Twenty-five years later

...Figures like that produce mysticism in Hollywood, so the partnership of Weiss, Landis, and, now, Belushi was given carte blanche on The Blues Brothers...

...I think we had a sense that somethingbeautifully subversive was going on, that while one part of Fordham was locking the Third Avenue gates to keep out the twentieth century(indeed, the nineteenth...

...It was probably as materialistic, self-centered a decade as the nation has seen...

...Not in the sense of the atheistic "dialectical materialism" they warned us about in our old ethics classes, but in the sheer glut of things that filled dorm rooms, American homes, and the public consciousness--from the stereo amplifiers whose sound could rattle the window panes, to the double plastic packaging on a slice of cheese, to our adoration of King Tut's traveling gold...

...It is mandatory to let essentials be our guide in all reform efforts...

...had saved us from the burden of freedom for another two years...

...This anger and destructiveness were more disturbing to me than that of our 1950s classmate who put his fist through the dorm doors, or even that of the 1960s Rippie who tore down the flag...

...And then, too, I "Was older, more conscious of my own mortality, conscious thari had been in one place for ten whole years and that institutions and persons alike must decide daily which principles to fight for and what price they will pay either to resist or foster change...

...We are, he said, like dwarfs on the shoulders of giants...

...mourned our dead...

...but we spoke, we thought, from within the mainstream ARE CATHOLIC SCHOOLS NE T? E RECENT Tvdocumentary, "Combat in the Classroom," presented some chilling statistics.Across the country one out of every ten schools has a serious problem with violence . Approximately 280,000 students are assaulted-every month . Over 110,000 teachers ate injured at schools in assaults every year...

...a subculture only hinted at in exploitation gang films like The Warriors and The Wanderers and their jungle vision of the Bronx...

...Certainly public school teachers also try to insist) on basic morality, butone of thefew discernible differences betweenpublic and parochial education-especially significant in an ultra-sophisticated society that often treats moral principles as relative-is the Catholic schools' ability to be authoritative about this morality, and to assume it as a common code, shared by church, school, and parents . "The key is parental involvement," says Niemack, Certainly parents have long been the backbone of Catholic education...

...This was the sort of thing that gave the film its astronomical budget...

...the personification of the tidal wave of change sweeping through the church...

...We were "professional killers...

...To help him make his case, the portly, dry-witted anthropologist Fr...

...But really I left because I had come to believe so strongly in Jesuit education and the intrinsic value of the intellectual life as an unending, disinterested search for truth, that I was open to becoming the dean of Rockhurst, a Jesuit liberal arts college in the "Heart of America...

...In May, the "days of rage" that surrounded the invasion of Cambodia and the killings at Kent State were even uglier .I will always remember looking out my A-House Martyrs' Court dorm window just in time to see a bunch of "Rippies" (too "wild" to call themselves Hippies) tear down the American flag and too late to do anything about it . One of them stood up later at a meeting and said:"The only way we can get them to pay attention around here is to burn down a building...

...Not that we were then free to chase our careers...

...ROTC--to which, it seemed, all of us belonged as we tramped around the campus on our Wednesday parades counting cadence against the heckling from the dorms (Carl Candels intoning his Gestapo accent into an amplifier on his windowsill, "Vhere are your papers...

...a trash basket turned upsidedown over the statue of Orestes Brownson...

...B. -- smashing the mirror behind the bar at the Decatur Bar, coming home running over the roofs and Commonweal: 524 hoods of parked cars on 193rd Street and crashing through dorm room doors with his fist...

...J. Franklin Ewing, the leading disciple of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, used to bring his basket of bones to Donceers philosophy class and line up the skulls (one of them named "Egbert") for us demonstrating, almost a hundred years after Darwin, the marvelous continuity of human evolution...

