Josh Zeitz has taught American history and politics at Cambridge University and Princeton University and is the author of Lincoln’s Boys: John Hay, John Nicolay, and the War for Lincoln's Image. He is currently writing a book on the making of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. Follow him @joshuamzeitz.

This month, when Erika Christakis, a highly regarded lecturer in early childhood education at Yale University, announced her decision to resign from active teaching, student protesters—who have upended college campuses from Claremont McKenna and Occidental to the University of Missouri, Amherst and Princeton—claimed their most recent scalp.

As has been widely reported, Christakis committed the high crime of introspection when she sent students a long and meditative email questioning the wisdom of the Yale Intercultural Affairs Committee’s elaborate guidance around what constitutes appropriate and inappropriate Halloween costumes. Protesters accused her and her husband, associate master and master of Yale’s Silliman college, respectively, of fostering a hostile environment for underrepresented women and minorities. “It is not about creating an intellectual space!” one dissenter exclaimed. “It is not! Do you understand that? It is about creating a home here!”


These students at Yale—and those at the heart of campus disputes around the country who seek to combat real structural inequities by renaming buildings, sheltering undergraduates from texts that make them feel unsafe, subjecting faculty and staff to mandatory sensitivity training, or imposing ideological litmus tests on campus speakers—might believe that their cause is rooted in the student experience of the 1960s, when protests over civil rights and the Vietnam War roiled American campuses.

In some ways it is: Today, as in the 1960s, a collegiate generation raised with an expansive understanding of its own rights and entitlements is fusing macro political issues to personal, everyday experience and demanding changes both in the halls of government and in the college dining hall.

But there is a startling inversion of logic in the progression from the 1960s and today. Fifty years ago, college students self-identified with repressed minorities at home and abroad and demanded freedom from the shackles of in loco parentis supervision and stewardship. They clamored to be treated as emancipated adults and foisted on their elders a noisy and disruptive free speech culture. Today’s students, who are certainly no less politically minded than their forbearers, are demanding the opposite. Far from freeing themselves of stewardship, they demand faculty “create a home” in which they remain children in the protection of more powerful elders. They insist on protection from ideas and voices that upset them and require a nurturing and therapeutic environment that bears no relationship to the real world of politics (or, for that matter, of business, technology, art or culture).

Today’s protesters may think they are marching in the footsteps of those who came before. In fact, they are undoing much of that generation’s enduring accomplishment.

***

One of the great fallacies about the 1960s is that every young person spent the decade marching, singing protest songs and shutting down campus buildings. In fact, polling and survey data suggest that no more than three percent of boomers in the mid-60s regarded themselves as activists, and only about one in five participated in a demonstration. Moreover, the 60s generation was not uniformly liberal. Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) looms large in popular memory, but the group was widely outnumbered by its conservative counterpart, Young Americans for Freedom (YAF), an outfit that demanded a military invasion of Cuba, unilateral action to raze the Berlin Wall and any variety of other actions that would have brought the country closer to war with the Soviet Union.

Nevertheless, campus unrest in the 1960s was a very real and pervasive phenomenon, involving several million college students at one time or another. While most campus activists were not among the relatively small but remarkably brave cadre of black and white civil rights workers who put their bodies on the line for freedom, they were deeply influenced by the heroism of their peers and disaffected by the glaring discrepancy between the national myths on which they were raised and the stark realities of Jim Crow at home and aggression abroad. They were also raised in a culture of affluence and progressive child rearing that made them different from earlier generations of collegians.

In the quarter-decade following World War II, the United States experienced an economic boom that was unprecedented in its scope and size. In the 1950s median family income grew by a stunning 30 percent, while in the decade that followed, per capita income grew by 41 percent. In the post-war years the average American transitioned from renter to homeowner, from blue-collar to white-collar worker, and from a culture of Depression-era scarcity and wartime rationing to post-war consumer abundance. Between 1950 and 1960, the average American family experienced a 330 percent hike in purchasing power. The typical American home in the late 1950s held seven times more equipment and goods than in the 1920—Polaroid cameras, hi-fi stereo systems, long-playing records, electric refrigerators and freezers, cars with automatic transmissions, and electricity, which 18 percent of households still lacked as recently as 1945.

Not only was the 60s generation affluent in comparison to the Depression generation; its middle-class students were (again, by contrast) remarkably cosseted. Beginning in the mid-1930s but taking flight in the post-war era, upwards of 75 percent of middle-class parents consulted child-rearing advice books that, more often than not, counseled attention to the whole child. This new family ethic firmly entered the mainstream in 1946 with the publication of Benjamin Spock’s The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care, which instructed the parents of the baby-boom generation to go light on punishment and heavy on reason and persuasion, and to bear in mind that their daughters’ and sons’ happiness was the paramount objective of child rearing. Spock was an enormously influential expert; a study conducted in 1961 revealed that two-thirds of new mothers surveyed had read his book. If his ideas were not entirely new, nevertheless Spock made permissive or child-centered parenting conventional wisdom for millions of new, post-war middle-class families.

