[lbo-talk] rebutting myths of elitist student protestors...

Stephen E Philion philion at hawaii.edu
Sun Dec 5 21:16:26 PST 2004


http://64.233.167.104/search?q=cache:EufNFNgu2dkJ:jwsr.ucr.edu/archive/vol10/number1/pdf/jwsr-v10n1-ross.pdf+richard+flacks+sds+class+background&hl=en

The old New Left witnessed a progression from larger and/or more selective elite institutions, outward to more broad-based institutions.
>From Michigan, Swarthmore, and Harvard early on, for example, chapters
later developed at places like Indiana, St. Cloud State, and Roosevelt University in Chicago. This process took five years and was speeded up after SDS was discovered by the national press around the time of the (first) March on Washington to End the War in Vietnam, in April 1965. By the late Sixties community colleges had chapters of SDS or other New left groups. The current pattern of outward diffusion has some, but highly compressed similarity to the Sixties.¹¹ From 1999–2000 there was marked “outward” movement from more to less elite campuses. The first wave of sit-ins, in 1999, was at relatively “elite” or flagship state universities. In this regard, looking for initiating movement groups among young adults with higher income and/or educational family backgrounds is similar in both generations. However, history is moving at warp speed. Despite the fact that the early and strongest presence of USAS was, as with SDS, at the most cosmopolitan institutions, outward motion is very rapid in comparison to SDS. During the next spring, 2000, sit-ins were much more representative of the national student body. (See Table 3) The speed with which chapter construction is moving to non-elite places—and growing—is faster than SDS before the War in Vietnam. It compares to the Southern students’ civil rights movement, which spread the sit-ins and lunch counter boycotts around the south within weeks, and created SNCC within three months of the first sit-in. It also compares to the tremendous growth of SDS after the March on Washington of April 1965.(For materialon SDS chapter growth, see Sale 1973) Already, by the fall of 1999 campuses in Alabama, Arkansas, and Georgia were involved and active. There were contacts at South Carolina, and a few community colleges. Acting in response to local demonstrations, or fear of them, or even a desire to do the right thing, 122 universities had joined the Fair LaborAssociation by June of 1999, 150 by Spring of 2000. Then when USAS initiated WRC, and campaigned against the FLA, membership increase slowed drastically.There are 178 college and university members of the Fair Labor Association(as of March 2003),a growth of only 28 in two years.In the meantime the WRC “Who are the Student Boat Rockers?” Later, in the opening of the Port Huron Statement he wrote, in answer to that question:“We are people of this generation bred in at least modest affluence,housed in the universities,looking uncomfortably to the worlds we inherit.” For white civil rights and antiwar students, and the New Left of SDS and other groups, the earliest movement participants came disproportionately from upper middle class homes.⁹,¹⁰ Eventually however, by 1967, the movement and SDS membership spread among students of work-ing class and lower white-collar families. Institutionally, the movement began at exclusive or elite private colleges, for example, Swarthmore and Harvard, but also at the cosmopolitan public institutions with long histories of radical colonies –like Berkeley,Wisconsin and Michigan.



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