"The economy is so different now. There is a different kind of pressure on students today. There is a need for young people to get out and make money--a lot of money. They do not have the freedom of the 1960s, when students were able to live on the fringes of the economy," says former Black Power leader Julius Lester, a professor of Judaic studies at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.

Such members of the last activist generation say that because the student of the 1980s are more practical, they have chosen smaller goals and single-issue projects, instead of working for major political change.

Although most say it is more effective politically for groups to focus their efforts in this way, Miller says, activists who do so may be missing the message of the 1960s.

"In a way, activists can do a better job by organizing in a single issue way," says Miller. "But there is something over and above just that--they need to raise the collective imagination of the students."

"There is no unifying spirit within the movement today," says Gitlin.

One effort to unify contemporary student activists took the form of a national student conference at Rutgers University last February, when more than 700 student representatives gathered in hopes of creating a national coalition.

Some initially compared the meeting to the Port Huron conference of 1960, where 55 students wrote a statement of intent that many activists of the time considered the foundation of the movement that followed.

At Rutgers, however, disagreements on issues and power struggles among student leaders divided the conference. Minority students said that they felt underrepresented and withdrew from the convention. The three-day conference ended in confusion, say students, without a national coalition and with students unsure if one could be established.

"What happened at Rutgers is very depressing," says Miller. "In three days, the students managed to duplicate all of the most idiotic features of 1960s sectarianism."

"The kids at Rutgers who wanted to duplicate the Port Huron conference didn't get what Port Huron was about," says Miller. "Port Huron was not about building a coalition. It was really about a group of only 55 people who were questioning, "What is the Good Society?" and not knowing the answer. The kids at Rutgers thought they knew the answers."

Professor disagree about how students today should go about creating a new student movement Christopher Lasch, a professor of history at the University of Rochester, says students need to begin again, without trying to follow the model of the last generation, but others say students need to recapture the idealism of the 1960s.

Without the same feeling of hope and optimism that characterized the early 1960s, the student movement of the 1980s will not be the same, say many professors.

"A lot of people are missing the point about the 1960s. Then, people believed that anything and everything was possible. That belief bound together everything that was good and horrible within the movement," says Miller.

"That spark of intuitive hope is not something you can organize. It is there or it is not. It cannot be created out of acts of sheer will," he says.