The No-Nonsense Kids

One outstanding trait about the U.S. college student of 1957 is that he is not acting at all as a college student is supposed to. His professors cannot decide whether to clap or wring their hands over him--whether he is dull or simply more mature than his predecessors.

Certainly, a strange sort of cultural calm has settled over the nation's colleges, at least on the surface. No campus is without its atrocity story of intellectual deadness. At the University of Michigan, Vice President for Student Affairs James Lewis asked a group of 100 students what they thought of Aldous Huxley. "Only one or two of them," he reported, "had ever heard of him." At Kenyon, Poet-Critic John Crowe Ransom sadly detects "a sort of idleness of the creative imagination." At the University of Illinois, English Professor Charles Shattuck complains : "A secondhand bookstore wouldn't be supported in this town." Says Joseph Baker, professor of English at the State University of Iowa: "Even the intellectuals do not read as much as they did a generation ago, and those who make literature their specialty tend to be Alexandrian--they talk of form, metaphor, style, leaving the important matters to sociology and psychology."

The kind of caper-cutting that previous generations took for a healthy sign of youthful high spirits--and sometimes mistook for a symptom of intellectual fire--has lost much of its appeal. There are some high jinks, but today's students go steady, marry early, refuse to worship the football hero, mostly leave the cheering of teams to the alumni. "Such irrational actions as riots are too much of a risk," says William Zabel, president of Princeton's debating society. "Anything you do out of the ordinary brings ridicule."

Whatever overt cultural excitement exists on the campus is most obvious in the arts. At the University of Wisconsin, for instance, courses in music appreciation turn students away by the score. At Harvard, the drama is booming, with more than 25 student productions scheduled during the year. From Dartmouth to the University of Kansas to the University of Texas, more concerts are given, more students attend, and when the campus string quartet is not in session, one simply switches on the hifi. But in general, the thing to be, on the subject of art--or on any subject, for that matter--is casual. "Anything that is in any way heroic or looks heroic," says Philosophy Major Peter Gunter of the University of Texas, "thumbs down. Don't ever stand up and pound your fist about anything, because that is sort of childish."

"A Good Deal." This mood, which once would have seemed so improbable among the young, baffles and disturbs some professors. Says Columbia Professor-Critic Lionel Trilling: "The undergraduate of today is not very much committed to anything; or if he is, they are secret commitments." Since students have had no personal experience with war and depression, Denison University Historian

Robert Seager finds in them "a tremendous amount of self-satisfaction with the world as it is. It kind of floors me that the zest has gone out of American intellectual life because the economy has achieved what the critics have always wanted it to achieve." Or, as one M.I.T. senior puts it: "We think we're getting a pretty good deal. The world needs us; we're in demand. Hell, I'll be making $450 a month as soon as I graduate."

Actually, passive as he may seem in comparison with his predecessors, today's student is anything but smug. Says Daniel Aaron, professor of English at Smith: "If young people behaved after World War II exactly as they did before it, there would really be something wrong with them." The student now simply faces a different kind of world. It demands that he be brighter, more conscientious, more in earnest than his predecessors. If he refuses to play the rebel, it is probably because he feels he must cover too much ground to prepare himself for the future. Perhaps the most significant.paradox in collegiate life is that today's intellectual calm is largely the result of the rising level and increasing intensity of the average campus' intellectual demands.

B.A., M.A., Ph.D. Since competition for a place in at least the major colleges is keen, students are aware as never before of their academic record--a record that has followed them from their very first days of school. "With more and more guys graduating from college," says Columbia Senior Peter Earth, "you're no longer looked up to if you went to college. You're just looked down upon if you didn't get a degree." But a simple bachelor's degree is not really enough. At Harvard, where only one in 100 students now qualifies for the once accepted gentleman's average of C, seven out of ten intend to go on to graduate school--a process that a previous generation might have condemned as going from one ivory tower to another. "What worries us is this," says one Harvard professor. "In his drive to make the graduate school, the current undergraduate is very serious. But that's the wrong reason for being serious."

This then is the no-nonsense generation, and the only real danger in it is that it might become a generation of grinds. Just as the goldfish swallower is dead, so, to a large extent, is the dilettante and the knowledge-for-knowledge's-sake boy. Today's student has little patience with mere intellectual flash. Nor is he particularly tolerant of any form of obscurantism. "The college student," says Editor Howard Seemen of the University of Minnesota's Minnesota Daily, "wants something he can put his hands on. The double meaning is not popular."

