USA i 1968: Protester, New Left og politisk uro

A minority of faculty members made common cause with SDS and the black occupiers. Others agreed with Columbia historian Richard Hofstadter who accused

student radicals of threatening the university’s commitment to “certain basic val­

nes of freedom, rationality, inquiry, [and] discussion” in the name of a dogma

called Tiberation.”23 SDS members and their black allies countered that universities like Columbia were training grounds for an elite that was exploiting ghetto

dwellers and slaughtering Vietnamese. What was so rational about that?

Meanwhile, the federal government stepped up the eavesdropping, infiltra­

tion, and harassment of the New Left—usually at the express instructions of FBI

director J. Edgar Hoover. In the aftermath of the Columbia events, Hoover ordered

his agents to set up a “COINTELPRO” operation specifically targeting SDS and

other radical organizations.

In June 1968, for example, FBI agents wrote a letter to the Los Angeles Depart­

ment of Education and sent it out under the fictitious name “Ann Hill,” supposedly

a concerned private Citizen of Houston, Texas. The letter was intended to prevent

a recently graduated University of Houston student (and SDS activist) from

obtaining a job teaching in the Los Angeles school system. “I feel it is my duty,” the