Not only at home, but also at school, the children of America’s expanding middle class learned that their ideas, feelings and experiences counted for something. Such was the objective of progressive education, which historian Dianne Ravitch has identified as “the dominant American pedagogy” by mid-century. In its post-war incarnation, progressive education celebrated a “child-centered school” where, as the New York City Board of Education explained it, “the curriculum should be developed as a cooperative project in which the teacher, the supervisor, the parent, the public, and the pupil participate and to which each makes appropriate contributions. … Curriculum policies and practices should encourage friendly understanding and democratic relations among supervisors, teachers, pupils and parents.” Though schools often paid more lip service than fidelity to progressive education, even this rhetorical concession indicated a new, 20th-century solicitude toward the individual child—a solicitude that pointed to a broader interest in cultivating happy and autonomous individuals.

Boomers in the 1960s arrived in their freshmen dorms as the most privileged generation in recent memory. It didn’t take long for reality on and off campus to run up against their considerably elevated expectations.

***

Campus protests began in earnest after the return in September 1964 of roughly 1,000 students who had participated in Mississippi Freedom Summer. They came back to campus battle tested and with eyes wide open, and yet found little outlet for their activism. At Berkeley, as on other campuses, students were barred from exercising their right to canvass on university property, and strict regulations governed outside speakers and political fundraising. Student activists understandably chafed at the suggestion that they leave their first amendment rights at the college gates.

One such Freedom Summer veteran was Mario Savio, the unofficial leader of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement, who told his fellow collegians, “Last summer I went to Mississippi to join the struggle there for civil rights. This fall I am engaged in another phase of the same struggle, this time in Berkeley. In Mississippi an autocratic and powerful minority rules, through organized violence, to suppress the vast majority. In California, the privileged minority manipulates the university bureaucracy to suppress the students’ political expression.”

On one level, Savio encouraged his peers to perceive a real parallel between political repression in the South—the familiar images of police dogs, water hoses and tobacco-chewing sheriffs—and the university administration’s restrictive policies governing political advocacy on campus grounds. More viscerally, he tapped into an undercurrent of resentment about the everyday realities of student life.

Having been raised in relatively affluent and indulgent households, boomers—particularly those who attended state schools—arrived on expansive campuses where they were left to glide anonymously. Fueled by a massive influx of federal research dollars, universities in the 60s grew to unprecedented size: Prior to WWII no American higher education institution had a student population over 15,000, but by 1970, over 50 campuses were that large. Undergrads at these schools were increasingly likely to take mass courses in which the professor was a distant pinpoint in the well of a lecture hall and a graduate teaching assistant, scarcely older than they, provided their only human interaction to the faculty.

Clark Kerr, the president of Berkeley, acknowledged that the “multiversity” was often a “confusing place for a student.” Young people accustomed to being treated as valued individuals were assigned IBM punch cards. “They always seem to be wanting to make me into a number,” complained one undergraduate. “I won’t let them. I have a name and am important enough to be known by it. … I’ll join any movement that comes along to help me.”

On the other side of the spectrum, but also contributing to the sense that students weren’t being treated as valued individuals and adults, was the thick web of in loco parentis rules that regarded college administrators as proxy mothers and fathers. At the University of Illinois, undergraduates faced a weeknight curfew of 10:30 p.m. and a weekend curfew of 1:00 a.m. At the University of Massachusetts, women who broke curfew by five minutes lost privileges for the ensuing Friday night; ten minutes cost them Saturday night; fifteen minutes bought them a hearing before the women’s judiciary committee. At Barnard College, a man could visit a woman’s dorm room at set hours, but three of the couple’s four legs had to be touching the ground at all times, while at Illinois, women could entertain male guests in residence-hall lounges but were not permitted to wear raincoats during these visits—holdover regulations presumably dreamed up by hopelessly unimaginative campus bureaucrats.

Earlier generations of college students accommodated themselves to these in loco parentis rules, which had governed college campuses in one way or another since the inception of modern American higher education in the late 19th century—but not the baby boomers. Having been raised according to the child-centered, “progressive” model preferred by middle-class parents and suburban schools in the early post-war era, many college students came to regard in loco parentis as a special form of oppression. The black freedom struggle and the Vietnam War gave them a way of understanding this sense of subjugation. “If there is any one reason for increased student protest,” recalled a journalist at the University of Utah, “it would probably be the civil rights movement. The movement … convinced many of them that nonviolent demonstrations could be an effective device on the campus. It also served to make them more sensitive of their own civil rights.” “The American university campus has become a ghetto,” claimed an activist at the University of Florida. “Like all ghettos, it has its managers (the administrators), its Uncle Toms (the intimidated, status-berserk faculty), its raw natural resources processed for outside exploitation and consumption (the students).”





