Here we are with all this youthful impatience. The faculty and administration, says the Muscatine Report, "are more willing to tolerate the evils of the world, believing they can be reduced but never entirely eliminated." And so we do not understand each other, and there is conflict.

The difference between Berkeley and Columbia is quantity not quality. The feelings are the same, but this year more people have them, and they are deeper. The reason for this is the self-destructive bent of Establishment liberalism. Throughout the year, the government and the universities have managed to "radicalize" large numbers of students, to turn cool liberals into hot radicals.

III.

RADICALIZING people has been one of the major tasks of SDS and other activist organizations for a long time. But SDS has never been able to radicalize people by what it does. Instead, its task has been to produce confrontations, then let the authorities do the work.

A radicalizing experience is often something like getting your head bashed in by cops, or watching your friends get their heads bashed in by cops. Or else it can be watching something fail, as Harvard's Student-Faculty Advisory Council has failed.

Keniston explained radicalization in terms of coming face-to-face with the evils of society:

Even more than most young middle-class Americans, these young men and women [radicals], while they had "done the reading," were not psychologically prepared for a personal and concrete confrontation with injustice, social repression and discrimination.

Coupled with the "shock of confrontation"--disproportionately strong for these students from privileged families--is the vision of failure these students see in the political system. The social injustice, the reaction in rioting that they see around them makes them reject the customary liberal belief that institutions already exist that can relieve the inequities. They have been around too long. Keniston writes:

What is most impressive is not their secret motivation to have the System fail, but naive hope that it would succeed, and the extent of their depression and disillusion when their early reformist hopes were frustrated.

As more students are radicalized by these confrontations, the polarization gets greater. The liberals, who say that things are bad but can be corrected, become lumped together with the racists and militarists who are actively making things bad. This year, more than anything else, we have seen a crisis for the liberals--the dispassionate sideliners who have been sneering and talking but not doing. I wrote in a Crimson article last October:

For those who were listening, listening to the war get worse and to the repression of demonstrations get more brutal, the time for the choice was zooming in very fast. Sitting on the sidelines, being cool-liberal and dispassionate was becoming irrelevant. The theme that the Washington demonstrators harped on was: if you're not with us, you're against us.

And how frustrating it is to try to convince them that you are with them! Words, apparently, are not good enough any more.

That was October. Since then, the pressures of the war have gotten worse (drafting graduate students), and the repression of demonstrations has gotten more brutal (the bloody raid on Columbia). More people have gotten radicalized.

IV.

The best way to look at this phenomenon of radicalization is to look at the history of student activism on university campuses this year. The focus will be on the events of October, 1967, and April, 1968, when outside events--the work of the self-destructive Establishment--managed to turn hordes of cool liberals into hot radicals and managed to build a movement.