The student protest movements of the 1960s initially reflected the optimism that characterized that decade’s birth. Inspired in part by the civil rights movement, which demanded that racial discrimination be made illegal, students across the academic landscape called for an end to in loco parentis on campus and pressed to be accorded the freedoms and responsibilities of adults, including the right to vote. The 1964 Berkeley student revolt that launched public awareness of the movement—there were less renowned antecedents—began by focusing on freedom of speech and personal autonomy, but the movement at Berkeley and elsewhere took darker turns as the decade wore on and the issues became vexed and even intractable, especially regarding race and the war in Southeast Asia.
By the early 1970s the student movement had mushroomed and fractured, resulting in competing liberal, radical, cultural, militant, and even
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