Here’s the beginning of that chapter I wrote:

** We may have lived in an ivory tower at Yale, but it was an ivory tower that existed in a period of tumultuous political and cultural transformation. The year that we began college (1966), profound changes were taking place all over the world, some beneficial, some not. In January, India had elected as its prime minister Indira Gandhi, only the second woman in modern history to head a government. In April, the Cultural Revolution had been launched in China by Mao Zedong to purge the bourgeoisie, the intelligentsia, and all those who were resisting “the great proletarian revolution.” In May, here in the U.S., a “Rally to Protest Exclusion of Homosexuals from the Armed Forces” was held at the Federal Building in San Francisco. In June, James Meredith was shot in a civil-rights march, and the Supreme Court handed down the “Miranda Decision.” In July, racial unrest led to violence in Chicago, Cleveland, and Brooklyn, with clashes between white, black, and Latino street gangs and confrontations with police. The Medicare Act, passed in 1965, went into effect, and on June 30 the National Organization for Women was founded. The F.C.C. ruled that radio stations were now required to broadcast separate programming on A.M. and F.M. radio. The Beatles held their last concert on August 29 in San Francisco, just after their album Revolver and the Jefferson Airplane’s first album were released, and John Lennon declared that the Beatles were “more popular than Jesus,” adding, “I don’t know which will go first——rock ’n’ roll or Christianity.” That same month, construction began on the World Trade Center towers in New York.
Under the administration of President Johnson, the United States had already become mired in Vietnam, and the war’s carnage was shown on the nightly newscasts, thus giving it the name “the living-room war” and making it real in a way that previous wars had not been. Americans began to protest our involvement in the war, with the numbers of protesters growing as the war dragged on. From 25,000 troops at the start of 1965, the number of U.S. soldiers fighting in Vietnam (both volunteers and draftees) rose to a high of 543,400 in 1968. It affected Yale students directly because of the draft, which had been in effect since World War II. The Military Selective Service Act of 1967 was a slight revision of the Acts of 1948, 1951, and 1955, and required all men between the ages of 18 and 26 to register for service (with several types of exemptions granted, including educational deferments). Some students were already resisting their future military service in Vietnam by participating in marches and picketing the offices of defense contractors (and some who had already been drafted fled to Canada). In May 1966, about 350 students had taken over administrative offices at the University of Chicago to protest the college’s cooperation with the Selective Service. Such activities increased during our college years.
These were also the years that saw the flowering of the counterculture. There were new words to describe those who embraced the new youth culture (hippies, long-hairs, freaks), their amenities (crash pads, food co-ops, head shops) and some of their activities (be-ins, freakouts, acid trips), and a new kind of music that arose out of the movement and, at the same time, helped it grow. In some cities, they congregated in certain neighborhoods, which became magnets for young people from other parts of the country: the Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco, Old Town in Chicago, Dinkytown in Minneapolis, and the East Village in New York City, among others. They developed an alternative life-style based on values that challenged the traditional American middle-class way of life, and struggled to establish and maintain their own traditions within the larger society, with which they often found themselves at cross-purposes. The counterculture, at its high point, created some positive social structures——such as self-sustaining communes and free clinics——but by the early 1970s had lost much of its idealism and its energy, and continued almost entirely outside the mainstream in isolated communities, mainly rural. However, the style of the counterculture was perpetuated by the fashion and entertainment industries, which developed (or exploited) the commercial possibilities of tie-dye clothing and psychedelic rock music. There was also something genuinely, traditionally American about the youth movement’s embrace of cultural diversity and social experimentation, and its desire for greater individual freedom and personal expression. Those legacies of the sixties youth movement are still with us, though encountering stiff opposition from radical right-wing factions in our society today.
On college campuses, sexual freedom and rebellion against authority were causes being taken up by students in growing numbers. Sexual attitudes in the mid-1960s were still very conventional, with taboos against premarital sex and homosexuality, and disapproval of cohabitation between individuals of different gender. But we and our peers across the country were beginning to question those attitudes, and just about everything else. As Todd Gitlin (Harvard grad, Columbia professor, and one-time visiting professor at Yale) wrote in his book The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage: “There were questions, endless questions, running debates that took their point from the divine premise that everything was possible and therefore it was important to think, because ideas have consequences. Unraveling, rethinking, refusing to take for granted, thinking without limits.” **

– Stephen