Creighton University - Bluejay Yearbook (Omaha, NE)

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Dr. Thomas Kulilman j One warm April evening 22 years ago, when I was a graduate student in the East, a bread fight broke out in the Animal Pit section of the university refectory. Soon both the Animals and the Fraternity Boys (at that school, such a distinction was made in conver- sation, although all were thoroughly aware that the Independents had no monopoly of feral behavior) had taken the uproar into the streets. After shouting long enough to attract television cameras and the police, they assembled in front of the president ' s house, howling like revolutionary Parisians at the gates of the Tuileries. For perhaps 15 minutes they vented their barbarities, until at last the immaculate white door of the Georgian man- sion opened and the president stepped calmly onto the front porch. He listened to a minute ' s worth of catcalls and then said simply, Go home. The students went home. The 1 1 o ' clock television news featured an interview with one of the offenders. Why were you rioting? Because it was the first nice day of spring. The next morning my Contemporary Drama professor commented: How very American! In Europe the students would be protesting the government, or demonstrating about some social or economical issue. Only here would the students riot just because they felt good. My professor ' s words would seem, within no more than five years, wonderfully, ludicrously naive. But that April in 1963 we students and teachers were in the last days of great in- nocence. There in New England we had pro- duced a demi-god, John Kennedy, whom we joyously expected to guide us into a new era of American glory. Only a tiny group of Jeremiahs saw dark clouds in our heavens, and no one predicted that students would soon be coming together to demonstrate with equal vivacity for a cause more serious than meteorological beneficence. Looking back at those happy children of 1963, and reflecting also on nearly two decades of Creighton classes, I am beginning to wonder Thomas Ashford Kuhlman received his bachelor ' s degree in the classics from Xavier University in Cincinnati and his Master ' s and Ph.D. in American civilization at Brown University where he was a Woodrow Wilson Fellow. He has been known to draw architectural sketches during classtime. 132

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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

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if the student ' s remark to the television inter- viewer was entirely foolish. Why riot? Because it ' s spring! I am quite sure that the fellow had no intention of speaking metaphorically, but we might not err should we play a bit with his remark as metaphor. Ultimately, might not the behavior of all of us be based on our sense of the meaning of spring? The late Nebraska novelist Bess Streeter Aldrich called one of her books Spring Came On Forever , a sentence she took from a poem by Vachel Lindsay. The idea behind those words is beautiful, but it appeals to some more than to others. Spring can mean vitality, fresh energy and growth. It can mean signs of strength without spoilage, of delicacy without weakness. It can also mean immaturity, fickleness and false hopes. I submit that students--and other groups in society as well-may be judged by their response to the idea that any spring, in this life, might truly come on forever. There are basically three possible responses. The first is that of the unimaginative realist: such a thing is impossible. Spring is soon followed by summer, and in the course of nature, autumn will bring both fulfillment and decline, and winter no rest but the rest of death. A second response is the opposite. For the idealist it can always be spring, always the time for planting, for the loosening and bursting of bonds, for flaunting the flags of May. Rest is unnecessary movement and budding and flowering are constant, irresistable. And there is a third response. When it is spr- ing, some give themselves to it wholly, joyful- ly, doing some of the foolish, playful things that the old and sage must censor as vulgar and brash, or dreaming and beginning things that the tired and timid dismiss as wild and imprac- tical, sentimental. And all the while these third respondents prepare for more somber seasons. They know that eventually spring will be a season of the past, but there can yet be, after May, more months for vigor and valor, for the accompHshing of goals. My metaphors and abstractions are meant to relate to the specifics of two decades of American campus life. Within eight months of that silly riot on the Ivy League campus, the assassination of our nation ' s President began years of agony for some, questioning for all. Soon, to be a student was to perceive a horrible barrier between lovers and haters of spring. In music and dress, in theater and politics, in religion and family life and work, a generation attempted to practice an ethic of eternal spr- ing. Rod McKuen and Kahlil Gibran and a thousand different posters in head shops pro- mised that we would know love and truth merely by listening to the warm. Others, sharp- ly conscious that the dreams of many had been too long deferred, cried out that the foulness of the communal air could be banished only by an endless April tornado of violent revolution. Weeds grow fast in the spring, often appear- ing where they are least expected. Rudeness erupted within the sanctuaries of the genteel. Hatred possessed the favored, and ignorance and oversimplification were counted as the prized blossoms of an exotic bush. I think that Creighton students never gave themselves so wholly to a season of maudlin warmth or tornadic destruction as did students in other parts of the United States. Yes, we had the campus politician whose banner read, The Jesuits are behind me-way behind me. But even a dozen years, 15 years ago, Creighton students more than others looked forward to something after spring. Perhaps it is the closeness of so many of us to the land, to the natural cycle and its dictation of the order of necessary work in the midwestern agricuhural heartland, that provides the sense of how life will be, must be. As the farmer understands and practices pa- tience, experiences disappointments and even disaster and begins again, as his family knows the importance of working together, of shar- ing, so Creighton students have been idealistic and practical at the same time. Relating has been more than a game en- couraged by pop psychologists. Love of sibl- ings and parents is not sentimental; it is fun- damental. Often shockingly ignorant of historical dates or geographic locations (this despite charter flights to Europe and buses to every ski slope in the Rockies), Creighton students have consistently expressed the im- portance of ties - to grandparents, to friends, to small towns, to urban ethnic neighborhoods, to people around them who hurt and hunger. In spring and summer, Creighton students have helped and healed, some cautiously, some daringly, but always with a confidence in the efficacy of caring. On our campus, perhaps, we have been outrageous only in a conventional way. We too often purchase rather than create expressions of our common feelings. If originality is ra- tioned, if the explorers among us are few, we are still rich in energy, frankness, generosity. Perhaps the subjects of our intellectual con- cerns come seldom from surprising sources, but when we are concerned, we do our own thinking. The unusual puzzles us, but we have not grown lethargic, unwilling and unable to act. We outgrow Hamlet. The Creighton student, in other words (and how risky it is to suggest that there exists such a beast, so varied are the national, regional, economic and cultural backgrounds, so wide the range of professional goals) is wise enough to know that spring is not the only season, nor to wish that it were. Spring is for dreaming and rioting not because the dream or the riot is good in itself, nor because life is meant for those things, but because our summers, autumns and winters will come to us with ques- tions: have we something to build upon and cherish from our early dreams, have we tested and refined our emotions so that we can act forever with passion, civility and joy? I think that the Creighton student will be able to answer yes to those questions in the later seasons of life. Spring will not come on forever, but what is good in it need never die. Dr. Thomas A. Kuhlman Associate Professor of English 133