REBEL

2. The Conversion: Ann Arbor, 1957-1961

23 The Conversion: Ann Arbor 1957–1961 Ann Arbor is one of the classic college towns where the sixties generation first commingled, where it was inspired and then alienated, and where it formed its distinct identity. It was the birthplace of Students for a Democratic Society, the Peace Corps, and the Vietnam teach-ins. None of this could be anticipated on the morning in September 1957 when my father drove me there. The leaves were brilliantly changing colors as we passed over the Huron River, by the charming arboretum, and through the shaded old neighborhoods toward the towers of the university. I felt a nervous excitement at the prospect of my sudden independence. With its twenty-thousand students trudging through its sprawling domain, the university was vastly more imposing than the cloistered culture of Royal Oak only fifty miles away. After dropping off my belongings, including one gray suit, a tennis racket, and my first shaving kit, and checking into the registrar’s office, we shook hands and said good-bye, smoothing over the moment’s magnitude, showing no emotion while promising to call each other regularly. In those days, large research universities like Michigan were beginning to dominate the national academic scene. After the Sputnik launching in 1957, the federal government began pouring vast sums into scientific research, accelerating an emphasis on research, scholarly publications, and scientific method, even in the “softer” disciplines of sociology, psychology, and political science. Providing a quality liberal arts education for undergraduates became distinctly secondary in the research university’s priorities. At the same time, unprecedented numbers of my generation were enrolling in universities; total enrollments doubled from 3.7 million to 7.8 million by the end of the decade (and kept climbing to 9.6 million by 1973). Setting a tone which has continued to prevail, the universities adopted 2. 2. Rebel 24 what Alexander Astin has called the “reputational” and “resources” definitions of excellence. Campus achievement was based on numbers of prestigious researchers, scholarly publications, PhDs, national security contracts, laboratory square footage, big-ten championships—everything but the best-quality education for the two thirds of the students who were undergraduates. This shift was noted by Clark Kerr, president of the University of California, in a controversial book, The Uses of the University. His own university, Kerr pointed out, was the “world’s largest purveyor of white mice” and would “soon have the world’s largest primate colony”; in addition , it had one hundred thousand students, including thirty thousand at the graduate level, but spent “much less than one third of its expenditures directly on teaching.” Labeling the new multipurpose educational conglomerate a multi-versity, Kerr was sensitive enough to see it was a “confusing place for the student” who “has problems of establishing his identity and sense of security within it . . . the casualty rate is high . . . the walking wounded are many.” But he also saw the multi-versity as inevitable and was optimistic at the end of the fifties that “employers are going to love this generation . . . they are going to be easy to handle. There aren’t going to be any riots.” Kerr and others like him clearly underestimated the conflict for new students like myself between our heady expectations and the reality of student life. There was a kind of congested loneliness on the campus of Ann Arbor. Educational historian Frederick Rudolph said of the generation then entering college that we knew the “experience of being abandoned,but somehow the sensations of self-reliance never seemed to follow.” Throngs of incoming freshmen like myself, leaving home for the first time, were required to live in massive, unimaginative dormitories that reminded us of urban public housing projects. Making us feel like dots on a grid, the dorms, called quadrangles, were divided into floors, corridors, and numbered cell-like rooms just large enough for two persons. At Ann Arbor, there was North Quad, South Quad (where I lived), East Quad, and West Quad. Nearly thirteen hundred young men were cramped into my sterile quad, arbitrarily assigned to roommates, whether we preferred each other’s company or not. An eleven PM curfew was imposed. The cafeteria food was processed and served with, it seemed, as little flavor or nutritional value as possible. After freshman year, students moved out and began to discover that the surrounding community was just as curiously lacking in adequate student services. Off-campus housing was hard to find; parking was scarce; even the libraries lacked enough seats...