University of Rhode Island - Renaissance / Grist Yearbook (Kingston, RI)

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responsibility to develope. But how to develope it is the question facing all colleges and universities today. Some are asking an even more interesting question: should a university even be in housing? Something else happened last spring and continued through the summer. Seniors left college and lo and behold — no jobs. The divine college diploma had lost it’s power. Economics for perhaps the first time in this genera- tion became a factor of daily living. Previously, college guaranteed the job, now it can ' t; but perhaps the best student in the class can. However even the best students are uneasy. Study harder, be quiet, yes but job inter- views are down 30% and jobs available are off 50% and everybody knows it. The grad students were affected no less severely. Many will tell you frankly they are staying in college to wait out the recession. Being a bit poor and student go together; being graduated and unemployed do not! Not all are working hard! , you say? That is true. Two years ago Kingman Brewster of Yale spoke of the unwill- ing student on campus. Students in college due to parental pressure or social acceptability are examples. To these I add the draft. Their interest in study and college life is minimum. If they draw a high draft number they often drop out of college; if not, they remain. While their contribution to the classroom is questionable, they certainly don ' t make a lot of noise lest they jeopardize their draft deferment. For many the job of student is preferable to the job of soldier in an unpopular and as yet unproven war. Yes, the mood is indigo — quiet-blue. The blue is the uneasiness, the frustration, the tendency to cynicism and isolation. The critical return to self and the courage to come to grips anew with the dynamic process of life in education. Reverend David A. InrVian, PhD Catholic Center U.R.I. 31

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Mood Indigo If anything sums up this year on campus, it is a change of mood. The enthusiasm of last spring, the new era of community, the almost crusade mentality dissipated in the haze of the summer. Most everybody returned in September feeling tired, apprehensive maybe, and a bit confused. By November, I overheard one university dean commenting that if you weren ' t confused, you just were not well informed. True there were some problems particular to this campus of 10,000: overcrowding in the classrooms and dormitory construction delays. Howev- er these were not of themselves sufficient to explain the general malaise. It was like continuing to bowl with a new ball — one with no holes. Those that wanted to play couldn ' t pick it up. Some were just too tired of trying. Others, in particular the incoming freshmen, either didn ' t know the rules or weren ' t interested in the game. And so the action stopped. It was the same across the nation. The New York Times in a November survey spoke of the quietness on the cam- puses, of the American uni-campus blanketed by a coast-to-coast calm. But lest you think this change was at- tributable to the fickleness of youth, or to a Burger Chef political mentality (quick, cheap, and around the cor- ner), I refer you to the remarks of Bill Moyers on assignment for Harpers Magazine. He reported on the fa- tigued, worrisome, isolationist attitude of adults in every state he visited. So I asked myself, something has hap- pened but what? I believe the answer is found to a great extent in three areas of our lives: the political, person- al, and economic. The roaring sixties came to a close last spring with an expenditure of emotional energy over Cambodia and a physical release climaxed by the shootings at Kent State, and the bombing of the physics lab at Wisconsin. The overwhelming majority of the people in this country were shocked and dismayed. With all good intentions it seemed that the political journey of the sixties had arrived at the crossroads of violence. To continue was insane, to go back was impossible. Thus the journey came to a halt. The college youth returned still not old enough to vote, still refusing to adopt violence but suspecting little could be gained by rallies, demonstrations and hand- bills. The result was a sort of political quietism this year on campus. I fear that cynicism and frustration are more to blame than apathy. For example, most colleges voted to continue with classes during election time. True, . there are plans afoot for a march on Washington on April 24 and May I . But it remains to be seen if people just have the strength for it. This outgoing expenditure of energy in the sixties also exerted a psychic centrifugal force, pushing each of us farther away from the center of ourselves and holding us there. Continued activism finally resulted in self loss which can only be overcome by an identity crisis. Erik Erikson who coined the term identity crisis wrote in a re- cent book that it does not mean to ask in a morbid fashion Who am I? . Rather it implies a dynamic process of questioning like What do I want to make of myself? and What do I have to work with? . Identity crisis then is an occasional event in our lives implying growth and constructive change. During the sixties the constant ener- gy discharge had diffused the question and the inquiring subject. Consequently, this search for the center characterizes much of the apparent calm or quiet on campus. Yet it is not a do-nothing calm, but has all the seeds, I feel, of a very fruitful regrowth of the person. No longer is one surprised to hear of students taking a year off from school to find out what they really can do. Sad to say for many the university experience has not answered this question or even assured that the answer arrived at would be respected later on. I also think it explains why more students are now living off campus, not for the big parties, but for the quiet and the privacy necessary to get one ' s head together. This curisis is also at the root of the widespread internal dissension of many student organizations, from the peace groups like S.M.C. to the staid and traditional student senates. One final example of note is the dormitory situation. The extension in parietals, the developement of coed living plans, counterbalanced by cries of invasion of privacy and lack of proper direction reflect more an attempt to discover the full potential of community living on a modern campus than permissiveness on the part of the stu- dents or authoritarianism on the part of the university. Alumni, administration and students alike should remem- ber that permissiveness and authoritarianism are of the same fabric since both positions do not allow a sense of

