Marching to a Different Drummer: Occupational and Political Correlates of Former Student Activists

Abstract

This study reports on long-range consequences of student political activism. Three groups were selected: (1) former civil rights activists, (2) student government members, and (3) apolitical undergraduates. It was hypothesized that variation in political activism would be linked with differing occupations and political orientations. Former civil rights activists are heavily concentrated in the knowledge and human service occupations and are politically radical to liberal in their attitudes and behavior. Beginning with the sit-in by four black freshmen from North Carolina A & T on February 1, 1960 a college student protest movement demanding political changes was launched (Matthews and Prothro, 1966; Pinkney, 1968). During the sixties hundreds of thousands of black and white students became involved as the direct action civil rights protest mushroomed. Later, segments of the movement redirected their demands to ending the Vietnam War, reforming universities, stopping environmental pollution, and to a host of local issues (Long, 1970; Peterson, 1968; Skolnick, 1969). For their efforts, students were to be killed, beaten, tear-gassed, arrested, suspended from school and generally harassed as they used the tactics of political confrontation to reform or radically change major institutional sectors of the United States (Armistead, 1969; Avorn, 1968; President's Commission on Campus Unrest, 1970). The correlates of student protests have been extensively investigated and attempts to evaluate the long-range effects of the movement on both the participants and the larger society are continuing (Altbach and Laufer, 1972; Flacks, 1971; Foster and Long, 1970; Weinberg and Walker, 1969). One question that can be raised is what happens to student activists after they leave the university environment. The only published information on the career development and political orientations of former student activists in the 1960s has been two reports by journalists who have interviewed former members of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement. Greene ( 1970) interviewed twelve of the participants in the Sproul Hall demonstrations, five years later. Neither the leaders nor rank-and-file participants were randomly selected. The former activists although knowledgeable about drugs and communal life-styles were neither in retreatist movements, nor upwardly mobile in some traditional career, living in the suburbs, raising families and voting Democratic. The squarest person in terms of conventional consumptive behavior was Matthew Halliman who at the time was the education director of the national Communist party. Most of the twelve remained in close contact with the university as teachers, students, or members of the youth ghetto. They remained politically active. Mario Savio was arrested in 1966 for taking part in a sit-in against the Navy recruiter at Berkeley and he ran for the State Senate on the Peace and Freedom ticket. Carl and Myra Riskin, as new instructors at Columbia, suspended their academic pursuits to take part in the 1970 protest of the U.S. invasion of Cambodia. * An earlier draft of this paper was presented at the annual meeting of the Southern Sociological Associaiton, 1972. We ate indebted to Seymour Martin Lipset and Richard Braungart for comments on an earlier draft. We would also like to thank Ronald L. Simons for programming assistance.