Prodigal Fathers and Existential Sons

A university as politically engaged as the University of California cannot help but become egocentric. Politically involved students automatically become the center of their own universe. The old joke about the Polish scholar who was doing a study of the elephant and the Polish question has a new application at Berkeley. Where others manage to center their concern on the question of Vietnam, here we deal with Vietnam and the Berkeley student movement. We always come back to the students, and the students to the university. If there is a rally on the Vietnam war, the chances are that a speaker will raise the question of university collusion with the Johnson Administration in prosecuting the war effort; if a student civil rights group accuses the Crown Zellerbach corporation of racial discrimination in Bogalusa, it is predictable that the speaker is building up to the point that the university obtains its paper materials from the same corporation. The same is likely to be true for a faculty member, although his emphasis is probably on the effects of the protest movement on the university. We try to talk about Vietnam, or Cuba, or civil rights. We end up by talking about ourselves.

How is this to be explained? There are, ...