What Today’s Activists Can Learn From 1968

Shortly after midnight on April 30, 2024, as pro-Palestinian protesters moved to occupy Columbia University’s Hamilton Hall, two counterprotesters — both white, male undergraduates — removed a picnic table being used as a barricade and attempted to physically obstruct the entrance of the building. As one protester — a 63-year-old career activist — explained Columbia’s “rich history of protest,” the two men shoved their way to the door, shouting that they aimed to “prevent our college from being destroyed” and that they had a “responsibility to stand in the doorway as these people try to destroy everything good about our civilization.”

The two men were swiftly and predictably martyred by the right, appearing on Fox News and other outlets as the university’s heroic defenders against the “professional outside agitators.” The left may have built the modern bureaucratic university, but in the wake of last spring, it was the right that rose to its defense.

So long as campus protesters lack a coherent defense of the university as anything other than an expensive dais from which to make demands, the right’s claim to the university is, if only rhetorically, an effective one. It was the rhetorical fuel for Gov. Ronald Reagan’s crackdown on colleges in California following the widespread unrest of 1968, and it’s the reason that a wave of anti-wokeism in higher education has proved so politically potent now at places like Gov. Ron DeSantis’s (new) New College of Florida and other homegrown conservative projects like Hillsdale College, in Michigan, or the University of Austin. By dismissing Columbia’s counterprotesters as bad-faith actors, the left risks ceding the very ground on which the university can be defended — embracing instead what Tom Hayden, one of the founders of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), called in 2015 “the pure insurrectionary act, memorialized as performance art.”

The question for the left, as Hayden well understood, is this: Why should the university, in particular, be the locus of protest? What would it take for the university to be the bridge to power that the left imagines it to be? Hayden and his SDS colleagues attempted to answer that question in their 1962 Port Huron Statement, which offered the most coherent political philosophy of the world the New Left attempted to create. Hayden, then a 22-year-old graduate student at the University of Michigan, drafted the statement for the first SDS convention in June 1962. Over the course of a week, it was debated, revised, and eventually adopted by a group of over 50 participants as the group’s official political manifesto.

The statement, named after the organized labor education camp in Michigan, where it was composed, offered a comprehensive policy platform for the New Left. But it was not just a policy platform. It was equally a pedagogical platform, demanding not just that colleges take political action but that they do their jobs as institutions of higher learning. Hayden and the SDS pushed the campus protesters of the 1960s to see the pedagogical problem of the university and the political problem of the fractured left as deeply intertwined — and to understand transformative, humanistic learning as valuable in itself and as a prerequisite for social change. The Port Huron Statement could offer the same guidance for campus protesters now.

The Port Huron Statement, which is almost 30,000 words long, is rightly remembered for its sweeping diagnosis of the myriad crises of its time: the decline of the public sphere, severe wealth and educational inequality, the military-industrial complex, the specter of automation, the frustration of the labor movement, the threat of nuclear war, global colonialism, and domestic racial discrimination. Crucially, the authors found the alienation, commercialization, and moral vacuousness of society at large to reflect the alienation, commercialization, and moral vacuousness of the university.

The authors lament the “radical separation of the student from the material of study,” the “compartmentalization of student and understanding,” and the “loss of personal attachment, by nearly all, to the worth of study as a humanistic enterprise.” As Mario Savio declared on the steps of Sproul Hall at the University of California at Berkeley on December 2, 1964: “If this is a firm, and if the Board of Regents are the Board of Directors, and if President [Clark] Kerr in fact is the manager, then I tell you something — the faculty are a bunch of employees and we’re the raw material!”

But the authors of the Port Huron Statement were equally concerned with a lack of imagination from the university’s insurgent left. The “outstanding paradox,” they wrote, is that “we ourselves are imbued with urgency, yet the message of our society is that there is no viable alternative to the present. … Our times have witnessed the exhaustion not only of utopias, but of any new departures as well.” It is the responsibility of the students themselves, the authors argue, to believe that such an alternative is possible.

Rather than seeking to enforce an unassailable set of ideological commitments, the authors instead envisioned a “community of controversy” as the only one in which students might organize to change society. The university was a failure not in its inability to espouse a particular political view, but in its inability to foster deliberative democracy. From this diagnosis, the authors offer a new set of values to guide both the reform of the university and the broader direction of the New Left:

Only with these values enumerated, and the role of the university and its students defined, do the authors proceed to their comprehensive political critique. And after a long list of granular policy planks — from nuclear disarmament to political depolarization — they ultimately find the university to be the necessary bridge to political power.

It is no wonder, then, that university campuses have emerged again as the crucible for today’s protest movement. In concert with a tradition of nonviolent Black activism during the long Civil Rights movement, university-based organizers like the SDS and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) contributed to the major democratic reforms of that decade, not least of which included the 1964 Civil Rights and 1965 Voting Rights Acts. But, as Hayden argued in his 2015 retrospective on the activity of the SDS in the late 1960s, “most of the thinkers who inspired the early SDS — Mills, John Dewey, Camus, Lessing, James Baldwin — were shelved in search of an ideology that only Marxism seemed to offer.” As ideologies balkanized, the students’ “heightened militancy became disconnected from a comprehensible narrative that the wider public might have understood.” The movement abandoned the project of coalition building, creating what the historian Michael Kazin describes as “a refuge from the nation’s rightward drive [rather] than a mass base for progressive change.” The 1969 edition of The New Left Reader no longer included the Port Huron Statement at all.

Even where the more militant activism of the late 1960s did find traction — for instance in the blossoming of new disciplines and departments, including Black and ethnic studies, diaspora studies, and gender and women’s studies — university administrators would prove especially capable of metabolizing and defanging these reforms. These same departments fought — and still fight — for resources and prestige, while the majority of the more-radical pedagogical experiments of the 1960s and 1970s, like the Tussman Experimental College at UC Berkeley or New College of Florida, were either closed or significantly reformed by the start of the 1980s.

