Class of '68 Revisited: A Cooler Anger

Three years ago, student protests reached new heights from the Sorbonne to Columbia University. To examine the ideas and feelings of vocal U.S. collegians, a TIME cover story profiled seven 1968 graduates who were particularly articulate about their discontent with U.S. life. Their common characteristics, the story reported, were idealism and "cynicism about society's willingness to embrace their ideals." Since that report (June 7, 1968), the U.S. has undergone profound changes in attitudes toward the war, youthful protest and culture. What have those years done to the seven graduates?

Last week TIME correspondents looked up six of the 1968 cover subjects.* All are alive; none have served in the armed forces; all have pursued graduate studies. Though still cynical about U.S. values and institutions, the six are now equally skeptical about changing things through mass protest. As a result, many of them verge on a bitter fatalism about public affairs. Still, none have dropped out into drug abuse, agrarian communes or similar escapism. Most have not yet settled into clearly defined careers, but in various ways all are working hard for idealistic goals. So far, not one is out to make money.

BRIAN WEISS, now 25, was the bearded, provocative U.C.L.A. senior and editor of the Daily Bruin whose picture was on TIME's cover. Then full of antiwar and pro-black views, he aimed for a college teaching job "making people socially aware, making them think, making them alive." Weiss still has a beard, but has given up journalism and is not active in politics. He is now a kind of rational pessimist: "Three years ago I might have said that 250,000 people marching must be able to stop the war, that someone must hear them and pay attention. Now, anyone can look out the window and see that 250,000 people marching does not stop anything. I don't think the war can be stopped--by any of us."

It is not only discouragement about the unresponsiveness of U.S. Government that keeps Weiss away from antiwar protest. He now spends 14 hours a day engrossed in becoming a research anthropologist. He is an able, warm teacher of undergraduate courses at the University of Michigan, where he is working on a Ph.D. after earning his M.A. at the University of New Mexico. Also an able economizer, Weiss saves most of his $1,500 pay to help finance his research trips. This week he leaves on his second expedition. Headed for a four-month stint in tiny Indian villages in Colombia and Nicaragua, he is taking a spectrographic kit, which he designed to measure the energy that foods produce. His concern is "human ecology": how communities obtain and use their food. Making no apologies for his work's lack of popular relevance, he says simply, "I am doing this because I enjoy it."

DAVID SHAPIRO, 24, is an intellectual onetime Columbia rebel who achieved notoriety of sorts in a famous 1968 photograph. It showed him occupying President Grayson Kirk's office chair while puffing one of Kirk's "liberated" cigars. Shapiro, who had already published a book of poetry at the time, now calls that episode "mock theater" and gives it only one big plus: he met his future wife during the activity. A Ph.D. candidate in English literature at Columbia, he plans a career of teaching and writing, has collaborated with Poet Kenneth Koch in encouraging ghetto kids to write poetry (TIME, Dec. 28) and regularly plays the violin. Shapiro's goal as he completes his third book of poems: "Creating a new poetry, a new cinema, a new voice."

After graduation, Shapiro used a fellowship to study Greek tragedy and English literature at Cambridge University's Clare College. He continued to see a psychiatrist. The English atmosphere, he says, was "like a garden of recuperation, especially when kids I knew back home were blowing themselves up." One of those friends was Ted Gold, a Columbia radical turned Weatherman who was killed in the explosion of a Greenwich Village "bomb factory" last year. When Shapiro talks about Gold, he stutters.

Shapiro put some of his feelings into a recent poem called "The Funeral of Jan Palach." Though Palach was a Czech who set fire to himself after the Russian invasion of 1968, Shapiro says that his poem is "really about the funeral of America. More than anything I can say it demonstrates my real feelings." Excerpt: "Halfway in mud and slush the microphones picked up/ It was raining on the houses./ It was snowing on the police cars./ . . . And my own mother was brave enough she looked/ And it was all right I was dead." Shapiro adds: "There is a time when 1 may be willing to risk my life, but for me now poetry is the way."

VERNON FORD, 24, has not altered his goals much either. A basketball player and leader of black students at Northwestern, he aimed to use his education as a lever to help blacks. While teaching and counseling at an experimental "free" school for high school dropouts in his old neighborhood, Chicago's West Side, he earned an M.A. in sociology at Northwestern. But he soon decided that teaching and sociology by themselves did not help kids expelled from school because "they didn't have the power to holler" or kids who got into trouble with the law for being out late at night or double parking. Ford believes such offenses would not be regularly penalized anywhere but in the ghetto. "Just in terms of personal leverage," he concluded, "the law seemed to be more hip."

Accordingly, Ford is now a first-year law student at Berkeley. This winter, he was too busy to join the political campaign that elected three blacks to the Berkeley city government. Still, he is active in a black law students' association and plans to do legal-aid work later this year. Choosing his words carefully, Ford speaks of American society as "basically immoral" and sometimes talks of "revolution"--but he does not know what form it could take or see any individual leading it, much less himself. More often he sounds like a future politician: he may return to Chicago and use legal services to build a "base" for "rendering service to the community." As he sees it, "I've just grown older. I realize that I have no monopoly on knowledge. Me, Vernon Ford--I can't change the world. I don't know what this country has in store for me, or for black people. But insofar as a problem is recognized, I'm going to do everything in my power to help solve it. That's the pragmatic approach."

