REPORT 49 life. Under the prevailing conditions, of course, procreation is often an oppression for the woman. Student Movements We have seen that capitalist growth and its consequences for the social corpus have caused the emergence of a type of white student who feels estranged from his family and community and is confronted by a sterile future in terms of work. The responses of the students to their social alienation have assumed the form of political action, the espousal of ideologies which will enable them to tolerate or ignore this condition and experimentation with new life styles. It should be emphasised thatactivism of any sort has been confined at all times to a minority of students. Still, it is these minorities who consciously attempt to shape the future and are responsible for much of the ideological forms and actions we associate with the American universities. The awakening social activism in the universities became manifest in the early sixties when the students went south to participate in the civil rights movement of the blacks. The diffusion of such an activism continued for almost a decade. Students began to learn about the Indochina war and about oppression in and out of the country. They turned progressively to the Left. The Students for Democratic Society (SDS) which was originally reformist in character, was transformed into a radical group. There also appeared splinter organizations like the Weathermen with a theory and practice for revolutionary change. The Indochina war played a decisive role in these trends. It touched the students intimately through the military draft and when they began to examine the causes for which they were called upon to disrupt or sacrifice their lives, many found them unjust. Education about Indochina then became for some a prelude to a study of the entire socio-economic order. Throughout the past decade or so, a feature of student activism has been that it has often been in the nature of a sympathetic response to the struggle of other oppressed groups. The early sixties show this characteristic transparently. The mid-sixties saw an intensification of the minority liberation struggles and the formation of the Black Panther Party and, similar organizations. The growth of campus radicalism was stimulated by this surge of militancy elsewhere although its significance at this period was not comparable to that of the Indochina war and the draft. If the sophisticated fringe of the student activists is left out, it is doubtful that this response was characterized by any mature appreciation of the social reality. It was rather like a declaration of sympathy for the predicament of groups whom the students perceived as fellow sufferers in a somewhat hostile world. Student activism on behalf of minorities has not led to any significant reciprocal solidarity between the two groups. The white university student and the coloured ghetto-dweller are divided too deeply by their social interests and backgrounds for sustained collaboration or effective communication.