The New Aristocrats

Predictions about the future of America during the next generation are likely to be in one of two sharply contrasting moods. On the one hand, the orthodox liberals foresee a Great Society in which all will live in suburban comfort or the equivalent; given a Head Start and Job Training, Negroes will go to college like everyone else, will be splendidly employed and live in integrated neighborhoods; billboards will be 200 yards off new highways, and the arts will flourish in many Lincoln Centers. On the other hand, gloomy social critics, and orthodox conservatives, see that we are headed straight for 1984, when everyone's life will be regimented from the cradle to the grave by the dictator in Washington; administrative double talk and Newspeak will be the only language; Negroes will be kept at bay by the police (according to the social critics) or will be the pampered shock troops of demagogs (according to the conservatives); we will all be serial numbers; civil liberties and independent enterprise will be no more.

Yet these predictions have much in common. They assume the continuation of the same trends and attitudes that are now in full sway. There will be increasing centralization in decision making, increasing mass education as we now know it, a stepped-up rate of technical growth and a growing Gross National Product, and more use of a technological style--of "planning" or "social engineering," depending (continued on page152) New Aristocrats (continued from page 111) on one's bias--with heavy use of computers. These same premises are seen by some as enriching and great, and by others as menacing and empty.

Oddly, however, both kinds of prediction describe the play and leave out Hamlet; namely, the next generation itself, the young people who are going to be the heirs to all this greatness or the slaves of this social engineering. I have not seen a single forecast that takes into account that present high school and college students will be of some importance in shaping society 20 years from now. Commencement speakers are eager to pass on the torch and they seem to be sure that there are ready hands to receive it. Yet the evidence is that students are not at all happy with the present trends and attitudes, whether the prediction is gloomy or rosy. For instance, in 1956, surveys showed that college students admired and wanted to work in big corporations, but last year (at Harvard) more seniors opted for the Peace Corps than for careers in business. Allow me a small personal example: My book Growing Up Absurd sells 1000 copies a week, of which the majority, my publisher guesses, are bought by high school students. This gives one pause; I wouldn't have thought they could read the words. Maybe they can't, but they get the message, that the conditions of our society are too inhuman to grow up in. For collegians that message is dated; they take it for granted.

I do not intend to predict what the future might look like if we take young people into account. I don't know (although I give plenty of advice, which they disregard). What I want to show, however, is that point by point, with remarkable precision, articulate students--and an indeterminate number of others--live, feel and think in direct opposition to the premises on which both the rosy and the gloomy predictions are based. It is so in their community life, their ethics and their politics. If only because of sheer numbers, the temper of young people must make a difference for the future. And it is whistling in the dark to think that their opposition is a "generational revolt" that will be absorbed as they grow older and wiser, for it is endemic in our system of things. If the planners continue to treat this temper as if it did not exist, the result will be still deeper alienation and worse ultimate disruption. My experience in Washington, as a Fellow of the Institute of Policy Studies, is that social and educational planners have about as much information of what happens on college campuses as the State Department has about Vietnam.

Community: About 50 percent of all Americans are now under 26. Of the college-age group, nearly 40 percent go to college--there are 6,000,000 in 2000 institutions. Of the present collegians, it is estimated that five percent are in some activity of the radical youth movement, usually "left" but sometimes "right." This does not seem a big proportion, but it has increased at least tenfold in the last decade, and it and the number of its alumni will certainly increase even more rapidly in the next years. We are thus speaking of several million people.

More important, they are the leaders. Radical collegians are not only middle class but they are also disproportionately the best academically and from the most prestigious schools. Unlike Negro youth, who are now causing such turmoil, collegians are a major economic force, looming large among the indispensable inheritors of the dominant power in society. And although--or perhaps because--they do not share a common ideology but rather a common sentiment and style, in showdown situations like the troubles in Berkeley, they have shown a remarkable solidarity and a common detestation for the liberal center, crossing even the apparent chasm between extreme right and extreme left.

