As the current drama on university campuses unfolds, I can’t help feeling just a little nostalgia for the student protests of May 1968. It was an exciting time — at least for anyone who is old enough to remember it, which means, in effect, members of AARP who have multiple doctors.
May 1968 is ancient history, but not to me. To my everlasting regret, I was not able to be a student protestor myself because I was already a junior member of the faculty, with a campus office, a pipe, a tweed jacket, and all the necessary equipment for that role. If I was too old to be a student revolutionary56 years ago, I’m certainly too old now. Now, as then, I can only be a somewhat frustrated spectator.
I recall the campus drama of 1968 very well, or at least I think I do. My lectureship was at one of Britain’s most radical universities, so I was right in the center of the whirlwind when the student movement came along, and in the perfect position to observe it.
What struck me most about the movement at the time was how much the students were enjoying it. It was a glorious letting off of youthful steam, half a protest and half a carnival. What a pleasure it is to act for yourself instead of just sitting and complaining or listening to dull professors doing the same. In my own institution, students occupied buildings, especially the bar, and started an informal university of their own where the educational process was considerably more creative, not to say anarchic. The police were called at one point to clear an access area, but they were ordinary, local police, not armed men in riot gear. The students linked arms and sang, “We will not be moved,” and the police swept them aside like leaves in the wind. It was all good fun.
There was a serious side to the youth movements of 1968 — some people were injured, some minor damage was done, and big institutions were paralyzed. Privileged middle-class students in Europe and America staged a rebellion that seemed to reject everything their parents' generation cared about.
In one sweep, the students trashed capitalism, the work ethic, orthodox sexual morality, discipline, education and (it seemed) civilization itself. But the central issue, then as now, was a brutal war. Yet, in retrospect, it seems not just unreal but ridiculous and even clownish. Where did students get the idea that they could change the world? How could they have so thoroughly mistaken gestures for reality? How could they have missed the blazingly obvious Golden Rule: that whoever has the gold makes the rules?
It's a question of age, of course. Nobody that age wants to hear how long, complicated and tedious it is to create real social change, and how hard you yourself would have to work to do it. Protest and revolution promise to put things right in a single dramatic moment — your problems are solved, your outrage is soothed, and justice is seen to be done. It feels good just to dream about it, and I must confess that, at the time, just for one heady moment, and even as an outsider, I was swept along by that wave of youthful idealism. We were so sure that we were right, so sure that we would win, and so certain that we would never change.
