The Prospector (El Paso, Tex.), Vol. 48, No. 54, Ed. 1 Tuesday, April 20, 1982 Page: 7 of 12
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Page 7 - The Prospector • April 20, 1982
Sixties------------------
Continued from page 6
recently sponsored “Sixties Weeks” during which
political celebrities like Jerry Rubin and Allen
Ginsberg appeared on panels to discuss the con-
troversial era.
In what amounts to a “down time” for the social
sciences, such panels and courses are the only ones
currently enjoying steady increases in enrollment,
says Robert K. Murray, a historian at Penn State.
“We don’t have any hard data to prove it, but
there is no question that class in popular culture or
contemporary topics about the sixties have increases
in enrollment” across the country, says Robert
Gladowski of the American Studies Association.
“Students now are showing a great deal of interest
in that time, which seems incredibly long ago to
them, ” adds Dr. Mary Young, vice president of the
American Historical Association. Students “are very
curious to understand what happened.”
The people who teach the courses, many of them
former activists themselves, attribute their students’
interest to a nostalgia for the era and even an anger
that its persistent influence may retard the develop-
ment of a peculiar culture of their own.
One teacher in her mid-thirties, for example,
reports a fed-up student telling her, “You guys had
all the easy issues. It’s harder on us.”
“Current students don’t really understand why
there was so much turmoil then,” Penn State’s Mur-
ray observes. “They’re not very sympathetic to their
Women Studies Office offers
scholarships, day care
The Women Studies Office, 303 Worrell Hall, of-
fers a directory of reentry services, list of resources
and a list of fall semester programs. Of the students
25 and older, 47 percent are women.
The League of Acadmic Women is a service
organization that has an ongoing interest in the retur-
ning student, with concern for providing day care for
the students’ children and providing access to quality
education through scholarships geared toward the
student aged 25 and over.
The Center for Continuing Education, 108 Miners
Hall, provides non-credit courses that are related to
self-interest and improvement. About 60 percent of
their classes are in the evening, and 80 percent of the
participants are over 25, said Assistant Director
Louise Rapisand.
older brothers and sisters who still ‘haven’t found
themselves.’ The students now are deadly
serious.There’s very little frivolity, and they’re
motivated to get ahead as fast as possible.”
Jack Nachbar, a professor of popular culture at
Bowling Green State University, adds, “The sixties’
idea of sitting around all day and getting high just
makes no sense to these kids. The confidence in mid-
dle class affluence as a given just no longer exists.”
Because the 1960s and 1980s are so different
politically and economically, teachers have found a
cynicism among current students about what their
predecessors of the sixties did and what they left
behind.
“What we have produced,” says Warren Susman,
a historian at Rutgers University, “is a new genera-
tion that is bright, interested in the past, but with an
absolute belief that nothing they do can make a dif-
ference.”
At the same time Susman adds, “Students sense
that (sixties students) had a culture of their own. At
least the young had their own experience. Students
today have a bewilderment that the legends could
really be like what they’ve heard. They don’t have
that sense of mystery, that sense of adventure that
the sixties students had.”
The professors have an especially difficult time
teaching about the Vietnam war.
Says Susman, “This group (of students) just
doesn’t seem interested in foreign affairs. Even isola-
tionism is too strong a word. Their attitude is the
Vietnam war was stopped, but so what? They’re
very, very dubious about everything and they’ve
given up that sense of heroism that students used to
have.”
But H. Bruce Franklin, himself an anti-war activist
once fired from Stanford for participating in campus
protests, disagrees.
Franklin, who now teaches “America and Viet-
nam” at Rutgers’ Newark campus, says, “Many
students see the sixties as something that was their
antecedent, and there’s a great deal of curiosity
about that time. The more they hear about it, the
more they see its relevance to their own lives.”
At the University of Rochester, history Prof. Jules
Benjamin finds, “The students come in pretty open-
minded. In a strange way they want to be convinced
if the war was good or bad. I get a few hawks and
doves, but most don’t have strong convictions.”
He characterizes his students as “more cynical, but
they’re angry with their own cynicism. They have a
wistfulness that they missed something creative and
romantic. They might turn it down, but they’re long-
ing for a cause.”
At Stanford, Prof. Clayborne Carson’s “students
have a feeling that the earlier generation might have
had a greater political influence than they do now,
but they blew it.”
But current students “didn’t see (Students for a
Democratic Society) or (the Student Non-violent
Coordinating Committee)- at their prime. What they
remember is the residue like the SLA (Symbionese
Liberation Army). It’s hard for students to see these
groups as something that had the capacity to win
their political goals.”
But Carson notes, “There are probably as many
students around now who have the same ideas as
their peers in the sixties, but they keep those attitudes
under wraps.”
Murray, however, attributes the harsher pro-
fessorial observations about the differences between
student generations to the age of the people who
teach the sixties courses. Many of them were college
students during the decade.
“For many,” Murray says, “it was a marvelous
time period when they cut their teeth. They’re
teaching it as if they could bring it all back. Their en-
thusiasm makes them good teachers, but it also
makes them dangerous. They tend to blow things all
out of proportion.”
“What’s happened,” agrees Queens College Prof.
Morris Dickstein, author of the highly-acclaimed
Gates of Eden, a cultural history of the 1960s, “is
that people from that period have gone into teaching,
and they’re building on their own experiences. Some
teachers are appalled that it’s all so remote to their
students.”
“They’re like veterans reminiscing and hoping it
will all come back.”
Dickstein, who just finished a European tour, says
the same continuing, pervasive influence of- and
ambivalence toward- the 1960s is evident among
students in England, Italy and France.
Yet Dickstein believes it may be waning here. Mid-
seventies students “had a sense that they missed a
good party. But I think the current generation
doesn’t even have a sense of what the party was all
about.”
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University of Texas at El Paso. The Prospector (El Paso, Tex.), Vol. 48, No. 54, Ed. 1 Tuesday, April 20, 1982, newspaper, April 20, 1982; El Paso, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth1625804/m1/7/: accessed July 17, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu.; crediting University of Texas at El Paso.