The result, as the historian Christopher P. Loss argues, has been a doubling down on “personnel” and “personality” in lieu of more-fundamental university reforms. On the one hand, colleges faced pressure to restructure the academy to respond to the demands of Black Power and other campus activists. Meanwhile, particularly after the Higher Education Act of 1965 made a college degree a reality for more students than ever before, the college experience itself took on a different set of meanings for students. In the wake of the 1960s, colleges revised, but did not do away with, in loco parentis, the conservative conception of undergraduate life forged in the 1920s in which the college operated “in place of the parent” to police students’ extracurricular lives. Instead, as Loss writes, a new, pluralist “diversity” paradigm “met administrators’ need for order and students’ need for liberation.” Rather than marshaling administrators (the “personnel”) to adjust students to a particular moral code, they would instead adjust students to the pluralistic social environment of the college campus through their embrace of each student’s unique constellation of identities (their “personality.”) Though organized toward a distinct end, the diversity paradigm employs a familiar set of administrative techniques, most of which have little to do with classroom pedagogy: orientations, trainings, extracurricular facilities, and an endless proliferation of “student services.”

Protest itself would come to play an important part in the social drama of the college experience. Administrators could expect a regular rhythm of student outrage, and students could expect a correspondingly impassive administrative response. Clark Kerr, a former chancellor of UC Berkeley, understood this trajectory quite cynically when he noted in his 1963 Godkin Lecture at Harvard University that “the participants go through a ritual of hackneyed complaints almost as ancient as academe, while believing that what is said is radical and new.”

These rituals, in turn, precipitate the atmosphere of alienation and absurdity on campus. Last spring, as students were arrested and college presidents penned more and more finely crafted, general counsel-approved, and mostly meaningless, emails, a kind of student-activist ennui that would have been familiar to Tom Hayden began to emerge from the front lines. Here’s how a Pomona College student put it in The Point:

The protest movement’s fatalism about the university is precisely what the drafters of the 1962 Port Huron Statement sought to address. Now, as then, this “inner alienation” remains a defining characteristic of life on campus, as in society at large. Now, as then, students enter with the bewildering expectation that their college is both irreparably corrupt and their best shot at securing generational wealth and status. Now, as then, we concede on some fundamental level that the function of the university is only to “help the student get by, modestly but comfortably, in the big society beyond,” as the statement put it.

As the historian Robert Cohen writes, the activist commitment to a sustained critique of the university belies a fundamental and enduring faith in the university, even as its most prominent academic critics — particularly from the standpoint of decolonization, as in recent work from Edwin Mayorga, Lekey Leidecker, and Daniel Orr de Gutierrez — conclude that there is no option but to burn it down. Against Kerr’s cynicism and his students’ and faculty’s fatalism about the university, the Port Huron Statement offers a useful idealism. The authors propose remaking the university as the “seat of influence” for a revival of participatory democracy born of a democratic education. The protests that followed the Port Huron Statement sought not just to make political demands of university administrators and trustees, but also to foster a space where the idea of the university itself could be radically challenged, debated, and reimagined.

This fall, as a fresh wave of protest meets an ever-more dispiriting administrative response, it would be fruitful for the left to ask honestly: Does it still believe in the university?

The importance of the university as a bridge to power is undeniable. But to marshal its influence without attending to its central function — teaching — forecloses any possibility for true coalition building. As the Port Huron Statement reminds us, we need not settle for pedantry, patronizing administrative programs, or the vicious and anti-dialogic rituals of outrage and cancellation. The problem of the university is as pedagogical as it is political. Instead:

But why critique the left for what is ultimately the university’s responsibility to change? Perhaps, in watching my own university kowtow to its donors this fall — a maze of fences and a constant police presence remind students that the University of Pennsylvania’s College Green is not, in fact, a public space — I wonder whether I really believe that any kind of radical postsecondary reform might be possible.

My faith may be in the university, but my belief is in us: the students, the faculty, the communities that call these bitter campuses home. Following Stefano Harney and Fred Moten in their conception of the activity of Black study, I believe in the “undercommons,” the “downlow low-down maroon community of the university,” a social form which is the foundation of both rigorous thought and meaningful resistance. But to have an undercommons requires a “commons”: a reason and a place to come together, even in our resistance. Besides “stealing to” or “stealing from” the university, as Harney and Moten suggest, we can also look to examples of reformers who have used the resources of the university (its funds, its physical spaces, its prestige) to build projects which enliven liberal learning on campus and engage the university’s neighbors off-campus.

We might consider, for instance, the legacies of the adult education movement of the 1930s or the free university movement of the 1960s as models in which university educators created spaces for working-class individuals to understand and transform their circumstances. Echoes of these institutions persist. Some, like the former Experimental College of the Twin Cities, explicitly denounce the university, while others, like Bard College’s Microcolleges, embrace the university’s potential to build critical consciousness. Several nascent postsecondary institutions like Outer Coast, my former institutional home in Sitka, Alaska, are starting completely anew, while still forming partnerships with colleges to ensure that students can take the risk of refusing a traditional college path without losing the opportunity to earn a useful credential. To build alliances on the left in 2024 requires a constructive vision of the university which recognizes, but does not accept as entirely unresolvable, the incommensurability of the university with true social change.

The history of American higher education offers plenty of reason to doubt that its entrenched bureaucracies and incentives could be meaningfully repurposed to this end. But the Port Huron Statement gives us a lodestar for a new pedagogical platform within the university, an aspiration to and a blueprint for the university as a utopia, or something close to it.