A Majority of Moderates

Despite a season of well-publicized student political protests both in the U.S. and abroad, the vast majority of university undergraduates are either apolitical or supporters of well-established parties. So concludes Harvard Sociologist and Political Scientist Seymour Martin Lipset, in a worldwide study of collegiate political views print ed in the latest issue of the intellectual quarterly Daedalus.

In the U.S., for example, Lipset claims that the leftish, militant Students for a Democratic Society have only 7,000 members among the na tion's 6.5 million university students. By contrast, the Young Democrats and Young Republicans have a combined enrollment of nearly 250,000. Lipset also believes that on both the left and right, far more students were activists in the 1930s than are so today.

Lipset concludes that there are more activists among humanities and social science students than among engineers; freshmen and sophomores, who are likely to be "anxious, disoriented and lonely" after leaving home, are prime can didates to join protest movements. The better universities, which have "the most creative, intellectually oriented and lib eral faculties," influence the more affluent students away from the conservatism of their parents. But when students find themselves torn between the attitudes of their parents and of the university, many, he says, tend to "escape the choice by abstaining from politics and accepting the doctrine that school and politics do not mix."

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