Here’s what’s missing from today’s student protests that you could hear loud and clear in the ‘60s

True confession: The biggest battle I had with my parents before my 18th birthday was whether to attend Yale or Columbia. And I stuck it to the man — I went to the less prestigious Ivy League school.

The biggest reason was location: New York had a lot more going for it than New Haven, Conn. But I was also thinking about history. In 1968, 11 years before I arrived at Columbia, students had occupied five buildings there. I wrote a paper about them in high school, and I thought they were eloquent and brave and extremely cool. And I wanted to be like that.

I’ve been thinking about them again over the past few weeks, as Columbia and other campuses burst into protest. I admire the new generation of student activists, too: their energy, engagement, and commitment. But there’s also something missing, which you could hear loud and clear back in 1968.

It’s called learning. The ‘60s student protesters imagined protest itself as an “intellectual commune” — to quote a veteran of the Columbia occupation — where people would critique, debate, and educate each other. That stood in stark contrast to their day-to-day classwork, which drowned inquiry and curiosity in dreary lectures from pedantic professors.

We associate the ‘60s protests with the anti-war and civil rights campaigns, and with good reason: At Columbia, for example, activists demanded that the university sever its ties to a military research agency and stop construction of a new gymnasium that would be open to Columbia students but not to the mostly Black and brown people in the adjacent community.

But student protesters also inveighed against their own education and imagined something better. In the 1962 Port Huron Statement, which became the iconic text of ‘60s protests, Tom Hayden denounced boring and irrelevant courses that ignored nuclear disarmament, racial injustice, and other pressing contemporary questions. Colleges should “import major public issues into the curriculum” and “make debate and controversy, not dull pedantic cant, the common style for educational life,” Hayden wrote.

Two years later, during the Free Speech Movement at the University of California, Berkeley, student leader Mario Savio condemned not just the university’s censorship of students but also the poor instruction they received. Berkeley viewed students as “raw materials” to be fed into the “knowledge factory,” Savio said, “where all the rough edges are taken off and smooth, slick products come out.”

Students needed to take control of their own education, Savio added, reinvigorating a “traditional educational philosophy” that had waned in modern times. “We believe in a university of scholars and students,” he told a 1964 audience, “with inquiry as its defining characteristic, and freedom as its fundamental tool.”

The same impulse — inquiry plus freedom — suffused the 1968 protests at Columbia. As Paul Cronin’s edited volume of first-person reflections shows, students debated each other throughout the protest. It was a “contest of ideas,” Cronin writes, “making for an extraordinarily stimulating learning curve that no one had ever before experienced.”

Across campus, conservative counterprotesters — calling themselves the Columbia Majority Coalition — rallied against their left-leaning classmates. And inside the occupied buildings, liberal champions of Democratic presidential hopefuls Robert F. Kennedy and Eugene McCarthy faced off against self-described revolutionaries. The liberals thought they could reform America by working within “the System,” while the radicals wanted to tear it down and start anew.

That dialogue was an “on-site lesson in politics,” one protester recalled, and vastly more educational than anything that happened in class. “What is education, after all?” another activist remembered. “It was as if classes had ended and learning had begun.”

It’s hard to find that spirit in today’s protests, which echo the anger of the 1960s without the open-ended sense of curiosity and possibility. Everyone seems to know exactly what they think, and nobody seems eager to speak outside their own circles.

Indeed, dialogue across differences has been framed as “unsafe.” Jewish students feel unsafe in the face of pro-Palestinian protesters, who likewise feel unsafe in the presence of “Zionists.” Best to wall yourself off from the enemy, lest you risk further harm.

Let’s be clear: Some students have suffered physical injuries, either in scrapes with each other or with the police. And that happened in the ‘60s, as well. But here’s the difference: The 1968 protesters eagerly embraced rough-and-tumble debate, while many students today see it as yet another danger to their well-being.

Nor do they have much to say about their classes, a key focus of discontent in the ‘60s. When Columbia moved instruction online — again, as a “safety” measure — there was little objection, just as only a few students protested Zoom classes during the coronavirus pandemic. Everybody knows students don’t learn as much online as in person, especially if they’re from lower-income or underrepresented backgrounds. But almost nobody will say so.

To be fair, many of our courses now address the “major public issues” Hayden thought universities were ignoring. But a full and honest classroom discussion of these issues might raise hackles and cause yet more harm. The safer move for professors is to lecture at the students (a highly ineffective teaching method), give almost everyone a high grade, and send them on their way.

In 1962, Hayden wrote that universities had forsaken the “liberating heritage of higher learning.” In the ensuing decade, students revived it. Then it declined again, hampered by our fear of each other. We must work hard — and work together — to win it back.