ROBERT REICH, 24, was a Dartmouth student in 1967 when he linked arms with demonstrators in Washington and started marching on the Pentagon. Because of his small size (4 ft. 11 in.), Reich was unable to see the protest target over the heads of taller marchers. These days he looks back on that incident as a symbol of the confrontations of the late 1960s --a seething mass of humanity moving loudly against an unseen enemy.

Still committed to social change, Reich is now less confident about how to achieve it. His breakneck college career as head of Dartmouth student government, founder of a "free university," and five-state organizer for Eugene McCarthy's presidential campaign made him an enthusiast for personality politics. But life as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford's 700-year-old University College gave him his first serious look at democratic socialism, a system he thinks is inevitable for the U.S. It also gave him "more humility about what individuals can accomplish in a short period of time." On his return, Reich looked up McCarthy campaigners who had gone on to more antiwar marches and discovered to his horror that they had become "burntout cases running on pure energy and not really thinking about what they were doing anymore."

Now at Yale Law School and living in an urban commune, Reich has ruled out careers in either regular law firms or most storefront legal-service projects because "they use law as an instrument of confrontation, not conciliation." He talks of "delegalizing" society so that people can resolve conflicts without lawyers--as in no-fault auto insurance systems. To get such ideas across, he has joined law and business students at Harvard and Yale in starting a "public policy union" to work with city officials and state legislators on social problems. He plans to get involved in Senator George McGovern's presidential campaign.

Whatever he decides after two more years of law school, Reich is determined to avoid two pitfalls. The first, as he sees it, is that reformers who let themselves become as prominent as Ralph Nader invariably turn out to be "hollow shells" when seen close up. Secondly, among the more relaxed ranks of the counterculture, Reich (no kin to Yale Law Professor Charles Reich, author of The Greening of America) sees an alarming tendency to conformity and an unconscious yearning for authority. "I hope to be a kind of cross between a philosopher and a political hack," he says. Looking back on his own class, he muses: "We were the real liberationists."

BRIAN P. MCGUIRE, 24, six months ago quit a teaching job at Maryland's uncompromisingly traditional St. John's College after only one semester. His resignation letter was a deeply felt blast: "The intellectual life for me can be nothing more than a game, because if I let it become my whole life, then I destroy some of the primal impulses within me: my creative urge, my animal emotions, my spontaneity, my chaos that I treasure just as much as my unity that I seek."

McGuire had taken the job in a last-ditch attempt to put his idealism to work in the U.S. In his senior year at Berkeley, he earned the highest grade-point average (3.9) in the College of Letters and Science--then decided that he had become enslaved to "American fanaticism" about achievement. On a Fulbright scholarship at Oxford's Balliol College, he earned a doctorate with a dissertation on The History of St. Anselm's Theology of the Redemption in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries. But his discontent with the U.S. deepened.

McGuire lived for a while with a Danish girl he had been seeing for three years since meeting her at a summer language course in Vienna. After they married, he started his quixotic last stand at St. John's College. Now the McGuires have returned to Copenhagen, where he translates technical papers for an electronics firm, polishes his near-perfect Danish, and hopes to become a Danish citizen and get a teaching job. "As a person I am just happy," he says. "We Americans suffer from a tendency to hail what is one hundred percent, but nothing is ever one hundred percent, and life is absurd, and that is the way it should be."

ELIZABETH STEVENS, 23, is the closest of the six to the semi-hippie life of "Consciousness III." Once a social activist at Wheaton, a fashionable women's college in Massachusetts, she now lives in a ramshackle house near Putney, Vt. Mike Kronley, her roommate, is teaching her photography, and she is baking bread and eating organic foods.

But the house is deceptive: it is actually one of the far-flung little "graduate schools" run by Ohio's freewheeling Antioch College. Every day Stevens goes to a job in the guidance office of a nearby high school as part of her work toward a master of arts in teaching. Her new emphasis on dealing "with one person at one level at a time" is an outgrowth of her post-Wheaton frustration over conventional reformist projects. As a graduate student at the Columbia School of Social Work, she went to Harlem to act as a "block catalyst." Her block was black on one side and Puerto Rican on the other; she was neither black nor Spanish. "My role," she says, "just was not valid." After another year of drifting among various office jobs, she ended up in Vermont, where she has stopped chain-smoking, turned watchful and reflective.

"I'm really into a whole day-to-day thing," she muses. "At Wheaton, I really believed that you could change things and make them better. Now I'm just sort of putting my head together." She gives the impression of a person who is not retreating but resting. Like the character in Robert Frost's poem, "The Pasture," Elizabeth Stevens has apparently stopped to watch a stirred-up spring and wait for the water to clear again.

* The seventh, Harvard's Paul Vance Hyndman, an Asian-studies scholar who contemplated self-exile in Canada if he was drafted, has just finished Peace Corps service in Thailand. Headed for the London School of Economics next fall, he is currently traveling somewhere in Southeast Asia, out of touch even with his parents, who live in La Grange, Ill.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.