THE CYNICAL IDEALISTS OF '68
THE troubled and troublesome college Class of 1968 tends to have a sober, even tragic view of life. They were high school seniors in the year that John Kennedy, a politician who gained their trust and inspired their ambitions, was shot to death in Dallas. They were college seniors in the year that Martin Luther King, the Negro leader who tapped their idealism and drew them into social protest, was murdered in Memphis. Throughout all of their college careers, the war in Viet Nam has tormented their conscience, forced them to come to personal decisions relating self and society, country and humanity, life and death. With the lifting of most of the graduate-school deferments, the men of '68 face the war and those existential issues as an immediate, wrenching reality.
Such pressures, direct and indirect, have had a profound impact on the 630,000 seniors who will pick up diplomas this spring. While many--perhaps a majority--are the familiar breed who spent their years at college in pursuit of an education or a profession without fretting too much over the meaning of either, even the quiet ones have been affected more than they show. Those who are in the really new mold sometimes show it by a defiance in dress: beards beneath the mortarboards, microskirts or faded Levis under the academic gowns. More often, and far more significantly, it emerges in a growing skepticism and concern about the accepted values and traditions of American society. Some of these graduates will become draft dodgers. Many smoke pot. Fewer than ever remain virginal. Yet it is also true that the cutting edge of this class includes the most conscience-stricken, moralistic and, perhaps, the most promising graduates in U.S. academic history.
Children's Crusade. Worldwide, this has been the year of student power. Taking to the streets to engage in bloody combat with police, students triggered a crisis for the Fifth Republic in France, contributed to the liberalization of Czechoslovakia, challenged the authoritarianism of Spain, and assailed the sluggish social institutions of West Germany. At home, the spontaneous "children's crusade" of college kids was largely responsible for making Senator Eugene McCarthy into a serious candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination.
The Class of '68 has also harassed military recruiters and Dow Chemical interviewers, picketed induction centers, held massive--and sometimes unruly--rallies to protest the war. It has eyed its own campuses critically and loudly cried out for a more relevant education. It has demonstrated in support of fired professors and striking janitors, thrown itself in front of campus bulldozers, demanded everything from black-culture courses to total freedom from parietal rules.
These disruptive power tactics have been led by a relatively small group of radicals who hate all authority. Yet many campus-wide protests have involved moderate and even conservative students with little or no use for the doctrinaire polemics of Students for a Democratic Society. Many students reluctant to march or picket have nevertheless been stirred to face the issues raised. The jolting, dramatic atmosphere created by defiant demonstrators, television cameras and, frequently, charging police have left only the most aloof students untouched.
Bridging the Gap. For all its deep commitment to protest and activism, the Class of '68 nevertheless seems to be more restrained than the Class of '69, '70 or '71 is likely to be. At many campuses, the instigators of the most violent demonstrations were sophomores or juniors. The seniors still see more in U.S. life worth saving, and have a far greater willingness to accept its traditions. English Major Thomas McKenna of Notre Dame rather pretentiously defines the Class of '68 as "the in-between class. We are the last of the old radicals, those who are willing to revolt in the systematic American way. We could be the salvation of everyone if we can just bridge the gap, for we have a foot in each view of American life."
The American way of life, though, has to prove itself. Introspective and analytical, this year's graduate may buy it after all--but not without a good deal of criticism and suspicion. "People have always accepted our system without question," says Penn Senior Dennis Wilen in one of those crashing oversimplifications that ignore history. "My class will not stand for that." The questioning extends well beyond the Johnson Administration's rationale for the Viet Nam war to the inevitability of capitalism and the viability of present political systems. The graduates insist that there is a need to fight injustices at home, not to "shoot peasants in Viet Nam"--an argument, of course, that is not the exclusive insight of youth. Some students have thus concluded that going to prison as a protest against the draft is a sacrificial act by which one "votes" his own concept of duty to country. Last week more than 100 Woodrow Wilson Fellows from across the nation said that they would not fight. As Stanford Senior Hugh West sees it: "Jail is where patriotism and morality intersect."
