University of Virginia - Corks and Curls Yearbook (Charlottesville, VA)

Page 14 text:

57.5. L , 7 fe.

Page 13 text:

six years or more of undergraduate schooling. The gut courses are disappearing, the attri- tion rate is dropping, and the libraries are filled with students even on a Saturday night. The professor who once quipped that Alderman Li- brary was the most pleasant place he had ever worked because he never saw a student there would have to seek solitude in different quarters now. The bright first year-man is studying princi- ples of physics his father might not have learned until graduate school. Getting an education, in short, has become a serious matter. As a result, the intellectual atmosphere of the University is becoming more electric. There are still those who label Charlottesville a cultural desert, but the shortsightedness of their judg- ment is obvious to anyone who has taken the trouble to look into the concerts, lectures, plays, exhibits, and discussions the University commu- nity is offered. There is local talent well demon- strated by groups like the Virginia Players and by many of the contributors to student publica- tions. There is also the slate of famed visitors to Charlottesville that reads like the guest list for a Truman Capote party. The interested student this year, for example, could have heard Eileen Farrell sing, Roger Blough discuss the economy, Malcolm Cowley reminisce about Paris in the Twenties, or George Wallace address the local hill folk. The University's in residence pro- grams, furthermore, brought to the Grounds the affable Sir John Wheeler-Bennett, the ever dip- lomatic Charles Baldwin, the formidable Sir Robert Menzies, the talented Peter Taylor. The new Center for Advanced Studies, the state's willingness to spend more money on higher edu- cation, the College's liberalized course require- ments and broader curriculum-all promise an exciting academic future.

Page 15 text:

There is growing steadily in the minds of students a healthy skepticism, an unwillingness to accept as sacred anything simply hallowed by age, an impatience with the paternalism of their elders. In Yeats' phrase, students are casting a cold eye on ways of thinking accepted blindly by the generation before them. The prospect of the gentlemen's club atmo- sphere of the University violated by coeds, for example, has stirred in the ast reat waves of rotest' today most students D , 8 P l 1 .yiew it with equanimity or even eagerness. The faculty's4com- plete control over academic rules, the administration's final authority over dispensing student funds, Charlottesville's ne- glect of its poor and ill-educated, the generation gap -these are just a few of the issues students are discussing-and doing something about. ln quiet, subtle ways the old institutions are being chal- lenged. The fraternity system, for example, faces an uncertain future: fraternity membership is no longer the sine qua non for success around the Grounds, and the Roaring Twenties sort of hedonism the houses have often represented is coming under fire. The fraternity system is being re-evaluated, both from without and within, and the results are anyone's guess. Like- wise, the utility of such established institutions as the dance societies and the political caucuses is being questioned, and the wearers of such traditional honors as ribbons and rings are finding that these gratuities no longer glitter as they used to. Their mystic letters, to many, are just more painting on the sidewalks.