In honor of the 50th anniversary of the release of the Port Huron Statement on student activism, NYU will be hosting a conference this week about the history and continued relevance of the document. The student-activist movement on campus has certainly turned college life upside down in the past 50 years. It has been responsible in no small part for the elimination of the core curriculum, the addition of politics to every traditional discipline and the introduction of numerous disciplines driven only by politics, the wide acceptance of the anything-goes social environment, and the addition of thousands of administrators to acknowledge and cater to every idealistic desire of these young idealists.
But I wonder whether the leaders of the movement believe they have made progress toward their own stated goals. These two paragraphs from the statement stuck out for me:
If student movements for change are rarities still on the campus scene, what is commonplace there? The real campus, the familiar campus, is a place of private people, engaged in their notorious “inner emigration.” It is a place of commitment to business-as-usual, getting ahead, playing it cool. It is a place of mass affirmation of the Twist, but mass reluctance toward the controversial public stance. Rules are accepted as “inevitable”, bureaucracy as “just circumstances”, irrelevance as “scholarship”, selflessness as “martyrdom”, politics as “just another way to make people, and an unprofitable one, too.”
Almost no students value activity as a citizen. Passive in public, they are hardly more idealistic in arranging their private lives: Gallup concludes they will settle for “low success, and won’t risk high failure.” There is not much willingness to take risks (not even in business), no setting of dangerous goals, no real conception of personal identity except one manufactured in the image of others, no real urge for personal fulfillment except to be almost as successful as the very successful people. Attention is being paid to social status (the quality of shirt collars, meeting people, getting wives or husbands, making solid contacts for later on); much too, is paid to academic status (grades, honors, the med school rat-race). But neglected generally is real intellectual status, the personal cultivation of the mind.
I’m pretty sure that this is what most universities look like today and that some fairly prominent conservatives both back then and now would agree with this assessment of things. Students do not care much about “citizenship” however you’d like to define that. They engage in scholarship that is largely irrelevant not only to society but also to “personal cultivation of the mind.” They go to college for reasons that often have little to do with intellectual development and little that goes on there actually changes that.
Now that the people who encouraged all this activism are in charge of the university, do they acknowledge failure? The way that academics speak about the larger social trends in America today often suggests that we have made no progress on the kinds of issues the writers of Port Huron cared about, like racism. (My favorite recent example of this was a column in The New York Times claiming that the killing of Trayvon Martin should remind us of life under the Fugitive Slave Law.)
So what went wrong? Were the activists simply too idealistic? Is universal disarmament any more likely now than at any other point in history? Were the Huron goals not ones that could be embraced by Americans? Are college campuses simply not the place to pursue these goals? Maybe reluctance to acknowledge victories over racial or gender inequality made people feel discouraged (Pssst, there’s a black guy in the Oval Office who was elected by a lot of white people). It wouldn’t be going too far out on a limb to suggest that the NYU speakers will end their remarks with something alone the lines of “There is much more work to be done,” but have they learned anything in the past 50 years?