Compassion v. Coercion. Beyond the war, the prevailing ethics of the Class of '68 place justice above the need for order, social welfare above creature comforts, compassion above coercion, people above institutions. In talking about these values, students sometimes act as if they had discovered justice and love. They also ignore the reality that undergraduates throughout history have always had ideals--some of which have been fulfilled by adult society. Condemnation of their elders occasionally comes too easily for the young today--witness the Berkeley coed who glibly condemns men who "sell their soul for higher salaries, then sink into suburbia, where the deepest thing they read is TV Guide."
One book that the Class of '68 does not read very much is the Bible; by and large, graduates dismiss institutional churches as irrelevant or unimportant. Nonetheless, Roman Catholic Philosopher Michael Novak of Stanford thinks that there may be "more religion among students who now act on their conscience than among those who sit in church every Sunday seeking to be blessed." The Protestant dean of chapel at Stanford, the Rev. B. Davie Napier, enthusiastically endorses this year's seniors, who, he says, "embrace an authentic, courageous morality that sees obscenity where it really is--in all schemes that thwart the realization of full humanity anywhere, from the campus to Saigon, or to hell and back."
Pinned & Engaged. The new morality of the college senior holds no brief for society's sexual taboos. Linda LeClair, Barnard's celebrated light housekeeper, is no rarity in her generation. Yet nearly all students argue that promiscuity is not on the rise. What they take for granted is sex among couples who consider themselves "pinned," engaged, or just plain in love. Honest relationships now, they contend, will lead to better marriages later on. And while students are increasingly aware that LSD and Methedrine are dangerous, marijuana has become an accepted part of college culture. For many, it simply provides a more illuminating kind of high than alcohol does.
Penn Coed Lucy Conger refers to her class as "the silver-platter generation." No economic depression clouds their horizon, and most students seem to accept the inevitability of luxuries with patrician assurance. In fact, the degree of affluence is astonishingly high: at the University of Texas, for example, nearly a third of this year's seniors come from families earning $20,000 a year. Indifferent to monetary success, a surprisingly large number of graduates are planning to enter such service vocations as teaching, social work, urban planning or small businesses, where they hope to define their own destiny. Many resent bureaucracy and bigness, and are turned off by corporate recruiters who speak of high salaries rather than the chance for creativity. Yet even within large institutions, concedes Sarah Lawrence's Sarah Loenberg, it is possible for a person to build "a smaller world by touching a few people."
Self-Conscious & Serious. The Class of '68 combines an idealism with a cynicism about society's willingness to embrace their ideals. The graduates do not speak with a common voice but with common candor, sometimes naively and too glibly, often with a deep faith in the perfectibility of man. In their self-conscious seriousness, they seem to be trying to live up to French-Poet Paul Claudel's contention that "youth is not made for pleasure but for heroism." Some of the demanding and perceptive students who best express the special things that their class wants to say:
U.C.L.A.: Bruin with a Bite
The Class of '68 has no one symbol. But Brian Weiss of U.C.L.A., who ap pears on this week's TIME cover, pointedly conveys many of its new mold characteristics, opinions and attitudes. His voice is amplified more loudly than most since it is reflected in the Daily Bruin (circ. 18,000); Weiss has made such an impact as editor of the paper that many call it the Daily Brian. Weiss allows that he has "always been a wise-ass -- only my vocabulary has improved." He has called California Governor Ronald Reagan "a liar" for manipulating university financial figures to justify budget cuts, and tells matrons of Westwood who complain about obscenity in Bruin reviews: "If you don't like it, don't read it, lady." Despite such brashness, one of his frequent targets, U.C.L.A. Chancellor Franklin Murphy, praises Weiss as a conscientious editor who has made the paper "a provocative and enzymatic force on the campus." A tightly packed bundle (he is only 5 ft. 7 in., 128 Ibs.) of confidence, he is full of irrepressible assertions as to what is good and evil in life. As with many of his classmates, his sense of independence developed only recently. For 17 years he moved almost unthinkingly through a lulling sea of trim tract houses in the hot suburbs of Los Angeles.
