Word: rudd
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...MARK RUDD'S sentences don't play back very well on the instant replay. He doesn't prepare what he is going to say in his speeches, and his mind seems to be listening to his own voice, forming its next ideas on the basis of what it hears. And he falls back on using a dogmatic-sounding language of generalization ("imperialism," "corporate expansion," "co-optation") that assume the listener already largely understands the things he is talking about...
...Rudd is not the spokesman of the Columbia revolt or its ideologue. He is the leader (like field commander) of the Columbia students who do already understand the issues Rudd generalizes about. And these intricate issues, such as the interests of Columbia's high-level decisionmakers, are easier to talk about when reduced into less painfully complex phrases...
...Rudd has an excuse for talking the way he does. But trying to figure out his ideas is still confusing. He contradicts himself, sometimes within the same sentence. In a discussion after the SDS film Friday night he told a group of people, "The Left is completely bankrupt; but the potential is there...
...Rudd wants, let's call it, a revolution. His activities--stopping registration, holding buildings as ransom for six demands--have been an attempt to influence decisions students normally couldn't change and building strength for an even greater power in decisions. But how what the revolutionaries are doing at Columbia ties into what they hope is a world revolution Rudd can't tell...
...find meaning and order in what happens to students and how they react to what happens to them, Rudd drags in too many irrelevant historical events. He insisted Friday that the situation at Columbia was "directly analogous" to the long chronology of the German student movement that his audience listened to just before they heard him. Perhaps because the difficult struggle of revolution unites those of similar causes, Rudd feels sympathetic to the Germans. But to lump together two such different and complex situations as the same is one of the dogmas of the old academics that new thinkers...