...It attracted an odd mixture of student government leaders and the Progressive Labor party faction of the SDS . Although the radicals and I didn't see eye-to-eye on some fundamental issues, like the heavy work load in my course and the value of non-violence, we had some rapport . At least we could share a Friday night beer with the throngs that packed the El Dorado bar, a run-down old speak-easy with ceiling fans that became, for a few years, a satellite center of Fordham's intellectual life . Then one day in October 1969 things got ugly . To protest ROTC the SDS and their followers, swept down from a stratpublic schools.-Acordingto Robert Niemack,-o authors andproducers of "Combat in the Classroom, research indicated, "There isnot a greatdeal of violence: in the private, religious schools...

...To us Leo McLanghlin, S.J...

...the kids high on drugs and booze roaring up the dorm stairs at 4:00 AM, turning up the rock, smashing beer bottles through the closed window panes, and shouting obscenities into the night...

...The next night, as I returned to my room after saying a midnight Mass, the thick, gray air throbbed red...

...The cultural historians will probably remember the seventies primarily for the inflationary economy and value system, which seemed to give people a lot of money fast and sucker them into spending it faster--to further inflate a wasteful life style they neither needed nor could sustain...

...Our social and intellectual heritage has been built up gradually over the ages...

...In this respect a healthy sense of tradition can be helpful...

...In Los Angeles one out of,, every four security agents isinjured, and in New ork City 7.5million is spent annually on school security . If these figures seem staggering, they are nevertheless true, and they are even more ominous because they show no signs of decreasing...

...The important thing to remember is that college years are short...

...Thus it was inevitable that the central idea of the 1960s, in both scholarly theology and in popular thougl]t, that the " secular" world is supernaturally "graced" from the fast moment of creation and thus should be embraced more than fought, came as a blow--even a betrayal--to those among us who had spent a lifetime shining shields and sharpening swords...

...II REFLECTIOHS OH A |ESUIT VJHIVERSITY Twenty-five years later IIIIII RAYMOND A. SCHROTH pERHAPS THE SINGLEmost important thing about our class at Fordham, now that I think of it twenty.five years after we have left, is that the Korean War ended the year before we graduated, and thus we were spared--at least in so far as our military obligation was concerued--a necessary emotional linkage between graduation and death...

...I may have told him something about loving books, Bach, and Eakins, about the ability to be entertained by your own thoughts without a TV flickering in your eye or a stereo in Commonweal: 528 your ear, and about the ability to think through a problem to make a moral judgment...

...Those for Airplane...

...Since the sky was the limit, one stunt the f'dmmakers pulled was to drop a Ford Pinto into downtown Chicago from an altitude of 1400 feet...

...But even our fifties' liberal Catholicism--fed by French intellectuals and enthusiasms like Jacques Maritain, Franqois Mauriac, and the worker priests' movement...

...It is untrue that Catholic schools achieve these results, as s, sometimes charged, by "creaming," accepting only the best of students and rejecting those from disadvantaged backgrounds . On the other hand, the perpetrators of violence in the public schools are a small minority, whose acts victimize not only individuals but, by creating a climate of fear and absorbing adult energies, damage whole schools . Catholic schools can-and frequently do-expel the few truly violent students . Comparisons with public schools, therefore, should not justify smugness . There is more to the story than the power of expulsion, however...

...I left partly because as a teacher I was beginning to repeat myself--to tell too many journalism classes in ten years, as we read Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail, the story of how I met the author, Hunter Thompson, at the Democratic convention in 1968 and how he took me for an FBI man...

...Many of us are scandalously underpaid...

...were $3.4 million, almost $5 million below Paramount's original estimate...

...Which of us has not thought of changing careers at one time or another...

...8 revolvers . As a Catholic school teacher,sometimes wonder why-and how much longer this happy condition wlast At present Catholic schools operate:at approximately one quarter of the cost of public schools,and they often operate in conditions that are far from idealand with facilities that way comparable.Despite these handicaps the offer a quality education . n fact that per capitaparochialschoos andardized tests than public school the forty-seven inner-cityCatholic my-eight percent of whosestuinority groups, RobertHoytare i continue It is a well-kno students...

...Even his monster flick made several million dollars, and Kentucky Fried Movie has grossed around $45 million...