He took for granted the middle-class values of his father, a proud, patient jeweler who is "the best watchmaker in the San Fernando Valley." At school, Brian was "the kind of kid who would run and tell the teacher if I saw another kid starting a fire with a magnifying glass."
Only two things really excited Weiss in his early years. One was reading Tom Swift at the age of seven ("It drove me crazy--I wanted to go to the moon myself; I was Tom"). The other was meeting a biology teacher who had "a whole garage full of tropical fish," and who "was the first person who got inside my brain and picked." Otherwise, Weiss was mainly untouched by social concerns or intellectual interests. Brian arrived at U.C.L.A. uncertain of what he wanted to be come. He majored in zoology, barely got passing grades for two years. "They were fact-piling courses, just rote." He turned to the campus paper because "I didn't know anybody." As a freshman, he dashed off a column for the Bruin, patly suggested that although U.S. involvement in Viet Nam was regrettable, the military at least ought to run the war right. So many older students grilled him about his beliefs that "I realized I'd accepted Viet Nam without acknowledging it was killing people. I emptied out my mind and started over."
After he began working on the Bruin, Weiss found a double inspiration in a U.C.L.A. husband-wife anthropology team, Lewis and Sally Binford. "They're heretics," he says. "Sharp, biting, absolutely brilliant." He switched to anthropology, wants to teach it because it blends his desire to be scientifically precise and his interest in people. He has pushed his grades up to a 3.8 average in his major, has a four-year graduate fellowship at the University of New Mexico. He hopes to avoid military service as a conscientious objector.
The rebelliousness of Brian Weiss extends to many topics besides the war. He does not flinch, for example, at the thought of race riots. "I don't know what took black people so long," he says. "The black man is tired of asking for it. Now he's taking it--and I don't blame him." As for university education, he claims, much of it "is insulting --they pile irrelevant facts on top of you and make you regurgitate them."
Yet to Weiss, as to many of his classmates, college was "a tremendous eye-opening introduction to life." With his usual cockiness, he says that "I can see myself as an excellent U.S. President," but he will settle more modestly for just trying to arouse college students in the same way that he was turned on by the Binfords. "I hope I can spend the rest of my life making people socially aware, making them think, making them alive."
HARVARD: Unfettered Eagle
Harvard's Vance Hyndman, 21, was an Eagle Scout in his home town of Mission, Kans., and president of the youth group at Countryside Christian Church. A major in Far Eastern languages, he once considered a career with the State Department or the CIA; if drafted, he now says, he will flee to Canada. He lives alone in a two-room suite at Lowell House, where his Oriental-styled living room is furnished with cushions rather than chairs. Nightly he browses through a red plastic-bound copy of Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung--in Chinese.
Hyndman's interest in the meeting of East and West began in junior high school, when he wrote a paper on the Gandhara art of India. Last summer he studied Chinese at Vermont's Middlebury College; there he met some South Vietnamese who opened his eyes to the cultural differences between the U.S. and Asia. By the time the U.S. began the heavy bombing of North Viet Nam, Hyndman was thoroughly disenchanted with the nation's war policy. He is now firmly convinced that U.S. military power offers the South Vietnamese "a worse alternative than Viet Cong control." From his study, of Asian history, he believes that the Vietnamese and Chinese are natural enemies--which to him means that the U.S. could safely abandon the war without fear of a Maoist takeover. Nonetheless, Hyndman is no hot-blooded activist. He considered the act of fellow Harvard students who kept a Dow recruiter captive in a room for seven hours last October "almost as tyrannous as the Army's policy in Viet Nam." And he does not regard his decision not to serve an act of disloyalty: "What I am patriotic to is a just nation and a just policy--when the nation changes from this, I find myself standing in opposition to it." As a sophomore, Hyndman developed a profound concern about racial prejudice on a hitchhiking trip to the annual spring beach-and-beer busts in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. When he and a Negro friend tried to check into a cheap hotel in Durham, N.C., a desk clerk barked: "Niggers can't live here." "I've never seen as much hate as that guy showed toward me," recalls Hyndman. His personal philosophy about what matters most can be summed up simply as: "It's humanity v. machinery--and human life v. death." In campus terms, Hyndman considers himself a rebel rather than a revolutionary. "Revolution," he says, "involves the same crimes as your tormentor's."
