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SOCGRAD MINI-LECTURES
by
In a recent post on PSN, Andrew Twaddle has a good point; all too often
reflections on the 60's become little more than 'self-preening' and small time social
history. I have attended to such sessions on the role of the SDS and student opposition to
the War in Vietnam...one five years ago and the second last week at the MSS in
Chicago...both were very interesting and well attended but, alas, far more self
celebratory and than balanced reflection on the long term effects of what we did.
At the Chicago session on the role of SDS, organized by my good friend, John Leggett, we
heard from those who helped organize SDS in the 60's...and learned why they were so
effective...lots of talent on that session.
I tried to do three things:
1. I, too, recounted my small part in those years.
2. I tried to give a reasoned judgment about the legacy of SDS and the efforts of those of
us to work toward a more democratic society.
3. In the last three minutes, I tried to think through what effect we American academics
might have in the first quarter of the next century should the social base for radical
activity reappear.
Permit me to summarize those points in response to Andrew's suggestion:
A. On Being a Radical Sociologist.
I finished the M.A. in sociology at Michigan [where I met John Leggett.] in 1958. After being fired quickly three times in succession [Iowa Wesleyan for going to see the Dean with 3 Black students who wanted to complain about racism on campus; from Rocky Mnt. in Billings for refusing, along with Walt Posner, a Jew, to attend Tuesday Chapel; and from SW Missouri St. College for suggesting that other marriage forms were not 'deviancy' and 'disorganization' to a chair who taught Marriage and the Family, I took the Ph.D. at Colorado and, in 1966, went to Colorado St. University where I had 22 very interesting years.
Upon leaving U/Mich, I had no particular radical elements in my teaching or my
research; the events of the 60's were to change all that; the students of the 60's would
not permit me to rest easy in my teaching or my tenure at Colorado State University...they
dragged me into radical sociology by their rage at the war in Vietnam, gender and racist
preferences at the University; the radical scholarship missing at U/Mich and at U/Colo was
provided by a series of radical caucuses at the Midwest Sociology Meetings, the ASA
Meetings and later the Humanist Sociology Meetings...
By 1968, I was deeply involved in four social movements at CSU:
1. The confrontation of racism at CSU. The Black Student Organization lead by
Paul Chambers and United American Mexican Students led by Manual Ramos were, separately
organizing a confrontation of the administration over ten demands. I helped fuse the two
and enlisted the help of the [mostly white] student government in support. Lots of
adventures but the short version is that, after UMAS and BSA and 500 white students
occupied the President's office, the Board accepted all 10 demands.
2. The Anti-war movement: Lots of teach-ins, vigils, demonstrations and marches which
along with thousands of other such forms of resistence inspired by SDS, Nixon moved to end
the war.
3. The women's movement on campus lead, in part, by another student from my classes, Nancy
Greenfield. Several hundred were 'arrested,' tried and convicted by a faculty court but,
after I wrote a full page condemnation of the Dean of Students and the administration [for
trying them instead of all the faculty and administrators who were using their office for
personal profit], the charges were dropped and gender policy on housing hours, women's
sports and programs altered.
4. Socialist Scholarship. Nixon was elected in 1968, I made the analysis that he would
move to destroy the social base for radical consciousness and activity in the USA; that we
needed a permanent base in the Rocky Mnt Area for marxism, cultural marxism, feminist
theory, and progressive labor movement. Four of us, at a 4th of July picnic, organized the
Red Feather Institute for Advanced Studies in sociology...we published a lot of papers;
held a lot of conferences; supported a lot of local confrontations.
B. Evaluation/Legacy
1. I made the point that perhaps the lasting legacy of the SDS was:
a) that it ended 'the awful innocence of Americans about war.
b) We learned a lot about institutional and street politics which is still useful. We know
a lot of people from those years [many on PSN] upon whom we can call. We know how easily
liberals can be pushed to more progressive policies.
2. We failed to make the USA a more democratic society.
a) after the assassination of MLK in April, 1968, the civil rights movement
faded and failed. Racism is on the march and economic inequality widens yearly.
b) after Reagan was elected, the women's movement was successfully dis-organized.
c) We did end the war in Vietnam but, as it turns out, moved the military policy to 'low
intensive warfare' by which one means low visibility. The USA now hides most of its
activity by arming, training, 'advising' 3rd world soldiers. It is doubtful that the moral
quotient of the world is greatly improved by the fact that third world men are killing and
being killed rather than American men killing and being killed. Leftists, I claim, do not
owe the USA any special loyalty nor give it any special preference in the matter of
killing and being killed.
d) The Red Feather Institute has made no noticeable impact on American sociology. It is
still run by very conservative and very linear sociologists...if anything, its new 'Code
of Ethics' is even more self serving and its links to the capitalist state even more
tightly established....but I have hopes.
C. The Future:
I said I doubt that the USA [and American academics] will be the center of
resistence and rebellion in the next century...the consolidation of the world capitalist
system...new centers of domination will emerge and new economic blocs will displace old.
We had our moment at center stage and, by and large, failed to make lasting changes.
Nonetheless, the USA will continue to be important and we will continue to need to
develop, as Marx said, good theory, good organization and good politics with which to help
expand democratic institutions; re-unite production and distribution; oppose elitist
politics in public and private organizations; improve programs of social justice and, as
Marx suggested, reunite praxis and theory.
Finally, we should not take our failures to grievously...we did better than did our
professors and, perchance, our students will do better than did we if we follow Andrew's
advice and combine social history with constructive self criticism.
T.R. Young