A chief reason for their solidarity and their increase in numbers is mass higher education itself. For most, going to college has little academic value--indeed, one of their shared sentiments is resistance to being academically processed for the goals of the "system." In my opinion, about 15 percent, instead of 40 percent, ought to be in colleges; the rest, including most of the bright, would be better educated in other environments. Nevertheless, the major colleges and universities are, in fact, many hundreds of physical and social communities of young people, with populations of a few thousand to 25,000, sharing a subculture, propagandizing one another and learning to distrust anybody over 30. Such collections of youth are a phenomenon unique in history.

Consider some details from San Francisco State College, where I was hired as a teacher by the Associated Students last spring. With 15,000 students, the Associated Students collect $300,000 annually in dues, more than half of which is free and clear and which they use for untraditional purposes. These purposes include organizing a tenants' league, helping delinquents in a reformatory, running a tutorial program for Negro and Mexican children (with 300 collegian tutors), sponsoring a weekly television program on KQED, running an "experimental college" with offbeat courses, and hiring their own professors. They apply on their own for institutional grants from the Ford Foundation and the Poverty Program. In the fall of 1966, the experimental college registered 1600 students!

Or consider the college press, with its fairly captive audience of a couple of million, many of them daily. In a few cases, e.g., Harvard and Columbia, publication has gone off campus and is not under the tutelage of "faculty advisors." Increasingly, college papers subscribe to news services and print (and edit) national and international news; and they also use syndicated material, like Art Buchwald, Jules Feiffer, Russell Baker. Occasionally, the college paper is the chief daily of its town (e.g., the Cornell Sun). More important, there is a national student press service that could be a powerfully effective liaison for mobilizing opinion on common issues. Last winter I wrote a fortnightly column on student matters for a tiny college in Vermont, which the enterprising editor at once syndicated to 50 other college papers. On this model there could spring up a system of direct support, and control, of students' "own" authors, just as, of course, they now indirectly support them through magazines whose main circulation is collegiate.

Nor are these young people properly called "youth." The exigencies of the American system have kept them in tutelage, doing lessons, till 23 and 24 years of age, years past when young industrial workers used to walk union picket lines or when farmers carried angry pitchforks, or young men are now drafted into the Army. Thus, another cause of their shared resentment is the foolish attempt to arrest their maturation and regulate their social, sexual and political activity.

More than other middle-class generations, these young live a good deal by "interpersonal relations" and they are unusually careless, in their friendships, about status or getting ahead. I do not mean that they are especially affectionate or compassionate--they are averagely so--but they have been soaked in modern psychology, group therapy, sensitivity training; and as a style they go in for direct confrontation and sometimes brutal frankness. Add to this the lack of embarrassment due to animally uninhibited childhood, for their parents, by and large, were permissive about thumbsucking, toilet training, masturbation, informal dress, etc. They are the post Freudian generation in this country--their parents were analyzed from 1920 to 1940. The effect of all this psychology--for example, long sessions of mutual analysis or jabber about LSD trips--can be tiresome, at least to me; but it is fatal to suburban squeamishness, race and moral prejudice, and to keeping up appearances. Still another cause of resentment at the colleges is the impersonality and distance of the teachers and the big classes that make dialog impossible. Students are avid for dialog. Sometimes this looks like clamoring for "attention," as our statesmen say about the demonstrators, but it is really insisting on being taken seriously as troubled human beings.

Middle-class privacy also tends to vanish. An innovation of the Beats was the community use of one another's pads, and this spirit of sharing has persisted in off-campus university communities, which are very different from paternalistic dormitories or fraternity row. In big cities there are rapidly growing bohemian student neighborhoods, usually--if only for the cheaper rent--located in racially mixed sections. Such neighborhoods, with their own coffeehouses and headquarters for student political clubs, cannot be controlled by campus administration. In the famous insurrection of Berkeley, Telegraph Avenue could easily rally 3000 students, ex-students, wives and pals. (The response of the University of California administration has been, characteristically, to try to root up the student neighborhood with Federally financed urban renewal.)

