Student Without Smiles

There are many subjects one is tempted to write about when given an opportunity to offer "predictions and recommendations" for the 1980s. The coming decade, I believe, will be a period of extraordinary turbulence in the world, brought about, in large measure, by the failure of the political leadership of the great powers to face courageously the problems before us. Ahead lies a time when the authority of the state and of law will be challenged as it had not been since the dawn of the modern era, a time of fiscal and economic upheavals, and, possibly, of yet more mass slaughter on the scale perpetrate by Nazi Germany and Communist Cambodia.

I have taught at Harvard since 1948. My experience thus spans more than a generation, and among my current students may be children of those I had taught 30 years ago. There is, therefore, a basis for comparison.

In some respects I find the present generation of university students more appealing. They are more open-minded and individualistic as well as less prone to social, religious, and racial prejudice. When I was a college student in the 1940s, there prevailed in this country quite rigid codes of social behavior and personality models one was expected to emulate, both of which, coming from Europe, I found ridiculous and annoying. During the past 30 years, in part due to strong influences emanating from continental Europe, American youth has emancipated itself from these conventions.

And yet, compared to the students of the 1940s and 1950s, the present generation of students seems less happy. Undergraduates then laughed much more readily; they seemed less anxious and suspicious of their elders. It first struck me in the mid-1960s how difficult it has become to elicit laughter from a classroom. This is no longer quite true today, but the spontaneous gaiety seems gone.

Why? The reason cannot be economic conditions which, if anything, are better today. The disciplinary restraints under which undergraduates once chafed have all but disappeared. The threat of nuclear war was fresher and in some ways more palpable in the immediate post-Hiroshima period.

It is possible, of course, that the young anticipate the coming turbulence, that the future already casts its shadow on the present. Perhaps, like some forms of wildlife, they have the capacity instinctively to anticipate an unusually severe winter, and make for it all sorts of preparations.

This may be true, but it does not seem to be the whole explanation. The main explanation may lie in the younger generation's increasing inability to cope with a situation of ever-greater choices with ever-fewer standards of guide them in their decisions.

The student generation of the 1940s and 1950s lived within fairly rigid social and other constraints which, though often violated, were not in themselves much questioned. Ethical norms and professional goals were set within a framework of widely shared standards.

Now the constraints are largely gone, but so are the ethical and professional standards. For a handful this is perhaps the best of all worlds. For most, it results in a state of confusion from which the majority seek escape in self-indulgence of all sorts, and a minority in political or religious fanaticism. But neither solution is satisfactory.

I do not mean to argue that the extension of freedom of choice in and of itself robs man of self-confidence, although there is some truth in this proposition. (I well recall the sense of elation experienced upon being inducted into the army because there one's responsibilities were precisely defined and almost no discretion was given in the choice of means). It is rather that the greater the freedom of choice, the greater the need for culture, that is, for knowledge of the reasons for and the consequences of various actions as recorded.

The vast majority of us do not possess the intelligence, the imagination, or the spiritual courage to create for ourselves comprehensive ethical systems. We require guides. I believe that most modern college students, especially those of middle class background enrolled at prestige institutions, not only have little knowledge of past human experience but, worse yet, have no sense that that experience is in any sense relevant to their own lives. They are culturally uprooted.

True, all our students are exposed willy nilly, through compulsory courses to a great deal of the human heritage, whether literary, artistic, or historical. But through all my years of teaching I have had the impression that the knowledge thus acquired touches neither the hearts nor the minds of students: the better ones pick it up as a sort of intellectual baggage, as they might a professional or athletic skill; the others slough it off the instant the relevant final examination is over.

I find it difficult to imagine, for instance, that a contemporary American college student faced with some major personal tragedy would think of turning for consolation to the Book of Job. Or that he would look for philosophical detatchment from the vicissitudes of daily life on the wise pages of Montaigne. Or seek to understand nature through the verses of a Romantic poet.

Why this should be so is perhaps the fundamental problem of contemporary America which deserves much more attention than it receives. Cultural deprivation, in the sense of a whole people, and espcially its youth, being progressively cut off from the sources of human and national experience, appears to me to the the principal form of poverty in this country. Among the affluent and educated is the main source of disorientaion and unhappiness. Among others, it is the stimulus to aimless rage and mindless vandalism.

This, rather than the political or economic outlook, seems to me to explain why it is becoming so rare to see what Einstein called the lovelist sight in the world: a smiling face.

Richard Pipes is Baird Professor of History.