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Plufort College / 19 in families, hobbies, peer groups, and alternative or mainstream schools, will eventually have to be realized. Furthermore, the students’ skepticism and ambivalence toward the appropriate paths to occupational success and personal fulfillment, often directed at the schools they are attending, is complicated by an awareness of shrinking opportunities for jobs and their parents’ anxieties about the economy and their own and their children’s future.8 Responding to the problematic economy, as well as their new-middleclass experience, these youth anticipate further encroachments on their free­ dom and the probable costs of success. Soon to be or already saddled with edu­­ cational debt, fearful of selling out and being co-opted, and fundamentally ambivalent toward the choices their parents have made and they will eventually have to consider, these students anticipate redemption through their higher education. The directions that progressive liberal arts colleges have taken since World War II are in part a response to the successive dilemmas of new-middleclass youth. In order to be attractively competitive, the higher academies have had to claim that in their curriculum and community life they transcend some of the more glaring imperfections that their faculty, administrators, and students attribute to the “real world.” For those prospective students who have already undergone religious and secular conversions, the decision to attend one of these small, progressive liberal arts colleges is often an attempt to escape from, avoid, or delay co-optation into the bureaucratic society. Seeking a wide variety of redemptive paths, they hope to live out some idealized image of spiritual life in a secular community. Yet they simultaneously want at least to be prepared for the option of joining the “real world.” Through an endlessly refined collaboration among faculty, administrators, and students, the liberal arts college becomes a laboratory in which all of the opportunities, ambiguities , and problems of new-middle-class life can be explored by its youth. The Regional Atmosphere Nestled in the hills of a rural, tourist region is a small liberal arts college called Plufort. Vaguely similar to Hampshire, New College, Oberlin, Bard, Carlton, Evergreen, Marlboro, Reed, Antioch, Goddard, and Bennington, Plufort College, in its competition for students, attempts to distinguish itself from these and other private academies of higher learning. Plufort’s sparse but expansive campus of traditional regional architecture is bordered by a few family farms, aristocratic estates, and clusters of traditional and working-class trailers and shacks found on the back roads of the township.9 Most of the area surrounding the college, however, is dotted with converted farms, estates, and old and modern houses that reflect the environmental and social fantasies of successive generations of new-middle-class and upper-class ­ vacationers 20 / Part I and migrants who, since the end of World War II, have transformed the village in which Plufort resides, as well as surrounding Evergreen County, into a new-middle-class region. Visible in the 1950s but accelerating in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, waves of urban, suburban, and exurban corporate managers, professionals, professors , artists, antiwar activists, environmentalists, feminists, retirees, and youth embarking on back-to-the-land and numerous religious, cultural, political , and alternative occupational directions migrated to Evergreen County. The common fuel propelling this largely new-middle-class migration was a rejection of the very urban, bureaucratic, industrial, patriarchal American society and its foreign policy that had been the basis of the migrants’ affluence and cultural ascendancy. These migrants assumed that despite their socialization in urban and suburban families, schools, and communities, and despite their participation in mainstream corporate, governmental, and professional service occupations, they could make a radical break with their past and begin anew. Fleeing racially explosive, crime-ridden, and polluted cities; sterile suburbs; oppressive families; corrupt universities; bureaucratic work; and the Vietnam War, these secularly born-again migrants continued their protest and founded back-to-the-land, New Age, artistic, revolutionary, feminist, and educational communes, collectives, and co-ops. They bought family farms, old estates, abandoned factories, town houses, and country stores and converted them into organic farms; food co-ops; health food stores; alternative schools; colleges; restaurants; health centers; theaters; music festivals ; and craft, specialty, and energy businesses. The migrants also found jobs in an older, more traditionally new-middle-class and upper-class corporate , educational, and professional service and small-business sector that was responding to the migratory and increasingly converted new-middle-class market. Despite the fact that this migratory movement attracted people from all social classes, these new, expanded...

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