Inevitably, sexual activity and taking drugs loom overlarge in the public picture; for, whereas unkempt hair, odd company and radical politics may be disapproved, sex and drugs rouse middle-class anxiety, a more animal reaction. The statistics seem to show, however, that quantitatively there are not many more sexual goings on than since the Twenties. The difference is that the climate has finally become more honest and unhypocritical. Sexuality is affirmed as a part of life rather than as the Saturday religion of fraternity gang bangs covered by being drunk. Since there is more community altogether, sex tends to revert to the normalcy of back rural areas, with the beautiful difference of middle-class prudence and contraceptives. (Probably, since there is less moralism, there are more homosexual acts, though not, of course, any increase of homosexuality as a trait of character.) In the more earnest meaning of sex, love and marriage, however, the radical young still seem averagely messed up, no better than their parents. There is no remarkable surge of joy or poetry--the chief progress of the sexual revolution, so far, has been the freer treatment of small children that I mentioned above. The conditions of American society do not encourage manly responsibility and moral courage in men, and we simply do not know how to use the tenderness and motherliness of women. The present disposition of the radical young is to treat males and females alike; in my observation, this means that the women become camp followers, the opposite of the suburban situation in which they are tyrannical dolls. I don't know the answer.

Certainly the slogan "Make love, not war"--carried mainly by the girls--is political wisdom, if only because it costs less in taxes.

The community meaning of the widespread use of hallucinogenic drugs is ambiguous. (Few students use addictives; again, they are prudent.) I have heard students hotly defend the drugs as a means of spiritual and political freedom, or hotly condemn them as a quietist opiate of the people, or indifferently dismiss them as a matter of taste. I am myself not a hippie and I am unwilling to judge. It seems clear that the more they take pot, the less they get drunk, but I don't know if this is an advantage or a disadvantage. (I don't get drunk, either.) Certainly there is a difference between the quiet socializing of marijuana and the alcoholic socializing of the fraternities, suburbs and Washington. Also, being illegal and hard to procure, the drugs create conspiracy and a chasm between those who do and those who don't. As usual, the drug laws, like other moral laws, fail to eradicate the vice they intend to eradicate, but they produce disastrous secondary effects.

The LSD cult, especially, must be understood as part of a wave of religiosity in young persons that has included Zen, Christian and Jewish existentialism, a kind of psychoanalytic yoga, and the magic of the Book of Changes. On the campus, a young Protestant chaplain--or even a Catholic--is often the center of radical activity, which may include a forum for psychedelic theory as well as peace and Negro rights. Certainly the calculating rationalism of modern limes is losing its self-evidence; and it is not the end of the world to flip. Personally, I don't like it when people flip, it is eerie; I like people to be in touch, and I think the heads are mistaken when they think they are communicating. Also, in our overtechnological society, I am intensely suspicious of Dr. Tim Leary's formula to "turn on, tune in and drop out" by chemical means. Yet by and large, the public repression in this field is grossly disproportionate to the occasional damage that has been proved; and frankly, the burden of proof is the other way: If we do not want young people to live in harmless dreams, we have to provide something better than the settled arithmetical delusions of Mr. McNamara, not to speak of Herman Kahn, author of On Thermonuclear War.

The shagginess and chosen poverty of student communities have nuances that might be immensely important for the future. We must remember that these are the young of the affluent society, used to a high standard of living and confident that, if and when they want, they can fit in and make good money. Having suffered little pressure of insecurity, they have little psychological need to climb; just as, coming from respectable homes, they feel no disgrace about sitting a few nights in jail. By confidence they are aristocrats--en masse. This, too, is unique in history. At the same time, the affluent standard of living that they have experienced at home is pretty synthetic and much of it useless and phony; whereas their chosen poverty is not degraded but decent, natural and in many ways more comfortable than their parents' standard, especially if they can always corral obvious goodies such as hi-fiequipment and motorcycles. Typically, they tour Europe on nothing, sleeping under bridges; but if they get really hungry, they can drop in at American Express to pick up their mail. Most of the major satisfactions of life--sex, paperback books, guitars, roaming, conversation, games and activist politics--in fact, cost little.

