Students: Moods & Mores

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At U.S. universities this fall, in loco parentis is suffering from rigor mortis.

Students at Notre Dame, for example, went back to school in September spoiling for a fight: they had decided that the behavioral restrictions traditionally imposed on them were too demeaning to tolerate any longer. But over the summer, President Theodore Hesburgh blandly did away with the bulk of the rules. The resulting mood of Notre Dame—new responsibility, dampening of protest, search for a more influential and meaningful student role in college affairs—is typical of most schools, barring Harvard's aberrations.

It is a time of battles-won-and-wherenow. With it goes some frustration, expressed in a fad for cynical or enigmatic slogans painted on the fences of every campus' inevitable construction sites. The old fire to hit the streets on behalf of civil rights has largely faded. A new desire to work pragmatically to tutor Negro kids and help out in slums is rising.

Committed to Madness. Most students, while unhappy about the war, seem weary of rehashing all the old arguments, and the issue is losing its emotional kick. Frustrated by the difficulty of "escalating protest," a Yale senior sighs: "This Government is committed to this madness, so what can you do?" The University of Wisconsin still manages to muster some 400 students for antiwar rallies, but most protests elsewhere take the forlorn form of silent vigils.

The passion in civil rights protests has petered out partly because black-power advocates have forced white students out of their movements. At Berkeley, the Afro-American Student Union even boycotted a "black-power day" conference because some whites helped plan it. Considering the Negro's legal rights mainly established, students at nearly every large urban university—notably Chicago, N.Y.U., Pennsylvania, U.S.C., San Francisco State—are working in Negro neighborhoods on the less dramatic long-range task of helping Negroes exercise those rights. No less than one-tenth of the 88,000 students on the University of California's nine campuses are engaged in volunteer work.

Open Communications. Taking a tip from Berkeley, many college officials have moved quickly to open up new lines of communications with students. Eager Cornell students packed an auditorium twice this year for meetings in which university administrators took on all student questions. Students at the

University of Michigan are demanding to be heard on academic policies, faculty tenure and educational philosophy. Princeton students sit on academic committees, recently won the right to audit courses, take the final examination, get credit if they pass, forget it if they fail. Some 800 students at Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pa., last week burned cardboard replicas of proposed campus buildings to protest the sterile modern architecture. Students at the City University of New York staged a sit-in to demand a voice in administrative decisions, but President Buell Gallagher insisted that they were asking too much.