Creighton University - Bluejay Yearbook (Omaha, NE)

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Dr. John Hollwitz John Hollwitz received his bachelor ' s degree in English literature from LeMoyne College in Syracuse, N.Y., before attending Northwestern University, where he earned a Master ' s in theater and, in 1980, his Ph.D. in speech. He has taught at C.U. since 1979 where ' s he ' s made it obvious that his son will not watch 10,000 hours of TV by the age of 15. In Louis Malle ' s acclaimed film My Dinner With Andre, the playwright Andre Gregory says that the 1960s represented the last burst of the human spirit before we collectively enter a kind of Dark Ages, a period of descent characterized by superficial goals, robot-like conformity, and a deadening of sensation. He goes on to argue that we are developing scat- tered pockets of light, centers of spiritual and psychological sustenance designed to keep the flame alive through whatever apocalypse is to come, and he reminds us of an important fact. Such centers of illumination existed once before, during the period which we have come colloquially to call the Dark Ages, and these centers were the monasteries and later the schools. But Gregory believes that the chur- ches and universities of today have extinguish- ed the light and have thereby lost soul. They risk a darkness as dense as the society around them. The image of the decline is a motif to which psyche returns in any culture ' s history through a kind of nostalgia for a mythical lost golden age. The impending end of the millenium pro- bably invites such fantasies. But I wonder how accurate Gregory ' s predictions are, for our col- leges and universities-Creighton among them- -seem to be struggling to understand and ar- ticulate their role in a world which has changed rapidly in the past few decades and which will change further still. Nowhere is the change more evident than in the attitude of our students, and in some aspects of the universities which give them their educational, spiritual and psychological sustenance. Educators are fond of comparing the campus climate to the 1950s, a period which survives in memory as one of conformi- ty, materialistic self-interest and conservatism. An oral tradition in many faculty lounges speaks longingly of the activism and energy of the late 1960s, when students were presumably more energized, more capable of enlightened action, more visionary. Certainly there are elements of truth in such comparisons in which we educators, like An- dre Gregory, sometimes indulge. I believe that our conclusions are largely accurate. Something has changed in the past 15 years to affect our social institutions (the universities among them) and our personalities, collective as well as individual. I ' m not sure that I understand just what that something ' is. But 1 can make a few guesses. First, 1 submit that the change is not, as some people have argued, a new climate of social apathy among student populations. A New Right has emerged on college campuses. I certainly find it unusual that today ' s students so heavily support a president whose financial policies, were they enacted, would render many of them ineligible to attend a school like Creighton in the first place. But that ' s my opi- nion, and I ' m no more sure now than I was in college 15 years ago that such opinions con- stitute a valid index of university students ' worth or psychological conditions. 130

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the phrase of journaHst Tom Wolfe, the Me Decade. Seventies people were narcissistic zombies who marched through the decade to the regimental beat of disco music. In the 1980s, they became Yuppies. I ' m grotesquely oversimplifying, of course, but it ' s more fun that way. I don ' t think I ' m oversimplifying at all, however, when I say that the political upheavals of the 1960s were motivated by passionate self-interest. Consider: The two strongest political movements of that time were the civil rights movement and the anti-war movement. The anti-authority wave that those two movements generated overflowed into all sorts of secondary whirlpools and minor eddies: the drug culture, the hippie movement, San Fran- cisco ' s Summer of Love (actually 1966, not 1967, according to Rolling Stone magazine, which ought to know; 1967 was the national media discovered Haight-Ashbury), the don ' t trust anybody over 30 Yuppies, Tiny Tim, Peter Max, Mod Squad, and such curiosities as The Greening of America, a very popular book by Yale Professor Charles A. Reich that seriously contended that bell- bottom pants were very important in creating the liberated consciousness of the era because they felt so loose and free around the ankles. My freshman year in college (not at Creighton; I transferred to the dear old Hilltop for my sophomore year), I took an advanced studies course on alienation. The Greening of America was one of our textbooks. That was in 1971-72, the last year for signifi- cant political upheavals on most of America ' s college campuses. Not coincidentally, that also was the last year that any American 18-year- olds were drafted for military service in Viet- nam. That was the fourth year of the draft lottery. If you turned 18 that year, lottery day pro- bably was the most important day of the year. My lottery number-the number for all of us born on Sept. 18, 1953 was 289. Supposedly, those in the first third of the list, numbers one through 120 or so, probably would be drafted. Those in the next third were in limbo, and those in the last third my group-almost cer- tainly would be safe. Unless, of course, American participation in the war escalated again. Everybody knew someone who. . . My best friend ' s number was 364. An old friend from my hometown drew number 13. He enlisted in, I think the Navy. The last I heard, years ago, was that he was stationed in Korea and drink- ing himself into a stupor every chance he