Thus, this is the first generation in America selective of its standard of living. If this attitude became general, it would be disastrous for the expanding Gross National Product. And there is obvious policy and defiance in their poverty and shagginess. They have been influenced by the voluntary poverty of the beat movement, which signified withdrawal from the trap of the affluent economy. Finally, by acquaintance they experience the harsher tone of the involuntary poverty of the Negroes and Spanish Americans whose neighborhoods they visit and with whom they are friends.

In a recent speech, Robert Hutchins pointed out that business can no longer recruit the bright young. He explained this by the fact that the universities are rich and can offer competitive rewards. But I do not think this is the essence, for we have seen that at Harvard, business cannot compete even with the Peace Corps. The essence is that the old drive to make a lot of money has lost its magnetism. Yet this does not seem to mean settling for security, for the young are increasingly risky. The magnet is a way of life that has meaning. This is a luxury of an aristocratic community.

Ethics: The chief (conscious) drive of the radical young is their morality. As Michael Harrington, author of The Other America, has put it, "They drive you crazy with their morality," since for it they disregard prudence and politics, and they mercilessly condemn day-to-day casuistry as if it were all utterly phony. When politically minded student leaders, like the Students for a Democratic Society, try to engage in "tactics" and "the art of the possible," they may temporarily gain in numbers, but they swiftly lose influence and begin to disintegrate. Yet indignation or a point of honor will rally the young in droves.

Partly, the drive to morality is the natural ingenuousness of youth, freed of the role playing and status seeking of our society. As aristocrats, not driven by material or ulterior motives, they will budge for ideals or not at all. Partly their absolutism is a disgusted reaction to cynicism and the prevalent adult conviction that "Nothing can be done. You can't fight city hall. Modern life is too complex." But mostly, I think, it is the self-right-eousness of an intelligent and innocent new generation in a world where my own generation has been patently stupid and incompetent. They have been brought up on a literature of devastating criticism that has gone unanswered because there is no answer.

The right comparison to them is the youth of the Reformation, of Sturm und Drang, and of Russia of the Seventies and Eighties, who were brought up on their own dissenting theologians, philosophes and intelligentsia. Let us remember that those students did, indeed, ultimately lead revolutions.

The philosophical words are "authenticity" and "commitment," from the existentialist vocabulary. And it cannot be denied that our dominant society is unusually inauthentic. Newspeak and double talk are the lingua franca of administrators, politicians, advertisers and the mass media. These official people are not even lying; rather, there is an unbridgeable chasm between the statements made "on the record" for systemic reasons or the image of the corporation, and what is intended and actually performed. I have seen mature graduate students crack up in giggles of anxiety listening to the Secretary of State expound our foreign policy; when I questioned them afterward, some said that he was like a mechanical man, others that he was demented. And most campus blowups have been finally caused by administrators' animal inability to speak plain. The students have faithfully observed due process and manfully stated their case, but the administrators simply cannot talk like human beings. At this point it suddenly becomes clear that they are confronting not a few radical dissenters but a solid mass of the young, maybe a majority.

Two things seem to solidify dissent: administrative double talk and the singling out of "ringleaders" for exemplary punishment. These make young people feel that they are not being taken seriously, and they are not.

