1960s Redux?

The current movements on college campuses that focus on racism, sexism, and the lack of diversity in faculty and in programs is somewhat reminiscent of the early 1960s when students who were opposed to the U.S. war in Vietnam started to ask questions about their education and about the operation and control of colleges and universities. The response of college administrators at the time  was to try to bring students into the conversation and to get them involved in solving the many problems that they were protesting. At the time, these actions by college administrators would be described as a form of "repressive tolerance" by Herbert Marcuse, a political philosopher. The idea was troubling, because it required thinking about something that was positive--"tolerance"--as a new form of control. Current student activism is limited because it lacks the strong national support of an anti-war movement or a civil rights movement, and it is unclear as to whether the current movement has any 'legs." We do not see any continuation of the current social movement until there appears on the scene a modern-day Mario Savio who will call upon students "to put their bodies on the gears of the machine."