Word: 1960s
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...There are as many students involved in working for change on campus today as there were in the 1960s," says Yale senior Jon H. Ritter, who has been involved in student activism during his four years at Yale. "The difference is that in the 1960s students were calling for everything at once, while students in the 1980s have more specific goals, and work on one issue at a time...
Students today say that the activism of the 1980s, although it attracts less attention than did the protest movements of 20 years ago, is a more effective method of achieving lasting change. "The 1960s were characterized by the baby-boom surge in youth culture, but the student movement that sparked in 1965 collapsed in 1971. What we have now is a much more enduring organization," Perkins says...
...There were a lot of things that contributed to the spectacle of the 1960s. We do not have a war going on today. We do not need a free speech movement. Administrators do not call the police at demonstrations. And the demography has changed--there were an awful lot of kids then, who got angry awfully fast," Kornbluh says...
Although the techniques of student activism have changed, some of the problems that plagued the movement 20 years ago have not. Many activists in the 1960s "appeared to have no stomach for hard, tedious, daily organizing, no respect for and little contact with the people in whose name they claimed to be acting," wrote Thelwell in The Village Voice last March. Some students see similar problems with activism in the 1980s...
...There are two different movements in student politics today," says Kornbluh. "One is focused on national networking, following the Students for Democratic Society (SDS) model, and the other is focused on local activism." The SDS was the leading radical student organization of the 1960s...