Moods & Mores

At U.S. universities this fall, in loco parentis is suffering from rigor mortis.

Students at Notre Dame, for example, went back to school in September spoiling for a fight: they had decided that the behavioral restrictions traditionally imposed on them were too demeaning to tolerate any longer. But over the summer, President Theodore Hesburgh blandly did away with the bulk of the rules. The resulting mood of Notre Dame--new responsibility, dampening of protest, search for a more influential and meaningful student role in college affairs--is typical of most schools, barring Harvard's aberrations.

It is a time of battles-won-and-wherenow. With it goes some frustration, expressed in a fad for cynical or enigmatic slogans painted on the fences of every campus' inevitable construction sites. The old fire to hit the streets on behalf of civil rights has largely faded. A new desire to work pragmatically to tutor Negro kids and help out in slums is rising.

Committed to Madness. Most students, while unhappy about the war, seem weary of rehashing all the old arguments, and the issue is losing its emotional kick. Frustrated by the difficulty of "escalating protest," a Yale senior sighs: "This Government is committed to this madness, so what can you do?" The University of Wisconsin still manages to muster some 400 students for antiwar rallies, but most protests elsewhere take the forlorn form of silent vigils.

The passion in civil rights protests has petered out partly because black-power advocates have forced white students out of their movements. At Berkeley, the Afro-American Student Union even boycotted a "black-power day" conference because some whites helped plan it. Considering the Negro's legal rights mainly established, students at nearly every large urban university--notably Chicago, N.Y.U., Pennsylvania, U.S.C., San Francisco State--are working in Negro neighborhoods on the less dramatic long-range task of helping Negroes exercise those rights. No less than one-tenth of the 88,000 students on the University of California's nine campuses are engaged in volunteer work.

Open Communications. Taking a tip from Berkeley, many college officials have moved quickly to open up new lines of communications with students. Eager Cornell students packed an auditorium twice this year for meetings in which university administrators took on all student questions. Students at the

University of Michigan are demanding to be heard on academic policies, faculty tenure and educational philosophy. Princeton students sit on academic committees, recently won the right to audit courses, take the final examination, get credit if they pass, forget it if they fail. Some 800 students at Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pa., last week burned cardboard replicas of proposed campus buildings to protest the sterile modern architecture. Students at the City University of New York staged a sit-in to demand a voice in administrative decisions, but President Buell Gallagher insisted that they were asking too much.

At Stanford, a Committee of Fifteen, composed of five students, five teachers and five administrators, reviews almost all campus-wide controversies. As they speak up on committees, however, many students wonder if anyone is listening. Dan McIntosh, president of the Berkeley student government, contends that student participation is still "largely tokenism to lend legitimacy to administration action."

A Girl, a Bottle, a Boxcar. On almost every campus, students are either attacking in loco parentis--the notion that a college can govern their drinking, sleeping and partying--or happily celebrating its death. "The university has absolutely no moral right to regulate the private morality of its students," argues the Daily Princetonian. At Wisconsin, where junior and senior coeds have no dormitory curfews even on study nights, a favorite male pastime this fall has been to grab a girl and a bottle of Scotch and ride a slow boxcar 100 miles to Prairie du Chien, spending the night wrapped in manila paper (commonly stapled to boxcar walls as insulating liner) on the lawn of the historic Villa Louis. Even at once harsh West Point, seniors can take dates to dinner at the officers' club and drink anything the bartender can mix.

Not all the barriers are down. Notre Dame's Hesburgh still insists that entertaining women in campus bedrooms is simply "not socially acceptable." After their first semester, Smith girls can now enjoy unlimited class cuts and stay out overnight, but are on their honor to report their personal misconduct to the student government. Insists one Smith girl: "There is no such thing as a discreet indiscretion here."

Whimsical Fences. Whimsical or campy causes are much in vogue. University of Pennsylvania students recently picketed against Flash Gordon and Howdy Doody. Wisconsin students are high on TV's Road Runner cartoon, W. C. Fields movies, and paisley undershorts for men.

The range of the new student mood, sometimes macabre and bitter, sometimes merely cynical, shows up in the current fad of slogans painted on fences. Warns a Cornell sign: STUDYING CAUSES CANCER. A Stanford fence pleads LEGALIZE SUICIDE, while a Haverford sign contends that INCEST BEGINS AT HOME. WHERE IS LEE HARVEY OSWALD, NOW THAT WE REALLY NEED HIM? asks a sign at Wisconsin, which also proclaims that THE MARQUIS DE SADE IS A PRUDE and GOD ISN'T DEAD HE JUST DOESN'T WANT TO GET INVOLVED. By and large, university authorities make no attempt to erase the signs Most of the fences are around construction sites and are going to come down eventually anyhow. Right now they serve as a good safety valve.

As usual, Berkeley students have their own special hangup. There the students once aflame with political causes are drifting toward the introspective world of psychedelic drugs and the beat life. It is what Chancellor Assistant John Searle calls "a move from the political culture to the hipster world."

Yet not all the Berkeley activists are quiescent. Thirty campus political organizations formed a new common council last month to unite their strength, and retired Free-Speecher Mario Savio drew 6,000 students to his old haunts outside Sprout Hall, where he spoke and passed out leaflets in defiance of a university ban on such activity by nonstudents. Citing that act, Berkeley officials denied Savio's application to re-enroll as a student.

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