THE 1960s ACTIVISM OF SDS AND HAYDEN WAS POSITIVE

THE 1960s ACTIVISM OF SDS AND HAYDEN WAS POSITIVE

1. THE 1960s WERE THE UNIVERSTIES’ FINEST MOMENT

Tom Hayden, activist and former California state legislator, NEW PERSPECTIVES QUARTERLY, Volume 4, #4, Fall 1987, p. 20.

On the contrary, one can argue that the finest moment of the university was when students and faculty stopped the university's business-as-usual during a time of national crisis. We were spending $30 billion a year on death and destruction; hundreds of Americans per week were coming home in body bags. Professors at Columbia and Berkeley were among the intellectual architects of that war, and to this day I am astounded by the fact that of nearly 1000 academic articles written for leading political science journals during the 60s, only one was about Viet Nam. It was honorable to protest that situation, and those who did so should be blessed in our history. They are the exact opposite of Nazi storm troopers. They were, on the contrary, calling on us not to be "good Germans." That's what Bloom doesn't understand.

Tom Hayden, activist, Port Huron Statement, 1962, p. np, http://coursesa.matrix.msu.edu/~hst306/documents/huron.html, accessed May 2, 2002.

Our world is guided by the sense that we may be the last generation in the experiment with living. But we are a minority - the vast majority of our people regard the temporary equilibriums of our society and world as eternally-functional parts. In this is perhaps the outstanding paradox: we ourselves are imbued with urgency, yet the message of our society is that there is no viable alternative to the present.... Some would have us believe that Americans feel contentment amidst prosperity - but might it not better be called a glaze above deeply-felt anxieties about their role in the new world? And if these anxieties produce a developed influence to human affairs, do they not as well produce a yearning to believe there is an alternative to the present, that something can be done to change circumstances in the school, the workplaces, the bureaucracies, the government? It is to this latter yearning, at once the spark and engine of change, that we direct our present appeal. The search for truly democratic alternatives to the present, and a commitment to social experimentation with them, is a worthy and fulfilling human enterprise, one which moves us and, we hope, others today.
4. THE AMERICAN POLITICAL SYSTEM ISN’T REALLY DEMOCRACY

Tom Hayden, activist, Port Huron Statement, 1962, p. np, http://coursesa.matrix.msu.edu/~hst306/documents/huron.html, accessed May 2, 2002.

The American political system is not the democratic model of which its glorifiers speak. In actuality it frustrates democracy by confusing the individual citizen, paralyzing policy discussion, and consolidating the irresponsible power of military and business interests.
5. THE NEW MOVEMENTS ARE LIKE THE NEW BOSTON TEA PARTY
Tom Hayden, activist, WASHINGTON POST, December 5, 1999, p. B1.
For the first time in memory, the patriotism of the corporate globalizers is in question, not that of their opponents. Do the Clinton administration's investor-based trade priorities benefit America's interest in high-wage jobs, environmental protection and human rights? Are American democratic values and middle-class interests secondary to those of transnational corporations? As a grass-roots movement seeking the overthrow of what it sees as an oppressive system, Seattle '99 was more like the Boston Tea Party than the days of rage we knew in the late '60s.

HAYDEN’S CRITICS ARE WRONG – THE 60s WEREN’T ABOUT MORAL RELATIVISM

1. ALLAN BLOOM’S FOCUS IS CONFUSED: HE SELECTS THE WRONG ISSUES

I'll give another example. One week after the Kent State shootings, Kingman Brewster, the president of Yale, led one thousand Yale students to Washington in protest. They spent an entire week involved in the process of lobbying the government to terminate the war. Was that a worthy undertaking by a university leader? Absolutely. Did that damage Yale? Did it morally and intellectually cripple the thousand students who participated? I think not. What would Bloom make of that situation? His focus is so confused because he chooses his events so selectively.

If we accept Bloom's Platonic model - the legitimacy of questioning everything - then of course one of the occasional consequences will be rebellious behavior. But far from being a time which gave birth to moral relativism, the 60s introduced morality into an amoral society and a materialistic university. To view the 60s as mindless because many of us followed C. Wright Mills and Albert Camus rather than Allan Bloom's prescriptions is wrong. The 60s were an intellectual and intensely introspective decade. If there has been an erosion of general education, that erosion comes from turning the university to the specialized uses of society, and Bloom knows that. That omission is another reason why his book is so baffling. He complains that students become economics majors prematurely and they all go to university with fantasies about becoming millionaires. How was that caused by the 60s? Those attitudes obviously result from the drive of the marketplace and the tendency of the university to provide for the immediate professional needs of society.

Tom Hayden, activist and former California state legislator, NEW PERSPECTIVES QUARTERLY, Volume 4, #4, Fall 1987, p. 20.

NPQ: Bloom argues that, in the 60s, thinking stopped with the moral indignation over the Vietnam War and racial injustice. Does Bloom have a point? Hayden: Of course he has a point, but it's confused because the cloistered community of scholars Bloom describes has not existed for many centuries. At my university, to be much more accurate about the 60s than Bloom, the Dean of Women was not encouraging reading in Greek tragedy. She was deploying a network of informants who notified parents of the white girls who were seen socializing with black men in the student union. That was the University of Michigan in 1960. That administrative behavior deserved a revolt, and it's not anti-intellectual to revolt against those attitudes.
4. HAYDEN’S CRITICS HAVE MANY MORE MORAL PROBLEMS THAN HE DOES
Tom Hayden, activist and former California state legislator, NEW PERSPECTIVES QUARTERLY, Volume 4, #4, Fall 1987, p. 20.

Speaking of mindlessness, how should we regard the official claim that the US was in Viet Nam to stop Chinese communism? Speaking of moral relativism, how are we to interpret Edward Teller's views on limited nuclear war? If academic leaders proclaim that the university is doing the best it can, but it can't improve on a black admission rate of 5% or 6%, and they say those things loudly on the edge of the Oakland ghetto, or Morningside Heights, the university will unfortunately reap a whirlwind. And it did. Furthermore, let's also not forget the 60s are over. We have the most conservative president we have ever had, the most traditional US Secretary of Education we have ever had, the whitest universities elitists could want and the income base of the people attending our universities is safely affluent.