The belief systems of protesting college students

Abstract

A group of 29 college students who had been arrested or nominated as having participated in a street disturbance aimed at producing social change were interviewed. The interview schedule was highly similar to one which had been used to investigate attitudes toward violence in a random, representative sample of American men. The data collected from the arrestees are compared with data from college students in the national sample. This study shows that the arrestees are more likely to think that violence is necessary to produce social change than are college students generally, and are more likely to believe that existing social institutions are inadequate. As a group, the arrestees are more identified with white student demonstrators and black protestors than are college students generally. The arrestees are also likely to regard the police as untrusworthy, looking for trouble, and apt to dislike people like themselves. In addition to the negative attitudes toward the police held by the student arrestees, they are more likely to regard police actions as violence (and hence provocative) than are other college students. The arrestees are far more likely than other college students to cleave to humanistic values. However, most of the differences between the arrestees and other American college students could be predicted from a general model of the justification of violence, so that it appears that the student activists' beliefs differ not so much in kind from those of other Americans as they do in degree.