In June 1962, the Students for a Democratic Society ratified the Port Huron Statement, an earnest call for a more egalitarian, horizontal society. The manifesto helped to catalyze the long, wild season of campus protests, sit-ins and walk-outs that radically unsettled traditional notions of authority, academic and otherwise. C. Wright Mills, a bespectacled, tousle-haired Columbia University professor who had died just a few months earlier, would have been ecstatic at the carnival of insubordination. His 1960 "Letter to the New Left" was a blueprint for the student uprisings, drafted in colors of...