Campus Radicalism
29th July 2024
Most of the excitement and action regarding the “From the River to the Sea” college student encampment movement has petered out as attention has shifted to other matters. The 20-year-old cultural revolutionaries behind it have gone home to their upper middle-class neighborhoods and are enjoying a relaxing summer of poolside reading of the collected works of Edward Said.
For the rest of us, it is time to probe the causes and consequences and to figure out what needs to be done to ensure their ideas have minimal impact on anything important.
Since the middle of the sixties, there has been significant media and scholarly interest in radical student activism. But very typically it has consisted more of cheerleading for it, or despair over its absence, rather than any concentrated effort to objectively understand, profile, and explain it.