Volume 11, Number 1 · July 11, 1968
The Revolting Academy
By Henry David Aiken
Young Radicals: Notes on Committed Youth
by Kenneth Keniston
Harcourt, Brace & World, 368 pp., $5.95
The Academic Revolution
by Christopher Jencks, by David Riesman
Doubleday, 600 pp., $10.00
A specter of revolution haunts the land. Or, rather, a congregation of revolutionary specters. For it is a major problem simply to sort them out and then, when possible, to relate them to one another. There seems to be general agreement that the working classes at least are out of it; their conservative unions, for example, belong as firmly to the established order as Hubert Humphrey, and for the same reason. To this extent, certainly, Marx must be updated by anyone who still finds him relevant. One major revolt (we may as well begin by distinguishing revolts, which are, as the term implies, active and intentional, from revolutions, which, in their loose common usage, may not be) is that of the Black Power movement. Like the revolt of individuals involved in the resistance against the war in Vietnam, it concerns us here tangentially: in so far, that is, as it relates to the student-young faculty revolts now occurring at great universities here and abroad. However all these revolts, in one way or another, are a part of the sophisticated scientific-technological 'revolution' which has converted the university into the indispensible feeder institution to the immensely rich and powerful post-industrial national society of which Daniel Bell and Zbigniew Brzezinski, among others, are exponents. The latter revolution, in turn, was made possible by the products of the 'academic revolution' which preoccupy Professors Jencks and Riesman in their new book, The Academic Revolution: the revolution, this is, initiated in the last decades of the nineteenth century, which transformed the old sectarian liberal arts and land-grant colleges into modern 'graduate school universities.'
Review, 7495 words
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