Spring Break
The sixties are over; politican urges the need for new way to take action
by Aaron Press Taylor
News | 3/25/08
Posted online at 1:59 AM EST on 3/25/08
Campus tour guides usually tell their groups about Brandeis' legacy of student activism exemplified by the January 1969 10-day takeover of Ford Hall in which students demanded better minority representation on campus.
While one of those groups passed the library last Tuesday, probably listening to the history of Brandeis activism, another sat in Rapaporte Treasure Hall listening to politician and publicist Daniel Cohn-Bendit's speech about American and European revolutionary movements of the 1960s.
A panel composed of Northeastern University Prof. Timothy Brown, Brandeis Profs. George Ross (SOC), Laura Miller (SOC) and David Cunningham (SOC), and Larissa Liebman '10 responded to Cohn-Bendit's lecture.
Cohn-Bendit, co-president of the Greens/Free European Alliance Group in the European Parliament since 2002, became known in the 1960s as Dany the Red, a leader of the 1968 May Revolution in Paris.
"I still see him as the 23-year-old that overturned France," Paraska Tolan '11, who grew up there, said.
"If you are a European, you know Dany," Ross said in his introduction of the keynote speaker. "He made the French sit up, notice and change."
Cohn-Bendit's lecture, titled "Forget '68," advised an approach to reflectnig on the 1960s, considering that the social and political conditions of that era were vastly different from conditions today.
According to Cohn-Bendit, some of the major themes of unrest during that era included anti-authoritarianism, the discovery of the practice of debate and an insistence on self-organization. "The establishment had an idea of society we refused," Cohn-Bendit remarked.
Cohn-Bendit's critics once accused him of misleading French students and labeled him an anarchist and a threat to the French working class, he said. Rallies protesting his expulsion from France following May 1968 brought many different types of people together, he remembered. It was all "toward the ideal that everyone's equal," he said.
While one of those groups passed the library last Tuesday, probably listening to the history of Brandeis activism, another sat in Rapaporte Treasure Hall listening to politician and publicist Daniel Cohn-Bendit's speech about American and European revolutionary movements of the 1960s.
A panel composed of Northeastern University Prof. Timothy Brown, Brandeis Profs. George Ross (SOC), Laura Miller (SOC) and David Cunningham (SOC), and Larissa Liebman '10 responded to Cohn-Bendit's lecture.
Cohn-Bendit, co-president of the Greens/Free European Alliance Group in the European Parliament since 2002, became known in the 1960s as Dany the Red, a leader of the 1968 May Revolution in Paris.
"I still see him as the 23-year-old that overturned France," Paraska Tolan '11, who grew up there, said.
"If you are a European, you know Dany," Ross said in his introduction of the keynote speaker. "He made the French sit up, notice and change."
Cohn-Bendit's lecture, titled "Forget '68," advised an approach to reflectnig on the 1960s, considering that the social and political conditions of that era were vastly different from conditions today.
According to Cohn-Bendit, some of the major themes of unrest during that era included anti-authoritarianism, the discovery of the practice of debate and an insistence on self-organization. "The establishment had an idea of society we refused," Cohn-Bendit remarked.
Cohn-Bendit's critics once accused him of misleading French students and labeled him an anarchist and a threat to the French working class, he said. Rallies protesting his expulsion from France following May 1968 brought many different types of people together, he remembered. It was all "toward the ideal that everyone's equal," he said.
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