To the editor: Some six a long time in the past, I absolutely would have welcomed Wesleyan College President Michael S. Roth’s insights in his op-ed article, “Faculty college students have been ‘woke’ within the ‘60s, annoying to elders and drivers of social change. Meet their successors.”
Within the spring of 1967, busloads of us UC Santa Barbara college students left our “usually sleepy campus” (per Time journal’s report) to journey in a single day to hitch a protest in Sacramento.
What provoked us to briefly abandon our research? Then-Gov. Ronald Reagan had proposed steep tuition hikes, broadly seen as his pandering to conservatives who denounced UC Berkeley’s Free Speech Motion.
Gathered on the state Capitol constructing’s entrance the following morning, we anxiously awaited Reagan’s look. Whereas we waited, considered one of his cranky previous (nicely, 50ish) workers members loudly rebuked us: “No marvel you youngsters don’t be taught something — you by no means research!”
Roth nailed it: Criticism of as we speak’s protesters “is all a part of the lengthy, cliche-ridden historical past of accusing the younger of failing to stay as much as an older era’s concept of the coed.” Too dangerous Reagan by no means realized that compelling fact.
Edgar M. Martinez, Orcutt, Calif.
..
To the editor: Roth missed a couple of issues in his look again at Nineteen Sixties protests.
Then, males have been topic to being drafted into the army at age 18 but couldn’t vote till age 21. Females suffered near-universal expectations to marry quickly after highschool and thereafter to stay devoted homemakers and moms.
Such basic points triggered in style protest songs that served to provoke demonstrators. Younger males touted Barry McGuire’s “Eve of Destruction,” with its lament that resonated through the Vietnam Battle period: “You’re sufficiently old to kill, however not for votin’/ You don’t consider in conflict, however what’s that gun you’re totin’?”
And younger ladies liked “Harper Valley PTA,” as Jeannie C. Riley’s narrative referred to as out the rampant hypocrisy of conservative townspeople who criticized a younger single mom whose social mores unduly involved them.
Having grown up listening to music that helped promote enlightened political and social adjustments, I hope as we speak’s younger protesters can sing comparable tunes.
Rona Dolgin, Los Angeles
