Students: A New Set of Labels

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"Everyone says there is something different about today's college student," says Kenneth Keniston, 36, assistant professor of psychology and psychiatry at Yale. From his undergraduate days at Harvard ('51) through years as a Rhodes scholar, Harvard junior fellow and frequent campus-hopper elsewhere, Keniston has been fascinated by what it is that makes one generation of students different from another. In the current issue of the Yale Alumni Magazine, he sets up some perceptive categories, each devastatingly cartooned by Artist Robert Osborn (Yale '28).

U.S. students used to be subdivided variously into gentlemen who were born to go to college, apprentices who thrived on a land-grant opportunity to struggle upward, Big Men on Campus who scorned study but succeeded by using college to form useful, lifelong friends. What is distinctive about American students today, says Kenistoji, is not the beats and the draft-card burners, whose revolutionism is only beard-deep, but a new breed of "professionalists." They are the "academically committed young men and women, who value technological, intellectual and professional competence above popularity, ambition or grace." The professionalist is not a status seeker, for he has already arrived. He prizes "the expertness of the man rather than the man himself" because this is what really counts in the "bureaucratized and organized society" in which he lives.

Activity v. Self. The professionalist may vaguely believe in God, may even go to church, but "religion plays no important role" in his professionalist attempts to find a meaning in life. Ethically he is a relativist, an existentialist who prefers Tillich to St. Thomas, who reads Camus rather than Marx. His intellectual style is "anti-ideological, pragmatic and empirical," much in the mainstream of American tradition. But he does have tensions, a sense of uneasiness, a vague feeling of disquiet, and they are rooted in his strivings to reconcile two separate parts of his existence, "his public and his private self."

This gap between "activity and self" finds expression in college slang such as "come on like," "make like" and "turn on." The compliment "cool" indicates this "same tenuous connection between deed and inclination." Though most of his life is centered on acquiring expertness, he seeks meaning in his personal relationships, and is in, this sense primarily what Keniston calls a "privatist," seeking human bonds to find identity and self-definition. The old question, to bed or not to bed, has been superseded by an "effort to define the precise circumstances under which sexual relations are meaningful and honorable." The professional^ takes the relations "between the sexes earnestly and even morally."

The Roots of Alienation. Keniston visualizes and defines the professionalists as the bulk of students, but he believes that the emergence of this type has been paralleled by a new kind of "student dissent, marginality and misery." He divides these students into three groups, all of them in a sense "professionalists manqués."