The Nation: The'60s End

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In the manic heyday of protest, California students were among the most demonstrative. They burned down the Bank of America at Isla Vista and brought out the National Guard five times. Berkeley, cradle of Mario Savio and the Free Speech Movement, was especially volatile. In 1968 the Berkeley authorities installed Willis A. Shotwell as a full-time disciplinarian to deal with demonstrators.

Last week Shotwell returned to his previous assignment of giving preprofessional counseling to students. It was an interesting shift, though scarcely a revelation. The California administrators had finally held a mirror to the nostrils of expiring rebelliousness and detected no life there. No organized public life, at any rate. Said Shotwell: "The draft is gone, the war is more or less over, and the threat of interruption of life has ended." The passionate, impromptu politics of the '60s has long since closed down, and may have to await renewal until Jane Fonda's and Tom Hayden's new baby comes of age.