Suchergebnisse

In 1968 a major student movement emerged in Mexico, to the surprise of virtually everybody knowledge able about Mexican student politics. The Institutional Revo lutionary Party (PRI), in power since 1929, had not been seriously challenged while the economy continued to grow at a rate of 7 percent, one of the fastest rates of growth in the world. The principal moving force behind the movement was the moral outrage of thousands of previously uninvolved stu dents, who responded to what they felt to be the unwarranted brutality of the riot police, and later the army, in quelling a campus disturbance, especially since the students were exer cising their legal right to peaceful protest. Additional exacer bating factors were cuts in the already meager budget of the National Autonomous University, juxtaposed against large outlays for the Olympic Games, as well as the hypocrisy of a government which mouthed revolutionary slogans while bru tally suppressing students and continuing its entrenched pat tern of graft and corruption. The movement, after mobilizing hundreds of thousands of Mexicans, came to an abrupt halt with the slaying, jailing, and exiling of hundreds of student activists. Since 1968, the main focus of Mexican student politics has been the obtaining of the freedom of the impris oned students.

The protests of university students in indepen dent Black Africa are described, using a communications framework with five basic elements: catalysts, students, mes sages, targets, and outcomes. Some appropriate future research activities are then indicated.

Three of the most talked-of problems in the Western world, and especially America, today are hair, drugs, and the Vietnamese War, and all of them center around the young. The young are seemingly America's first preoccupa tion, and they have brought these matters to the forefront of our concerns. In all three, they have threatened the tra ditional culture by their adoption of the attitudes of opposi tion. By their actions they are expressing deeply held convic tions so opposed to the accepted mores and the status quo that parents, teachers, and governments are being challenged to review their own stances or accept the disquieting, chilling, or sometimes horrifying results. The responsibility for all these actions on the part of the young is laid at the door of the control structure that is the cause of the civilizational crisis with which the Western nations are faced. A laborious course of social reconstruction, led by men of wisdom and inspiration, is probably the only way to the survival of our culture.

Present student unrest and activism is not a clear product of student university tensions or of discontent with education. Such tensions are accentuated through stu dent involvement in non-university issues. The pattern of activism and violence among college and university students in many countries has also existed in the United States throughout much of its history, reinforced and sanctioned by the self-governing character of American higher education. Contemporary student activism is continuous with that tradi tion in its forms but differs profoundly in its political and national character. Most American universities, especially the large and public ones, are highly "under-administered" and thus are unable to form and execute policies toward issues raised by student action and toward that action itself. Administrators lack power and authority to lead faculty or students in the formation of institutional policy. The plural istic and leaderless character of American universities makes student protest a highly traumatic event, while student discipli nary action, in its present form, adumbrates internal campus tensions.

Student activism has rarely been examined in political perspective. Most of the existing literature treats it as a form of deviancy which must be explained as a special tendency of students to respond, in an unorthodox manner, to social, psychological, and cultural disturbances. Such formulations generally fail to account adequately for levels of activism, let alone the political positions—left or right, nationalistic or internationalist—which students espouse. This paper represents an attempt to lay the foundations for a political theory of student activism. It points out the affinities between students and other "marginal elites," the military and clerical professions, which tend to play indepen dent political roles at times of crisis. Most political alliances involving student movements are ephemeral because students lack effective means of coercion, such as armaments and religious sanctions. And being the weaker partners in any alliance, students tend to be deprived of most of the fruits of victory, or become an easy target of repression following defeat. They then move into ideo logical opposition to their former coalition partners. The paper illustrates these shifts in coalition patterns and ideo logical positions by tracing the historical changes in German student movements from the period of the Napoleonic wars to the present.