In principle, "authenticity" is proved by "commitment." You must not merely talk but organize, collect money, burn your draft card, go South and be shot at, go to jail. And the young eagerly commit themselves. However, a lasting commitment is hard to achieve. There are a certain number of causes that are pretty authentic and warrant engaging in: Give Negroes the vote, desegregate a hotel or a bus, commute Chessman's sentence to the gas chamber, abolish grading and get the CIA out of the university, abolish HUAC, get out of Vietnam, legalize marijuana and homosexuality, unionize the grapepickers. But it is rarely the case that any particular authentic cause can really occupy the thought and energy of more than a few for more than a while. Students cool off and hop from issue to issue, then some become angry at the backsliders; others foolishly try to prove that civil liberties, for instance, are not so "important" as Negro civil rights, for instance, or that university reform is not so "important" as stopping the bombing of Hanoi. Others, disillusioned, sink into despair of human nature. And committed causes distressingly vanish from view at the June vacation, when the community disperses.

Shrewder psychologists among the young advocate getting involved only in what you "enjoy" and gravitate to--e.g., don't tutor unless you like kids--but this is a weak motive compared with indignation or justice.

The bother is that, except with a few political or religious personalities, the students' commitments do not spring from their own vocations and life ambitions; and they are not related in a coherent program for the reconstruction of society. This is not the fault of the students. Most of the present young have unusually little sense of vocation; perhaps 16 continuous years of doing lessons by compulsion has not been a good way to find one's identity. And there is no acceptable program of reconstruction--nobody has spelled it out--only vague criteria. Pathetically, much "definite commitment" is a self-deceptive way of filling the void of sense of vocation and utopian politics. Negroes, who are perforce really committed to their emancipation, notice this and say that their white allies are spiritually exploiting them.

It is a difficult period of history for the young to find vocation and identity. Most of the abiding human vocations and professions, arts and sciences, seem to them, and are (to a degree) corrupt or corrupted; law, business, the physical sciences, social work--these constitute the hated System. And higher education, both curriculum and professors, which ought to be helping them find themselves, also seems bought out by the System. Students know that something is wrong in their schooling and they agitate for university reform; but since they do not know what world they want to make, they do not know what to demand to be taught.

Politics: It is not the task of age 18 to 25 to devise a coherent program of social reconstruction; for instance, to rethink our uses of technology, our methods of management, our city planning and international relations. They rightly accuse us of not providing them a program to work for. A small minority--I think increasing--turns to Marxism, as in the Thirties; but the Marxist theorists have also not thought of anything new and relevant to overripe societies. Most radical students, in my observation, listen to Marxist ideological speeches with polite lack of interest--"they are empty, man, empty"--and they are appalled by Marxist political bullying. On the other hand, they are disgusted with official anticommunism. By an inevitable backlash, since they think all American official speech is double talk, they disbelieve that Communist states are worse than our own.

What the American young do know, being themselves pushed around, itemized and processed, is that they have a right to a say in what affects them. They believe in democracy, which they have to call "participatory democracy," to distinguish it from double-talk democracy. Poignantly, in their ignorance of American history, they do not recognize that they are Congregationalists, town-meeting democrats, Jeffersonians, populists. But they know they want the opportunity to be responsible, to initiate and decide, instead of being mere personnel. Returning from their term overseas, the first thousand of the Peace Corps unani-mously agreed that exercising responsibility and initiative had been the most worthwhile part of their experience, and they complained that back home they did not have the opportunity.

The primary area for seeking democracy would be, one would imagine, the universities, for that is where the students are and are coerced. And the radical students, who, we have seen, are among the best academically, have campaigned for Lernfreiheit--freedom from grading, excessive examination, compulsory attendance at lectures and prescribed subjects--and also for the ancient privilege of a say in designing the curriculum and evaluating the teachers. But unfortunately, as we have also seen, the majority of students do not care about higher education as such and are willing to put up with it as it is. They are in college for a variety of extrinsic reasons, from earning the degree as a union card to evading the draft. There is no mass base for university reform.