...The 1960s died not because the issues that enflamed them were resolved, but because the sixties burned out . The 196970 academic year gave a number of us what Shakespeare's Henry V said the soldiers who fought with him at Agincourt would share in their old age-a wound we might someday show our children with pride...

...The paradox is that the only thing holding The Blues 26 September 1980:529...

...Fordham of the 1950s was by no means an intellectual ghetto...

...I still remember wincing at Fort Bliss, Texas, when, in 1955, a visiting Jesuit assured us during a "day of recollection" that as Catholics, we were very fortunate to "have the answers for everything...

...Unless robust traditions guide us, our reform efforts will be clumsy and unenlightened...

...The film examined schools in New ork, Ohio, Maryland, and California- all of which it should be noted were Commonweal: 526of American liberal Catholic thought, and in the summer of '55 we dutifully flew off to Fort Bliss or to Germany for two years on the "trip-wire," guarding Rhine River bridges from the Soviet jets and tanks our commanders assured us would come roaring our way that winter...

...The one way in which they are not alike, however, is that for Airplane...

...the Jesuit ethics teacher, whose brother had played a rapist in a.famous movie, being asked if a Catholic actor may licitlyplay a rapist in a movie and answering, "You may leave the room.' ' But the schizophrenic, half-full, half-empty character of Fordhamintellectual life in the early 1950s was best symbolized by the struggle of gentle, scholarly, philosophical psychologist Joseph Donceel, S.J., against opposition from within the Society of Jesus on the campus and in Rome, to teach and publish his textbook with the chapters accepting the theory of evolution...

...There is a certain kind of academic who pants after a change as the hart after-the fresh waters...

...When I returned to Fordham as a Jesuit priest in 1969 to teach both journalism and history and to finish my George Washington University Ph .D...

...Yet, my long-term commitment crystallized when, one night, as we toured the bars of Juarez--from our limited experience one of the "worst" cities of the world--where little boys sold their sisters on the street and, away from the gaudy commercial strip of restaurants and souvenir stores, the Mexicans lived in subhuman hovels, Phil Curtin put the question: "If you feel so bad about all this poverty, Ray, why don't you join the Jesuits where you can do something about it...

...Because "the future belongs to John Trav~olta.'' Not, of course, to Travolta as an individual, but to the culture, swelling inexorably before our eyes like the green blob in a science fiction movie, that Travolta's persona has been created to represent: the unending thump of disco beat, vinyl, neon, fast food, ear-splitting stereo, precocious sex, assertive pseudomasculinity validated by paying to ride a mechanical bucking bull in front of the gang at the bar...

...THROUGHOUT THE PROLONGEDcrisis, however, Fordham had never come to the equivalent of what, inThe China Syndromegeneration, we have learned to call a "meltdown...

...What inspired Universal Pictures to have $32 million worth of confidence in Landis was his track record...

...The uglier side of the decade's hedonism was the spirit of Animal House: vulgarity pushed over the threshold of violence--weekly punch-outs in the neighborhood pubs...

...A date was "going over to 'Wazoo' (Juarez, Mexico) to tear off a piece...

...Avery Dulles, S.J., attending a Sodality of the Blessed Virgin Mary beer party downtown at the headquarters of the Associated Catholic Trade Unionists where a liberal activist upperclassma~ named Bob Moser tried unsuccessfully to goad him into repudiating the "massive retaliation" foreign policy of his father, the secretary of state...

...and--thanks to a few Jesuits like Donceel, Ewing, J. Quentin Lauer, Joe Frese, Joe Fitzpatrick, and Bob Roth-Darwin, Marx, Dewey, and Freud were not classroom clay pigeons tossed up as "adversaries" to be blithely blasted outof the air...

...by Thomas Merton's romance of monasticism, and the "harsh and dreadful love" of Dorothy Day's Catholic Worker movement--did not prepare us to live undisturbed with the sixties notion that now everything was up for grabs...

...was suddenly made editor ofAmerica magazine, replacing the man who was being sacked for attacking Senator Joe McCarthy...

