Children of Privilege: Student Revolt in the Sixties a Study of Student Movements in Canada, the United States, and West Germany

Toronto Buffalo London: University of Toronto Press, 1984. Assumed First Edtion . Trade Paperback. Near Fine. 5 3/4" x 9. 266 Pages Indexed. No marks or stamps to this tight, bright book with a flawless interior. Why did a student movement arise in the early sixties? Why did it take the course it did? And why did it begin to decline in the late sixties? The author answers these questions by examining the changing conditions of life facing middle class youth in the fifties and sixties and the changing role of the universities. His book is based in part on extensive interviews with former student leaders in the United States, Canada, and West Germany. In all three countries students in general, and student activists in particular, were from middle and upper income and status families. They had been promised that university studies would provide an entrance into a small, influential, and powerful intellectual elite. But the massification of higher education led to the devaluation of the university degree and to the assification of the intellectual elite itself. The promise was broken. After taking up the causes of others, including civil rights and peace, student radicals gradually became concerned with student syndicalism, student power, university reform, the war in Vietnam, and anti-draft activism. But they met rejection in their attempts to move beyond the campus and developed a politics based upon a fantasy. Through Marxist ideology they sought to establish the elitist claims denied by elite massification. With the slowing of the boom in higher education, the increase in graduate unemployment, and the widening gap between the activist leadership and the mass of students, the student movement began its decline. Levitt demonstrates that the student movements in all three countries were remarkably similar in their trajectories despite national differences, and that they were revolts of privilege against privilege, for privilege in a society in which the character of privilege had been changing.