Alexander Riley, Senior Fellow of The Alexander Hamilton Institute for the Study of Western Civilization (AHI), continues his pungent commentary on higher education. Dr. Riley examines the anti-Israel protests that have recently dominated leading university campuses.
Little insight comes from most scholarship and journalism on radical student activism, he suggests in “Campus Radicalism” for the Claremont Institute’s The American Mind. Over half a century, these analyses have largely been characterized by “cheerleading for it, or despair over its absence.” But Dr. Riley, also a sociologist at Bucknell University, highly recommends a classic study titled The Conflict of Generations by Lewis Feuer. It argues that the great wave of 1960s student radicalism resulted from “the liberal transformation of college curricula” plus the Baby Boom generation’s “messianic narcissism.” In these respects, “the more things change, the more they stay the same.”
As Dr. Riley explains, education’s leaders have seen themselves “as the bearers of ‘a special historical mission to fulfill where the older generation, other elites, and other classes have failed.’” The rebels attack a perceived “entrenched gerontocracy,” while events that young people view as crises spur the movement’s crystallization. Dropping the Old Left belief in the working class, Sixties student radicals considered themselves “more conscious and knowledgeable about what needed to be done than any other group … uniquely moral and righteous.”
But this overwhelmingly white and middle-class movement also ideologically adopted “non-whites as the only groups who truly fathomed the depravity of American power.” Before long, “indigenous revolutionary groups around the world came to occupy this place in their political pantheon.” Among the many other continuities today: The student extremists are “frequently … unable even to mildly mask their disdain for dialogue . . . They easily let slip. . .that it is not compromise they seek, but that the administration ‘fold to our demands.’”
The key difference between the student radicalism Feuer examined in 1969 and what we saw this year: “Today, whole departments and academic divisions are on the side of the radicals. . . For decades now, and in an accelerated way since the George Floyd Revolution of 2020, faculty and administration radicals have been endeavoring to change the mission of their institutions . . . to . . . social justice action. . .these efforts have borne much fruit.”
The young people who became anti-Israel, often pro-Hamas, radicals have “learned … from their professors that the very purpose of education in the fields in which they are being educated is activism. . .Entire universities. . .preach to students the necessity of ‘speaking out’ against ‘injustice’ as an official pedagogical element of their mission.”
Dr. Riley warns that extreme violence is a “likely trajectory,” repeating what occurred when some in the late Sixties became “full-blown anti-American terrorists.” The Weathermen who plotted “bomb attacks on police stations and military barracks” illustrates the point. We should be “watching carefully and studying student radicalism historically for clues as to how to face this possibility.”
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