...a campus strewn with bent beer cans and broken glass...

...The administration withdrew into the north wing and the protesters seized the south wing . They held their wing for a day until, after they had injured a security guard, the police scared them out...

...But then, in 1955, we entered the Artillery or the Air Force (or the CIA or NSA) not perchance to die, but to see Germany or, if the dice rolled against us, Thule, Greenland...

...True, we had given America Charlie Shaffer, John Dean's lawyer...

...Sixty automobiles were demolished in staging the 300 collisions which occur during the film's frenzy of chase scenes...

...Not the least of the ways in which these two parody-comedies are alike is that at the peak of the summer season, each was earning roughly the same amount...

...When the president of Universal-MCA objected to the original running time of well over two hours, one of the cuts made was of a gas station blowing up...

...Animal House, the fifties frat-club comedy starring John Belushi and directed by Landis, was made for less than $3 million, and has earned a whopping $160 million...

...no future without a past...

...Education in this sense is the difficult art of making meaningful connections with the experiences of the race...

...Now the parental role seems more important than ever .In my years of teaching I have noticed a pronounced change in both my students and in their attitude toward life . The toward material values and away from the spiritual realm is the most noticeable.The constantly escalating violence in public schools has not yet contaminated, to any degree, the Catholic system, but it may be only a matterof time...

...He may be right...

...Screen SINGINGTHE BLUES HOLLYWOOD'S BIG SPENDERS s I WASpointing out in the last issue, Airplane...

...The Campus Center was in flames . Disoriented by bomb threats, the faculty postponed or canceled some final exams...

...anotherpart was opening the blinds in the classroom to let in a shaft of secular light...

...In short, the Fordham-Catholic world view of the 1950s assumed that there were two spheres of existence: the sacred, in which we had been trained and which provided the norms by which the other, the secular, was to be judged...

...In addition to teaching students the traditional academic subjects, Catholic schools have been able to be utterly straightforward in instilling in their students distinctions between right and wrong, and elementary 26 September1980: 527ent at the edge of nearly every meeting, protest, late-night rap session, march, and bonfire-partly because we wanted to listen and understand, partly because it was exhilarating to see young people interact politically, partly because we didn't want to wake up the next morning to hear that while we slept someone had been killed...

...As a result there is a lot of craziness in higher education, creating a climate in which it is often difficult to distinguish desirable innovation from mere faddism...

...and that whatever happened on the campus twenty-five years ago had planted a seed that will never die...

...But it also survived because there had always been a band of friends at its core-Jesuits, lay faculty, and students-who:answered calls for help or invitations for a beer in the middle of the night ;weren't afraid to sign a "controversial" petition that would cost them a few ounces of their "moderate" image ; did all the work on those experiemental, interdisciplinary, "values" programs that were one of the few signs in the 1970s, when Fordham and the country as a whole were getting duller, that the school's collective imagination had not withered . I sometimes think it is this kind of heart-when enough of the participants have been touched by the teachings like "Thou sha t not steal...

...The hitch in the comparision between the two films is what they cost to make...

...to prolong II| FATHER RAYMONDA...

...That is to say, each new insight is "grafted" (to use William James'smetaphor) to our stock of old ideas...

...No innovation...

...Kentucky Fried Movie's budget was only ten times that amount, but it was enough to promote the kids from Milwaukee to ~irplane!, while Landis and his producer, Robert Weiss, worked their way up to The Blues Brothers...

...X. Keep your spirits up...

...I guess I was too worn out...

...THE THIRD MOSTimportant change to affect our generation was the forced redefinition of what it meant to be a good American . In 195 , 101 of us had published a letter that tried to say-after some friendly editing by the administration-that Catholicism and McCarthyism should not be identified in the public mind . As a result, we called down upon our heads months of abuse from the then right-wing Catholic Brooklyn Tablet...

...This single shot had cost $300,000...

