As with everything else going on in the new today, historians should think about the protesters on campuses from Missouri to Yale in historical context. Most notably, we as historians should begin to think about the world in which most of these protesters grew up. Shaped by 9/11, the War in Iraq, the aftermath of Katrina, the 2007-2008 economic crash, and the election of Barack Obama, these students have a world view profoundly different from earlier generations of activists, especially those of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s. Such a comparison is understandable, but we shouldn’t limit our historical imagination to automatically comparing today to the 1960s. It is similar to, say, comparisons between Ta-Nehisi Coates and James Baldwin made when Between the World and Me was released—understandable, but needing nuance to reveal anything new or profound about either writer. The same is true of the desire to compare the current campus activism with the Civil Rights Movement of the past.
Historical comparisons should serve, ultimately, to make us think about how much the past teaches us about the present. But the past remains “another country”—perhaps we can understand and even relate to it, but the past is never fully knowable. With that said, I am surprised more comparisons have not been made with, say, the anti-Apartheid movement of the 1980s. Those protests often encountered conservative backlash and were part of a polarized political climate. Yet even a comparison with the 1980s can yield but so much. At the heart of current debates are arguments over the idea of “diversity,” coupled with a Black Lives Matter—infused sense of urgency among activists. Remember, 
many of the students who are part of the University of Missouri demonstrations participated in the Ferguson protests last year, a galvanizing experience for future protest if there ever was one.
The two generations, the protesters of the Civil Rights era and today, have experienced different worlds. Just consider the use of the term “diversity” by colleges and universities in their recruitment of African Americans and other students of color. Nothing like this existed in the aftermath of Brown v. Board of Education. Precisely because these students live in a United States where outright racism and discrimination is outlawed, their demands for further integration on a college campus may be difficult for some to understand. And yet, like ideas of a “post-racial” society being proclaimed with the election of Barack Obama in November 2008, the concept of “diversity” on a college campus is one that needs further defining by everyone. That includes not just protesters but also college professors and administrators. The development of the idea of “diversity” on college campuses in the last thirty years has, arguably, left many students, regardless of race or political affiliation, disappointed. We have gone from black student unions and multicultural student centers to…what, precisely? That is the question at the core of many of the demands put forth by students on college campuses across the nation. At the very least that is how I interpret both the protests on college campuses and the conservative backlash to them. In an age of Black Lives Matter, Dylan Roof’s Emanuel AME massacre, and polarized rhetoric about immigration and Islam, this movement is but one outgrowth of how African American and other students driven by social justice view the situation.
Meanwhile, conservative (and some liberal) commentators are concerned about the intellectual trappings of the modern university. Debates about trigger warnings and censorship on campus collide with concerns about racial and ethnic diversity, along with a variety of other issues that have animated campus activism for years. As is the case with much else today (and in the recent past), polarization rules. As activists press for more on the issue of a concrete realization of “diversity,” the backlash will only grow in intensity. What sort of a university will be produced on the other end of these debates, it is impossible to say.
With that, we need to carefully consider the history of the African American middle and working classes since 1968. The works of Ellis Cose bear consideration here. His 1994 book The Rage of a Privileged Class argued that middle class African Americans felt that, despite all their material success, true advancement in American society was still blocked to them due to race. Cose’s argument changed considerably by the release of his 2011 book, The End of Anger, which showed that African Americans had become more optimistic on racial issues in the immediate aftermath of the election of Barack Obama. Both of these books utilized surveys of middle class African Americans. I bring these books up because they capture some sense of the ways in which middle class blacks view society—and many of these folks have sons and daughters going to institutions like Yale or Missouri.
Cose himself argued in a USA Today column from this summer that denial of a racial problem still cripples African American advancement in society. It would be interesting for Cose to do a new survey, comparing and contrasting the ways in which middle class African Americans and their children view the world. After all, there should be no assumption of a uniform black public opinion—just consider the rioting in Baltimore this summer, a city with an African American mayor and police commissioner.
