Word: sds
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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After the Paine Hall sit-in Faculty members began shaping proposals for the Faculty meeting of Feb 4. 1969. The Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), one of the more radical student groups, demanded adoption of six major points including the expulsion of ROTC from Harvard and that the scholarships of Paine Hall students be returned. Because Faculty rules forbade students from advancing proposals. Pearson Professor of Mathematics and Mathematical Logic Hilary W Putnam presented the SDS proposal to the Faculty...
...coalesce in the early 1960s, focusing on the dehumanizing aspects of academic expansion into new areas of government-sponsored research, the broadening of technical and pre-professional graduate programs at the expense of liberal arts, and the willingness to subordinate these new "multiversities" to a higher national purpose. SDS's 1962 "Port Huron Statement" argued that prestigious schools had become entangled in an elite bureaucratic network that was engineering a Cold War abroad and serving corporate might, rather than popular will, at home...
...with less patience for theories and manifestos, linked universities to the planning and execution of the Vietnam War. They vowed to raze academia along with the rest of the Establishment to permit a "fresh start" for American society. In April 1969, a Marxist splinter group of the fast deteriorating SDS led a forceful takeover of Harvard's University Hall, telling the majority of the campus leftists, who had opposed the occupation. "You and the administration are the same thing, and we will smash you both...
...piling the sociological data to new heights. Rothman and Lichter do not add much to these conclusions. Moreover, when the authors take the Jewish theme to its extreme, intertwining it with their SDS caricatures of various "rebel" types, they settle into some dubious armchair psychoanalysis...
...SDS and much of the New Left did disintegrate into an unimaginative revolutionary mindset in the late Sixties. The Rothman-Lichter "authoritarian" model seems fairly appropriate when applied to the post-1967 years and the devolution of the Weathermen. The authors set out to explain what powered a movement, and their effort has the positive effect of prompting curiosity about the variety of factors involved. But the book quickly becomes an indictment and fails because its charges are too often obscure and exaggerated. Regardless of its pathetic demise, the SDS-led New Left deserves serious consideration of its major accomplishment...