On Agency

Abstract

We looked to find significance in the sixties, examined the university and a privileged generation faced with moral challenges who would not accept the answers offered, demanded better, and in so doing helped end a wretched war. But with that, they did not change the world the way they had hoped, instead reaching the limits of their agency and accepting the world as it was, knowing they had failed to make a revolution. Even with such failure, they remembered that as such a movement had happened once, and in the arc of history, if and when the times demanded, it would happen again.