The Sixties Revisited

In the eighth week of classes, the quarter is old enough for the collective restlessness of the students to be palpable, and young enough for that restlessness to be indulged without interfering with anyone’s preparation for his final exams. This and the nice weather at the University of Chicago spurred the search for a Cause, and the fact that Robert McNamara was to receive an award on campus for his contributions to “international understanding” filled the bill. A half dozen other Causes would have done at least as well—after all, most of those who embraced this one were too young to remember McNamara’s policies as Secretary of Defense and/or too ignorant to be aware of his policies as head of the World Bank. (This was neatly underscored when the student newspaper ran a series of educational pieces explaining just who this Robert McNamara was and why he merited derision.) But a Cause had been selected, and a combined Demonstration/Picnic in the middle of the quad at lunch hour on a beautiful day drew an unsurprisingly large crowd.

In some ways, it was a good approximation of the Sixties. The kids milling about were, by and large, as vapid as their brothers and sisters had been ten years earlier, and the ridiculous middle-aged professors who joined them managed to recreate their own ridiculous youth as accurately as the advancing years would allow. In other ways, it was a good approximation, if not to the Sixties, then to our collective revisionist memories—wasn’t it always spring in 1968? And weren’t finals always a comfortable-number of weeks away?

SL

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Steven E. Landsburg

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In the eighth week of classes, the quarter is old enough for the collective restlessness of the students to be palpable, and young enough for that restlessness to be indulged without interfering with anyone’s preparation for his final exams. This and the nice weather at the University of Chicago spurred the search for a Cause, and the fact that Robert McNamara was to receive an award on campus for his contributions to “international understanding” filled the bill. A half dozen other Causes would have done at least as well—after all, most of those who embraced this one were too young to remember McNamara’s policies as Secretary of Defense and/or too ignorant to be aware of his policies as head of the World Bank. (This was neatly underscored when the student newspaper ran a series of educational pieces explaining just who this Robert McNamara was and why he merited derision.) But a Cause had been selected, and a combined Demonstration/Picnic in the middle of the quad at lunch hour on a beautiful day drew an unsurprisingly large crowd.

In some ways, it was a good approximation of the Sixties. The kids milling about were, by and large, as vapid as their brothers and sisters had been ten years earlier, and the ridiculous middle-aged professors who joined them managed to recreate their own ridiculous youth as accurately as the advancing years would allow. In other ways, it was a good approximation, if not to the Sixties, then to our collective revisionist memories—wasn’t it always spring in 1968? And weren’t finals always a comfortable-number of weeks away?