...To his friends (and I, like lots of 26 September1980:525 people, counted myself among them) he was simply forcing Fordham to compete academically with comparable secular universities rather than rest on a pre-Vatican II religious complacency .To his critics he had "sold out" Fordham's Jesuit heritage-taken the crucifixes off the classroom walls-to qualify for state aid . To those who most resented the "payany-price-break-any-mold" innovations of his leadershipthe radical Ben Salem College experiment, the expensive Marshall McLuhan professorship, the broadening of the transfer of Jesuit controlling power to laymen and women, "freedom" in the dorms etc...

...But it was a terrible wound of physical and emotional exhaustion-especially for those faculty and administrators who somehow felt obliged to be presdiscovered that`A comparison of standard test scores reveals that children in Catholic inner-city schools generally score higher on these tests than do children in public schools in the same neighborhoods...

...We can see further than those who preceded us because their labors support our vision...

...Our reformist impulses should be kept under the tightest control...

...Which of us has not cast envious eyes upon other higher paid professionals like lawyers and doctors and even administrators (just why administrators should be paid more than professors is an interesting question in itself...

...and The lues Brothers have a lot in common...

...without tradition...

...I remember only a few scenes from class: Professor Buford suggesting, to our amazement, that High Noon would have been a better movie if Gary Cooper had been been killed...

...To an extent, my own vocation as a Jesuit, though it grew gradually out of my family's constant but not oppressive devotion, and was warmed up during my encounters with Chartres, Rome, the Benedictine monastery in Bruges, and with a vibrant core of French Catholicism during my junior yearin Paris, came into focus in the traumatic contrast between what we learned at Fordham and what the army--and life itself--was teaching us in the fast months of Artillery School at Fort Bliss...

...We can't do a great deal and have little time to do it in...

...I began to sense what so many of my classmates--now affluent and successful, married to one wife--must have sensed, that a man, particularly a celibate, must decide to grow and change at forty-five or he may never get that chance again...

...And are those of us who in 1952 were supposed to be impressed by Alan Alda on campus because he was R~Jbert Alda's son supposed to feel better about Fordham because the mind behind M *A*S*H was formed with ours on Rose Hilt...

...our Honors Program seminar making it through a chat with Helene Iswolsky on Warand Peace with few, if any, of us having read the book...

...Ideas are isomorphic...

...To those who either shared his vision or loved him in spite of his mistakes, his paradoxical career personified one ambivalent theme of the 1960s which men and women long buttressed by the church's structure did not deal with easily : each of us really is both free and responsible-free to reassess and shift certain commitments, and responsible for the failure to grow as well as for the failure to obey...

...but, while for the larger society this cultural eruption came from the inability of its culturalmoral consensus to keep pace with the acceleration of technological change, for us as Catholics the upheaval came when we finally sat down to eat bread and drink wine with Darwin, Marx, Dewey, and Freud...

...When he became president in the 1960s he became--to the readers of the New York Times (even a new course in sex education made headlines...

...nothing new without something old...

...Thus far Catholic schools have remained free from security agentsarmed with handcuffs, batons,aloaded...

...this represents a smashing success, whereas for The Blues Brothers it is rather disappointing...

...I remember, complaining to my roommate the In'st night in Dealy dorm that the ticking of his clock was keeping me awake and asking him to put it in the desk drawer...

...But who knew that...

...We swim against a constant current of antiintellectualism and cultural chaos...

...Stunt co-ordinator Gary McLarty, Hollywood's "King of Crash and Bash," had to drop two test Pintos just to prove to the FAA that no one would be killed...

...There is a moral to this story, if only Hollywood could figure out what it is...

...had been the tall, soft-spoken, very quietly charismatic, priest with the warm smile who took over as dean after Thurston Davis, S.J...

...Some of the most spectacular pyrotechnics never even got into the film...

...Because we never stopped talking, community grew out ofconflict . I think Fordham survived the transition from the late 1960s to the 1970s partly because of its presidents-Mike Walsh, S .J.,the healer of the wound, looking tired, but sweet and tough, the Godfather (in the best sense of that word) of Jesuit higher education;James Finlay, S .J.,modest, faithful, making both brave and prudent decisions that will shape Fordham's new urban image that must somehow transcend, without detaching itself from, the galloping, pathetic squalor of the Bronx, the garbage and graffiti of Fordham Road...