Meanwhile, opinion polls show African Americans continue to be optimistic about their future—just as white Americans view their position as been worse than ever before. How you see the history of the last 60 years, according to this poll, may hinge on your racial background. Such varying views of American society are worrying. However, they should not be too surprising when examining the history of post-Civil Rights America: debates about affirmative action and Southern strategies, growing gaps of wealth inequality tied with multiple wars overseas—all have contributed to a polarized society. It would be a mistake to think of the current protests as separate from these larger factors.
It would be a mistake to wrap up this post without thinking about the life and legacy of Jerry G. Watts. His book on Ralph Ellison, Heroism and the Black Intellectual: Ralph Ellison, Politics, and the Afro-American Intellectual Life should not just be required reading for intellectual historians of 20th century America, but should be read by anyone who wants to 
pursue both the life of the mind and the life of an academic devoted to publicly engaged scholarship. It was an issue Ellison grappled with his entire public career, as Watts deftly argued in his book. I do not believe my views on “public intellectuals” or engaging the public would be the same without reading Watts’ book. His book also includes a sustained and valuable critique of Harold Cruse’s The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual.This, along with his book on Amiri Baraka’s public career, are both worth reading when considering American intellectual history since the Second World War. Nor do I think about graduate school the same way after reading his funny but important essay about the life of graduate students, reproduced here.
This tribute does not do him justice. It comes amid an era when his arguments about the struggle of African American intellectuals to balance between serving the broader African American community and to be true to their own intellectual curiosity become more important with renewed debates about “black public intellectuals.” Ta-Nehisi Coates has already declined to be thought of as such; Cornel West and Michael Eric Dyson have done battle over the idea. The New Republic searches for more, but Jerry Watts’ work reminds us of the historical difficulty of being an African American intellectual in search of artistic mastery during an age of racial and cultural turmoil. I only wish he were around to say more, because as with the careers of most accomplished academics, I suspect he still had more to give to all of us.
9 Thoughts on this Post
S-USIH Comment Policy
We ask that those who participate in the discussions generated in the Comments section do so with the same decorum as they would in any other academic setting or context. Since the USIH bloggers write under our real names, we would prefer that our commenters also identify themselves by their real name. As our primary goal is to stimulate and engage in fruitful and productive discussion, ad hominem attacks (personal or professional), unnecessary insults, and/or mean-spiritedness have no place in the USIH Blog’s Comments section. Therefore, we reserve the right to remove any comments that contain any of the above and/or are not intended to further the discussion of the topic of the post. We welcome suggestions for corrections to any of our posts. As the official blog of the Society of US Intellectual History, we hope to foster a diverse community of scholars and readers who engage with one another in discussions of US intellectual history, broadly understood.
Robert, thanks for this.
One of the tasks I undertook in my dissertation was to correct the flat, one-dimensional image of the Black student protestors at Stanford in the 1980s. The sometimes dismissive journalistic coverage of the canon debates at the time reduced the entire political worldview and activism of those students to a single sound byte — “Hey, hey! Ho, Ho! Western Culture’s got to go!” And of course that’s all that most people ever hear/know about the controversy. But there was a whole range of issues/causes these students were championing, on campus and beyond it, including (as you mention above) divestment in South Africa. So part of my job, I thought, was simply to contextualize and connect these students’ demands for curricular change to a broader array of civil rights/justice causes they were also involved in. (That’s more than I’ve ever said about my argument anywhere in writing — but I better stop there for now!)
In any case, I think a lot of the coverage of these student protests today )in some ways like the coverage of the 1980s and 1990s) perpetuates a comforting fiction that university students are in a sheltered space and just don’t realize it — it’s the fiction that the university is a place apart and separate from the broader culture, rather than intricately connected to it and embedded in it in a thousand ways.
This. ^^
So, so very true. I hoped someone would catch that as one of my main points! It’s also apparent in the demands many of these groups are making–I can tell you here at South Carolina they’ve made sure to include demands for greater services to help transgender people on campus, and expand mental health care across campus. So like you said, these activists aren’t in an academic or collegiate vacuum.
And these protests include concerns over health benefit cuts and Planned Parenthood contract suspensions. These concerns, particularly over women’s reproductive health, sometimes get lost.
Robert: Thanks so much for that pointer to Jerry G. Watts book on Ralph Ellison. – TL
It’s definitely worth a read! I have to admit, being an Ellison fan it’s always been one of my favorites because Watts captures the struggle Ellison faced to be true to himself as an intellectual, writer, and artist.
