Recent Work on Student
Activists
Excerpt from Christian Bay, "Political and
apolitical students: facts in search of theory." Journal of Social Issues 23(3):34-51,
1967
I shall not attempt an exhaustive survey of all
available data on student activism or student leftism generally. The reader is referred to
several of the articles in this issue for a summary of these data; the articles by Trent
and Craise and by Flacks are particularly relevant. Of especial importance to the line of
argument which I have been developing are the following findings.
Berkeley, 1957 -- Selvin and Hagstrom Findings
Hanan C. Selvin and Warren O. Hagstrom in
December, 1957 while things were still fairly quiet on the Berkeley campus, did a study of
the views on civil liberties in a sample of 894 Berkeley students (Selvin and Hagstrom,
1965). Anticipating that abstract statements favoring the Bill of Rights would sooner
indicate conformism than liberalism, these investigators elicited responses to specific
civil liberties issues involving conflicts with other values. On the basis of these
responses they constructed a Libertarianism Index. They divided their sample into three
groups: highly libertarian (34%), moderately libertarian (46%), slightly libertarian
(20%).
Of interest here are the data comparing the
highly libertarian students with the Berkeley student body in general. In a linear
relationship, again, the proportions of highly libertarian students on the Berkeley campus
ascend from freshman to senior and graduate level: 21% -29% -34% -40% -54%. The
relationship between libertarianism and grades is inconclusive in the lower division but
clear in the upper division: among A to B+ students 54% are "highly
libertarian", compared to 37% among B to C+ students and 25% among students at C
level or below.
Children of blue collar workers among Berkeley
students are libertarians more often, by a wide margin, than are children of parents
better able to support their offspring financially through college; this is true in spite
of the fact that blue collar parents average lower educational attainments than other
parents and are likely to be relatively non-libertarian themselves. "Greater economic
independence, in the sense of self-support", conclude Selvin and Hagstrom "is
strongly associated with having more libertarian attitudes than one's parents"
(Selvin and Hagstrom, 1965, 504).
Among male students the social science and
humanities majors were by a wide margin found more libertarian than the rest, with
engineering and education (a field that has recruited low achievers in Berkeley) and
business administration at the bottom. Among female students, social welfare majors were
most libertarian, while life science majors shared the next level of libertarianism with
social science and humanities majors, and with education majors once again at the bottom.
And, finally, fraternity and especially sorority students -- who are least likely to get
to know well people with unorthodox ideas -- are least likely to be libertarians, compared
to students with other living arrangements.
Berkeley, 1964 -- Somers' Data
In November, 1964, when the student rebellion at
Berkeley was under way, Robert H. Somers interviewed a carefully drawn sample of 285
Berkeley students: He found 63% to favor the goals of the Free Speech Movement, while
about 34% approved of the FSM's tactics; clearly favoring goals as well as tactics were
30%, and Somers calls this group the militants, while the moderates,
again 30%, clearly supported FSM's goals but not the means used, and 22% conservatives
were opposed to the ends sought as well as the tactics used (Somers, 1964).
For my purposes the crucial findings of this
study are summarized as follows by Somers: "it is hard to overlook the fact that in
our sample there is a strong relation between academic achievement and support for the
demonstrators. Among those who reported to our interviewers a grade point average of B+ or
better, nearly half (45 per cent) are militants, and only a tenth are conservatives. At
the other end, over a third of those with an average of B-or less are conservatives, and
only 15 per cent are militants". If the FSM represented a minority of students,
Somers concluded, it would be "a minority vital to the excellence of this
university" (1964,544).
Berkeley 1965 -- Heist's Findings
Early in 1965 Paul Heist did a study of a sample
drawn from a list of more than 800 persons said to have been arrested in the Sproul Hall
sit-in (Heist, 1965). On advice of their legal counsel, about 50% of the 33% sample
refused to return the questionnaire but the rest cooperated, 128 in all; an additional 60
FSM activists were recruited subsequently as subjects for the study. In addition, a random
sample of 92 seniors (class of 1964-1965) were given the same two questionnaires. Also,
Heist had access to the same attitude inventory data from 340 seniors (class of
1962-1963)and from"2500+" entering freshmen, all at Berkeley. Further details of
this study by Heist plus other related work are presented by Trent and Craise in this
issue.
