Richard Flacks

Who Supports the Troops? Vietnam, the Gulf War, and the Making of Collective Memory

During the Gulf War, U.S. media portrayed Vietnam-era protesters as having treated American soldiers shamefully during the Vietnam War. Even Gulf War protesters lent credence to this historical interpretation. By “supporting the troops,” dissenters distanced themselves from their counterparts during the Vietnam era and its “remembered” anti-troop sentiments. But after analysis of Vietnam era media, we find that the media of the time—consistent with most subsequent published accounts—did not report the movement as “anti-troop.” Although policymakers frequently attempted to imply that protesters were anti-troop, we find virtually no instances of protesters themselves being reported as targeting the troops. Our findings show that the memory of protester-troop antagonism is not so much the product of conflict between these two groups, but rather of a selectively remembered and edited past. Just as it hamstrung the anti-war movement during the Gulf War, the current recollection may endure as part of the conditions facing opponents of future military actions.

Social and Cultural Meanings of Student Revolt: Some Informal Comparative Observations

A new middle class has emerged, composed of persons who have achieved affluence and secure status in occupations oriented to intellectual and cultural work. Families in this stratum rear children with values and character structures which are at some variance with the dominant culture. Such youth are especially sensitized to social questions, are repelled by acquisitive and nationalistic values, and strive for a vocational situation which maximizes autonomy and self-expression. This sector of the youth population has been the primary constituency for the American student movement of the 1960s. Although the situation of these youth differs from that found in other countries with significant student movements, there are important resemblances between the two. A comparative analysis of student movements suggests that their emergence is a precursor of major qualitative societal and cultural change.

Towards a Socialist Sociology : Some Proposals for Work in the Coming Period

This paper was presented at the 1971 meetings of the American Sociological Association, Denver, Colorado. Anyone who works as a radical in academic life, experiences extreme intellectual isolation. This fact is probably important in explaining why radical intellectuals in America have been relatively effective at criticism and markedly deficient in working out coherent alternatives to established intellectual structures in the academic disciplines,

Book Review: Closed Minds?: Politics and Ideology in American Universities

Finally, what makes this volume the perfect read for those interested in higher education, and especially for those interested in the evolution of the field, is a series of short introductions to each previously published article or essay—written with the assistance of Burton Clarke’s wife, Adele Clark. In this series of vignettes, one gains the sense of a marvelous career, with a few bumps and turns, as a chronological story. From UCLA, one year at Stanford, a short stint at Harvard, to eight years at Berkeley at my own Center for Studies in Higher Education (but before my time), to Yale, back to UCLA where Bob Clark has been a towering figure in their school of education since 1980. Reflecting on his career, Clark issues a statement with which I heartily agree. He states that the education of higher education scholars, “by means of theory-defined hypotheses takes them precisely in the wrong direction—at least when they tackle the character of such complicated social systems as universities and colleges.” (p.1) Fledgling researchers, he concludes, get lost in abstract variables, they assume organizations and individual behaviors are uniform, and “play out elsewhere. They do not. No wonder researcher knowledge is so different from practitioner knowledge! It is often useless to the people running things.” The word from an experienced and wise scholar.