So instead of working in their own bailiwick, activist students have mainly sought participatory democracy for poor people, organizing rent strikes, opposing bureaucratic welfare procedures, and so forth. But there is an inherent dilemma in this. Negroes claim, perhaps correctly, that middle-class whites cannot understand their problems; if Negroes are going to run their own show, they have to dispense with white helpers. The present policy of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee is that Negroes must solve their own peculiar problems, which are the only ones they care about and know anything about, and let their young white friends attend to changing the majority society. There is something in this. Certainly one would have expected Northern students to get their heads broken in the cafeteria at Tulane or the University of Mississippi, where they could talk with their peers face to face, as well as on the streets of country towns. And white Southern liberals have desperately needed more support than they have gotten.

But pushed too far, the rift with the middle-class students consigns poor people to a second-class humanity. The young Negroes cannot do without the universities, for there, finally, is where the showdown, the reconstruction of society, will be--although that showdown is not yet. Consider: Some pressing problems are universal; the poor must care about them, e.g., the atom bomb. Many pressing problems are grossly misconceived if looked at short range from a poor man's point of view; only a broad human point of view can save Negroes from agitating for exactly the wrong things, as they have agitated for educational parks, when what is needed in schooling is a small human scale. Also, there is something spurious in Negro separatism, for a poor minority in a highly technological society will not engineer the housing and manufacture the cars that they intend to use. Finally, in fact, the Negroes are, perhaps unfortunately, much more American than Negro. Especially in the North, they are suckers for the whole American package, though it makes even less sense for them than for anybody else. The Negro subculture that is talked up has about the same value as the adolescent subculture; it has vitality and it does not add up to humanity.

As in other periods of moral change, only the young aristocrats and the intellectuals can afford to be disillusioned and profoundly radical. And in a high technology, only the students will be able to construct a program.

In their own action organizations, the young are almost fanatically opposed to top-down direction. In several remarkable cases, e.g., Tom Hayden, Bob Moses, Mario Savio, gifted and charismatic leaders have stepped down because their influence had become too strong. By disposition, without benefit of history, they are reinventing anarchist federation and a kind of Rosa Luxem-burgian belief in spontaneous insurrection from below. In imitating Gandhian nonviolence, they do not like to submit to rigid discipline, but each one wants to make his own moral decision about getting his head broken. If the Army really gets around to drafting them, it will have its hands full.

All this, in my opinion, probably makes them immune to take-over by centralists like the Marxists. When Trotskyites, for instance, infiltrate an organization and try to control it, the rest go home and activity ceases. When left to their own improvisation, however, the students seem surprisingly able to mount quite massive efforts, using elaborate techniques of communication and expert sociology. By such means they will never get power. But, indeed, they do not want power, they want meaning.

Parallel Institutions: The operative idea in participatory democracy is decentralizing, to multiply the number who are responsible, initiate and decide. In principle, there are two opposite ways of decentralizing: either by dividing over-centralized organizations where it can be shown that decentral organization is more efficient in economic, social and human costs, or at least not too inefficient; or by creating new small enterprises to fill needs that big organizations neglect or only pretend to fulfill.

Obviously, the first of these, to cut the present structures down to human size, is not in the power of the young. But it happens that it does require a vast amount of empirical research and academic analysis to find if, where and how decentralizing is feasible; and in current American academic style, there is no such research and analysis. So on 150 campuses, I have urged students to work on such problems. They seem fascinated, but I do not know if they are coming across. (To say it wryly, there is a fine organization called Students for a Democratic Society, but it is not enough evident that they are scholars for a democratic society.)

The other way of decentralizing, by creating parallel enterprises, better suits the student zeal for direct action, and they have applied it with energy and inventiveness. They have set up a dozen little "free universities" that I know about--probably there are many others--in or next to established institutions, to teach in a more personal way and to deal with contemporary subjects that are not yet standard curriculum, e.g., Castro's Cuba, Psychedelic Experience, Sensitivity Training, Theater of Participation. Some of these courses are action sociology, like organizing labor or community development. In poor neighborhoods, students have established a couple of radio stations, to broadcast local news and propaganda and to give poor people a chance to talk into a microphone. They have set up parallel community projects to combat the welfare bureaucracy and channelize needs and grievances. In the South, they have helped form "freedom" political machines, since the established machines are lily white. They have offered to organize international service projects as an alternative to serving in the Army. (I have not heard of any feasible attempts at productive cooperatives or planned urban communities of their own, and students do not seem at all interested in rural reconstruction, though they should be.)

