But not wiser, if the professors interviewed about the protests are any measure. "We used to like to offend people," Professor Martha Saxton of Amherst's women's studies department told the newspaper. "We loved being bad, in the sense that we were making a statement. Why is there no joy now?"
Frankly, there's plenty of joy now, only it's in Baghdad, not Berkeley. This, of course, will do nothing to cheer Ms. Saxton, still pining for the days when "being bad" made a "statement." And she is not alone. "In Madison, teach-ins were as common as bratwurst," said Austin Sarat, another nostalgia-minded professor at Amherst whose salad (bratwurst?) days came while studying political science and protesting the Vietnam War in Wisconsin, or vice versa.
Now, as the newspaper puts it, he tells his students that, "if you love the United States, you must, as an act of patriotism, oppose the war."
Which is one way of coping with a protesting past. "There was a certain nobility in being gassed," Mr. Sarat explained. "Now you don't get gassed.
You walk into a dining hall and hand out informational pamphlets." Nobility aside, Mr. Sarat should look on the bright side: At least Iraq's Kurds don't get "gassed" anymore, either. And informational pamphlets will probably suit them just fine.
Meanwhile, American students are practically AWOL when it comes to recreating the sort of mass campus anti-war rallies of yesteryear. Why? The New York Times has pointed out that war in Iraq entails no draft -- once upon a time, a major incentive (and guilt-trip) for draft-exempt, nobility seeking students of the Vietnam era. Then there's the fact that more students today receive financial aid, and may actually feel compelled to make good grades rather than statements -- bad, joyous or otherwise. And there is another explanation, this one from Yale history professor John Lewis Gaddis: "These are the kids of Reagan," he told the newspaper. "When I lecture on Reagan, the kids love him. Their parents are horrified and appalled."
Their parents and professors, both. Talk about a generation gap. But today's students hardly form a pro-regime-change-monolith. Every campus poll on the war I've seen indicates an evenly divided student body. It is the professoriate that forms the monolith, a statistical oddity due less to changing times than to the professors who fail to change with the times -- and fail, ever, to grow up.