「内なる反知性主義」――1968年コロンビア大学ストライキと知識人

抄録

In the spring of 1968, historian Richard Hofstadter (1916-70), sociologist Daniel Bell (1919-2011), and sociologist Immanuel Wallerstein (1930-) faced the “Crisis at Columbia University.” The “crisis” started with the student occupation of several buildings and ended with the violent evacuation of them by officers of the New York City Police Department. The majority of faculty supported the student’s claims regarding institutional racism and ougoing dissatisflcation with the Vietnam War, but not many could easily accept the student’s militant tactics because they wondered if the student actions represented the anti-intellectualism in American life.

The Ad-Hoc Faculty Group, organized during the strike, played a significant role in the crisis. Consisting of mostly of younger faculty members, it became “the third force” to intervene in the negotiations between the students and the university. The group also placed itself within the confrontations between protesting students and counterdemonstrators as well as between the students and the police. Yet the group’s independent actions were accused of confusing and delaying the negotiation process by the university administration.

Richard Hofstadter believed that the university was a “special community for inquiry” and feared student’s violent actions on campus as “anti-intellectualism within the wall.” Hofstadter had been consistent with his “non-ideological” liberal stance toward the black liberation movement and the anti-Vietnam war cause during the sixties. When the movement came onto the campus, however, he was forced to make tough decisions: he was eager to understand student claims, but he eventually accepted the administration’s request to support the introduction of the police force onto the campus to restore the “special communitity.”

Daniel Bell and Immanuel Wallerstein showed contrasting reactions as sociologists. Both of them were members of the Ad-hoc Faculty Group, but neo-conservative Bell was very critical of the leaders at Columbia Students for a Democratic Society for their antiauthoritarian confrontational politics. In his writing, Bell ridiculed the stndents for leadirg “a revolution in a doll house” by imitating Mao in the post-industrial American society. He later argued that anti-authoritarianism of 1968 led to the anti-intellectualism in the Regan era. In contrast, Wallerstein was very sympathetic of the movements, especially of the African-American students, which he observed very closely during the strike. He believed that a certain tension between university and society was necessary because a university no longer existed as an isolated ivory tower in the society. Then he theorized the “antisystematic movements” in modern society, in which 1968 was “a rehearsal” for another wave of social change.

The intellectuals who faced the student strike at Columbia University in 1968 saw the change of relationship between university and society and the demise of the Cold War liberalism. However, their reactions were different because their beliefs in what should be conserved in the university and what should be challenged in the socieff did not coincide. In this sense, American universities in the late 1960s functioned as a contested ground for new social knowledge.