The Womb-Clingers

"Our society is full of people like this," observes a University of California psychiatrist, "people who say, 'I want to get off.' " At a university, "getting off" means dropping all studies without taking up a job -- and U.S. campuses have thousands of such nonstudents. During the rebellion at the University of California about a fifth of those arrested were not students, nor were half the directors of the Free Speech Movement and most of the participants in the filthy-speech display.

So irked were California legislators that this month they passed a law to give university officials clear-cut authority to kick nonstudents off the campus when they "interfere with the peaceful conduct" of the school. But these restless souls also haunt Harvard, the University of Wisconsin, Columbia University, and other places where an academic community proves congenial to the outsider.

Haven of Discontent. The Berkeley campus, a cultural haven in a neighborhood of cheap housing and depressed industry, has some 3,000 hangers-on. They consist mainly of would-be artists, rootless university dropouts, left-winging political activists, and quite harmless little old ladies who delight in attending every concert, rally and public lecture on the campus.

The nonstudent at Cal can nap to recorded music on the plush sofas of the softly carpeted student union lounge, attend class lectures--and even ask questions in class. He can borrow a friend's registration card, get free medical treatment, attend free movies. He can sun himself near the union fountain, lunch on cheap sandwiches and pie at the outdoor Terrace, bang on bongo drums on the Lower Plaza. "Berkeley is one of the best places I know of to drop out of the system and yet survive," says Dr. David H. Powelson, director of the campus psychiatric clinic.

"On the Avenue." Many a Cal dropout "goes on the Avenue," which means he prowls the coffee shops, self-service laundries, bookstores and record shops in nearby Telegraph Avenue's grimy red brick buildings. One frequent stopping place is a shoestore called Sandals Unlimited; another is a self-service laundry where the machines, arranged in pairs, bear student-humor names: Tristan and Isolde, Godliness and Cleanliness, Toulouse and Lautrec, Dun and Bradstreet, Anthony and Cleopatra.

Victor Scott Keppel, 23, a dropout who spent two years on the Avenue before returning seriously to his studies, recalls his hiatus as a fast-moving kaleidoscope of LSD, drinking, faceless girls, and empty days. "The nonstudent life tastes like peanut butter, stale bread and leftover booze," he says. As for sex, "there were a few beatnik chicks that were wailing, but the volume didn't match the myth." At talk sessions, "everybody was very bored and very boring. There was something there, but I couldn't tell what it was. I took a closer look--and found it was nothing."

Through Yin & Yang. Several hundred nonstudents linger around the Harvard campus, attracted by what one Harvard junior terms "the tinsel and titillation of the academic life." They can be found in Harvard Square or at such student hangouts as the Waldorf Cafeteria, Tommy's Lunch, and Club 47. Some slip into lectures. Poet Gregory Corso is said to have gained a rounded education at Harvard without ever enrolling. One bogus student was exposed at a student songfest: he turned out to be the only person who knew all the stanzas of Fair Harvard.

Mostly, insists Radcliffe Junior Nancy Moran, the nonstudents are "gentle, lonely people who sit around a table trying to out-unhappy each other. They've worked their way through drugs, the yin-yang philosophy, and are now working on orgone boxes." This kind of life, says Harvard Senior Jacob Brackman, is a "hedonistic mode of existence--a limbo." Adds a Harvard professor: "It's the type of bohemian world that American students are always looking for in Paris but never seem to find." Radcliffe Senior Patricia McColloch says she plans to become a nonstudent after graduation as a "psychosocial moratorium."

Where's the Party? New York City colleges have relatively few nonstudents because the city itself offers almost anything the typical nonstudent seeks. New York University, jostling up against Greenwich Village, posts campus police to discourage nonstudents; City College of New York relies on Burns agents to enforce a city ordinance similar to the new California law that permits the ouster of troublesome loiterers. About 150 nonstudents normally drift along the fringes of Columbia, carrying a textbook or a copy of the New York Times as a prop and using politics as a conversational gambit. At the West End Cafe, a one-room saloon where Playwright LeRoi Jones can often be found, Billy Ford, 27, once a nonstudent at Michigan, is much in demand whenever Barnard students "need a Negro at a party." West End table talk often starts with such a wisecrack as "Well, I see that Johnson has succeeded in destroying two bicycle shops in North Viet Nam with 100 jets," finally works up to the crucial question: "Where's the party tonight?"

Many nonstudents cannot face up to leaving the womblike campus atmosphere. They fear--often with reason--that they cannot make it on the outside, avoid admitting that fear by protesting that "I will not do anything I do not believe in." Yet for the more imaginative, life is not wholly boring. They travel a seasonal circuit, such as Madison for its lakeside summer coolness, University of Colorado for winter skiing, U.C.L.A. for a balmy spring. Odd jobs, freeloading, and indulgent coeds take care of such mundane problems as bed and board.

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