DARTMOUTH: The Tiniest B.M.O.C.
Except for his height (a tiny 4 ft. 9 in.), Dartmouth's Robert Reich could easily be taken for the classic Big Man On Campus. From a Republican family in New York's affluent Westchester County, he racked up a succession of A's in college, won a Rhodes scholarship, wrote and starred in campus plays, headed the student government. Yet he is in total rebellion against what he calls "status quo-ism: the feeling that order and status quo are the most important things--in the ghetto, in Southeast Asia and everywhere." Reich feels that his age group has been under tremendous pressure to excel in scholarship ever since Sputnik. But "all of a sudden, somewhere in there --for me in the sophomore year--we started to think about goals, where it was all leading." Everyone seemed trapped by sameness, he thought, and too many colleges offer monotonously similar educations. "What a drag. Not only have we all seen the same television programs, but we have all taken the same science and economics courses. We are going to have a nation of people who all think the same way."
In his own effort to "open up alternatives for making it," Reich started one of the nation's first "free universities," offering anyone in the Dartmouth area no-tuition, no-credit courses otherwise unavailable at the university. Some 600 students are now enrolled. Although he served last summer as an intern in Robert Kennedy's Senate office, Reich this year plunged into the cross-country McCarthy campaign, recruiting students in five states for the cause. The key to his class, Reich says, is its accent on "a new kind of humanism --not a selfish kind of humanism, but a kind of privatism--and a new ethic of simply being extremely sensitive to other people rather than loyal to an abstract group." And, as applied to world politics, such an ethic means that "oldfashioned patriotism or chauvinism--my country right or wrong--is extremely dangerous. We have to get over our fear of Communism or any other isms." Domestically, it means "putting the political decisions back down where people are--making more room for self-initiative and creativity." Reich contends that there are two reactions to a "society geared to inhumanity--creation or destruction. Destruction is the choice when creation is impossible. That's what I see the Class of '68 choosing in Paris and at Columbia." He hopes to work for change creatively through either law or teaching, but worries about getting sidetracked by comforts and conformity "I certainly hope that all of my class doesn't end up with Mustangs at Shaker Heights or Scarsdale. But it's really tough, when you have a mass culture to carve out new life styles."
BERKELEY: Machine with Feelings
Brian Patrick McGuire, a slim, in tense history major at Berkeley, lived through the clamor of the Free Speech Movement, noted the "joy and excitement in the air," but remained confused and aloof. "It was like seeing it through a glass window." No activist then or now, he nevertheless registered his own personal protest against impersonal education in poignant terms last month. "I have been informed that I have the highest grade-point average of any graduating senior in the College of Letters and Science," he said in a speech to Berkeley's chapter of Phi Beta Kappa. "The first thing I would like to say to you is that it was not worth it."
McGuire, son of a former San Francisco newspaperman, explained that in the pursuit of grades, he had become "subject to a paralyzing mental machinery: if I did not study twelve hours a day, compose at the speed of 1,000 words an hour while writing a paper, go through required reading at 33 pages an hour, I was a failure. I pushed myself until I was more enchained than a Russian factory worker in the 1930s." His longing for human contact, he said, "would come at night as I walked home from the library. I would look at the lights in the windows and think to myself: behind those windows are people--real, live, human, fleshy, thinking, feeling, loving, despairing people. I am out here and they are in there. They will never come out here to me, and they would never allow me to come inside to them." McGuire punched through his "academic bag" last December. "I suddenly realized," he explains, "that I had not made a single friend in four years." He broke through by taking "sensitivity training" courses at Berkeley's Newman :iub Center and California's Esalen Institute. The way to change society, he now feels, is "to subvert it from the inside with the power of love and caring." He thus considers the hippies ineffective for dropping out, the activists wrong for "alienating the older generation from the younger." The campus revolutionaries "are so lost in their own idealism that they forget that those with other ideals are people too. Students must wake up and realize that what they want is not to tear down the universities--but to embrace each other."
