Some Reflections on Student Commitments and Attitudes

Extracts from the Report to the President of the University for the year 1968-69. It is significant, I think, that for the first time in the Fall of 1969, the Law School will have a student body composed almost en tirely of persons whose experience with institutions of higher education has been confined very largely to the period following the first dramatic instances of organized student protest which erupted at Berkeley in the academic year 1963-64. Most of those who will begin their third year of law studies in the Fall of 1969 were college freshmen in 1963-64. What has happened since that time?

Optimistic dreams of the success of the civil rights movement withered and died on the campus, to be followed by events sufficiently identified by names like Watts, Newark, Detroit, Washington D.C., and Chicago. Political and social leaders deeply admired by students were murdered: Dr. Martin Luther King, the two Kennedys, Medgar Evers, and other civil rights workers. The Vietnam War festered. And all the while protest on the campuses overshadowed almost every other aspect of university life.