258
DAVID RIESMAN
elders. And the Negro college students increasingly fail to adopt the
passivities and covert compromises of their elders.
Our
PR
essay was written before the desegregation decision had
made itself felt in the South, and shortly thereafter, in connection with
the Fund for the Republic study of academic freedom, I visited, though
only for a day, the Greensboro Agricultural and Teclmical College
where a few years later the first sit-ins began. From my visit and from
what I was told by other observers, I would not have expected the sit–
ins to start in an institution where most of the students appeared to be
satisfied to enter the lower ranks of the "Black Bourgeoisie" and where
their apparently docile patriotism comforted and confirmed the estab–
lished leadership, Negro and white alike. That same year, I analyzed
several hundred interviews of college seniors at twenty colleges and
universities throughout America in which the students had described
what they looked forward to in life fifteen years hence; I reported the
complacency, amiability, and tolerance, and lack of ideological and
political concerns of most of these respondents.
*
From such material,
I certainly did not expect the rise of student protest movements that has
taken place on many campuses, today still small in number but not small
in vigor and impact. When I came to Harvard four years ago, an effort
to found a chapter of student SANE was temporarily abandoned thanks
to disruption by a group of Young Republicans (who intervened much as
Communists used to take over liberal organizations) ; presently, as I write
these lines, Harvard students have taken active leadership in planning
a demonstration in Washington [February 1962] and three hundred
students at this notably skeptical, cool, and sophisticated college have
voluntered to go.
Students in America are not a class nor do they speak for a class
(though in the Negro community they are able, perhaps, to speak for
a race). Their tendency toward acting outside of conventional parlia–
mentary channels may represent their feeling that they are living in an
occupied country-and indeed those students who have been abroad,
whether in the Peace Corps or in such predecessors as the Experiment in
International Living, are often well aware that the climate of debate in
this country concerning Cold War issues has become extremely con–
stricted, more so in my opinion even than at the height of McCarthyism.
For at that time, the very virulence, unpleasantness, and demagoguery of
McCarthy led, if not to counter-attack or even to solidarity, at least to a
general feeling of disgust and distrust among liberal intellectuals and
• See "The Found Generation,"
The American Scholar,
Vol. 25, 1956, pp. 421-
436.
