Richard Flacks

• University of California, Santa Barbara

The term “New Left” came into use in the late 1950s, when it was adopted by British intellectuals who came together after the Khruschev revelations about Stalin and the Soviet invasion of Hungary and the British invasion of Suez. Politically, this group shared a rejection of both Stalinism and the rightward drift of social democracy and a determina...

Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) was the leading national organization in the white student movement of the 1960s. SDS originated as the Student League for Industrial Democracy (SLID), whose roots were in the Intercollegiate Socialist Society, founded in 1905. The latter group, founded by such notables as Jack London, Upton Sinclair, and Wal...

Fifty years ago, a massive oil well blowout and subsequent oil spill triggered community resistance to oil company operations in Santa Barbara county and its surrounding waters. The county has had surprising success in regulating and reducing oil development. That success is due to the combined effectds of grassroots mobilization, longterm organiza...

In the symposium devoted to the Prague Spring of 1968, 14 sociologists and political scientists recall how they experienced the Prague Spring and reflect on the significance of the Czechoslovak reform movement for the present day. The symposium includes contributions from Johann P. Arnason (Iceland/Czech Republic), Richard Flacks (USA), John A. Hal...

A History of American Working-Class Literature sheds light not only on the lived experience of class but the enormously varied creativity of working-class people throughout the history of what is now the United States. By charting a chronology of working-class experience, as the conditions of work have changed over time, this volume shows how the p...

Heins is a civil liberties lawyer and her particular aim in Priests of Our Democracy is to examine the Supreme Court’s role in defining a constitutional foundation for academic freedom, especially during the McCarthy years. She shows that the Supreme Court, in the 1960s, reversed decades of precedent, to assert that academic freedom is essential fo...

Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) was the leading national organization in the white student movement of the 1960s. SDS originated as the Student League for Industrial Democracy (SLID), whose roots were in the Intercollegiate Socialist Society, founded in 1905. The latter group, founded by such notables as Jack London, Upton Sinclair, and Wal...

The term “New Left” came into use in the late 1950s, when it was adopted by British intellectuals who came together after the Khruschev revelations about Stalin and the Soviet invasion of Hungary and the British invasion of Suez. Politically, this group shared a rejection of both Stalinism and the rightward drift of social democracy and a determina...

A participant observer interpretively sketches the nature and history of the New Left movement, from its genesis in the civil rights movement in the early 60s to its recent factional divisions, focusing primarily upon how New Left groups such as the Students for a Democratic Society have viewed their own aspirations and efforts and (to a lesser ext...

Lost in student research of the last three decades is the effort to depict and understand the student experience and the students’ role in creating it. That students create a culture or cultures, and that such cultures crystallize collective and individual student identities, has largely disappeared as an identifiable theme in contemporary research...

Although the phrase “New Left” was used as a shorthand for a variety of social movement phenomena of the 1960s, it refers specifically to a project in Britain and the United States that was aimed at renovating the discourses and practices of the established lefts in both societies. The term “New Left” came into use in the late 1950s, when it was ad...

During the Spring of 2002 and 2003, a team of faculty and institutional researchers conducted an innovative web-based survey on the undergraduate experience at all eight undergraduate campuses of the University of California. This report provides the first formal presentation of preliminary findings from that survey and discusses potential areas of...

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 s...

When The Coming Crisis in Western Sociology (New York: Basic Books, 1970) appeared, "radical sociology" was in its first years. Those of us who identified with this project--a few young tenured faculty and a large number of new Ph.D.'s and graduate students--believ ed that we had the duty and the opportunity to remake sociology. Gouldner's book was...

A major finding of the pioneering empirical research on the American student movement of the 1960's was that students who engaged in campus protest were pri marily raised in "humanistic," liberal, middle-class families. Based upon these data, the development of student activism was seen as growing from the almost unique aspirations and values of a...

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Michigan, 1963. Includes bibliographical references.

This is an edited version of a paper given at the September i, 1968, meeting of the American Psychological Association in San Francisco, California. Since Richard Flacks's paper is both timely and provocative, we feel it a privilege to publish it here. The Editor

As the target of student protests has changed from the Southern sheriff to the university administrator, attitudes of educators and the public have hardened. Today academic liberals enunciate the view that most protesters are sincere and idealistic but that there is a small band of nihilistic revolutionaries dedicated to destroying the university....