Throughout the United States, but particularly in a small number of universities, including UB, many of the students had become radical due to the civil rights movement and the Vietnam War. In 1962 the Students for a Democratic Society, generally known as the SDS, was founded in Port Huron, Michigan. By coincidence, this organization had the same acronym as the radical German student organization, the Sozialistische Deutsche Studentenbund (Socialist German Student Association), with which it had many similarities, although the American SDS was more pragmatic and less ideological than its German counterpart. A basic concern of the SDS was U.S. foreign policy, which in its view was closely intertwined with the capitalist economic order. Colonialism, imperialism, and racism were all aspects of this social system. The critique of capitalism restricted itself not to economics and politics but included culture and everyday life. The critics called for a counterculture free of the compulsion for conformity and from the pressure for achievement. The radical students turned to the Critical theory of the Frankfurt School, less to its two most important theorists Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno who had returned to Frankfurt from the United States after the war, than to Herbert Marcuse, who was much better known to them and who several times visited the Buffalo campus. Foucault too played an important role in their thinking and to an extent replaced Marx.
Source: Wilma and Georg Iggers, Two Lives in Uncertain Times, New York: Berghahn Books, 2006, p. 111f