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Ken Del Rossi |
A FEW MONTHS AGO, in a fit of delusion, I thought I had a great idea. What if STANFORD went underground looking for the bohemian alter ego of the University, remnants of the counterculture?
Wouldn’t that make a great story? I began imagining cover photos of purple-haired men and women with tiny silver earrings affixed in peculiar places.
Turns out it wasn’t such a great idea.
After some determined poking around, including interviews with students
who would seem to be the usual suspects in a story about tweaking the
establishment—Synergy residents, anybody majoring in art—we
discovered that what used to be known as the counterculture has become
just the plain old culture. The mainstream has effectively co-opted the
rituals, language and values of what once might have been considered “counter.”
Tolerance rules, at least on Stanford’s campus. We were left without
much else to report.
But although that story died in infancy, a related theme kept reappearing
as we produced this issue. That theme was the Sixties.
We couldn’t talk about Stanford’s relationship with ROTC
without returning to the turbulent antiwar period
that culminated with the Faculty Senate’s 1969 vote to dis-credit
the officer-training program. That decision continues to affect Stanford
students. And, naturally, we could not retrace the life of Stanford’s
countercultural icon, Ken Kesey, without tripping
through the Day-Glo days of inveterate drug use and experimentation.
Meanwhile, the confluence of events surrounding September 11—particularly
the war in Afghanistan—had everybody talking about whether American
college campuses would be throbbing with new protest energy. What were
students saying and doing? Was the new patriotism somehow tainted by its
complicity with the government? Where were the demonstrations? Invariably,
observers placed the responses of current students in sharp relief alongside
those of students from the Vietnam era, as if the two were inherently
related.
Of course they’re not inherently related. That was then, this is
now. Socially and politically, the Sixties differed radically from the
climate of today. As a result, when our editors began exploring the counterculture
idea through the lens of political activism, we stumbled every time we
got near a meaningful conclusion. An antiwar rally in White Plaza last
fall seemed almost quaint—the slogans and the signs were somehow
too familiar to be provocative.
The Sixties continue to overshadow virtually every discussion about dissent
and its role in America’s public dialogue. I don’t know whether
this is good or bad, but I think it has as much to do with my generation’s
proselytizing as it does with that era’s usefulness as a historical
benchmark. Many of today’s students are fascinated by the Sixties—or
perhaps by what it seems to represent—because their parents and most
of their teachers were influenced by that period. Some are faintly apologetic
about their alleged political apathy and deferential to the notion that
their predecessors did the heavy lifting for them, protest-wise. Others
are sick of hearing about it.
Regardless of their point of view, they are probably stuck with the Sixties
for a while longer. Baby Boomers still rule, and we are getting maximum
mileage out of our generation’s influence.
It may be time, however, to liberate succeeding generations from the tyrannical
claw of that era. The process might begin with a clearer-eyed accounting
of what college was like back then. It wasn’t one long sit-in. For
a lot of people, even at the height of Sixties unrest, university life
was as much about studying and goofing off as about changing the world.
Just as it is now.
Nevertheless, while I can’t get all weepy about the passing of the
counterculture, I am a little sad about one thing: I was really looking
forward to those purple-haired students on the cover.
You can reach Kevin at jkcool@stanford.edu.