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Strike? As these words are being written, late in December, 1970, speculation on the whatever-became-of-last- spring-? question has become almost a national indoor sport. Learned articles are cropping up lushly like weeds in a vacant lot. I notice that a conference to discuss student apathy , of all things, is to be held soon at a sister institution. Who’d of thunk it? Boldly I reply: I ' d of. The question is all about what happened in the Fall of 1970 — since no one seems to argue that it is missing — to last Spring ' s enthusiasm, a word that I use at the risk of begging the question. Because I welcomed and supported — whatever that may mean — the Student Strike, I could not but be dis- appointed by the apparent dissipation of its energies. Disappointed but hardly astonished. I saw in the spirit, the enthusiasm and the excitement of the students last May and June one of those finest hours ' ' about which orators like to orate. The strike seemed to me to have forced briefly to the surface a right- ness of instinct that social encrustations usually manage to surpress. You may contrive your own volcano meta- phor, if you like. There is also your very popular emotional orgasm ' ' label and, for those more gastro- than geni- to-oriented, your giant catharisis . In point of fact, though, the Student Strikes in toto may well have had some as-yet-unmeasured effect for the better upon their participants and possibly (though I am more skeptical of this) some salutary effect on public policy, so called,- toward the war in Southeast Asia. The reason that I was not amazed at the quick dissipation of that explosively unleashed energy of May and June or, to put it another way, at the very evident let-down in the stop-the-war drive, has nothing to do with that too-handy comparison with post-orgasmic lassitude. Rather I believe that the let-down was inevitable given the nature of the Student Strike as an emotional rather than an intellectual experience for most of its partici- pants. For the strike to have produced any substantial, solid residue of politicization, to use the in word of last May, it would have had to be based on a reasoned conviction that the war in South-East Asia is not some . unique phenomenon existing in a socio-politico-economic vacuum but is, in fact, an aspect of a continuing, world-wide struggle constantly involving and enmeshing all peoples of all classes. Regrettably, appeals to end THE war tend to perpetuate myths to the contrary, such as that ending THE war will bring about peace. Such appeals, while emotionally attractive, tend to shunt aside reason. For reason would tell us that absent some fundamental changes in society, war is inevitable and that the only real solution to the war in Southeast Asia is to find and eradicate the cause of ALL war through an understanding of the physical, material reasons for armed conflict between men and nations. Reason would tell us to apply to the solution not slogans and incant ations but methods at least as scientifically sound as we might apply, say, to curing brown patches on a putting green. Freshly painted posters, their wet ink still glistening in the Spring unshine, red rags of armbands, slogans painted on walls and sidewalks, bullhorn rhetoric, guerilla theater — all these are fine and romantic and useful to supplement reason, not to supplant it. Real change will be brought about by a convinced majority. Until then, I suppose, there will be other Spring Strikes: to bring the troops home from Amman, from Santi- ago, from Dar es Salaam, from the Ussuri, from Athens, from hell and gone. Until then, I suppose, other pedants and pundits will be explaining what happened to last Spring ' s enthusiasm. Wilbur Doctor Ass ' t Dean Arts and Sciences