SOURCE: Hirschorn, Michael W. “A New-Left Challenger Comes to an Uneasy Peace with Academe.” Chronicle of Higher Education 34, no. 42 (29 June 1988): A3.

[In the following essay, Hirschorn examines The Sixties, contrasting Gitlin's relationship with institutions of higher education during that period with his role as a member of the University of California, Berkeley faculty in the 1980s.]

For Todd Gitlin, a self-described “movement intellectual” of the 60's New Left, the academy has never been the ideal setting for his work.

As an undergraduate at Harvard University and a graduate student at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, Mr. Gitlin was an open and impassioned critic of the academic establishment. As an early president of Students for a Democratic Society, he was in an elite cadre of left-wing students and young intellectuals who used the university as a punching bag for their criticisms of American society and government.

But two decades after Mr. Gitlin and other members of the New Left posed what many still think was one of the greatest challenges to the academy, Mr. Gitlin is a member of the faculty at the University of California's campus here.

An associate professor of sociology, he teaches courses in the sociology of the media and communications, a topic on which he has written three books. Most recently, he wrote a favorably received personal and historical account of the 60's student movement, The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage.

OUTSIDE THE IVORY TOWER

Mr. Gitlin, now 45 years old, has not made peace easily with the university. He spent the late 60's and early 70's searching for a way to lead the life of what the writer Russell Jacoby calls a “Public intellectual”: thinking, writing, and teaching outside the confines of the ivory tower.

“I had no interest in the academic life, in what I thought of as a segmented, disciplinarily demarcated approach to the world,” he says.

In 1974, however, disillusioned with a teaching job at California's New College—a “loosey-goosey” alternative institution, he says—he began working on his doctorate at Berkeley. “It was beginning to be clear that a doctorate was a necessary meal ticket,” he recalls. “I don't mean just a matter of making money—it was a matter of getting some standing from within which I could think and write.”

Mr. Gitlin is not the only former New Left radical who has returned to the academy, the same academy that served as a spawning ground for the student movement.

A number of prominent former New Left activists now hold teaching jobs, and many are carrying on the battles of the protest movement in the contexts of their academic disciplines. No definitive numbers are available on how many former radicals have become faculty members, but many old New Leftists say—and many conservatives complain—that the university has become the new front line of radical politics.

Says Richard Flacks, a former s.d.s. leader who is now a professor of sociology at the University of California at Santa Barbara: “In a real sense the New Left, and the student movement, included at its core quite a few people who were academic from the beginning. The protest was interpreted as a protest against the university. I read it as a protest of people who felt betrayed by the university, but felt a close attachment to it.

“The movement resulted in a lot of questioning of life directions and a temporary move away from the university,” he says. “But as the 70's went on, a lot of people, after being free-lance intellectuals and pursuing other kinds of work, began to go back to graduate school and have ended up in some form or another in the university.”

For Mr. Gitlin, there is no inconsistency between his days as a protest leader and as a professor. “I see [my work at Berkeley] as continuous with the best that I was about in the 60's,” he says. “You pay certain prices for being in the university, and I get mightily disgruntled about those prices from time to time, but I'm in the same league.

“Given the fact of the case, I don't see any terrific alternative to the university,” he adds. “We're forced willy-nilly into making the most of a university. It's a setting. It's a site. It's an arena of action.”

PROFESSOR'S SPEECH A KEY

In his book The Sixties, Mr. Gitlin describes his path from an avowed Adlai Stevenson fan as a high-school student in the Bronx, to liberal peace activist at Harvard, to left-wing-movement intellectual.

A key event in his radicalization, Mr. Gitlin writes, was a speech by the Harvard professor Barrington Moore, Jr., a Marxist, at a 1962 rally held by the peace group Tocsin. Tocsin's politics were so mild, Mr. Gitlin writes, that he recalls a Tocsin member passing him a note at a meeting that said: “demonstration is wrong.”

Mr. Gitlin remembers the speech by Mr. Moore as an ideological bombshell. “The standard pacifist reaction, stressing the horrors of war, with an appeal to the United Nations, … is utterly inadequate,” Mr. Gitlin recalls Mr. Moore as saying. “It doesn't expose the roots of the situation. It merely contributes to the general mystification.”

Soon thereafter, Mr. Gitlin became part, and later the head, of a fledging group of leftists that included Tom Hayden, Al Haber, Mr. Flacks, and others.

Mr. Hayden, the best known of the student radicals and now the author of his own memoirs of the New Left, recalls Mr. Gitlin as an intellectual and a theorist in a movement he believes was driven more by emotion.

“Most of the people involved in the 60's were not intellectually driven,” says Mr. Hayden, who wrote the original draft of the “Port Huron Statement,” the best known political document of the New Left. “But Todd and others were at the intellectual center in the early s.d.s. and peace movement, and there were a lot of people who went through a very exciting intellectual ferment there that they didn't find in the schools.”

Mr. Hayden, now a California Assemblyman from Santa Monica, says Mr. Gitlin was driven by the feeling that students in the protest movement needed an analysis of what was happening around them. Mr. Hayden scoffs at that notion. “I think people were motivated by wanting to change the world and the desire to lead an unconventional life and take action and be in the streets,” he says. “Where there was a need for some analysis, you could pick it up. You knew in your gut the Vietnam War was wrong.”

Mr. Flacks, however, remembers Mr. Gitlin as having a profound influence on the movement, bringing a sophisticated analysis of nuclear politics to the s.d.s. in its early days and arguing early on that the movement should turn its attention to events in Vietnam. “Todd was one of the early people as I recall it to argue that action against the war was a priority,” he says.

SHIES AWAY FROM JUDGMENTS

Though Mr. Gitlin wrote often about the events of the 60's—even as a participant—he shies away in his book and in his conversation from making judgments about the movement. Yet the book's tone is one of profound disillusionment with the fractionalization of the s.d.s. in the late part of the decade and its collapse in a wave of violence in 1968 and afterwards.

Mr. Flacks says Mr. Gitlin had “a lot of faith, a naïve faith in the movement as a total answer to one's personal direction and the society's direction.”

“The fact that it couldn't be sustained as a single cohesive force was a big blow,” he says.

Mr. Flacks adds: “What he does not tell in the book is that he really suffered psychologically because of that.”

Mr. Gitlin ends his book on a hopeful tone, however. He argues that while the movement collapsed, it has had a lasting impact on the country. “On a larger scale, the ideals of cultural plurality and participatory democracy remained alive, cultural standards against which to criticize the workplace, the polity, and the household,” he writes. “As an impossible revolution it had failed—how could it have succeeded?—but as an amalgam of reform efforts, especially for civil rights (ultimately for Hispanics, Native Americans, and other minorities as well as blacks) and women's rights and the environment and against the war, it had been a formidable success.”

Mr. Gitlin says he is still grappling with many of the same cultural and political issues that he faced 20 years ago. The difference, now, he says, is that he is doing it as a professor. “I see it as a place where I try to continue the Lord's work,” he says of Berkeley. “I don't mean to proselytize. I mean it as an intellectual.”

Says Mr. Hayden: “He was always brilliant and very cerebral and had infinite curiosity about ideas. He's a born intellectual who didn't like universities, and with good reasons. But I'm glad he found his place.”