In  The Lost Promise: American Universities in the 1960s, Ellen Schrecker illuminates how American universities’ explosive growth intersected with the turmoil of the 1960s, fomenting an unprecedented crisis where dissent over racial inequality and the Vietnam War erupted into direct action. Torn by internal power struggles and demonized by conservative voices, higher education never fully recovered, resulting in decades of underfunding and today’s woefully inequitable system. As Schrecker’s magisterial history makes blazingly clear, the complex blend of troubles that disrupted the university in that pivotal period haunts the ivory tower to this day. 
 
In this guest post, Schrecker examines the connections between today’s protestors and the student movements of the 1960s.  

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For those of us who lived through the student unrest of the 1960s, the recent campus demonstrations and subsequent police crackdowns on them seem, in the immortal words of Yogi Berra, “like déjà vu all over again.” But as I noted in The Lost Promise: American Universities in the 1960s, today’s academic institutions are in much more trouble than those fifty years ago. They are reeling from nearly half a century of neoliberal austerity and a lavishly funded right-wing campaign against higher education that the conservative backlash against the 1960s in part precipitated. 

The protestors’ demands and behaviors then and now are certainly similar. The dissidents in the 1960s were motivated by a revulsion against the horrific military effort by the U.S. in Vietnam; today’s by that of America’s Israeli client. Both groups of students demonstrated against their institutions’ complicity with the wrongs they opposed and the repression of their protests. The earlier movement also contained an equally strong demand for racial equity. 

Protests then and now were overwhelmingly non-violent and law-abiding. But, with few exceptions, top administrators and trustees, as well as many professors, refused to engage with their dissenting students. Most viewed them with hostility, demonizing them as irrational troublemakers in the 1960s and as antisemites today. Academic leaders and the media made unfounded allegations about outside provocateurs and paid undue attention to disruptive behavior and extreme language. All-too-often the academic authorities, both then and now, capitulated to outside demands to call the cops—only to make everything worse. 

The student movement of the 1960s developed during what historians call the “Golden Age of American Higher Education.” Considered essential for economic development and national security during the early years of the Cold War, academia had enormous prestige. As colleges and universities doubled and tripled in size, federal, state, and local governments showered them with seemingly unlimited funds. They became more egalitarian – drawing their students and faculties from a broader cross-section of the American middle and working classes. By the 1960s, the US seemed on the verge of creating a low-cost, high-quality system of public higher education open to any qualified student.  

That promise disappeared—a victim of the backlash against the student movement and the concomitant neoliberal restructuring of the academy that began in the 1970s. College and university presidents proved unwilling to defend their own students and faculty members, and much of the American public was as unprepared for, and antagonistic to, the student protests as those administrators. Encouraged by Ronald Reagan’s successful gubernatorial campaign against the Berkeley Free Speech Movement in 1966, politicians rushed to enact punitive measures against student activists. While most bills failed to pass or proved unenforceable, the concomitant financial sanctions imposed on public higher education were devastating. State legislators cut back on their academic institutions’ operating budgets, even as enrollments continued to grow. The free, or virtually free, access to a rapidly expanding system of public higher education, as well as affordable tuition at many private institutions, gradually disappeared.  

By the late 70s, administrators and boards of trustees were buying into the neoliberal political culture that favors the private sector over the public good. As state appropriations dwindled, universities turned increasingly to other sources of income – tuition, of course, but also private donors and federal and corporate research grants. Like the business executives they were courting, academic administrators adopted a hierarchical managerial style that imposed austerity on their campuses, treated students as consumers, and prioritized growth instead of educational quality.  

At the same time, a network of ultra-conservative ideologues and billionaires mounted a well-funded campaign against the university that continues until today. They subsidized right-wing intellectuals and think tanks that not only demonized faculty members as hard-core radicals, but also attacked the veracity of academic knowledge. Recently, red-state politicians have passed dozens of measures banning books and interfering with the teaching at every level of such “divisive concepts” as America’s past and present racism and sexism and – even more recently – criticism of Israel.   

As in the 1960s, today’s academic establishment has crumpled in the face of the right-wing onslaught. Professors, who once had considerable say over the academic work of their institutions, have been shoved aside. Their expertise and experience no longer seem to matter even in such crucial areas as curriculum and the hiring, promotion, and firing of their colleagues. With universities now containing more administrators than instructional staff, academia’s leaders applied recipes from the corporate sector, implementing “reforms” by downsizing, outsourcing, and turning their academic employees into gig workers. 

The result: over 75% of all instruction within higher education today is delivered by part-time or temporary employees who have no academic freedom or voice in faculty governance. Most are as credentialed, competent, and devoted to their work as their tenured and tenure-track colleagues but are poorly paid with few if any benefits. Adjuncts average only $3500 per course and often teach four or more courses per semester, sometimes at several institutions. Many lack such professional perquisites as offices, library privileges, and parking spaces. Worst of all, they can be let go at any time, for any reason, or for no reason at all. Moreover, their inadequate working conditions make it hard for them to give their equally stressed students the kind of individual attention they need for academic success.  

So, what is to be done? How can the hollowed out and demoralized academic community confront the current onslaught against higher education?  

Even in the age of AI, no college or university can function without a faculty. But faculty members must overcome internal divisions and then mobilize the broadest possible constituency on campus and beyond—students, parents, cafeteria workers, alumni, librarians, labor unions, and other community groups and individuals concerned about preserving higher education and the freedom to think. Creating that movement will require an enormous one-on-one organizing campaign, but there is no alternative. Our universities, our students, and our—albeit imperfect—democratic system is at stake.  

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Ellen Schrecker is a retired professor of history at Yeshiva University and the author of numerous books, including No Ivory Tower: McCarthyism and the Universities; Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America; The Lost Soul of Higher Education: Corporatization, the Assault on Academic Freedom, and the End of the American University; and coeditor with Valerie Johnson and Jennifer Ruth, The Right to Learn: Resisting the Right-Wing Attack on Academic Freedom. 

The Lost Promise is available now from our website or your favorite bookseller. The paperback edition will be published in December 2024 and is available for preorder now.