Williams College was never Berkeley. Founded in 1793 among the minor mountains of western Massachusetts, the red brick buildings of this tiny liberal arts college housed generations of white, Protestant elites from the East Coast. In 1961, the New York Times Magazine described Williams as "a gentleman's school -- fashionable, mildly snobbish, not too obtrusively intellectual."

But by the time I entered Williams College in the fall of 1990, the school was more intellectual and, judging by the ubiquitous sweatshirts and jeans, less fashionable. While still mildly snobbish, Williams had heaved off its stuffy conservatism in favor of earnest multicultural liberalism.

We were, most of us, the children of baby boomers. Our parents had filled us with stories of their turbulent age. We inhaled their nostalgia for heroic youth and aspired to hurl our own young bodies against injustice and oppression.

The only trouble was finding it.

In January of my freshman year, President George H.W. Bush launched the Gulf War. A rumor circulated around campus that the draft would be reinstated. The young men anxiously tried to determine how the draft had worked and calculate their odds. One student hung a banner from his window promising, "If I am drafted, I will serve!" which inspired several hours of heated conversations in the all-you-can-eat cafeteria.

Some of us gathered on one of Williams' charming lawns to protest the war, but it wasn't easy to stoke our passions. Saddam Hussein was, after all, a brutal dictator, and he had invaded a sovereign country. And then, before we'd even begun to study for mid-term exams, the war was over.

Next, we aimed our golden lances at racial inequality. The Jim Crow laws and segregated schools were long gone thanks to the courage of civil rights activists a generation before. Williams College, which had once shunned minorities, now avidly recruited them. Yet many African-Americans and Latinos remained desperately poor in America's inner cities, where they suffered gang violence, drug epidemics, police abuse, and widespread unemployment.

We assailed gender inequality as well. My mother, in her day, had campaigned to end curfews for female students at her college. Curfew had never been an issue at Williams, since the college did not admit women until 1971. My incoming class, however, was evenly split between men and women. We shared co-ed bathrooms and enrolled in Womens Studies. Nonetheless, the gender ratio among professors was still skewed. Out in the real world, women earned less than men, and they were virtually shut out from top management positions.

Unfortunately, it's hard to fight entrenched social inequality from a privileged mountain redoubt. Trying to reverse crushing cycles of endemic poverty, of which we hadn't the faintest experience, was an exercise in confusion. Creating job opportunities and raising salaries, when we ourselves earned only minimum wage if we worked at all, was beyond our skill.

What we needed was a villain—a person or institution responsible for all the social injustices at whom we could roar with rage or humiliate with wit. We found our antagonist in the White Male Power Structure, a massive network of powerful white men that had wrapped women, African-Americans, and other disadvantaged classes in invisible chains.

But the White Male Power Structure is a wily opponent. It does not arrest you or spray you with a fire hose. You cannot outlaw it or sue it or beat it. And it stubbornly ignores the objections of earnest college students, no matter how passionately or cleverly presented.

So we read our Foucault, smoked our clove cigarettes, and bided our time. Then something happened. White cops in Los Angeles savagely beat a black man named Rodney King. We watched it on a video. Real live American racism in all its horrific splendor!

In the spring of my sophomore year, a mostly white jury added injustice to injury by acquitting the police officers involved in the beating. Los Angeles exploded in race riots. Williams College quivered with righteous indignation.

On May 4, 1992, more than 500 Williams students, a full quarter of the student body, marched 23 miles to a federal building in Pittsfield, Massachusetts to protest the verdict. Pittsfield is a small, depressed town with a miniscule black population. The federal building has no relation to the California court system, but it stood in for the White Male Power Structure. And it was a convenient marching distance from Williams College.

At the protest, student speakers eloquently harangued federal employees and the citizens of Pittsfield about the injustices of modern America. An enterprising group of Poli-Ec majors sold "I Marched on Pittsfield" tee shirts. Then everyone came back to campus to study for final exams.

In 1994, we graduated and eventually became doctors, lawyers, teachers, engineers, management consultants, investment bankers, and other white-collar professionals. The tee-shirt-selling Poli-Ec majors founded an Internet startup and made millions.  A few of us went into non-profit work. One worked as a union organizer for the telecoms until she became disillusioned with union politics and took a telephone repair job with better pay and fewer hours.

The inequalities we protested still exist, though they have somewhat receded. You don't hear much about the White Male Power Structure these days. Many of us rallied behind the historic election of a black president, but the novelty soon faded. We live on with a nagging sense that the world remains sick, but we cannot diagnose the pathogen, and our attempts to cure it have all the effect of a march on Pittsfield's federal building.