got. It turned out that the war ended sooner than expected. Very few people were drafted after- ward. And political activism fairly quickly turned to passivism. Had it not, again, been for the paranoia of Richard Nixon and his hen- chmen in trying to ensure victory over an op- ponent who was clearly going to be trounced anyway, or their spitefulness in wanting to see him not simply defeated but also humiliated, apathy would have settled in even more rapid- ly. Apathy is much easier to pursue than ac- tivism. Unless personally threatened, people are loathe to bestir themselves. The blacks who spearheaded the civil rights drive were personally threatened--with discrimination, subjugation, even death. The masses who demonstrated against the Vietnam War were personally threatened, with the very real prospect that they, or their sons or husbands or brothers or boyfriends, would get their head shot off in a rice paddy a long way from home. That is why the anti-war movement was pro- bably the broadest-based anti-government pro- test in American history. And that is why political activism faded when that direct threat disappeared, to be replaced by much more dis- tant and vague menaces. A drop of acid rain will not kill you, nor cause any measurable damage to anything by itself. If you live in West Omaha, you are not likely to be personal- ly acquainted with people on welfare. If you are, it is easy to avoid them. So today ' s college students, like the young Americans of the post-World War II and post- Korean War eras, are free to concern themselves with realizing their personal American Dreams without fearing that they or their loved ones will be forced to live in a bar- racks instead of a condo. I don ' t know whether that situation is good or bad, inspirational or tragic, or even worth wondering about. I do, however, think it is in- evitable. I also find it interesting that the robust economy of the 1960s gave people the luxury of concerning themselves about such issues as the environment and the poor without fear of economic consequences. It was easy to be an environmentalist when you had a secure job; today, you don ' t find many environmentalists in Pittsburgh ' s unemployment lines. Conversely, there is the phenomenon of noblesse oblige, manifested in the guise of philanthropy by such tycoons as Andrew Carnegie and Peter Kiewit, and under the unacknowledged banner of liberal guilt by Stewart Mott (another tycoon, though by in- heritance), Walter Mondale and others. Could the personally isolationist Yuppies of today be the social activists of tomorrow, organizing rallies and political campaigns from their co-op lofts? Can it be that the Reagan revolution, which undeniably has been an economic boon to a large segment of America at the same time it has been an economic disaster for another large segment, contains the seeds of its own destruction. Damn if I know. This I am certain of, however: I plan to hang on to my faded McGovern for President T-shirt. Maybe one of today ' s college kids will grow up to be a wealthy collector and offer me a bunch of money for it. Everyone has his price. Steve Millburg 129

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Anyway, students clearly are active in the 1980s, though expressions of this activism dif- fer profoundly from the rhetoric of enlighten- ment which characterized much of the 1960s. In fact, today ' s college students show much of the energy of the 1960s campus movements in routine interactions. As a whole they are vocal, energetic, critical in a way which would seem utterly strange to their counterparts in the 50s, and in much of the 60s as well. We talked a lot about relevance in 1968 or 1970. Today ' s student is no less concerned, but the criteria of relevance have changed. Students no longer presume that their curricula must be pertinent to social conditions. Instead, they are concerned (maybe too concerned) that their four or so years in the undergraduate halls pertain directly and immediately to themselves—to their professional (or profes- sional school) aspirations, less frequently to their immediate lives, interpersonal relation- ships, extra-curricular activities. That their social concerns are what the old liberals might consider conservative seems to me unimpor- tant. They enjoy a sense of collective potency in their conservative leanings and, I would sub- mit, a record of success which some earlier ac- tivist movements barely attained. Further, I think that a lot of our students look to the 1960s with a kind of longing and a regret for having been born so late. A film and panel discussion this year on the subject of the 60s attracted a couple of hun- dred people, many of whom were eager to ask what it was really like back then. The answer is that it is no different now, except in the fairly simple willingness to shift attitude and perspective. People were being killed in Southeast Asia (and shot to death on one of our major campuses) back then, and that was a heavy price for a feeling of liberation. Second, I submit that the student body is not as homogeneous as we educators sometimes despairingly complain. Certainly a university such as Creighton attracts a clientele which dif- fers in many respects from the students of state institutions; variables of tuition, geographical location and religious orientation help to make us, for better or worse, what we are. I sense another similarity between today ' s students and those of the 1960s or early 1970s: the similarity concerns a sensitivity to style, ap- parent in the implicit communication of the body and in the rhetoric of dress, movement and language in which today ' s students in- dulge. These expressions seem leaner, sharper, more clearly defined, and I find that in- teresting. Hair is shorter, beards less frequent, scruffy clothes less acceptable. Many of today ' s students can afford a Land ' s End look which conforms to peer, parental and profes- sional