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Though, as tomorrow's historians, they may ultimately credit their elders with a certain degree of prowess in staving off thermonuclear war, many pop-psych their growing pains in terms of the atom. "We're the Bomb Babies," says Los Angeles City College Student Ronald Allison, 23. "We grew up with fallout in our milk." The hyperbole may sound sentimental, but because of the Bomb, some Now People reach their teens feeling that they are trying to compress a lifetime into a day.
Despite unprecedented academic and social pressures, the young on campus are carefully keeping their options open. (After all, it was Kierkegaard who said: "The desire to avoid definition is a proof of tact.") From Columbia to U.C.L.A., the shift is away from specialized subjects such as engineering and business administration and toward the humanities: English, history, political science. In particular, engineering, once a burgeoning discipline, is in sharp decline as a major subject: last year nearly a third of the engineering openings in the U.S. went unfilled. A new field of interest is urban planning, for today's young are committed as was no previous generation to redeeming the social imperfections that have ired and inspired the New Muckrakers: Ralph Nader (Unsafe at Any Speed), Richard Whalen (A City Destroying Itself), Michael Harrington (The Other America).
For the most altruistic, there are the Peace Corps and the 14 domestic service programs. "Here is a real, positive outlet," says Gibbs Kinderman, 23, who with his wife Kathy, 24, daughter of Historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr., directs a poverty program in Appalachia. Laurance Rockefeller Jr., 22, great-grandson of John D., obliquely justifies his work as a $22.50-a-week VISTA volunteer in Harlem: "Beyond affluence, what?" Answers Co-Worker Tweed
Roosevelt, 24, great-grandson of Teddy:
"Individualism."
Death & Transfiguration. The search for individual identity is as old as the generational gap. Athens and Rome both fondly cosseted and firmly curbed their children. Youth did not achieve a degree of social and political freedom until the 12th century. A rebellious band of University of Paris students decamped to Oxford and established a new and freer university; soon their idea spread throughout Europe, along with an entire youth subculture of drinking, wenching, dueling and an arcane language, a bastardized Latin eminently suited for drinking songs. In Italy, students formed guilds and hired professors (granted only one holiday a year), dictated the curriculum, and at Bologna even insisted that their teachers speak at the double in order to get their money's worth.
In the eyes of many a modern university protester, this was the golden age of education. The essential debate between Lernfreiheit, student freedom, and the Anglo-Saxon tradition that the college stood in loco parentis, was first articulated in Germany in the late 18th century, and later drew some 9,000 American students eager to endorse the new freedom. The issue is still being fought on American campuses.
The transition from the free university of the Middle Ages to the disciplined college of the Renaissance heralded the birth of a new concept: the prolonged and