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We Could Use Another Nathan Glazer, Scourge of Campus Radicalism

On the anniversary of his death, a reminder that his struggles against the extreme Left continue today.
Nathan Glazer

When Nathan Glazer died on January 19, 2019, we lost one of the 20th century’s most astute commentators on American society and politics. I am alas quite tardy in joining the well-deserved parade of writers extolling Glazer’s contributions to our political thought. But better late than never.

I dare hope that I have not missed my opportunity to laud Glazer, on this one-year anniversary of his death. It’s also the 50th year since the publication of his Remembering the Answers: Essays on the American Student Revolt, a collection of the great sociologist’s reflections on student and youth activism throughout the ‘60s. 

This now nearly forgotten book makes for invaluable reading today, at a time when we are again experiencing a noticeable uptick in high-profile cases of radically extremist student activism on campuses. It is both a profound aid to understanding the radicalism of the 1960s and a rich source of insights into the current wave of activism.

It is essential, Glazer reminds us, to recall that the overall number of campus radicals was small—in the ‘60s, perhaps only a few hundred out of tens of thousands of students at the most activist campuses (Berkeley, Wisconsin, Michigan), and many fewer than that at other schools. The same is true today. At a recent protest of a speaker whom had been risibly mischaracterized as a “white supremacist,” which took place on my campus, the radicals could attract only around 1 percent of the student body to attend. More probably supported the protest in spirit, but it’s unlikely that more than 10 percent of students backed their cause.

These numbers are important to remember for two reasons: they remind us of how minoritarian such radical ideas are and they make us realize that it only takes a small number going off the rails to disrupt the business of a university. That’s especially true when a certain number of the faculty are skewed in the direction of the radicals, as they almost always are. 

In these essays, and especially in the introduction, we get invaluable insights into Glazer’s own move from left to right, from the “mild radicalism” of the late ‘50s to a position a decade later reasonably described as conservative. As he argues, it was less he who had changed than the radicals. 

The radicalism of his generation, he writes, 

had a good deal in common with conservatism—the skepticism at government intervention in various areas, the willingness to let people decide for themselves how to spend their money, the disbelief that the theoretical and political structures reared by liberals to control policy in the foreign and domestic realms really had solid bases or would work, the allergy to Communist repression, the bias toward the small

By the mid-‘60s, the increasingly extreme demands of youthful left radicals bore almost no resemblance to the stances Glazer and his generation of leftists had taken a decade earlier. The radicals now looked with admiration at repressive communist regimes. Glazer’s time working in Washington at the Housing and Home Finance Administration taught him precisely how much of the radical agenda “had already been thought of, considered, analyzed, and had problems in [its] implementation that [Glazer’s radical generation] had never dreamed of.” Practical political work taught him lessons unimagined by the typical radical professor shut up eternally in the confines of an institution of higher learning:  

I learned that [i]t was a big country, and it contained more kinds of people than were dreamed of on the shores of the Hudson. I learned, in quite strictly conservative fashion, to develop a certain respect for what was; in a world of infinite complexity some things had emerged and survived, and if the country was in many respects better than it might be or had been (just as in many respects it was much worse than it might be or would be), then something was owed to its political institutions and organizational structures. 

Today, just as in the ‘60s, coteries of radicals are working to reduce institutions made up of many competing interests to their own narrow ideology, attacking everyone and everything else—STEM programs they disdain, administrators whose work they do not understand and are ill-equipped to do, parents and students more interested in learning and employability than in social revolution, taxpayers desirous of a rational balance sheet for the money taken from them to sustain the universities—in dismissive, absolutist terms. As the ‘60s wore on, Glazer recounts, the gratuitous attacks on universities, with no articulated plan for what would replace them once they were dismantled, became less and less defensible.

Glazer decried with elegance the moral simplification he saw from the radical youth. His older generation knew well that the United States was not Nazi Germany. Neither Lyndon Johnson nor Richard Nixon could be equated to Hitler, and only those stupendously ignorant of history could make such claims. But in the ‘60s, the relevant questions for radicals were:  

Did you hate Johnson enough—Rush, Rostow, the police, the South Vietnamese leaders?  Did you hate the southerners enough, or the northern white middle classes, or the northern white workers, or the Jewish school teachers of New York? It was not pleasant, and it is not pleasant now. 

Today, similar moves are underfoot. Radical faculty and students paint with the same broad brush. All who question progressive dogma are morphed into reactionaries and fascists and white supremacists, to be silenced, boycotted, shut down, shamed, and when possible fired. No ill-considered woke notion is to be criticized or opposed. Affirmative action based on race forever? Of course—anything else would be acquiescence to white supremacy. Empty the prisons tomorrow? Why not, bigot? Eliminate national borders and accept anyone who presents himself at our southern border claiming refugee status? Only a fascist would ask for more discussion of something so obviously righteous. As Glazer put it, “Paradoxically, ‘white racism’ has become a rallying cry precisely at a moment when it has never been milder.” 

The refrain of today’s campus radical is startlingly similar to that of the ’60s demonstrators. Because the objective threat of white supremacy is so massive, only enemies of progress would dare to cloak themselves in the language of “academic freedom” or viewpoint diversity. It is the grotesquely crude party line of Black Panther thug Eldridge Cleaver that the radicals follow: “If you are not part of the solution, you are part of the problem.” 

In his rebuttal to the ‘60s Luddites who demanded the “dismantling [of] the machinery, physical and institutions, of modern society” in order to achieve their utopia, Glazer could well be responding to the Green New Deal coalitions sprouting up everywhere on college campuses today:

Only a radical reduction in standards of living—and radicals are the first to insist they are too low…–or a radical reduction in the total number of people is compatible with the degree of freedom from organization, control, discipline, and contribution to the support of others that seems to be the special demand of contemporary radicals. The young radical guerrillas now engaged in the sabotage of social organization take it for granted that they will be provided with complex means of transportation and communication, with medical care, easy availability of food, clothing, and shelter. All this is based on a system they deride and which in their confusion they want to bring down, not realizing it would reduce themselves and all those they wish to help to misery.

The American university got through the disaster of the late ‘60s in large part because of figures like Nathan Glazer. We could sure use a few more like him today.

Alexander Riley is a professor of Sociology at Bucknell University in Pennsylvania.

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