Creighton University - Bluejay Yearbook (Omaha, NE)

Page 137 text:

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

Page 136 text:

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

Page 138 text:

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