University of Virginia Library

A Young Man's Fancy

Judging from the warm breezes blowing
over the Grounds that have finally arrived
from whatever beneficent place sends them
our way each year, Spring is finally here. And
in Spring, the fancies of young men
traditionally desert the more prosaic pastimes
of and turn joyfully to thoughts of
love and splendor. Editorialists in college
newspapers might therefore be expected, since
we are young men, to turn their attentions to
similar matters. Somehow, though, our hearts
aren't in it this spring; this seems to be a
spring that will become merely an extension
of the winter of our discontent.

Perhaps every generation feels that the
burdens which are soon to be thrust upon it
and the problems it will have to face when it
claims its majority are such that they dwarf
the petty concerns of its predecessors. Even
so, there never seems to have been a time in
American life, and especially in American
student life, when despair, cynicism, and
nihilism so dominated the thinking of the
nation and its youth. People everywhere are
groping desperately for an understanding of
the new and ominous forces which seem to be
controlling their lives.

For the American student, the problem is
doubly desperate and doubly bewildering. He
exists, and has always existed, in a world
which has changed radically from the one in
which his parents were raised. He is asked to
adopt the system of values that guided his
parents through that other world. But he is
educated; he has been taught to think critically
about ideas presented to him. So he has
rejected many of the values that guided his
parents and their parents, because he has
found them irrelevant to this new and different
world which has been his only experience.
Even more significantly, he has decided that
much of his predecessors' ethic is good and
worth keeping. But he has also decided that in
many cases, his elders have hypocritically
chosen to ignore that ethic when it suited
their purposes to do so.

He has looked at this new and different
world, and he has decided that his elders have
spawned a burgeoning technology while
neglecting to form a rational system of ethics
to govern it. The technology of the atom has
given man the capability to destroy himself,
though he still relies on the old methods for
sustaining a community of nations. The in
creasing breadth of man's knowledge and the
increasing number of people capable of assimilating
some of it have not been coupled with
changes in the educational system which
would keep that system from the personalizing
dangers of the megaversity. Technology
has augmented our ability to produce food
and goods at an astonishing rate. It has not
augmented our ability to give each of our
citizens, regardless of race, his just share of
those goods.

No, this is not a spring for a young man to
rejoice in his existence, for this is a spring in
which his existence seems threatened by
forces beyond his control. And he can no
longer look to his elders to control those
forces that threaten him, for his elders seem
no more capable of understanding them or
controlling them than he is. His elders have
allowed systems and structures to evolve as
technological advances necessitated them, but
in allowing this, they rarely stopped to con
sider the human ramifications involved. Now
we are faced with a proliferation of systems
and complexes which seem to run us and
which defy our efforts to even understand
them. The "military-industrial complex,"
rather than any man or group of men makes
the decisions on foreign policy. "Business
interests" and "academic technicians" force
the universities to become assembly lines for
turning out educated cogs in the wheels, force
students to submit to an increasingly
impersonal education whose reward is realized
solely in grades issued from a computer.

Thus it is this feeling that the University
administrations and civil governments of our
society can no longer bring the principles they
espouse to bear on the system they have
created that leads to what has been loosely
termed the student movement. Not all students
take part in it. Some have accepted the
existing order. Some have merely given up
trying to combat it and have apathetically
resigned themselves to whatever the system
has in store for them. The student movement
consists of a third category, a group that
rejects what the system has to offer them, and
refuses to acquiesce quietly.

Students, however are a notoriously
disorganized lot on the national scale. More
over, they no longer have the easily recognizable
villains that afforded themselves to an
earlier generation. They have no more understanding
of the real dynamics of the system
than do the administrators who are its cogs.
So their protests become issue-oriented and
ephemeral, drawing on a vast reservoir of
discontent and unease. They protest the war,
the draft, and the university trustees because
these are easily understood villains. They
flock to politicians and public figures who
seem to come from outside the system's
establishment. And as the men to whom they
turn to for results - the politicians and
college presidents - prove increasingly unable
to modify the institutions to serve the community,
the students become increasingly frustrated
and increasingly radical. Their tactics
begin to work against the fruition of their
own goals.

Thus, love and splendor become increasingly
remote and increasingly as we sit
amidst the warm breezes of spring on the
Grounds. The problems that we will have to
face and solve - war, famine, racial justice,
providing a relevant education - continually
challenge our resources of imagination and
ingenuity. They must be solved, if future
springtimes are not to find a nation whose
abilities in some fields have destroyed its
quality of life, a nation in which reason has
been subverted by technology, a nation in
which men have lost the ability to govern
themselves.