched cards or a rude form letter from the library threatening terrible reprisals if an overdue book is not returned. But perhaps the most convincing explanation for student alienation is the one that only a few men such as Russell Kirk choose to discuss: the American college student, especially the undergraduate, gets gypped. Most undergraduates, at least at the outset, are not potential rioters who want to overturn the whole academic structure just for the hell of it. But, somewhere along the collegiate assembly line, something happens to too many of them. They find they are not being educated.