Campus tour guides usually tell their groups about Brandeis' legacy of student activism exemplified by the January 1969 10-day takeover of Ford Hall in which students demanded better minority representation on campus. While one of those groups passed the library last Tuesday, probably listening to the history of Brandeis activism, another sat in Rapaporte Treasure Hall listening to politician and publicist Daniel Cohn-Bendit's speech about American and European revolutionary movements of the 1960s.

A panel composed of Northeastern University Prof. Timothy Brown, Brandeis Profs. George Ross (SOC), Laura Miller (SOC) and David Cunningham (SOC), and Larissa Liebman '10 responded to Cohn-Bendit's lecture.

Cohn-Bendit, co-president of the Greens/Free European Alliance Group in the European Parliament since 2002, became known in the 1960s as Dany the Red, a leader of the 1968 May Revolution in Paris.

"I still see him as the 23-year-old that overturned France," Paraska Tolan '11, who grew up there, said.

"If you are a European, you know Dany," Ross said in his introduction of the keynote speaker. "He made the French sit up, notice and change."

Cohn-Bendit's lecture, titled "Forget '68," advised an approach to reflectnig on the 1960s, considering that the social and political conditions of that era were vastly different from conditions today.

According to Cohn-Bendit, some of the major themes of unrest during that era included anti-authoritarianism, the discovery of the practice of debate and an insistence on self-organization. "The establishment had an idea of society we refused," Cohn-Bendit remarked.

Cohn-Bendit's critics once accused him of misleading French students and labeled him an anarchist and a threat to the French working class, he said. Rallies protesting his expulsion from France following May 1968 brought many different types of people together, he remembered. It was all "toward the ideal that everyone's equal," he said.

But the experience of young people today differs from Cohn-Bendit's experience of youth, he said. "It's more difficult to be young today than in our time," he said.

"We didn't have to worry about jobs," Ross concurred. Unafraid of AIDS, climate change and globalization, the generation of the '60s took ownership of the future, Cohn-Bendit said. He said that the events of 1968 weren't influenced by history as much as they made history.

False identification of socialism and imperialism represent some of the 1960s movements' wrong ideas, Cohn-Bendit continued. Brown suggested a process to "retrieve the 1960s by getting past mytholicization."

Liebman presented her finding that today's students do more complaining about issues than actually taking action. They are more influenced by grades than social justice, she said.

Matt Schmidt '11 agreed. "With so many different issues, there's no longer a common rallying point," he said after the program.

Miller explained that today, the possibilities of change and achieving a new world are understood less frequently. The irreverence of the 1960s encouraged a critical frame of mind but made it more difficult to reach out to those who find value in stable institutions. "The 'we can have it all' attitude created burnout," Miller said.

Cunningham said that today, people in power react differently to protest than in the past. The 1968 protestors capitalized on the notion that any protest could become out of control. "The vibrancy of politics included tactical innovations," he said. With the 1970s and 1980s came an entirely new police response to protest.

"He used so much of his personal experience," Saghi Sofinzon '11 said. "This is the best event I've seen since [Bill] Clinton [came to speak in December]."

Miller also complimented the presentation of the event. "It rang true both based on what I remember and from studying it," she said.

"What happened in Europe in the last fifty years is an incredible step forward for civilization," Cohn-Bendit said during the question-and-answer session. He further emphasized learning from the '60s' misguided idolization of figures like China's Mao Zedong.

Cohn-Bendit urged the audience not to replay moments of the 1960s but to make new moments.