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.
