Poisoned Ivy?

A notebook of campus woe

Here at last is the book for parents who have been bemused by the way their college-age children treat what was once regarded as academic Arcadia, the U.S. liberal arts college, as if it were a cross between a snake pit and a Marine boot camp. Lansing Lament's Campus Shock (Dutton; $8.95) is a reporter's notebook of horrors, gleaned from 675 interviews in the eight Ivy League schools, plus the University of Michigan, the University of Chicago, Stanford and Berkeley.

As Lament sees it, life in the early and mid-'70s in the $7,000-a-year Halls of Ivy was a round of rape and robbery and rising racial distrust, of crowding and cheating and grade grubbing and sexual anxiety, of pulverizing noise (from your roommate's stereo) and fear of future unemployment (for history and English majors particularly). Some of the causes are familiar. Heavy enrollment, due to simple greed plus the need to admit more women and blacks, sometimes led to tenement-like conditions in dorms originally equipped to handle half as many bodies.

Sexual permissiveness, and the belief that it is O.K. to disturb everybody else provided you're doing your own thing, plunged college students (as actors or witnesses) into time-consuming and emotionally exhausting domestic squalor.

"Taking a girl on is like taking on a fifth subject," said a Harvard sophomore.

Lament's avalanche of quotes and statistics is often devastating. "Cheating is a way of life here," one Penn student told him. By 1976 only half the undergraduates at Stanford would say they thought cheating was unjustifiable. In one year 4,500 books were stolen from the Berkeley library. When caught, college thieves and cheaters tended to say, "I didn't do anything that everyone else isn't doing." Faculties were not much help. Many, Lament reports, objected to taking a moral stand for fear of "sounding like scolds" to their students. As a University of Chicago professor confided, "We lack the language to teach right and wrong."

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