Perhaps no phenomenon more vividly epitomizes America’s cultural revolution than the student uprisings that swept across college and university campuses from the mid-1960s through the early 1970s. What began in 1964 with demonstrations by members of the Free Speech Movement at the University of California at Berkeley soon engulfed hundreds of campuses and made front-page news everywhere. The ostensible political issues—the Vietnam conflict, curricular reform, housing arrangements for racial minorities, university investment policies, and so on—were quickly assimilated to a much broader emancipationist program. Students may have marched to protest the presence of the ROTC on campus, university rules governing political activism, or U.S. policy in Southeast Asia. But in the end such issues were mere rallying points for a revolution in sensibility, a revolution that brought together radical politics, drug abuse, sexual libertinage, an obsession with rock music, exotic forms of spiritual titillation, and a generalized antibourgeois animus.

It is difficult at this distance to recapture the suddenness and fury of those insurrectionary episodes. The consternation of early press accounts—at the beginning, even The New York Timeswas aghast—shows that the assault, like a kind of cultural Pearl Harbor, caught the nation totally unprepared. Our complacency, as we look back on those events, is one measure of how successful the revolution turned out to be. The whole cultural climate of America, including the climate of higher education, was transformed by that