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Hyndman's interest in the meeting of East and West began in junior high school, when he wrote a paper on the Gandhara art of India. Last summer he studied Chinese at Vermont's Middlebury College; there he met some South Vietnamese who opened his eyes to the cultural differences between the U.S. and Asia. By the time the U.S. began the heavy bombing of North Viet Nam, Hyndman was thoroughly disenchanted with the nation's war policy. He is now firmly convinced that U.S. military power offers the South Vietnamese "a worse alternative than Viet Cong control." From his study, of Asian history, he believes that the Vietnamese and Chinese are natural enemies—which to him means that the U.S. could safely abandon the war without fear of a Maoist takeover. Nonetheless, Hyndman is no hot-blooded activist. He considered the act of fellow Harvard students who kept a Dow recruiter captive in a room for seven hours last October "almost as tyrannous as the Army's policy in Viet Nam." And he does not regard his decision not to serve an act of disloyalty: "What I am patriotic to is a just nation and a just policy—when the nation changes from this, I find myself standing in opposition to it." As a sophomore, Hyndman developed a profound concern about racial prejudice on a hitchhiking trip to the annual spring beach-and-beer busts in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. When he and a Negro friend tried to check into a cheap hotel in Durham, N.C., a desk clerk barked: "Niggers can't live here." "I've never seen as much hate as that guy showed toward me," recalls Hyndman. His personal philosophy about what matters most can be summed up simply as: "It's humanity v. machinery—and human life v. death." In campus terms, Hyndman considers himself a rebel rather than a revolutionary. "Revolution," he says, "involves the same crimes as your tormentor's."
DARTMOUTH: The Tiniest B.M.O.C.
Except for his height (a tiny 4 ft. 9 in.), Dartmouth's Robert Reich could easily be taken for the classic Big Man On Campus. From a Republican family in New York's affluent Westchester County, he racked up a succession of A's in college, won a Rhodes scholarship, wrote and starred in campus plays, headed the student government. Yet he is in total rebellion against what he calls "status quo-ism: the feeling that order and status quo are the most important things—in the ghetto, in Southeast Asia and everywhere." Reich feels that his age group has been under tremendous pressure to excel in scholarship ever since Sputnik. But "all of a sudden, somewhere in there —for me in the sophomore year—we started to think about goals, where it was all leading." Everyone seemed trapped by sameness, he thought, and too many colleges offer monotonously similar educations. "What a drag. Not only have we all seen the same television programs, but we have all taken the same science and economics courses. We are going to have a nation of people who all think the same way."