When Activism Turns to Introspection

George Wald, Higgins Professor of Biology, likes to tell a story about the time he asked a Radcliffe freshman why she was so intent on being pre-med. Although she wasn't really sure, when he pressed her, she finally answered, "We want to do something to help people--that's lucrative." When Wald, a leftwing activist himself, tells the story now, he adds a rather cynical final note: "And between people and lucrative, make sure you put a good long dash."

Frank B. Freidel, Warren Professor of American History, says without hesitation that students who take his course on the New Deal have become more and more conservative since 1972. When he first started teaching the course, he says, radicals declaring themselves socialists denounced the New Deal as a pallative Roosevelt offered the working class. Now, he says, he finds students more willing to consider the intricacies of New Deal decisions, willing to work within the old frame of government and economics. They don't seem to be working only for grades, he says--but he adds, rather wrily, that "History has never been a key to a quick way to earn a living."

Donald A. Gibbs, former assistant professor of Chinese, who started teaching the University of California at Davis this fall, complained frequently last spring about how his course, Hum 132, "Chinese Literature in Revolution," was going. Gibbs says now he believes the problems in the course were rooted in his own insensitivity to changes in student attitutdes over the last few years. When he first started teaching about China in the early '60s, he says, no one in America accepted any aspects of the Chinese revolution as positive, and he spent a good deal of time defending Mao Tse-tung. Then in the '60s he found himself having to bend over the other way, to avoid fostering the romanticism with which young radicals were beginning to view modern China. But last year, he says, students were much more skeptical, more conservative. Gibbs, however, didn't realize the change until the end of the semester, because his students were less argumentative, more docile, more worried about their grades.

Just about everyone who talks about the shift in the general atmosphere at Harvard since the early '70s mentions a heightened emphasis on grades and pre-professionalism--it isn't all in the minds of scared Biology students. The explanation faculty members and administrators fall back on for the rise in applications to law and medical schools most often has to do with the economics of college degrees and the students' weak financial situation. Unemployment rose in 1974 to nine per cent, the highest it had been since World War II; it isn't surprising that Harvard students, like college students everywhere, began to worry about the future. And as the professions became a more attractive alternative, grades became increasingly important. "Only 20 per cent of the entering class is seriously pre-med," L. Fred Jewett '57, dean of admissions and financial aid, says, "but in terms of people who view college as a path to a future career, the number is much larger. College used to be seen as an intermediate period, a time to experiment, and it really isn't any more."

Whether or not faculty members are relieved that the social activism of the late '60s has died down, they almost unanimously find preprofessionalism a cause for concern. Harvey C. Mansfield Jr. '53, chairman of the Government Department, last spring spearheaded an effort to slow down what he calls grade inflation by limiting the number of A's given out in Gov tutorials. Part of his motivation was a desire to restore the Faculty's old academic standards; but part of it, he says, was also a feeling that because good grades come so easily in most courses, students don't really think about the material. When he was here, he says, people took guts to lighten their workload, so they could get involved in extracurricular activities; but now, he thinks it's only in order to get a good grade without having to work.

Faculty members always view the way students act now against a backdrop of the late '60s and the early '70s, when students were willing to jeopardize their academic careers to protest events within and outside the College. Five years ago, Richard J. Herrnstein, professor of Psychology, found his classes frequently interrupted by students who objected to his theories of the genetic element in intelligence quotients. Sometimes the protests grew so heated that it was difficult for him to teach the rest of the course. "There probably weren't more than two dozen students involved in the demonstrations and public displays outside my classroom," Herrnstein says now, "and had it not been for those two dozen there probably wouldn't have been a Herrnstein incident. But there wouldn't have been one if they hadn't struck a resonant note, either--a deep sense of malaise directed at all the institutions in the society."

One of the symptoms of that malaise--caused in large part by the ongoing war in Vietnam--was a feeling, Herrnstein says, that the future was unimportant. Academic studies and future careers were unimportant, he suggests. "It was harder to keep your mind on Ec 10 when you or someone you cared about was struggling to decide whether or not to run away to Canada to escape the draft."

But Wald says he finds it hard to believe that student protest was so single-minded as to be centered only on the war. Five years ago, he says, "students were telling us, 'look, we came here to be educated, not to get grades.' They were looking for experiments not only in lifestyles, but in education."

People who wanted to change their world were more interested in learning, he says, than they are now. They abandoned grades not because they were lazy or uninterested in academic subjects but because they were turning away from external judgment, to a more self-initiated learning process. Now, he suggests, students work only for grades, seeing them as a pass to a secure financial future.

