For this study of campus activists, the author examined commission reports, diaries, clinical case studies, and other sources. He found student activists to be high academic achievers, concentrating mainly on the humanities and social sciences, with upper middle or upper class professional family backgrounds. The parents were unusually highly educated and frequently Jewish or agnostic. The issues over which crises developed varied, were 'capriciously changeable', and often 'patently pretexts'. Generational struggle involving irrational as well as rational elements was a latent factor. The typical childhood pattern of the activist showed a dominant mother, a successful father, and unconscious resentment against the father who did little to counteract the dominance of the mother over the son. Activism expresses wishes for punishment, destruction of father, possession of mother, assertion of masculinity, and interest in real issues.