Undergraduates: The Politically Disengaged

In most countries, youth gets passionately political when it tastes higher education and rapid social change. Yet American collegians, taken as a whole, remain unconcerned: even the current political revival on U.S. campuses probably does not involve more than a tenth of all students. What feeds this peculiar American trait, and will it ever change?

The question is asked in the Phi Beta Kappa magazine American Scholar by Kenneth Keniston. a Rhodes scholar and Harvard junior fellow, whose brilliant reconnoitering of psychology, philosophy and political science at Harvard led him to focus on youth ''alienation." Now a professor of psychology at Yale Medical School. Keniston as a result has become a top scholar of the oddly American dilemmas of growing up.

Not Worth Rebuffing. What helped make young Americans apolitical in the first place, says Keniston. was the absence of a feudal aristocracy to resent and smash. During the rapid industrialization after the Civil War, for instance, the young could easily see themselves rising from rags to riches in a world that rewarded hard work, not rebellion. Now the "image of youth as an apprenticeship for upward mobility is waning," to be replaced by a self-centered style of behavior that Keniston calls "youth culture." It has many forms—the beatnik, the delinquent, the suburban adolescent—but all have in common a "lack of deep commitment to adult values." including politics.

The young often do not regard their parents' conception of the world as even worth rebuffing. Instead, youth culture provides a moratorium in "growing up" to be like one's parents. It includes both the hedonism of beer-and-twisting at Fort Lauderdale and the smugness of those who hit 800 on the college board exam. It respects love, decency, tolerance. It leads to the "privatism" of early marriage and big families as a substitute for big careers. Perhaps it also leads to the Peace Corps—in one sense, the flower of youth culture —but certainly it does not lead to the political barricades.

Fear of Being Taken In. To Keniston. who feels that "true politics" should indeed concern collegians, a key deterrent is campus politics. By dealing only with trivia, he says, student government subtly argues that only "omnicompetent officials" have the wisdom to make real policy decisions. Even more subtle is an echo from the McCarthy era—not fear of speaking out. but fear of being taken in. Given the abiding American fear of being a sucker, says Keniston. McCarthy's allusions to "unwitting dupes" still make collegians wary of offbeat ideas.