Marching to a Different Drummer: Occupational and Political Correlates of Former Student Activists*

This study reports on long-range consequences of student political activism. Three groups were selected: ( 1) former civil rights activists, (2) student government members, and (3) apolitical undergraduates. It was hypothesized that variation in political activism would be linked with differing occupations and political orientations. Former civil rights activists are heavily concentrated in the knowledge and human service occupations and are politically radical to liberal in their attitudes and behavior. Beginning with the sit-in by four black fresh-men from North Carolina A & T on February 1, 1960 a college student protest movement de-manding political changes was launched (Mat-thews and Prothro, 1966; Pinkney, 1968). Dur-ing the sixties hundreds of thousands of black and white students became involved as the direct action civil rights protest mushroomed. Later, segments of the movement redirected their demands to ending the Vietnam War, re-forming universities, stopping environmental pollution, and to a host of local issues (Long, 1970; Peterson, 1968; Skolnick, 1969). For their efforts, students were to be killed, beaten, tear-gassed, arrested, suspended from school and generally harassed as they used the tactics of political confrontation to reform or radically change major institutional sectors of the United States (Armistead, 1969; Avorn, 1968; Pres-ident's Commission on Campus Unrest, 1970). The correlates of student protests have been extensively investigated and attempts to evaluate the long-range effects of the movement on both the participants and the larger society are con-tinuing (Altbach and Laufer, 1972; Flacks, * An earlier draft of this paper was presente