While I agree that it’s important to resist the temptation to automatically view today’s campus revolts through the prism of the 1960s, it is a difficult to hold back because so many of the protests have issued demands that hearken back to the struggles to establish Black Studies departments in the 1960s and 1970s. More importantly, many of the liberal critics of these student protests draw on the intellectual and political commonsense that emerged in the 1960s to challenge the bureaucratic and administered society. Older left-liberal critics, many of whom came of age in the 1960s or passed through the academy in subsequent years when the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory still had swayed, argue that protestors today have lost sight of advances the 60s made towards challenging authority based on a profound distrust if not outright disdain for bureaucratic institutions. With their insistence on expanding the managerial class at colleges and universities, students are rebuking these earlier activists and their politics. The starkest expression of these generational differences is Todd Gitlin’s recent editorial in the NYT.
One last point. In analyzing the 1960s, no U.S. historian can ignore the international arena. Nor should they do so interpreting today’s campus protest movement. In fact, even the founding of Black Studies departments had an international dimension. For example, McGeorge Bundy, former national security advisor to the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, and brother to William Bundy, the CIA director under Johnson, was one of the power brokers behind the implementation of Black Studies programs while president of the Ford Foundation. Bundy transformed calls for African American Studies into a project to advance the integration of colleges and universities throughout the country. His experience with Latin American policy perhaps shaped his response to racial conflicts flaring in U.S. cities and compelled him to embrace a policy of détente to forestall the growing radicalism of African Americans. As the scholar Noliwe M. Rooks observes in White Money/Black Power, “just as the war in Vietnam was often described as an effort to advance the cause of democracy around the world, a similar concern was at the heart of Bundy’s embrace of Black Studies as a field.” I mention all of this to ask, what are the international factors shaping student demands and influencing their choice of political language to frame these demands? I, for one, can’t help but think that the War on Terror and the surveillance state has influenced students’ demand for space spaces and their fear of journalists outing activists at Mizzou.
Bill Bundy was not LBJ’s CIA director; in fact he was never director of the CIA and instead was an attorney and an analyst with the CIA. He was notable as a foreign affairs adviser to presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson.
LBJ’s directors of the CIA were:
John McCone 1961–1965
William Raborn 1965–1966
Richard M. Helms 1966–1973
“I, for one, can’t help but think that the War on Terror and the surveillance state has influenced students’ demand for space spaces and their fear of journalists outing activists at Mizzou.”
Questions for this quote:
1. Have you ever heard of COINTELPRO?
2. Do you think Stalinism is freedom?
3. Does totalitarianism require secrecy?
5. Do you think that the War on Terror and the surveillance state have anything to do with this one way or another:
“But then you move to the absurd, where at Yale they’re spitting at somebody who was talking about free speech. Or where they ban the showing of “The Vagina Monologues” because it doesn’t take into account transgender.
‘Well, let transgenders write their own plays. Everybody should write their own plays. The idea that you can’t have a play about “The Vagina Monologues” because it doesn’t include transgender is just blatantly absurd.”
Ah, the good old days:
First of all, understand that you’re not entitled to any safe space for your ideas. Your ideas are not subject to being put in safe spaces. You have to allow your ideas to be criticized. It’s not an answer to say, “I’m offended by your ideas, therefore you shouldn’t be able to express them.” There should be no safe spaces for ideas on university campuses.
Obviously, there should be safe spaces from physical assault. But there’s an enormous difference between physical assault and not liking what somebody else might have to say about controversial issues on campus.”
Quotes are by Alan Dershowitz
Publius, thanks for the correction on William Bundy’s role in LBJ’s administration. As for the rest of your comment, I don’t hold any of the positions you attribute to me. And, yes, I’ve heard of COINTELPRO but I’m not sure students fears stem from that program or similar ones targeting social protests. In fact, I only point to the broader context of the War on Terror because I think it lends credibility to the pseudo-theories of safe spaces for young people who came of age in the wake of 9/11. But in making that point, my intention wasn’t to draw a strong or neat causal link between the political vocabularies students use to frame their grievances and the surveillance state.