Flippant Revolt

The rebellion of youth and its suppression by the constituted authorities mark the end of the present academic year. Spring always brings its crop of student literary revolutions, but this year the percentage of more notable engagements runs unusually high. Within the past few weeks four student periodicals in the Northeastern States have felt the administrative axe after publication and at least one other has been stified before birth.

There is scarcely a college in the country which has not produced some sign of symbol of student ferment during the present college year. Here it takes the form of a campaign against compulsory chapel, there it is advice to the Trustees and Faculty as to how to run the college, again it is a barbed critique of the mental habits of the students themselves.

Five or ten years ago undergraduate dissent had a distinctly economic tinge Radicalism in the colleges was a favorite subject for academic excursions of alarmed investigators, in and out of official position. But today it is not economic and social change that has captured the imagination of the dissentient minority. It is something far more sophisticated, far more worldly-wise. Socialism has given place to Menckenism: assertion to negation, political enthusiasm to the religion of militant cynicism. As one experienced radical campaigner in, the colleges put it, Scot; Fitzgerald is more revered than Scott Nearing in undergraduate circles of the intellectual elite. Apparently economic and political radicalism has fled from the flippant milieu of the undergraduates, to the more earnest atmosphere of the theological seminary and the Y. M. C. A.

It is not the profiteer and the capitalist who stirs college youth to critical expression in these days so much as George F. Babbitt, his rotarian friends and the hosts of the "stodgy" and the commonplace. The Opposition in college today is not composed of the rigid economic dogmatists of yesterday with fixed ideas on the distribution of wealth, labor unions and the revolution, but rather is it made up of the care-free, mentally and morally loose-jointed "flapper" whose twin passions are disrespect and personal nonesty and whose favorite word is "moron." It is all very gay and most earnestly flippant. Evans Clark.   In The New York Times Magazine.