Crisis on Campus_ A Bold Plan for Reforming Our Colleges and Universities - Mark C. Taylor [9]
There is no doubt that the urgency of the social protest in the middle and late sixties was inspired by the threat of the military draft for privileged college students. But it would be a mistake to overlook other motivations. I was fortunate to have several professors who insisted on a close relationship between the abstract philosophical and religious ideas we were exploring in the classroom and the concrete social and political events going on beyond the confines of the university. The professor who was responsible for my majoring in religion, John Maguire, introduced me to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and helped me understand the stakes of the movement he led. One of my most vivid undergraduate memories was hearing King recite words from the Book of Amos while he was preaching in the Wesleyan chapel:
Let justice roll on like a river
And righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.
(5:24)
These words still echo in my ears, and I try to pass on to my students the most valuable lessons my professors taught me. Many young people at the time shared King’s dream of a more just world in which all people would have the opportunity for a good education and a better life; indeed, some of us still do.
Important disagreements notwithstanding, most young people on the left were convinced that critical political and economic decisions in the United States were made to advance the interests of what President Eisenhower had presciently dubbed the military-industrial complex. While often overstated, student concerns were not completely unfounded. During the Cold War, to conduct research and educate students many universities received lucrative grants and contracts from government agencies, the Department of Defense and even the CIA. William J. (Wild Bill) Donovan, who, we have recently learned, directed the espionage career of Julia Child at the Office of Strategic Services during World War II, also asked James Phinney Baxter III, president of Williams College, to help him recruit the best and brightest undergraduates. The secrecy of much of this work increased the suspicions and raised the level of paranoia among restive students. Most of the government money was funneled to the natural sciences, but some went to programs in the social sciences, including anthropology, sociology and history, as well as to fields of the humanities such as literature and languages. The government backed existing departments and disciplines but also supported the development of new programs aimed at addressing the threat posed by the Soviet Union and China. Initially funded privately by the Ford, Rockefeller and Carnegie foundations, these new fields of inquiry were designed to meet the needs of the government and the military. One year after the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, the federal government passed the National Defense Education Act (1958). This initiative was designed to improve young people’s math, science and language skills and to create a pool of experts with substantial knowledge about areas of the world that were likely to become trouble spots. As the war in Vietnam heated up and draft deferments were revoked, these programs became lightning rods for student protests. Since students tended to be less aware of government involvement in some of the social sciences and humanities, they focused their protests on the hard sciences and research devoted to military technology. In the post–Cold War era, it is difficult to recall that some of America’s most gifted students actually blew up buildings to bring an end to what they considered American imperialism and start a revolution inspired by Marx, Lenin, Mao, Fidel and Che.
Students were right when they claimed they were starting a world revolution, but were wrong about what revolution was then being launched. While rebelling against the military-industrial complex, they did not realize that media, digital and network technologies initially developed for military