HGSE News: The '60's Unfinished Business

Decades after the campus revolts of the 1960s, academia still has not addressed its role as a political entity, says Julie Reuben, a newly tenured professor of education at HGSE. Reuben grapples with the unfinished business of the era of change in her book-in-progress, Campus Revolts: Politics and the American University in the 1960s.

A historian of higher education, Reuben is well-acquainted with the strains that riddled modernization efforts at colleges and universities a century ago, as these institutions shed their religious affiliation to seek knowledge and truth. That era yielded new understandings about the academic pursuit—such as the idea that knowledge is a consumer product created by researchers. A driving interest in this kind of tension led Reuben to consider other turning points in the history of learning institutions.

At the Intersection of Knowledge Production and Money
In her new book, Reuben will describe how universities have played a significant and complicated role in social revolution. Up until the 1960's, administrations considered their work to be of "scholarly objectivity." They limited student involvement in politics, censored student publications and regulated student organizations; they issued in loco parentis ("in the place of a parent") regulations that controlled details of students lives down to what they wore to dinner and where they went to bed.

At the dawn of the Civil Rights era, students nationwide started challenging the neutrality of academia's apolitical stance. They rallied for the right to free speech on campus; they questioned government funding of university research, especially military research; they contested universities' treatment of women and minorities; they objected to the narrow pool from which college trustees were selected.

Immediately following the protests, universities responded with short-lived efforts to tease politically controversial research out of their programs. Stanford University, for instance, divested the Stanford Research Institute (SRI), which relied on government funding for military research. As an independent laboratory, SRI continued to take government funding without "sullying Stanford's name." But over the years, says Reuben, universities have become less critical if anything about their funding sources, relying more heavily on relationships with industry. "Those of us in the academy have to ask ourselves at what point does the intersection of knowledge production and money distort the knowledge that is produced."

Questions of this sort have no simple resolution.

Protecting the Idea of Neutrality
Likewise, student activism dissipated within the decade, but the challenge to "scholarly objectivity" opened a door that, decades later, the academy has not been able to close. "Universities have been in an awkward position since then," says Reuben. "While it's admitted now that politics have a role in universities, they're addressed in a more or less neutral context so as to maintain ties with institutions that make them powerful."

Sixties-era students met an impasse with their demand that universities further left-wing political agendas. "In a sense, institutions were right to protect the idea of neutrality," says Reuben. "Universities are only powerful to the extent that other powerful institutions in society acknowledge and support them." If universities break radically with mainstream thinking," she explains, "they risk losing their solid stature. Few students have asked how the academy could change society if it functioned from a marginalized position."

"These issues might stay unsettled and contradictory," says Reuben. "We simply may not be able to go much further than that."

For More Information
Information on Julie Reuben and her research can be found in the Faculty Profiles.

About the Article
This article first appeared in the Spring 2001 issue of Ed., the magazine of the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

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