(2 of 4)
In Wisconsin's centennial year there are 18,623 students enrolled at Madison, from Edna Aaness to Norris Zvniecki, from 47 states and 57 countries. About one-fourth of them are girls.* The centennial's bumper crop had outgrown dormitories, boarding houses, and the fraternities and sororities on Langdon Street, spilling over into Army barracks, an ordnance works and three trailer camps. It now costs about $1,000 a year to go to college in Madison, for board, room and tuition, with not much left over for beer, dates and phonograph records.
More than half the students are being helped through school by the G.I. Bill of Rights, but the 745 ex-G.I. freshmen this fall were a new sort, who had never heard a gun fired in anger and had served mostly as occupation troops.
Uncertainties. Over in Sterling Hall, silver-haired little Professor Selig Perlman, 60, a top economist, is sorry to see the veterans on their way out. Says Perlman: "I liked the returned G.I.s very much; you could talk to them. They were rather fed up with particularism and intellectual isolation; they wanted to see the whole picture . . ."
Adds Classicist Walter R. Agard: "Their determination to get something out of Wisconsin has been positively painful . . . A much more solid, substantial crowd than after the first war. They went after their problems hard, and not too optimistically . . . Uncertainty is the nearest thing to a common banner. They'd like to be assured, and can't be. That's part of the disillusionment."
History Professor William Hesseltine files a minority report: "I was considerably happier over the generation of the '30s. These veterans have been harder workers—but except in technique, they're not as good. They don't have the quick, keen intellect or the inquiring disposition . . . The slogan of the '30s was 'Oh, yeah?' —a general, basic skepticism. This generation wants to believe something. It is looking for a quick and easy answer."
Convertibles v. Textbooks. Once it was considered hilarious when the engineers kidnaped the law president, and paraded him up & down State Street in a monkey cage stolen from Vilas Park Zoo. The returning G.I. generation had little heart and less time for such pranks; it hit the books with a sense of urgency, of "lost" years to make up. The G.I.s did well: they consistently studied harder, and averaged higher grades, than nonveterans.
Now there are signs of a letdown. In the Badger Tavern, an off-campus hangout, ex-G.I. Bob Miller remarked one night last week: "Some blame it on the talk about another war, some say we're just tired. Whatever it is, there seems to be more cutting of classes this year, more playing around, and less work." President Harold W. Stoke of Louisiana State University, who once taught at Wisconsin, returned there recently and observed: "If you take a freshman at college and give him a convertible and a textbook, you have an uneven contest."