The Politics of Knowledge in 1960s America

Abstract

This article offers a broad sketch of claims regarding the university’s public purpose in the 1960s while noting that a vision of the university as an autonomous forum for moral debate cut across the seemingly insurmountable divide between young radicals and their liberal elders. Read through the lens of educational philosophies, the era’s clashes did not simply pit liberal advocates of political neutrality against radical exponents of political commitment. Rather, many radical activists—and some liberals—believed that the university should cut off many of its ties to the wider society to gain a more critical purchase on it. Indeed, activist critics of Clark Kerr’s bureaucratic “multiversity” often hewed to a remarkably traditional conception of higher education.