school norms, but many of us 15 years ago conformed to equivalent norms. Too, a fair number of today ' s Yuppies (Jerry Rubin among them) were yesterday ' s hippies, blessed now with M.D.s and J.D.s and M.B.A.s (and, to be sure, with Ph.D.s and professorships). And anyway, 1 can ' t see much difference between the iconography of Woodstock and the image of John Belushi, the archetypal fraternity partier, smashing beer cans against his head and going on to become a United States senator. Both icons are extreme, but a lot of us from the 1960s now regularly read the Wall Street Journal. I ' m speaking not of classroom dress re- quirements (according to Gregory, robot-type behaviors are a sign of the impending darkness), nor of the dress-for-success type presentations which some departments periodically inflict on the campus, but of something else, manifest in a small percentage of our students but indicative, perhaps, of restlessness and intelligence combined-much like the restlessness of the Beats in the 1950s or of the post-Dylan poets and their followers 10 years later. Out on the edges of the mainstream are a small but defined group who suggest the lean- ness and even severeness of a new aesthetic, a new wave, which differs from collective norms as much as the countercultural look did some years ago. Some would respond rightly that this is a superficial matter. But the non-verbal codes of dress, hair, even jewelry are by defini- tion both superficial and significant. Style is no less than energy seeking embodiment, and the energy is what counts. But all this neither denies Andre Gregory ' s insight nor invalidates the concerns of educators faced with students who seem a little alien. In fact, I agree with both. Times have changed. As I write this, educators debate a major new report which claims that the Bac- calaureate has become routine and therefore nearly meaningless. Higher education may be in decline, and I would attribute this state of affairs to a couple of conditions. During the 1960s, we placed a lot of blame on the institutions themselves. I think I ' m nostalgic enough myself to wonder if the col- leges and universities aren ' t themselves the problem. If this be the case, the solutions rest more with us the educators than with them the students. It is we who have permittted subtle or gross shifts toward demand analyses which are more concerned with the marketing game than with what Gregory calls the flame -the traditions of soul, the grounding in the past without which the present loses significance. To be sure, institutions of higher education must scramble to survive in an economic and political climate which treats schools as basic training for upward mobility or, at best, as an- tiquated repositories of musty books. We ' re just not the real world anymore. Maybe there are worse things than going out of businesss, if the alternative is to play to a market that deliberately obscures the only traditions for which we properly exist. Our students have changed to accommodate the megatrends thinking of the universities, and they ' re paying the price in attitudes and behavior. It seems to me that one of the dif- ferences between students now and students then is a difference in psychological attitudes. Despite the rhetoric of doing your own thing, the campuses of the 1960s were fun- damentally extroverted places: the focus of classroom interaction, confrontation and pro- test was the outside world, the institutions of society, evaluated as just or not, pertinent or not, according to criteria which were alien to the people involved in the sense that these criteria were external ones. I think that the new materialism which bothers many educators represents a shift to introversion-to criteria of merit, withdrawn from external institutional realities to internal motivation, to the private drives of self- determination. Such introversion has produc- ed a fascination with matter-with the value of the degree, with job demands, with social status, with salaries. These criteria are not weak, and this in- troversion throws a powerful and disabling shadow in the form of ego-oriented will, of blindness to alternatives which I, at least, con- sider humanizing. Neil Young, one of the heroes of the old period, recently said something to the effect that we must make everybody stand on his own two legs, even if he have only one to stand on. If we can ignore the logical and grammatical contortions of his statement long enough to get the point, we can easily sense the callousness which turns the healthy process of individuation into egoistic cruelty. The shadow appears elsewhere as well. Dur- ing the middle ages, certain groups compen- sated for inadequacies in collective religious in- stitutions by devoting themselves to esoteric practices which were also introverted and, ap- parently, devoted entirely to matter- specifically, to the alchemical process of gold making. Our universities have become, in a way, alchemical laboratories. Witness the preoccupation of our brightest young adults with the various paths to attain worthy social positions which all have one thing in common: an income which exceeds any relation to ra- tional (and humanitarian) need. These criteria, as extreme and as unfortunate as they may be, are entirely characteristic of an introverted sen- sibility seeking validation in a spiritual climate no longer equipped or willing to accommodate it. Ultimately, I agree with Andre Gregory. We are not collectively disposed toward the preser- vation of dominant ideals. We encourage a fascination with a material reality which, paradoxically, our industrial societies seem determined to destroy. We ignore the Bomb, or we treat it as a deity with the language of awe, ultimacy, and fear that we once reserved for Jehovah. All may yet be well, but not if our lights be extinguished, and not if our univer- sities continue to run with the crowd. Dr. John Hollwitz Department of English