NORTHWESTERN: Black + Basketball
Northwestern Senior Vernon Ford is under no illusions about why a highly selective private university wanted him: he is bright, black and a fine basketball player. Ford has found living that dual role -- "as an athlete and as a black, but still an individual"--painfully difficult. Yet, as one of the key members of the militant Black Power movement on campus, he has helped make Northwestern aware of the Negro students' determination to carve out their own niche on white campuses. Last month, Ford was among 60 Negro students who camped in the university's business office for 36 hours and won promises to admit more Negro graduates of ghetto high schools and conduct courses in black literature and art.
Originally from Chicago's West Side ghetto, where his father is a machinist, Ford decided that the black college student "adjusts, conforms, compromises, and goes through a song-and-dance to get a degree that only qualifies him for nonexistent opportunities. He acts like the fraternity boy who barely makes it through hell week--he gets obsessed with the values of the system that has worked against him."
College has long been used by Negroes to escape the ghetto, but Ford feels that the real need is for them to return, join the struggle to expand the economic and political control of blacks within their own community. He worries about his own ability to make the transition from the campus back to the ghetto, where he intends to teach while working for his master's degree in sociology. Looking back, he wonders whether Northwestern treated Negroes much differently than the world out side. "You come into the university expecting to find an ideal situation," he says. "But an upper-middle-class conservative school isn't immune to bigotry. For the black man, there's no Utopia."
WHEATON: Lady Bridgebuilder
Liz Stevens, 20, an impulsive senior at fashionable all-girl Wheaton College in Norton, Mass., had a comfortable up bringing in affluent Greenwich, Conn. She attended Rosemary Hall, an expensive private girls' school, enjoyed the social life at The Belle Haven Club, to which her father, the president of a local radio station, belongs. But, she says, "I never realized how prejudiced I was. In Greenwich the blacks are all maids or something similar, and you don't have to think about them because you've put them in a category." Like many in the Class of '68, she has since discovered that prejudice can be checked only by shunning labels, committing oneself to personal involvement with others.
That awareness came through a spontaneous "guilty feeling" when three civil rights workers were murdered in Mississippi in the summer of 1964. Liz "wanted to do something," so she gathered five Wheaton classmates, made weekly trips to Boston's Roxbury neighborhood to tutor Negro children. Liz recruited more student-teachers, created a program that now includes 60 Wheaton girls. She found the work so satisfying that she spent two of her college summers living and working full time in the slums of Hartford.
"Maybe what we're doing in Roxbury smacks a little too much of white paternalism," she says now. "And if the blacks don't want me, I guess that's O.K. But seeing so many white people who just don't care is also frustrating--and it's inexcusable." She recalls helping break up a knife fight between two Negro girls in Hartford one day, partying at Belle Haven the next. "When two worlds are as far apart as the slums of Hartford and the Connecticut suburbs," she says, "something is wrong."
Liz would like to help bridge those two worlds as a social worker, has been accepted for graduate study at the Columbia School of Social Work. She admires those of her generation-including both of her two older sisters--who have joined the Peace Corps. But she expresses the consensus of her class in insisting that there is a more urgent need for service in U.S. cities. Even the suburbs need help, she adds wryly: "A lot of white suburban society is sick."
COLUMBIA: Poetic Revolutionary
Shortly after the second massive police raid at Morningside Heights, David Shapiro, 21, walked into the office of the Columbia College dean, ripped up his new Phi Beta Kappa certificate, and said: ";I'm ashamed of this university." A self-styled "fellow traveler" of the S.D.S., Shapiro is also a poet who writes of the need for tenderness and love in life and insists that "wonderful things can still happen in this country."
