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Pinned & Engaged. The new morality of the college senior holds no brief for society's sexual taboos. Linda LeClair, Barnard's celebrated light housekeeper, is no rarity in her generation. Yet nearly all students argue that promiscuity is not on the rise. What they take for granted is sex among couples who consider themselves "pinned," engaged, or just plain in love. Honest relationships now, they contend, will lead to better marriages later on. And while students are increasingly aware that LSD and Methedrine are dangerous, marijuana has become an accepted part of college culture. For many, it simply provides a more illuminating kind of high than alcohol does.
Penn Coed Lucy Conger refers to her class as "the silver-platter generation." No economic depression clouds their horizon, and most students seem to accept the inevitability of luxuries with patrician assurance. In fact, the degree of affluence is astonishingly high: at the University of Texas, for example, nearly a third of this year's seniors come from families earning $20,000 a year. Indifferent to monetary success, a surprisingly large number of graduates are planning to enter such service vocations as teaching, social work, urban planning or small businesses, where they hope to define their own destiny. Many resent bureaucracy and bigness, and are turned off by corporate recruiters who speak of high salaries rather than the chance for creativity. Yet even within large institutions, concedes Sarah Lawrence's Sarah Loenberg, it is possible for a person to build "a smaller world by touching a few people."
Self-Conscious & Serious. The Class of '68 combines an idealism with a cynicism about society's willingness to embrace their ideals. The graduates do not speak with a common voice but with common candor, sometimes naively and too glibly, often with a deep faith in the perfectibility of man. In their self-conscious seriousness, they seem to be trying to live up to French-Poet Paul Claudel's contention that "youth is not made for pleasure but for heroism." Some of the demanding and perceptive students who best express the special things that their class wants to say:
U.C.L.A.: Bruin with a Bite