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The New Children's Crusade: Lessons for College Presidents from the 2008 Presidential Campaign

By Ronald R. Thomas

Lately I have been feeling like it's 1968 instead of 2008, and I am a freshman in college again. The parallels are eerie. The nation is immersed in a controversial and unpopular war overseas that has been costly in human life and treasure. We live in fear of a sinister foreign enemy who, we are told, wants to take over the world and destroy our way of life. There are deep anxieties about the health of our economy, a decline in American prestige among historic allies abroad, concern over attenuations of our civil rights, and a cloud of innuendo and distrust around issues of race and gender here at home. I can almost hear Joan Baez and Bob Dylan singing.

And now, the national presidential election, still in the primary stages, has galvanized the country like none since, well, 1968. Sounding a chord with college students and generating on our campuses a level of political passion and excitement the likes of which we haven't seen for four decades, the election of 2008 is being figured in the press as (among other things) a new "Children's Crusade." College presidents, many of us having been on the other side of the barricades and marches and teach-ins in the earlier version of the Children's Crusade, should take note of both the similarities and the differences, and be prepared. There’s something happening here. . . .

Excerpted from the spring 2008 issue of The Presidency. To subscribe to the magazine, please call (301) 632-6757, or order online through ACE's bookstore.