The son of a Newark physician, he played violin under Leopold Stokowski at 16, had his first book of poems (January) published as a college freshman; he has written a play, a short novel and an opera, this spring won the university's prestigious Kellett fellowship for graduate study. Shapiro's Jewish grandfather emigrated from Russia to avoid both the draft and the pogroms; David says that if his draft board calls him, he might leave the country rather than serve.
Shapiro believes that U.S. society tries to put people into one-dimensional motivational grooves. "We've all been brought up on Tootle, the children's tale in which baby locomotives are told to stay on the tracks no matter what; don't go off to look at the buttercups, don't take short cuts to race with the stallions. The struggle is for each man to live up to his own conscience, even if it is under continual pressure to go to sleep. The whole world is being divided into those that are participating in the waking up and those that would massage and tranquilize."
To adults who criticize the tactics students employed at Columbia, Shapiro asks: "What are the techniques that the liberals are suggesting? I don't hear them in a time of crisis. I think one thing that youth has on its side is a feeling of crisis. Most of the intellectuals in this country have abdicated their critical role or are being sentimentalists. Robert Lowell may march on the Pentagon, but then he goes off to tea parties. This is sentimentalism. How can you use your ends to justify your means? Well, as my philosophy teacher used to say, what else can you possibly use to justify your means? There's nothing else."
The trouble with Columbia, Shapiro claims, is that "instead of [being] a place where creativity was admired, it was a place where clarity and discursiveness were admired. It was a place that stilled your voice. I felt I was in a prison in which the bars only receded, never dissolved. I could almost physically feel it, here in this university with its iron gates keeping the community out." But since the demonstrations, he says, "I have a new kind of faith in myself. It's like going from death to life. I'm becoming more alive. I'm able to be more tender toward people I love."
Instant Democracy. The tone of these youthful voices--strident and self-confident, proud and often contemptuous--naturally grates on the ears of their elders. And the questions students raise create in turn a further question: Can you trust anyone under 30? Some of the men who have taught the Class of '68 have their doubts; they wonder whether so much youthful passion might lead to nothing more than an expense of spirit in a waste of shame. Cornell Economics Professor Alfred E. Kahn applauds the new social concern of this class but sees "impatience and intellectual arrogance" in much of the demand for "instant democracy." Williams' Dean John Hyde questions some of this generation's motives and asserts that many use a moral position as a fac,ade for self-interest.
A more common complaint is that while the graduates may be guided by lofty ideals, they offer no pragmatic programs. They are basically indecisive. "They can't command and they won't obey," says Wallace Markfield, novelist and English professor at San Francisco State. As for their demands for student power, Notre Dame Sociology Professor Robert Hassenger whimsically suggests that universities ought to draw straws and let students run the school that loses. "It would be a shambles," he says. Others wonder whether some of today's moralistic, activist students are really willing to work at either an education or a productive job. Many students freely admit that they are tormented by the fear of losing their compassion--and their passion--a few years after graduation.
But whom can the nation trust, if not its young? Moreover, there are better reasons than sheer necessity for faith in the Class of '68. It is far ahead of the graduates of a decade ago in command of the skills that can make a society work. It is self-propelled and world-wise beyond its years. So rapidly has youth matured, says Northwestern Dean of Students Roland J. Hinz, that if Booth Tarkington were writing Seventeen today, he would have to call it Eleven.
Above all, perhaps, this generation of students has an instinct for humanity that may help redress what many of their elders concede is an imbalance in American life. Sociologist Edgar Friedenberg, one of the nation's most perceptive analysts of campus culture and a fond admirer of student activists, nevertheless warns that "a society in which intensity of feelings becomes a major driving force can be a frightening prospect." But so, of course, can a society in which feeling is frustrated and human hopes nullified by outmoded tradition or law, a situation that students cannot and will not accept. The spirit of '68 is at times uncomfortable and uncouth. It may also turn out to be the most creative ferment ever to disturb the college campuses.
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