Visiting Columbia University last week to see the pro-Palestinian protests took me back to my own student days at the University of California at Berkeley, from 1987 to 1991.
As a journalist for the Daily Californian, the university’s independent, student-run newspaper, I covered a lot of protests for causes as varied as divesting from South Africa, ending U.S. proxy wars in Central America, getting the ROTC off campus and staying out of the 1991 Gulf War (“no blood for oil”). But underlying all of the transitory passions of the day, I detected a powerful nostalgia for the 1960s — that heady era when mere students could imagine they were heroic figures in the vanguard of historical change. It often felt as if the students of my generation were simply historical reenactors of past glories for whom the act of protest was more important than the causes for which they protested.
