Paper, Not Class Taught Sociologist David Riesman

Author of "The Lonely Crowd" and "Faces in the Crowd," David Riesman is a professor of sociology at the University of Chicago. In the following article he treats changing attitudes among college journalists.

It is very interesting to me to compare the attitude of the editors of the Chicago Maroon as I understand them, with those I recall from my own days at The CRIMSON--I hope the latter not too clouded by nostalgia. Today it seems hard to get people out to work on a paper at a University like this, where they feel that the curriculum and the academic subjects are all important and that they can learn more in theclassroom that matters than outside it. This tends to leave the initiative, in college journalism, to those who have some ideological axe to grind, and may be one partial explanation for the Stalinoid complexion of a number of college papers (of course matters stand differently where there is a journalism school, when work on the college paper is a form of academic activity). In other words, what I find among students here is that they don't take journalism, as such, seriously, or at least seriously enough to make it competitive with the curriculum.

The attitude of the group of us who were CRIMSON editors in the late 20's was very different indeed. The curriculum was not worthy of a serious person's attention. I was concentrating on bio-chemical sciences and had to spend more time in laboratories and in class work generally than most of my colleagues. But all of these, Paul Sweezy, Gene Bolio, Ayres Brinser, Don Field, made it a point of pride not to worry about our academic work, though some of us managed to do quite well in it and to consider that The CRIMSON was our major educative enterprise. Indeed I could say of myself that I fied to The CRIMSON because I was bored with the curriculum. And one of the innovations of our period, the so-called student vagabond column, which criticized courses and commented on them, was based on our desire to float around among a number of different courses in the hope at last of turning up a stimulating man. Now that I am on the other side of the academic fence, I realize that we must have been a rather insolent bunch of students and have pained our teachers--although at the time it never occurred to any of us that we could make a dent on them. It is perhaps one of the disadvantages of the great improvement in college teaching, that students can no longer at the better universities take the curriculum quite so casually and look elsewhere for their enterprise and intellectual adventure.