VANGUARD
223
III. The Students
The almost comic inadequacy of the universities' structures and
traditions is no secret. A student generation raised in (relative) pros–
perity is asked to prepare for elite positions in the exploiting fraction
of Global society, while within Western society proper, the new genera–
tion is expected
to
maintain existing systems of domination and in–
equality. The maximum development of intellectual powers, demanded
by the universities, conflicts with the conformist psychology required for
bureaucratic careers. Not yet fully integrated into the career system, and
not yet therefore using human power (in the form of higher culture)
in the pursuit of goals set by an inhuman social mechanism, the stu–
dents have assumed the role of surrogates for the missing humanity of
their educated elders. The students' frequent unreflected rejection of
cultural tradition, the shallowness of much of their own version of high
culture, the denial by some of the articulate students that culture can be
both "high" and meaningful, are indeed deplorable. Does not much
of the blame lie with the students' teachers, who have been unable to
transmit a viable tradition?
Critical intelligence has served as a unique refracting medium for
the crisis. Practically alone the students have thought about a better
future: the faculties' discontents have not led them to a more general
awareness of contradictions, injustices and brutalities. It is characteristic
of the student movement everywhere that it has sought allies, or more
precisely allied itself with, the unprivileged. The global underclass has
been a favored object of student concern: the Vietnam conflict actually
has crystallized earlier tendencies in the student movement. The enor–
mous force of student resistance to the war in Vietnam was preceded
by an alliance of the most conscious and active of the student critics
of American society with the American underclass itself, at first with the
black population in the South and then in the North.
It
was the ex–
tention of the campaign for civil rights to the North, the discovery of
the resistance of the system as a whole to those changes which would
assure the blacks a fair share in American life, that contributed to the
radicalization of a student generation which had started out with a
"liberal" ideology, in the American use of the term. That is to say, a new
kind of American socialism, in the broadest sense, has developed among
those who began by supposing that they were simply serving as catalysts
to the conscience of a society committed to a welfare politics. In
both
the alliance with the blacks and the campaign against the war in Viet–
nam, the American student movement has been conspicuously distant
from
the American labor movement, the preferred instrument of whose
leaders is the American Democratic Party and the preferred policies of
whose members are often imperialistic, chauvinistic and racist.
