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Smooching, Etc. In the '30s, a popular Tin Pan Alley song once told the world what happens "when it's dark on Observatory Hill." It still gets dark there, but most of the sex at Madison since the war has been domesticated. One out of every five students is married (prewar: one in 21). In the G.I. generation, sex doesn't even seem to be a favorite bull-session topic.
Morris Rubin, an alumnus, sums up: "This bunch doesn't feel the compulsion to boast about its conquests the way my generation did. Iwo Jima was all the proof of their manhood anybody required." One well-informed coed says: "As far as smooching, et cetera are concerned, there is considerable smooching—but not much et cetera."
Fun for 80¢. It is almost impossible not to have a good time at the University of Wisconsin. Without leaving the Union building, and with only 80¢ in his pocket, a student could take his pick last week of an art exhibit, a performance of Girl Crazy by the Wisconsin Players, a dance in soft-lighted Great Hall, a concert by the Marching Band, a community sing, a movie (Odd Man Out) or bowling. On Langdon Street, the Greeks were having their final white-tie-&-tails flings before Christmas vacation.
But if you ask ten Wisconsin students why they came to college, the odds are that nine of the centennial crop would reply, "To get a better job," or just "To get a job." When the G.I.s came back, the College of Engineering doubled in size. A new School of Commerce, set up in 1944, already has 1,235 students. Classes in philosophy are smaller than in 1940, though the university's enrollment has doubled in the same time.
Even the girls, who used to be the mainstay of the humanities, are going in more for home economics and the newer vocational majors (recreation, social work). Meg Rothermel, the 1948 Sweetheart of Sigma Chi, is planning to be a social worker. Dean of Women Louise Troxell finds girls much franker and surer about what they go to college for these days: "To get a job, and a husband, and very possibly both."
Prom King Politics. Plainly, Wisconsin 1948 is a transitional generation, half in and half over the G.I. era. "Politics" to many a Wisconsin student is once more coming to mean the election of Junior Prom King, instead of Harry Truman. Before the November elections, Bob LaFollette, 22-year-old grandson of "Old Bob," made speeches for MacArthur; there were about a dozen avowed campus Marxists, and even one Dixiecrat. A Daily Cardinal poll showed students about evenly split between Truman and Dewey; they were also vaguely internationalist, and convinced that Russia would have to be stopped. The Cardinal, though, seemed more exercised by such issues as racial discrimination at the University Boat House and whether or not Harry Stuhldreher should have been replaced as football coach.