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By Root 479 0

purposes would create another major revolution during the latter decades of the twentieth century. While the development and extensive distribution of personal computers marked an important milestone, the world did not significantly change until computers were linked together to create what can best be described as network culture, in which people across the globe are connected to one another. These networks, initially local and proprietary, quickly spread from universities and private businesses to encompass the entire world. Rapid developments over the past several decades tend to obscure the importance of changes that took place during the late 1960s. In his informative book 1968: The Year That Rocked the World, Mark Kurlansky writes:

There has never been a year1 like 1968, and it is unlikely that there will ever be one again. At a time when nations and cultures were separate and very different—and in 1968 Poland, France, the United States, and Mexico were more different from one another than they are today—there occurred a spontaneous combustion of rebellious spirits….

Four historic factors merged to create 1968: the example of the civil rights movement, which at the time was so new and original; a generation that felt so different and so alienated that it rejected all forms of authority; a war that was hated so universally around the world that it provided a cause for all the rebels seeking one; and all of this occurring at the moment that television was coming of age but was still new enough not to have yet become controlled, distilled, and packaged the way it is today. In 1968, the phenomenon of a same-day broadcast from another part of the world was in itself a gripping new technological wonder.

A few weeks after the Beatles’ appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show, Marshall McLuhan, who became famous for coining the phrase “global village,” published a book that would prove prophetic—Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. What McLuhan theorized, young people were living. While the Internet and the World Wide Web were still several decades away, May 1968 was the first tremor of what eventually would become the network revolution that would transform countries as distant as Russia, China and Iran. The global student revolution foreshadowed how increasing connectivity and speed of communication would transform the dynamics of social, political, economic and educational systems. May 1968 was neither planned nor organized but erupted spontaneously and simultaneously at multiple sites distributed throughout the world and spread at an increasing rate of speed as it moved across the globe.

Turmoil on college and university campuses deepened as a result of changes in the student population during the 1960s. When I entered Wesleyan in the fall of 1964, there were two African Americans in my class of 350; by the time I graduated four years later, 5 percent of the student body was African American. In the years that followed, students from diverse racial, ethnic and economic groups entered higher education in much larger numbers than ever before, and a growing number of women chose to pursue postsecondary study. With greater affluence and more affordable transportation, foreign study expanded, becoming a rite of passage for many American students, and young people in foreign countries found the lure of American colleges and universities irresistible.

As demographics shifted, student interests and demands began to change. A curriculum made up of works largely written by dead white men taught by tenured professors who were almost exclusively white men no longer seemed adequate. A diverse student body not unreasonably wanted a diverse curriculum. Young people demanded change that faculty members and administrators were either unable or unwilling to deliver. Faculty resistance provoked further student reaction, creating a self-reinforcing loop of accusation and recrimination. Already suspicious of authority, students began to demand that their teachers defend the books they assigned as well as their pedagogical practices.