I've come to college to learn to question, to grow, to learn, all the standard things that sound like clichés because no one takes them seriously. And they discover from one moment to the next that to become part of society, to become lawyers, ministers, businessmen, people in government, very often they must compromise those principles that were dearest to them.
They must repress the most creative impulses they have; this
is a prerequisite for being part of the system
The students had creative impulses and principles that were very dear to them. But they had all been repressed to become part of organized society. The result is that these students are displaced: "Strangers in their own life there is no place for them." Actually, he continued, students don't need to do anything other than let the university do its job, which is to prevent individuals from constructing their authentic identity. The opposite is true:
The university is well structured, well equipped, to produce people with all the sharp edges worn down, the whole person. The university is well equipped to produce such a person, and this means that the best of the incoming people must
wandering aimlessly for four years most of the time wondering why they're on campus, wondering if there's any point in what they're doing. They are doing, and they look towards a
very bleak existence afterwards in a game in which all the rules have been made up, which one really cannot amend
The job of the university is, in effect, to 'produce' the shaped person. This kind of misdirection of the education system coincided with the takeover of administrators.
He described them as "depersonalized and callous bureaucracy" and identified this class of self-serving, technocratic officials as "our nation's biggest problem." But the goal remained vague, immaterial. Savio prophetically deciphered the link
between “respectable bureaucracy” and “financial plutocrats,” and he cited Aldous Huxley's dystopian novel Brave New World to project the sense of transcendent, invasive, and unstoppable dark power. However, the image projected the feeling of
a faceless, invisible and unprincipled enemy, “truly Kafkaesque” (Lucas & Medhurst, 2009, pp. 423–426).
In short, an illiberal trend is already at work in the heart
same of modernization. Two ingredients are still missing to complete the full picture: first, the punks' uncompromising anger at the system, and second, a system imbued with
technology. The dystopian figure of an apparently arbitrary, faceless and absurd bureaucracy, which will eventually be renamed 'technocracy', however, is already at work in
student protest. In Savio's accounts, and more generally in the student-led free speech movement, the framework of the later cypherpunk movement is already evident in nuce. On the one hand, there is a rational society with a
technocratic and hierarchical orientation, in which knowledge and power are concentrated in a class of administrators; on the other hand, free will and the intrinsic value of the individual are denied. In the context of radical behaviorism promoted by Harvard psychologist and inventor Burrhus Frederic Skinner (1904-1990) in the novel Walden Two and Beyond Freedom and Dignity, the idea of viewing human beings as "complex chickens."
Savio also pointed out that "the university is well structured, well equipped, to leave people with all the worn edges, the complete person." Here the university is no longer a coercive force, but a manipulative power that produces people conforming to acceptable social standards. "University,"
Savio continued, “it is well equipped to produce that kind of person, and this means that the best of people” can only accept or resist what others try to do with them.7 In this case, the
Identity is not a natural right, and neither is freedom of expression from external sources of interference. Rather, identity is a framework and as such is more of a destination than a
choice. It means that one is defined by others, and this eventuality has rarely been benign and in fact could very easily be lethal. When the artifice broke down and it became clear that individuals cannot choose who or what they will be, it also became clear that they can only accept or resist what others try to do to them.
