"CAMPUS UPRISINGS captures the voices and spirit of student activists, faculty, administration, and staff as they protest the racial and social injustices that occurred in communities like Ferguson, Missouri and elsewhere, and to demonstrate the power and value of principled non-violent activism to provoke change"--

Political activity and student unrest have been recurring phenomena in American universities even after they reached their apogee in the 1960s. In Rebellion in the University, Seymour Martin Lipset reviews that turbulent period and places it in a larger historical perspective. He analyzes the source of student activism, the roles played by the faculty, the spectrum of campus political opinion, and the history of American campus protest. Two decades after this book was first written, the academic community is once more sharply divided over issues of political correctness. The term refers to the efforts by campus advocates of leftist politics to control the content of speech, courses, and appointments, and to impose their views with respect to multiculturalism, minority rights, and feminism. Lipset's new introduction is a major effort to account for this new wave of repressive moralism, to explain the issues involved, to locate sources of support and opposition, and to voice a judgment about the current situation in the American academic community.

For seven days in April 1968, students occupied five buildings on the campus of Columbia University to protest a planned gymnasium in a nearby Harlem park, links between the university and the Vietnam War, and what they saw as the university’s unresponsive attitude toward their concerns. Exhilarating to some and deeply troubling to others, the student protests paralyzed the university, grabbed the world’s attention, and inspired other uprisings. Fifty years after the events, A Time to Stir captures the reflections of those who participated in and witnessed the Columbia rebellion. With more than sixty essays from members of the Columbia chapter of Students for a Democratic Society, the Students’ Afro-American Society, faculty, undergraduates who opposed the protests, “outside agitators,” and members of the New York Police Department, A Time to Stir sheds light on the politics, passions, and ideals of the 1960s. Moving beyond accounts from the student movement’s white leadership, this book presents the perspectives of black students, who were grappling with their uneasy integration into a supposedly liberal campus, as well as the views of women, who began to question their second-class status within the protest movement and society at large. A Time to Stir also speaks to the complicated legacy of the uprising. For many, the events at Columbia inspired a lifelong dedication to social causes, while for others they signaled the beginning of the chaos that would soon engulf the left. Taken together, these reflections present a nuanced and moving portrait that reflects the sense of possibility and excess that characterized the 1960s.

L'opera fornisce una panoramica generale riguardo alla capacità degli studenti universitari americani nel relazionarsi con i problemi sociali e politici di quegli anni. L'A. sostiene che essi abbiano maturato, nel corso degli anni Venti e Trenta del Novecento, una forte presa di coscienza e comprensione dei principali problemi socio-politici con i quali la società americana conviveva in quegli anni, quali le manifestazioni contro la guerra, la lotta al socialismo e al comunismo, e la tutela dei diritti sulla libertà di parola e pensiero. Questa progessiva consapevolezza può portare i giovani a reagire a tali questioni in modo non corretto o costruttivo, pertanto, è necessario fornire loro, durante il percorso di studi, i giusti strumenti per analizzare e comprendere i problemi esistenti fuori dal campus universitario.

“Puts campus activism in a radical historic context.”—New York Review of Books In the post–World War II period, students rebelled against the university establishment. In student-led movements, women, minorities, immigrants, and indigenous people demanded that universities adapt to better serve the increasingly heterogeneous public and student bodies. The success of these movements had a profound impact on the intellectual landscape of the twentieth century: out of these efforts were born ethnic studies, women’s studies, and American studies. In We Demand, Roderick A. Ferguson demonstrates that less than fifty years since this pivotal shift in the academy, the university is moving away from “the people” in all their diversity. Today the university is refortifying its commitment to the defense of the status quo off campus and the regulation of students, faculty, and staff on campus. The progressive forms of knowledge that the student-led movements demanded and helped to produce are being attacked on every front. Not only is this a reactionary move against the social advances since the ’60s and ’70s—it is part of the larger threat of anti-intellectualism in the United States.