SOURCE: Hirschorn, Michael W. “A New-Left Challenger Comes to an Uneasy Peace with Academe.” Chronicle of Higher Education 34, no. 42 (29 June 1988): A3.

In the following essay, Hirschorn examines The Sixties, contrasting Gitlin's relationship with institutions of higher education during that period with his role as a member of the University of California, Berkeley faculty in the 1980s.

For Todd Gitlin, a self-described “movement intellectual” of the 60's New Left, the academy has never been the ideal setting for his work.

As an undergraduate at Harvard University and a graduate student at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, Mr. Gitlin was an open and impassioned critic of the academic establishment. As an early president of Students for a Democratic Society, he was in an elite cadre of left-wing students and young intellectuals who used the university as a punching bag for their criticisms of American society and government.

But...