(8 of 11)
McGuire, son of a former San Francisco newspaperman, explained that in the pursuit of grades, he had become "subject to a paralyzing mental machinery: if I did not study twelve hours a day, compose at the speed of 1,000 words an hour while writing a paper, go through required reading at 33 pages an hour, I was a failure. I pushed myself until I was more enchained than a Russian factory worker in the 1930s." His longing for human contact, he said, "would come at night as I walked home from the library. I would look at the lights in the windows and think to myself: behind those windows are people—real, live, human, fleshy, thinking, feeling, loving, despairing people. I am out here and they are in there. They will never come out here to me, and they would never allow me to come inside to them." McGuire punched through his "academic bag" last December. "I suddenly realized," he explains, "that I had not made a single friend in four years." He broke through by taking "sensitivity training" courses at Berkeley's Newman :iub Center and California's Esalen Institute. The way to change society, he now feels, is "to subvert it from the inside with the power of love and caring." He thus considers the hippies ineffective for dropping out, the activists wrong for "alienating the older generation from the younger." The campus revolutionaries "are so lost in their own idealism that they forget that those with other ideals are people too. Students must wake up and realize that what they want is not to tear down the universities—but to embrace each other."
NORTHWESTERN: Black + Basketball
Northwestern Senior Vernon Ford is under no illusions about why a highly selective private university wanted him: he is bright, black and a fine basketball player. Ford has found living that dual role — "as an athlete and as a black, but still an individual"—painfully difficult. Yet, as one of the key members of the militant Black Power movement on campus, he has helped make Northwestern aware of the Negro students' determination to carve out their own niche on white campuses. Last month, Ford was among 60 Negro students who camped in the university's business office for 36 hours and won promises to admit more Negro graduates of ghetto high schools and conduct courses in black literature and art.
Originally from Chicago's West Side ghetto, where his father is a machinist, Ford decided that the black college student "adjusts, conforms, compromises, and goes through a song-and-dance to get a degree that only qualifies him for nonexistent opportunities. He acts like the fraternity boy who barely makes it through hell week—he gets obsessed with the values of the system that has worked against him."