...Although I could have seen closing the school as a moral protest against the Cambodian invasion and Kent State, I didn't like closing shop out of fear .I didn't argue that publicly then and I suppose I should have, whether it would have been well received or not...

...Peer contact, peer pressure will eventually take their tollwill they...

...Behind both is a 977 film called Kentucky Fried Movie, which was dreamed up by three kids from Milwaukee and directed by John Landis, whose only credit until then had been a $60,000 monster spoof...

...SCHROTH,S.J.,formerly associate editor of Commonweal, isAcademic Dean ofRockhurst Collegein Missouri.and test, in another crucible, the process that Fordham had begun--that rite of passage by which we were gradually ripped from the wombs of Catholic Brooklyn, Bayside, Trenton, Jackson Heights, Jersey City, and New Haven and turned loose to compete in the world of Wall Street, law, medicine, and the media which most of our fathers had never cracked but where we might have a fighting chance...

...Religion, politics, values were not proper conversation topics--they only led to disagreements...

...The ROTC class of '55 had marched toready ourselves for Korea .Now hundreds and, on the night of the great Moratorium, thousands of Fordham students marched with the judgment that the country's policy was wrong, even-to use the word once used most commonly in ethics class to denote illicit sexual activity- "immoral ." My first course was on the history of American domestic violence, centering initially on the nineteenth-century Haymarket bombing and the Pullman strike and later touching on race riots and George F . Kennan's essay on student unrest...

...This June I returned to Fordham for my twenty-fifth anniversary reunion, where we drank beer and gazed again into the semi-lined faces of now only half-young men who were once the most important people in our lives...

...It was his next feature that made him a legend, though...

...and a book on the Brooklyn Eagle, I found it a healthier intellectual community than ever, and that valuable but sometimes elusive force, "the Jesuit presence," was, in my judgment at least, as free as ever to have its influence felt . But the big difference was the impact of the Vietnam War...

...Everyone did know that Fordham Law School had brought forth John Mitchell and the College, that madman G. Gordon Liddy, whom some of us must have passed on campus never knowing what he would come to represent, and whose new autobiography, Will, praises the Fordham Jesuits (without giving any evidence he ever met one) for all their more fascistic traits...

...and admitted truthfully that we loved one another...

...Later this summer, in Omaha for another Jesuit's first Mass, I had a few beers with a Fordham student who had switched to Creighton, and who asked what I was trying to accomplish as a dean...

...Or even still exist...

...IF, AS AMERICANS, we are basically embarrassed by the 1970s, by our nation's failure to define itself--in spite of that one glorious day, July 4, 1976, when New Yorkers swam together in a Walt Whitmanesque suntanned sea of gently bumping bodies to sigh for the fireworks and tall ships off the Battery--as Fordhamites we were uneasy too...

...held in thinly veiled contempt by the general public...

...connection between the Gospel and the intellectual life--that gives Jesuit education its distinctive style...

...danced with one anothers' wives to a Glenn Miller-sound band under a gigantic green and white tent...

...Operating in this high, wide, and handsome style tends to be wasteful...

...He said I was wasting my time...

...Morale is understandably low...

...No doubt,Catholic schools have been able to forestall violence by operating within a firm and explicit moral framework...

...I poured out my revulsion in a letter home and my father, an editorial writer for the Trenton Times, who had won a Distinguished Service Cross in World War I, replied gently that I must learn to respect my fellow soldiers on whom my life would depend in battle...

...All this at a time when Newsweek editor Kenneth Woodward says that the most neglected news story in the church today is the collapse of Catholic college liberal education...

...But I do not recognize it in Grease or in the seventies' college students' "fifties parties" where the kids slick back their hair into duck's tails and carry their cigarette packs rolled up in the left sleeve of their T-shirts...

...It is good advice to be suspicious of reform movements...

