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Web Exclusives:
Under the Ivy April 6, 2005: Three
years and out?
A few issues ago I wrote about young artists at Princeton in the 1970s: a weaver, a stained-glass artist, a ceramicist. (The weaver, it should be noted, went on to become a doctor.) I thought the PAW article on the group captured the spirit of the 1970s very nicely, especially editor Lanny Jones ’66’s take that the crafts provide “a refuge from the oppressive intellectualism at Princeton” and “a means of striking back at a machine-tooled, consumer society.” A few months later, though, PAW ran a series that encapsulates another distinctive aspect of the decade: generation clash. Towards the end of his tenure at Princeton, President Robert Goheen created a “Commission on the Future of the College,” to be headed by Marvin Bressler, chairman of the sociology department. In November 1971 PAW ran some significant excerpts from the commission’s report. Most notable was the recommendation that Princeton adopt a three-year course of study, with each year broken into trimesters and a “limited option” to pursue a fourth year. One of the many reasons for this proposal was simply the length of time, in terms of their lives, that college students spend in school: “The inordinate length of the interval between kindergarten and the final degree imposes penalties on students in the form of high educational costs, deferred income, and psychological strains that arise because of the lag between biological maturity and socially defined adulthood.” Bressler’s group also concurred with some of the findings of the contemporaneous Carnegie Commission on Higher Education, which found, among other societal shifts, that elementary and high schools had improved, more students were taking advantage of graduate school, jobs had changed, and young people were reaching “physiological and social maturity at an earlier age.” PAW happily printed responses from alumni on the proposals. The first, titled, “But Mr. Bressler…”, summed up many of the problems and worries that earlier generations had about the, well, hippie generation. Writer Thomas Wertenbaker ’43, a longtime secondary school teacher, bemoaned the lowering of academic standards. “In times of bewilderment and change I hope Princeton remains a community of scholars offering a liberal education to those who want it. I hope it will continue in the humanistic tradition to interpret the past, illumine the present, and prepare young minds for the future. “Yet what I keep hearing about these days are ‘flexibility,’ fewer lectures, ‘options,’ cars, girls, ‘alternatives,’ no Saturday classes, ‘pass-fail’, fewer or shorter courses, ‘liberalized’ requirements, and of course ‘relevance.’ These are called ‘reforms’ or, euphemistically, ‘meaningful change,’ and they seem either student-inspired or inspired to meet student apathy, resistance, and rebellion.” Concluding, Mr. Wertenbaker wrote, “Education begins with curiosity and desire. It entails humility, patience, labor, and enthusiasm – qualities that, among today’s young, seem in short supply. … I says nuts to the ‘Now’ generation; let them shape up or go to Yale! … Never sell Princeton short!” Neither “side” won the battle, of course. While Bressler’s
overall proposal was never adopted, many of the suggestions Mr.
Wertenbaker railed against in the above passage were. Despite these
erosions of tradition – or more accurately, perhaps, evolutions
of academic curricula, I feel certain that Professor Bressler would
say today that Princeton has, by and large, maintained Mr. Wertenbaker’s
“humanistic tradition.” The Now Generation both shaped
up – and shaped – Princeton’s future.
Jane Martin ’89 is PAW's former editor-in-chief. You can reach her at paw@princeton.edu
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