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Revenge of the Nerds
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11850 |
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BOOK WORLD
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8 / 1987 |
2,845 Words |
| Author
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Edward Shapiro
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CAMPUS LIFE
Undergraduate Cultures from the End
of the Eighteenth Century to the Present
Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz
Alfred A.Knopf, 1987
331pp., $24.95
William Gerhardie once remarked that "there are as many fools at the university as elsewhere. But their folly has a certain stamp - the stamp of university training, if you like. It is trained folly." The American public first became conscious of this in the 1920s when football became a national craze, F. Scott Fitzgerald published This Side of Paradise, and collegians took to wearing raccoon coats and swallowing goldfish. Collegiate culture came into its own as a widespread phenomenon during the 1960s, when the nation experienced (and suffered) the results of mass higher education. By the end of the decade, there were over six million American college students. A century earlier there had been only fifty thousand students, less than the total number of students currently attending several individual midwestern state universities. Even in 1929, there were only one million students. The percentage increase in college attendance was also impressive. While less than 2 percent of those in the 18-21 age group were in college in 1869, in 1969 the number grew to over 40 percent. England and France, in contrast, were sending less than 10 percent of their young to college.
In view of this purported vast increase in wisdom among the American young, the Twenty-sixth Amendment to the constitution took effect in 1971, lowering the national voting age to eighteen years. Political pundits such as John Kenneth Galbraith and Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., predicted that George McGovern could win the 1972 presidential election because of his appeal to the nation's college students. (This would not be the last time that the entire population between eighteen and twenty-five would be identified with those in college and that the entire student body would be identified with the politically active and leftist segment.) Providing the goods and services required by the university became a big business during the 1960s and university administrators pictured academia as a long-term growth industry. But by the mid-1970s, many colleges had closed, several of America's most important institutions were tottering on the verge of financial collapse, and many businesses catering to the needs of collegians were bankrupt.
The student body is not a monolith. Helen L. Horowitz believes students since 1800 have been divided into three contending cultures and her book describes "the variety of ways that undergraduates have defined themselves, viewed their professors and fellow collegians, formed associations, and created systems of meaning and codes of behavior." Horowitz terms her three college cultures the "college men" (and "college women"), the "outsiders," and the "rebels." She recognizes that her approach is rather abstract and that each one of her college cultures is an ideal type - "a mental construction that strives to represent reality...(but) is far too clean and uncomplicated for the messy world of actual historical phenomena."
The college men devoted their four years in college to having fun, avoiding serious study, and making contacts so they could later take their rightful place in the realms of business and law. The college men were the Big Men On
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