American Student Activism: The Post-Sixties Transformation.
The sixties, of course, saw the flowering of American student political activism. The American university was in turmoil, and students, for the first time since the 1930s, played on a national political stage. A sitting president, Lyndon Johnson, decided not to run for reelection in part because of student demonstrations against his Vietnam policies. Students were also at the forefront of a major change in American values and attitudes particularly in areas such as relations between the sexes, reproductive rights, music, and social norms. For a short period in the late 1960s, public opinion polls indicated that the most important concern of the American population was campus unrest. What has come afterward has been an anticlimax. It is certainly true that the two decades following the sixties have, in contrast to the decade of turbulence, been characterized by quiet. In reality, the situation is much more complex. There has been some activism, and the revolution in attitudes and values started in the sixties has not completely disappeared. The one major upsurge of student activism, the anti-Apartheid "divestment" movement of 1984-86, involved thousands of students nationwide and indicated a new trend in student activism. The current period seems apathetic only in contrast to the previous decade. It may, in fact, be a bit more active than the norm for American student politics. Several things are clear about the past fifteen years. The first is that