University of North Carolina Greensboro - Pine Needles Yearbook (Greensboro, NC)

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In 1967, American jmpuses echoes with a growing and for student power over the decisions that control the lives of youths both in and outside of the university. Some- times the demand is merely an assertion of egotism in the face of huge and impersonal institutions that seem to reduce the individual to irrelevance. As one Princeton student said after the demonstration against the Vietnam war at the Pentagon in October. We had to provoke some response. We had to get them to admit that we exist. But the demand for student power often goes deeper; it is a signal that today ' s college youths do not like the world that has been handed them and want to change it. The rebellion of youth is as eternal as the seasons, but the protests of this generation have peculiar relevance for American politics and education. They are the post-World War II and almost the post-Cold War generation— the world has changed so fast since their parents were in school that the gap between the generations is not merely a question of time but of hist ory. Today ' s students make new assumptions about the threat of Communism, the rights of the poor, the way to allocate the nation ' s resources. They worry less about paying their tuition (or having their parents or the taxpayers pay it) than about what they are being taught. They espouse a moral codi that places concern for individual people (or, sometimes, individual value judgments) above abstract precepts derived from formal religion or hierarchical family structure. It is these ideas, crashing against the institutions and policies formulated by an older generation, that strike the sparks of student revolt. Ironically, the affluence and security provided by the older generation is a major reason why students can afford to worry about civil rights and Vietnam, and be nonchalant about their own future. The students who care about influencing politics or their own education remain a small group on any campus; the apathetic, as always, outnumber the activists. But change has usually been initiated not by the mass but by an active leadership that is first to perceive the gap between the professed ideals of the old order and the realities of its policies. Early in this decade, student political