University of Virginia Library

No Spring Fever

Once upon a time, the coming of spring
signaled the advent of all sorts of collegiate
activities. The warm weather set the sap to
rising in young vines, and the kids went on
panty raids and mass road trips, stuffed
themselves in telephone booths, swallowed
goldfish. Sometimes they got in trouble, but it
was the kind of trouble that caused people to
smile benignly and say boys will be boys,
secure in the knowledge that students shared
their values and that they were simply sowing
some wild oats before crawling quietly into
their societal niche.

In case you've spent the last week or so in
a sealed room and haven't noticed, Spring is
almost upon us and the sap is again rising in
the vines. Administrators here and around the
country are sitting around hoping that their
institutions will have a quiet spring. Certainly,
compared to the traumas of the past several
years, the fall and winter just past have been
exceedingly peaceful; but it's always been
springtime when the big crunches — Harvard,
Columbia, Berkeley — have occurred in the
past.

There is reason to believe, however, that
this Spring will demonstrate that American
colleges and universities have passed through
the era of the violent confrontation on
school-related issues. Things have been, and
are likely to remain, quiet in the near future.
This quiescence is probably due in part to the
reforms instituted in the wake of many of the
demonstrations of years past. To varying and
often unsatisfactory degrees, colleges have
become more democratic; students are finding
themselves in seemingly significant positions
of responsibility in administrative procedures;
the universities have changed, or at least have
seemed to change, many of the practices that
sparked the demonstrations and sets originally.

So it would seem that the students are
waiting to see whether the promises that have
been made are actually going to be fulfilled.
They are willing to give their schools time to
produce on minority admissions, curricular
reform, etc. How much time is another
question, but it appears that a great number
of non-radical students will stay off the streets
if they are satisfied that something is being
done. The committed revolutionaries, of
course, are still just that; but the universities
are succeeding in preempting the issues which
they could use to mobilize extensive student
support.

On the national scene, the situation is
quite different. Here, the initiative has been
arrested and put in jail; in some cases, it has
simply been ignored; at other times it's been
bought off; and mostly it's been rejected by
the silent majority — quite often with
outraged vehemence. Students have discovered
that it really doesn't make any
difference what they say on things like the
war — the power lies elsewhere, and the
people in power aren't about to listen. And if
the students decide to go beyond peaceful and
acceptable means to make their point, Spiro
Agnew is going to get on TV and make their
actions counter-productive, simply by vilifying
them and denigrating their rationale.

With all the old avenues and issues either
co-opted, closed or discredited, there will
probably be some sort of qualitative change
within what has loosely been referred to as
"the movement." Some people will go
underground or go apathetic and resigned —
this type of attrition has already sapped the
strength of protest attempts. A number of
other people will feel that the issues that
mobilized them are dead — the war is
immutable, some progress has been made, etc.
They will become more and more quiescent.
The committed revolutionaries will have to
remobilize these people with new issues if
there are ever to be large scale student
movements again. Ecology is about the only
thing on the horizon now, and it will not
suffice. Ecological issues have few clear-cut
and attackable villains everybody is in favor
of preserving the environment.

Thus, it would appear that the nation is in
for a relatively peaceful spring. The fuel for a
new round of disorders is missing now; it may
again be present when the generation now in
high school gets to college; it may re-emerge
when the number of black students increases
to the point where there is a large number of
alienated people populating the campuses. But
for now it appears that road trips and grain
parties the pastoral, understandable, and
non-menacing pursuits are going to be in
this Spring.