Heist developed an Intellectual Disposition
Index on the basis of six of the twelve scales in his attitude inventory, and with this
instrument divided his FSM sample and his three general student samples according to eight
"degrees", from low to high Intellectual Disposition. Here is what he found:
"For the total FSM group we find almost 70
per cent in the top three categories and none in the bottom three, and it is to be
remembered that a large proportion, in fact, the majority, of the FSM persons were
freshmen, sophomore and juniors. The number of persons in these upper categories in the
senior sample amounts to 25 and 31 per cent. The Free Speech Movement drew extraordinarily
larger proportions of students with strong intellectual orientations, at all levels
(freshmen through graduate)." (Heist, 1965, 21-22a).
Watts and Whittaker and FSM
William A. Watts and David N. E. Whittaker's
study of FSM activists compared to Berkeley students generally started with this
hypothesis: "We expected that FSM members would be more flexible as defined and
measured by personality tests of flexibility-rigidity . . . than their counterparts who
were less committed, neutral, or even opposed to the Movement" (Watts and Whittaker,
1966, 43).
Their study was based on questionnaires
administered to a chance sample of 172 participants among the 1000-1200 students who
"sat in" at Sproul Hall in the afternoon of December 2nd, 1964, (and who were on
this occasion not arrested, or not yet, except for the two thirds who stayed on all
night). In addition, the same questionnaire was given to a random sample of 182 Berkeley
students at about the same time; 146 of these cooperated. The instrument included a
27-item rigidity-flexibility scale. The most important result of this study, for present
purposes, is its indication of "strong support for the prediction of greater
flexibility among the FSM members" (1966, 59). The authors conclude that this latter
finding is of particular interest considering the purported rigidity of the FSM members in
negotiations with the University administration, and suggests the necessity of
distinguishing between a trait of rigidity as psychologically defined and commitment.
Two other findings of the study by Watts and
Whittaker should be noted in passing. First, with an additional sample of 181 students
drawn from the District Attorney's arrest list for December 3, and 174 names drawn at
random from the Student Directory, they failed to establish greater academic achievement
on the part of the FSM'ers compared to other students, and concluded that these activists
were quite typical or average with respect to grade point averages (1966, 52). While Watts
and Whittaker's objective check is more trustworthy than the data on grade point averages
reported in the Somers study which were based on respondents' information, I am inclined
to discount, until substantiated by further research, this particular finding by Watts and
Whittaker, because it appears to run counter to so many other findings discussed in this
article. It may well be valid for the 773 who were arrested, though I would have liked to
see a replication of the study, which can easily be done; if it is valid for this group, I
would still doubt that it is valid for FSM activists generally. It is possible, for
example, that the most academically as distinct from intellectually
oriented students among FSM activists felt greater anxiety than the rest about their
academic credits, and were more likely to shrink from taking the most extreme risks.
Secondly, the FSM students were far more likely
to have parents with advanced academic degrees, compared to the cross-section sample:
"approximately 26 per cent of the fathers and 16 per cent of the mothers of the FSM
sample possess either Ph.D. or M. A. degrees compared to 11 per cent and 4 per cent
respectively in the cross-section" (Watts and Whittaker, 1966, 53 and Table 4). This
finding does not contradict Somers' finding that student militants were more likely than
the rest to have blue-collar fathers. Among several factors that could be taken into
account here, I would emphasize the difference between having militant attitudes and being
prepared to jeopardize academic achievements; the value of academic credits may well loom
somewhat larger to the self-supporting student from a working class background, than they
do to students from families in which academic proficiency or intellectual gifts or future
financial safety tends to be taken for granted. The latter category among the militants
may be more likely to risk jail and expulsion for their beliefs.
I have confined this brief inquiry to activists
on the Left, who are far more significant than those on the Right, both by their numbers
(at least in the better universities), and by their tendency to persist in political
activities disturbing to the university "image" desired by most administrators
and trustees. In so far as rightist student groups, the most important one among them at
the moment being Young Americans for Freedom, have staged demonstrations, they have
usually been ad hoc counter-demonstrations, directed against issue-oriented protests by
liberal or leftist student activists; there have been no protracted campaigning or even
articulate political programs; and while student leftists have tended to be fiercely
independent of older leftists, or of the "generation over thirty" generally,
there has been no evidence of a corresponding intellectual independence among organized
rightist students.