The Tentative Emergence of Student Power in the United States

Abstract

From colonial times through mid-twentieth century America, the status of students in colleges and universities within the United States depended substantially upon the sufferance and pleasure of the colleges themselves. While the great majority of public and private universities (with such notable exceptions as Yale) supported some sort of government, these governments maintained only a minimum of authority over matters of peripheral institutional importance, operating largely as impotent facsimiles of parliamentary processes. Each might adopt parliamentary resolutions vocalizing sentiment on institutional policy or matters of national concern, but few were conceded any authority beyond that of memorializing or petitioning. Standards respecting admission to the college, curriculum, faculty composition, capital construction, tuition, salaries, research, honor codes, personal misconduct, alumni relations, government support, and virtually all other matters of substance were reserved ultimately to the disposition of non-student bodiles within and without the college. Aside from some institutional practices delegating limited control to organizations over athletic budgets and operated campus newspapers, not even the administration of standards directly affecting campus life itself was generally committed to significant participation. Indeed, not until the United States was well into the 1960s did the phrase student power acquire sufficient conversational currency even to provide a meaningful or identifiable concept, much less a specific content. Only with the success of civil disobedience as a short-lived instrument of social change in the early 'sixties, developed initially and hesitantly by black students to dramatize community conditions of racial discrimination off campus, did there gradually develop a spillover effect into the campuses themselves.' Only then, through