Further encouraging the marriage of macro and personal politics was the prevailing practice by which universities sent semester grades directly to parents, in consideration of the students’ status as un-emancipated minors. When in 1966 the Selective Service System began revoking the deferments of men who did not maintain a requisite grade average, universities—which furnished such information directly to the government—found themselves actively complicit in sending their boys off to war.

It’s unsurprising, then, that just as campus activists observed similarities between their personal situations and the challenges faced by African Americans, by the late 1960s they also found common cause with victims of imperialism in the Third World. This association became more common among the ranks of the anti-war left, especially as many activists came to appreciate the intimate relationship between the academy and the military industrial complex. Of the $3 billion that American universities devoted annually to research and development in the late 1960s, roughly 70 percent was financed by the federal government. The vast majority of these grants were military-related. Pentagon funds underwrote 80 percent of the budget at institutions like the Massachusetts Institute for Technology (MIT), while at Penn State, over three-quarters of the engineering college’s budget came from the Navy.

None of this is to suggest that student protesters in the 60s didn’t believe in the imperative of civil rights or doubt the morality and wisdom of the Vietnam War. Many if not most protesters were deeply sincere in their beliefs. But they also situated their own experiences within a broader spectrum of political repression and fought both for civil rights and an end to in loco parentis—for draft resistance and free speech on campus—against the Vietnam War and the culture of benign neglect to which faculty and administrators subjected them. When they complained, as did one activist, that “Michigan State is the Mississippi of American universities,” they risked incurring the perfectly valid charge that they were a favored cohort appropriating the legitimate struggle of less privileged people.

But that sequence is precisely what fueled so much campus activism in the 1960s. Student protesters fused the personal and political to such a degree that they couldn’t imagine decoupling one from the other. Many historians would agree that the student movement succeeded in amplifying civil rights and anti-war sentiment on the broader political stage. It also emancipated future generations of college students, who would thereafter enjoy greater freedom of speech, movement and fraternization on campus.

The singer-songwriter Phil Ochs, who attended Ohio State and became something of a troubadour for the student left, gave voice to this confluence of the personal and political in his ballad, “I’ve Got Something To Say”:

Oh, you’ve given me a number

And you’ve taken off my name

To get around this campus

Why, you almost need a plane.”

And you’re supporting Chang Kai-Shek

While I’m supporting Mao

So when I’ve got something to say, sir

I’m gonna say it now

I wish that you’d make up your mind

I wish that you’d decide

That I should live as freely

As those who live outside

’Cause we also are entitled

To the rights to be endowed

And when I’ve got something to say, sir

I’m gonna say it now

Ooh, you’d like to be my father

You’d like to be my dad

And give me kisses when I’m good

And spank me when I’m bad

But since I’ve left my parents

I’ve forgotten how to bow

So when I’ve got something to say, sir

I’m gonna say it now

***

On the surface, there are striking similarities between the 60s generation and their spiritual descendants. Both cohorts were raised in a climate that privileged individual autonomy and expression. Like the boomers of yesteryear, today’s students exhibit an admirable sense of political consciousness. Fifty years ago, students forced their parents to confront the thorny issues of Jim Crow and Cold War militarism; today, young people are placing into sharp relief structural inequalities that continue to advantage some Americans at the expense of others, both on and off campus.

But it’s a curious thing to see today’s college students fusing the personal and political in such an unfamiliar way. If the ultimatum of the boomer generation was emancipation (theirs and everyone else’s), today’s student demonstrators are—knowingly or otherwise—infantilizing themselves.

Fifty years ago, the Berkeley Free Speech Movement (in which members of the Young Americans for Freedom rallied alongside their left-wing classmates for the right to canvass) demanded that collegians enjoy the same expansive right to political assembly and advocacy as their parents. Today, protesters are appropriating broader political struggles in an effort to be shielded from hurtful or uncomfortable texts, and they demand that their elders provide the enforcement muscle to shut down debate.

Fifty years ago, demonstrators demanded an end to Jim Crow and to in loco parentis regulations. Today, they demand in the name of social justice that adult administrators and faculty members help govern matters of personal expression—for instance, what Halloween costumes they should or shouldn’t wear.

Fifty years ago, activists fought to make the college campus a raucous, unruly and democratic environment; their successor generation is equally willing to take to the streets, but only in the temporary service of creating a bland culture of shelter and conformity.

At first glance, it’s tempting to draw parallels between yesteryear and now. Then and now, students are demanding that the crooked lines be made straight. But that comparison over-glorifies an earlier generation whose protest culture was more complicated than we often acknowledge, and lets the current generation of protesters off the hook too easily.