Handlin Raps Youth's Quest For 'Security'

Harvard College is muggy with modest ambitions today; the postwar generation seems to welcome the shackle of orthodoxy, directing its ambitions not towards monumental accomplishments but toward comfortable positions in a bureaucracy.

Oscar Handlin, associate professor of History, decries this situation in an article for this month's "Atlantic Monthly" entitled, "Yearning for Security."

Recalling his generation of the early thirties. Handlin notes a deep concern with individual self-development, free expression, and social progress. They too were realists, as some describe the postwar generation. But their realism left room for continuing experiment and an element of non-conformity.

By contrast, this generation seems to delight in dogma. Handlin reluctantly observes "all the eager young faces looking up at the platform, waiting to be told what to believe."

Security and conformity seem to be the aims of the present younger generation. The "tragic divorce of youth from liberalism" is another sign of this tendency. Whereas years ago, Washington looked carefully at the ideas of youth, today "Washington would be as little inclined to regard the ideas of youth as youth is to look for ideas in Washington," Handlin says.