A New Set of Labels

"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 manques."

Some are "activists," who express their moral simplicity and indignation by furiously waving Viet Cong flags, spending a summer helping to register Negroes in Mississippi. The activist, in essence, lacks firm commitment and seeks justification in highly personal protest against what he considers an immediate, tangible wrong. The main aim of the activist is to "stand for something," but his program is usually shor-range. The success of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement spelled its collapse; it had lost its meaning.

Then there are the "disaffiliates," the unconscious existentialists, who take their cues, whether they know it or not, from Heidegger rather than Camus. They are "too pessimistic and too firmly against the System to demonstrate." Their protests are consequently private. They are the alienated, the "beatniks, the bohemians, the LSD crowd," who turn to drugs in "search for intensification of experience." For some, only the "intense drug-assisted subjectivity is real."

Finally, there are the "underachievers," those who reject themselves rather than society. They are the school dropouts, the would-be suicides, the defeated. They seek to express their subconscious personal protest "against parental, academic and social pressures" in deliberate failure.

Tomorrow's Privatists. Despite the obvious difference between the dominant professionalist and the minority of disaffected dissenters, they have much in common. All are "non-ideological," distrustful of dogma, essentially privatists. All seek the meaning of life in "a personal, existential statement."

For this reason, says Keniston, those who anticipate a coming generation of "adults committed to social reform" are mistaken. The civil rights marchers of today, the Vietniks and the sit-in enthusiasts will turn into tomorrow's privatists. The Berkeley students marched off to jail for sitting in the Administration Building will ten years from now live in comfortable suburban homes, have professional jobs, be parents of two or three children. And they will be wondering "what on earth they were doing in Sproul Hall."

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