...Nor do I dare characterize our year with a Tom Wolfean catch phrase of my own--except to say that by the time we graduated history had not yet inflicted its wounds...

...and not always much respected by our students...

...but I'd rather conclude that the power of a hollow, dis-spirited dominant culture is all the more reason for the Fordhams and Rockhursts and Georgetowns to get a renewed sense of how badly they are needed--to preserve what is valid in traditional culture (like medieval monks copying and illuminating manuscripts), and, if necessary, to establish a counter culture (like the French Resistance in World War II or the Apostles in the upper room), all the while making friends with that "shaft of light," open to the men and women of each new generation with whom we can share books, bread, and wine...

...How many of the educational reforms of the last ten years have been of genuine worth...

...An old Latin adage applies here: nihil novetur nisi traditum est...

...Still, we hang in there...

...THE SECONDMOSTimportant thing that happened to our class was the impact of that shaft of light--truly the culturally delayed impact of the eighteenth century, the Enlightenment, the celebration of the autonomy of the intellect, the confidence that individual man, once set free from authority and constraint, had within him the intellectual and moral resources to remake his world from scratch...

...And most of us do so out of conviction, taking pride and satisfaction in the knowledge that we are doing an important and civilizing work...

...Five million dollars were spent in Chicago on mayhem alone, and another $5 million to repair the damage, which included the destruction of an entire shopping mall (damaged merchandise was paid for at wholesale while undamaged was returned...

...How does that sound after twenty-fiveyears--the idea that one would join a religious order to help the poor...

...Only when considered in the context of the rest of the film do the expenditures for a scene like this seem normal instead of outrageous...

...In the twelfth century John of Salisbury coined the appropriate image...

...Our generation--"the fifties," "the silertt generation"-has not had good press...

...If der saboteurs do not zurrender, der vomen und children viii be shot...

...These students' pathology seemed more deeply rooted in a subcultureof despair, of alcoholism and aimlessness that Fordham's curriculum and traditions could not (or did not try hard enough to) penetrate and challenge...

...Production expenses for The Blues Brothers were $32 million...

...They have given their time, donatedtheir money, and helped in ways too numerous to mention...

...often bullied by administrators and trustees...

...This phenomenon has been labeled"the sixties...

...The other Brother, Dan Ackroyd, contributed a 400-page script...

...Professor Andrew Myers informing us, after chronicling the disordered lives of all the poets in the syllabus, that Algernon Swinburne was a "masochist," and my wondering if a disordered life was a prerequisite for being a celebrated writer...

...I know that sounds banal but college teaching is often discouraging and always uphill work...

...Jack Haley Jr., very tall and thin, his red hair accenting his pale face, reporting on his date with Loretta Young's daughter as we jealously mocked and jeered...

...One element of experience is "married" (James again) to previous elements...

...his sudden removal for financial mismanagement, his voluntary exile in a Southern black college, his decision, in his sixties, to leave the Jesuits and marry were further proof that Fordham's and the church's worst mistake had been to neglect the dikes constructed long ago to keep out the flood of change...

...toilet paper rolls strung from the trees...

...do better o studeeyt schools' ine' dent population c eatMore Catholic High SchoolonStaten egy session in Keating Hall, crossed Edwards' Parade and crashed into the Administration Building, right into President Michael Walsh's office while Walsh was there...

...lleft Fordham the second time, July 3, 1979, in a brokendown U-Haul truck headed for Kansas City, with Neil Grealy, Ram editor, as companion...

...Recent parts relate to past parts organically...

...And almost every college has at least one administrator, on a bounteous travel allowance, who specializes in the newest thing...

...When higher education is entering one of the most difficult periods in its history, when the demographic pool of eighteen-year-olds is drying up and when the survival of any small private college--Catholic or nonsectarian--will depend on the school's ability to maintain high academic standards, adapt its curriculum to meet the needs of ajob-oriented generation, market its reputation with an aggressive admissions program, and emphasize each school's distinctive character-something that decisively sets it off from the others on the shrinking academic supermarket shelf...