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

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.

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57.5. L , 7 fe.

Page 16 text:

Student politics, once the preserve of the few and noted for its dullness, is becoming more open and more issue-oriented, as the University Party's recent successes show. The Cavalier Dai- ly is showing signs of life, whether writing about marijuana or lVlcNamara, and new publications like Rapier are jabbing satirically at all our foibles. For a long time somewhat isolated in a world of his own, the University student is extending his horizons beyond Charlottesville. More and more students are becoming involved in tackling the problems of an urban society or in joining the Peace Corps, and such foreign phenome- na as protesting the war in Vietnam and smok- ing marijuana are appearing on the Grounds. Let us look more closely at two institutions of the old University-one superficial, the other much more important-that are being challenged.