The College Kaleidoscope
ILLICK, JOSEPH E.
The College Kaleidoscope Campus Life: Undergraduate Cultures from the End of the 18th Century to the Present By Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz Knopf. 330 pp. $24.95. Reviewed by Joseph E....
...If so, why didn't the Depression, for example, have a similar impact—or did it...
...A virtue of Campus Life is its conversational tone, although this may blur the fact that it is an ambitious piece of scholarship...
...But college life persisted through the 1950s because it was official...
...Colleges were not simply avenues to professional schools, they were becoming the principal means of social mobility...
...Is this another way of saying that student culture was invaded and overwhelmed by the outside world...
...Student government and football became university-sponsored events...
...The 1970s saw the triumph of the outsiders over the college life and rebellion groups...
...my father, a building contractor, newly-affluent in the postwar boom, saw the university as a symbol of our upward mobility close enough to home that my presence would not be sorely missed...
...Horowitz does not ignore the larger American context in which colleges and universities exist, but she draws on it rather haphazardly and imprecisely, leaving unclear the relationship between student culture (s) and the national culture...
...Nevertheless, it took the circumstances of the 1960s to topple established tradition...
...Usually poorer, more religious, and more rural than the pace setters, often preparing to be ministers or teachers, this group accepted the culture of the professors...
...My maternal grandfather had attended Princeton Seminary for a year, and my mother hoped I would follow him into the ministry...
...A second subculture did not emerge until the early 20th century...
...They did not passively accept the culture of the professors, if by that is meant the established curriculum and the grading system...
...Incoming freshmen were fed it by upperclassmen...
...It meant good times inclining toward rowdiness, fraternities and, later in the 19th century, athletics...
...In this bifurcated world, the wealthier students tended to fight authority, the poorer complied...
...I was in most ways an outsider, although yesteryear should not be confused with modern times...
...Had I read Campus Life I would at least have been able to gain some perspective on my situation...
...Only the most privileged children destined to inherit great wealth felt free of its demands...
...A significant number of students, called "outsiders" by the author, could not or would not participate in college life...
...Women, who had begun their college careers in the 19th century as outsiders, intent and purposeful, were now drawn into the swirl...
...Even before reaching Princeton I was requested by the student government president to sign the honor code and, as I recall, upperclassmen nurtured the traditional—indeed, the institutionalized— conflict between freshmen and sophomores...
...I was a clever but not deep-thinking student, an accomplished swimmer, and a lovesick young man with a sweetheart only a few hundred miles away...
...What I knew after arriving at Princeton was that I felt left out...
...The new band of "rebels" actively spurned college life, vying instead for control of the student government and literary magazines...
...In fairness, (hough, it should be said that the book's concluding chapter does implicitly suggest why such a transformative effect is not prevalent today: Since the 1970s the campus has been dominated by new outsiders, "the frightened sons and daughters of the middle and upper middle classes who fear downward social mobility...
...The old collegiate culture had been dealt a punishing blow in the previous decade...
...Possibly because the story is so familiar to us, Horowitz' analysis of the triumph of dissent is not very enlightening...
...A weakness is its focusing on the "residential four-year liberal arts college," for in the case of the postWorld War II years it therefore deals superficially with a significant portion of the college population...
...Outsiders gained in numbers almost unnoticed between World War I and the 1960s, while rebels fought ever more vigorously for control of campus institutions...
...Reviewed by Joseph E. Illick Professor of history, San Francisco State University In the autumn of 19521 entered the engineering program at Princeton University from a public high school...
...One answer that is unexplored here is demographic: In the 1960s the postwar baby boom burdened America with more adolescents than it could properly socialize, and the young turned to their peers...
...College life appears to have existed at cross-purposes with the faculty and with the realities of American economic life...
...To be sure, rebels who view college as a place to expand their intellectual and creative horizons still exist, as do jocks and fraternity members eager to pursue the time-honored college life...
...Meanwhile, school administrations were reaching an accommodation with the college life crowd by harnessing its energy through the cooptation of its activities...
...Furthermore, it was the tum of the 20th century before the children of Jewish immigrants began to enter college, swelling the ranks of outsiders...
...The religious origins and initial student culture of American colleges are not discussed here...
...I entered college as an outsider, occasionally finding my way into the mainstream by winning a varsity letter or joining a club of middling prestige...
...This is not to deny the potency of some of the issues they raised, it is merely to recognize the power of their numbers...
...College life was slowly being threatened—and suffered a direct attack when veterans temporarily flooded the universities after World War II...
...As Horowitz notes: "Very few in the middle class brought their aspirations to college until later in the 19th century, when higher education emerged as the principal route to the professions...
...Major questions are left unanswered: Why did the boundaries of student cultures soften and then collapse...
...Women flocked to colleges with professional goals in mind...
...These rebels exhibited an intellectual maturity far beyond that of their classmates, as exemplified in the later literary, journalistic or academic careers of people like Vincent Sheean, Walter Lippmann, Max Eastman, Thomas Wolfe, Randolph Bourne, and Margaret Mead, a lonely female in this volume...
...Horowitz favors the rebels, but alas, must consign them to minority status...
...Perhaps because of my personal experience—or because I am a professor who wants to believe in the influence of the classroom—I also miss in Campus Life an analysis of the transformative effect of the university experience in the past...
...Most of the kids in my high school did not go on to college (though a majority of my friends did), so I was aware that my life was taking a special course...
...They are serious students whose vocational perspective obscures the possibilities of a broad liberal arts education...
...My parents favored Old Nassau...
...Why did individuals who earlier might have been among the mainstays of college life become leaders of protest...
...In the course of four years I abandoned my religion and my vocational outlook, partook a little of the rebel culture, and changed my career goals...
...Yet despite my having belonged to an elite clique of teenagers, I did not know I was joining the student culture, set apart from both adults and nonacademic contemporaries, let alone that it contained several subcultures...
...the question of whether time was better spent in the fraternity or the library was at least partially answered by the undeniable evidence that high school graduates had significantly higher grade points than their prep school classmates...
...In addition, Horowitz declares, "Meritocracy—once one of the two basic routes to financial success in American society—now appeared, for all but a handful, the only way...
...Those classmates of mine who set the tone for student affairs were part of a long tradition that Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz labels "college life.' This dominant culture was born in the late 18th- and early 19thcentury revolt of wealthy, genteel students against what they viewed as the oppressive discipline imposed by college presidents and their faculties...
Vol. 70 • October 1987 • No. 14
