The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties

by Christopher Caldwell

Of all the battles that pitted students against forces of order in 1968—from demonstrations against administrative high-handedness at Columbia University to clashes with police at the Chicago Democratic convention—the most consequential, in retrospect, was the five-month strike launched by the Black Student Union and the Third World Liberation Front (TWLF) at San Francisco State University that fall. At the end of it, the university established the first ethnic studies departments in the United States. Thus began a process that would saturate the national culture with racial and gender politics. These ethnic studies departments, which had spread to virtually all universities by the end of the 1970s, aimed not so much at understanding power relations among ethnic groups as at transforming them. Another purpose was to provide a welcoming landing spot for students admitted under affirmative action programs. By the end of the 1980s, the spirit of “teach-ins” had taken over entire colleges. Antioch in Ohio instituted a policy, designed by a group called Womyn of Antioch, requiring explicit verbal assent at every stage of an escalating romantic encounter and establishing the on-campus position of “sexual offense advocate.” The Modern Language Association gave its academic conferences over to such panels as “The Muse of Masturbation.” At City College of New York, the Afrocentric scholar Leonard Jeffries laid out theories of how his own people (“sun people”) had invented virtually...