Stanford University - Quad Yearbook (Palo Alto, CA)

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demonstrators tended to make their demands of the university in the same depersonalized fashion they had found so objectionable in the university's dealings with them. Buttons reading, “Down with the Regents,” and discussions of the evils of “the administration” became very popular; no notice of the individuality of the Regents' members or of members of the administration was ever taken. This is perhaps the most discouraging aspect of the demonstrations, for it showed that the process of depersonalization had gone deeper than anyone had realized. Quite often, the students tended to see issues as 13

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polar, and administrators as all-powerful and removed. This tendency to classify everything as black or white is the effect of the negative student make-up. It illustrates what happens when a situation is allowed to exist in which this negativity is reinforced to the point that it becomes a stronger force in the students than their natural idealism. At Berkeley, milder forms of student protest against the depersonalizing forces in the university had been ignored or rejected. All that was left to the students was a sense of frustration and anger at the institution, and it was this frustration that caused the destructiveness of their protest. Two new aspects of the student personality have thus emerged in the past few decades. They arc rooted in changes that have occurred in society at large and are both strong influences on student behavior and, more importantly, on student motivations and aspirations. It is this influence that has caused the difference in this student generation from the ones that preceded