The Campus Radical in 1960

If there is to be an American political left in the 1960s and 70s it will be led, for the most part, by radical students of today and tomorrow, rather than by those who received their political training in the 1930s and 1940s. It is this fact which gives a certain interest to the posture and moods of the current generation of radicals.

Thus it is significant that in the two spontaneous student movements that have developed recently—movements against segregation and bomb testing—there has been a notable coolness toward programs and realpolitik. This reaction stems largely from a deeply-felt notion that the older kind of politics, with its resolutions, machinations and polemics is both futile and totally unnecessary for dealing with such clearcut questions as Strontium 90 and the right of a child to be decently educated. To these problems one need apply no dialectic, but simply an immediate response of emotion and will. And these are the kinds of problems to which today...