The shift clearly came in 1972, the fall of the McGovern-Nixon election. As it became more and more obvious that McGovern could not win the presidency, students turned away from politics and began to worry about careers. "They left for the summer talking about social change and came back in the fall talking about medical school," Wald says. Although one theory speculates that Harvard stopped admitting radicals, Jewett denies that admissions criteria changed at all; the change, he says, came in the applicant pool, as high school students began reflecting their parents' fears about the unemployment facing college graduates.

Charles P. Whitlock, associate dean of the Faculty and a clinical psychologist who was dean of the College during those years, suggests another element to what he considered a College-wide depression. Freshmen and sophomores from the early '70s, and the high school graduates who followed them, were tired of political activity as well as worried about their futures. But even as they gave up the political goals of their immediate predecessors, he says, they felt guilty. "They came after a group of heroes," Whitlock says, "and they knew they weren't going to be anything of the sort."

Whitlock describes that period between 1972 and 1974 as a bleak one at Harvard, when students were caught up in feverish competition. Not that students don't worry about grades now, he points out; but between '74 and '72, he says, students seemed terribly afraid of failure. They already felt they had failed as revolutionaries by getting out of politics, he says, and they could not tell what would happen to them if they also failed in getting into professional schools.

But that kind of "total lack of joyfulness" died down after 1974, Whitlock says, along with the rise in psychiatric problems that accompanied it. "Both extreme idealism and extreme cynicism are unrealistic," he says, "and students now seem to be more willing to deal with their problems with a sense of humor, realistically."

Whitlock's feeling that the College has changed since that post-'72 period is born out by a profile of the Class of 1975, compiled by Robert J. Ginn Jr. of the Office of Career Services and Off-Campus Learning (OCS-OCL). Between 1974 and 1975, the percentage of seniors in each class who were unsure of their eventual vocations at the time they graduated more than doubled, jumping from 4.1 per cent to 9.1 per cent. And although 95 per cent of the Class of '75 told the OCS-OCL they planned to eventually attend either graduate or professional schools, only 50 per cent said they were headed there immediately after graduation.

"This generation of students," Ginn says, referring to recent graduates, "has been much maligned for returning to the '50s and being grasping and upwardly mobile. They aren't. It's only that students have a lot of options now, and they want to make reasonable decisions for their future." Decisions, that is, based on wider knowledge of available options and a deeper understanding of themselves. Applications to med and law schools--which rose astronomically after 1971--have leveled off since 1973, he points out--a fairly good indication that Whitlock is right, and there has been a sudden, distinct change since the days when law and med schools were seen as the only career alternatives.

Ginn says the idea that Harvard graduates are no longer looking at social service vocations as career options--as they did in the late '60s--because they are not adequately lucrative, is a myth. In fact, social service is still considered an important criteria for jobs. But he suggests that graduates now are working on "a different schedule of issues, a different agenda for themselves" than simply finding a career and fitting into it. Many people, he points out, see law school as general training providing more insurance against the future. In the '60s, you had a choice between the army and something else, so that the decision was structured in terms of careers. The loss of that kind of structure, he believes, helped intensify the anxiety of the Class of '72 through '74.

But the shift from the '72-'74 period, while more relaxed than the old pre-professionalism, is marked by a continued turn away from social activity. Jewett says that applications now show a much stronger interest in the arts than in politics, a much more introverted group of students. Students seem to be more interested "in things that relate to their own happiness," Jewett says, "where in the '60s we had more people interested in changing society."

A number of faculty members and administrators, including Jewett, suggest that while it is an improvement over the kind of careerism of the '72-'74 period, greater introspection does not automatically lead to an interest in social change. Jewett says the tenor of the applications he has been receiving worries him somewhat, because he fears that unless college students (he believes Harvard applicants generally reflect the attitudes of the rest of the nation) become more motivated to social action, the nation will be stagnant in a few years, when these students become a politically apathetic group of adults.

Stephen A. Marglin, professor of Economics, and the Economics Department's only tenured radical, has what is perhaps a realistic attitude toward students' failure to show the kind of social commitment he would like to see, either in class or in their activities. "You can't divorce courses from society," he says. "There's always much more involvement when there's much more involvement in general--in politics, in society. Right now, there's very little involvement in anything. All that I or anybody else can do is to plant seeds that are probably going to lie dormant until the times are ripe; but if you don't plant the seeds, you don't have anything to grow from when times do change, and people do want to act."

It doesn't seem likely that anyone will fully understand the changes that have occured on campus over the last six years for some time to come, until they can be placed in some perspective. Students are less socially active, more conservative, more introspective. They still think about grades, but don't seem quite as worried about indecision about future careers. The days of radicalism are far behind us. But what comes next in this transitive community remains an open question.