Who Am I? With no public cults or causes to speak of, the student does have one commitment that he takes most seriously: a commitment to himself. "They feel," says Columbia Historian Richard Hofstadter, "that there is nothing much they can do about so many things like radioactive fallout. So today, college students are serious about their careers, and they feel that's about, all they can do." In this sense, students are "more individualistic than anyone would guess," says Amherst Psychologist Robert Birney. "They try to be able to cope with what they can control. They don't worry about what they can't." At Southern Methodist University a discussion group is now engaged in exploring the theme, "I am I." "What this really means," says Coed Annette Robinson, "is, 'Who am I?'--and that's what we're trying to find out."

Since their foremost concern is themselves--and the place they will have in society--they seem to read less for esthetic pleasure than for answers. They still study, though they do not imitate, such erstwhile heroes as Hemingway and Joyce, but the nearest thing they have to a U.S. literary ideal is Faulkner. James Gould Cozzens has made little impression on them. Students read Koestler, but Orwell gets a bigger play. Eliot holds his own, but as much for his criticism as for his poetry. Dylan Thomas is admired, but evokes no hysteria. Students still delve into Freud, but they are just as apt to be worried about the psychology of The Organization Man. The one new American author who has something approaching a universal appeal is J. D. Salinger, with his picture of the tortured process of growing up.

Age of Consolidation. Even so, the present generation recognizes no single voice as its very own. In so complex a world, no one voice, or even a chorus of voices, would be enough. Rather than take on any untried creative artists, the young prefer to read what the New Critics have to say about the artists of yesterday. Mailer and Jones have had their brief fling, such as it was. Colin Wilson never achieved any vogue at all. There is no cult of the "beat generation," and the San Francisco literary renaissance has scarcely begun to penetrate the ivy. "Maybe," wrote Princeton's Carlos Baker recently, "this is the Age of Consolidation . . . [Students] are too busy reading and thinking about older thinkers and writers to pay extensive heed to the newest ones."

Though no philosophy particularly excites them, existentialism--especially that of the early Camus--comes closest. But some professors have profound doubts as to whether young Americans really understand what existentialism is all about. A Princeton professor recently told a student: "Your generation hasn't the foggiest conception of existentialism. Kierkegaard and Pascal seem merely to be chic in cocktail conversation."

Intellectual Anchors. Chic or not, this interest in Camus--as well as in such theological thinkers as Niebuhr--indicates the kind of quest today's students are on. "They have serious interest," says Princeton Dean of the College Jeremiah Finch, "in Faulkner, Eliot and Dostoevsky--writers concerned with the human predicament. This contrasts with the dominating interest of the past in Sinclair Lewis, Richard Halliburton and Fitzgerald, and gives you some measure of this increasing tendency to seek and examine. This is a critical generation, in the best sense of the word." What has happened, says Reed Political Scientist Charles McKinley, "is a marked return to fundamentalism, a general disturbance and anxiety about the prospects of the human race, a profound search for intellectual anchors."

That being the case, the charge of conformity seems rather empty. Indeed, says Social Scientist Reuel Denney of the University of Chicago, "this is about the freest generation of students in U.S. colleges in the 20th century." It is free of the cults of the '20s, which in themselves were a form of conformity. It is also free of the causes of the '30s and the crises of the '40s--free, in fact, of all the "moral inflation" of previous generations. "Students," says Denney, "are having to reconstruct from scratch the pre-crisis definition of the student as a personality in his own right. They no longer have to make the campus world a mirror that reflects the outside world. In 1957 the student's ego does not shrink just because he's engaged in small talk."

With the rise of mass culture, the student may also feel that he no longer has as great a responsibility as he once did to bear any special cultural message to the world, or that he would be heard even if he did. The kind of leadership he seems to want to offer is not as a member of a select intelligentsia, but as something far less spectacular. "They're good people." says William Duren Jr., dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Virginia, "remarkably good morally and spiritually--a lot better than their fathers were in the human sense." Adds Dean Wilbur Bender of Harvard: "The weight of the world rests heavily on their shoulders. They want to do something about the world. But they feel that they have to know a lot more in their minds before they can become effectual. They are not weak. They are strong and they are serious."

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