Southeastern Louisiana College - Le Souvenir Yearbook (Hammond, LA)

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a group of waiting observers, and in a fitting manner of the times, had been prepared for by no one. In the advent of the Susceptible Sixties, the student influx wreaked quick havoc with the unprepared educational systems of the Nation . . . Our quiet little college shared in the crises. In 1959, there were 1734 stu- dents at Southeastern; the 1963 fall semester admissions doubled this figure with a record 3600 students enrolled. The quiet little college be- came an educational pressure pot with a remarkably stable exterior and a slowly smouldering germ of discontent within. hfowever, numbers alone do not tell the full story of SLC today. To real- ize the depth of the change, one must study the individual student. Today ' s student is not yesterday ' s collegian; he, too, is in a transitory phase. Bombarded by appeals to make good so that he will achieve mone- tary success in later life; today ' s student is cautioned to study hard and, conversely is u rged to live a full and active social life. He is dis- covering that achieving the desired status of a well-rounded student often demands more concentration and effort than he possesses. South- eastern students of the sixties live in over-crowded dormitories or off- campus apartments, they develop ul- cers in the cafeteria talking over the race issue, foreign problems, and domestic policies. Some close out the world and live for the moment, losing themselves in parties while others shrink from proms and school dances, discarding them as trivial immaturities. All live in the shadow of fifty megaton bombs, and some crack under the strain and join the ranks of those in Mandeville and Jackson. Formerly, students got the blues ; today, they suffer from manic de- pression with overtones of failure complexes, ego-drives, and other disorders inherent in the sick seman- tics of the age. Students have constructed class societies on campus of which SLC has its share. There are the con- formers, the workers, student gov- ernment members, and more do- gooders ; there are the disinterest- ed, some of whom party their way through (or out of) school, and some of whom merely attend classes and submerge themselves in their protect- ive dormitory shells at night; and there are the flashers who are seen and heard everywhere and who do nothing. Finally, there are the rebels, a frus- trated flexible group whose mem- bers are only consistent in their in- consistency. They have one rule, one byword — discontent. With what they are discontent varies with the in- dividual and runs the gamut from desires to change the world, the state, the college, to merely changing themselves. These students dispute the college ' s essentials and consti- tute its effect, making it fluid in character.

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