Radical politics was a rising force on the campuses, and we were trying to draw attention to the dangers of what was happening while there was still some chance of arresting it. But it's now clear that we failed to stop the slide, because the political radicals on campus never had any interest in what we had to say. Their purposes were not ours. We were interested in the quality of higher education, but what they cared about was getting control of the campuses so they could use them to promote their political ideology, one so unpopular with the general public that it could not have been advanced in any other way. We got to this point not because they didn't foresee the grim result of what they were doing - the virtual destruction of higher education as we have known it - but because they did.
- John M. Ellis in The Breakdown of Higher Education: How It Happened, The Damage It Does, & What Can Be Done
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