Regarded coldly, such parallel projects are pitifully insignificant and doomed to pass away like so many little magazines. And, in fact, at present, the most intense discussions among student radicals, causing deep rifts, are on this theme. Some, following older thinkers like Michael Harrington and Bayard Rustin (director of a civil rights and poverty research institute) want to engage in "coalition politics," to become effective by combining with the labor unions and leftish liberals in the Democratic Party, to get control of some of the Federal money and to campaign for A. Philip Randolph's (president of the Brother-hood of Sleeping Car Porters) 185-billion-dollar budget to eliminate poverty. This involves, of course, soft-pedaling protests for peace, community action and university reform. Recent history, however, has certainly not favored this point of view. Federal money is drying up and radical coalition people who go to work for the Government get fired; nor is it evident that, if it were spent for liberal social engineering, Randolph's budget would make a better world--even if the money were voted.

Others, for example one wing of SDS, say that the use of participatory democracy and parallel institutions is not for themselves but to consolidate people into a political party; it is not to provide models for the reconstruction of society but, as a kind of initiation rite, to get into the big game of numbers and power. This seems to me to give up on the authenticity, meaning and beautiful spontaneous motivation that have, so far, been the real power of the radical young and the source of what influence they have had. And it presupposes that the young know where they want to go as a party, rather than in what direction they are going as a movement. But they don't know; they (and we) will have to find out by conflict.

In my opinion, it is better to regard the parallel institutions as a remarkable revival of a classical American movement, populism, that seemed to have been dead. It is now reviving on the streets and among citizens who storm city hall because they feel they have been pushed around; in such a movement, the young are natural leaders. The principle of populism, as in 1880, is to get out from under the thumb of the barons and do it yourself. And perhaps the important step is the first one, to prove that self-help is possible at all. There may be hope of bringing to life many of our routinized institutions if we surround them with humanly meaningful enterprises. The most telling criticism of an overgrown institution is a simpler one that works better.

This was John Dewey's vision of the young 60 years ago: He thought of an industrial society continually and democratically renewed by its next generation, freely educated and learning by doing. Progressive education, free-spirited but practical, was a typical populist conception. And it is useful to regard the student movement as progressive education at the college and graduate-school level; for at this level, learning by doing begins to be indistinguishable from vocation, profession and politics. It is the opposite of the mandarin establishment that now rules the country, and of the social engineering that is now called education. Maybe this time around, the populist movement will succeed and change what we mean by vocation, profession and politics.

So, describing radical students--and I do not know how many others--we have noticed their solidarity based on community rather than ideology, their style of direct and frank confrontation, their democratic inclusiveness and aristocratic carelessness of status, caste or getting ahead, their selectivity of the affluent standard of living, then effort to be authentic and committed to their causes rather than merely belonging, their determination to have a say and their refusal to be processed as standard items, their extreme distrust of top-down direction, their disposition to anarchist organization, and direct action, their disillusion with the system of institutions, and their belief that they can carry on major social functions in improvised parallel enterprises.

Some of these traits, in my opinion, are natural to all unspoiled young people. All of them are certainly in contradiction to the dominant organization of American society. By and large, this is as yet the disposition of a minority, but it is the only articulate disposition that has emerged; and it has continually emerged for the past ten years. It is a response not merely to "issues," such as civil rights or Vietnam, but to deeply rooted defects in our present system, and it will have an influence in the future. It will make for a more decent society than the Great Society and it may well save us from 1984.