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Paul Rogat Loeb. Generation at the Crossroads: Apathy and Action on the American Campus. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1994. 458 pages. $24.95.
Christopher Lasch. The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy. New York: W W Norton, 1995. 276 pages. $22.00.
Taylor Stoehr, ed. Crazy Hope and Finite Experience: Final Essays of Paul Goodman. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1994. 144 pages. $26.95.
David Damrosch. We Scholars: Changing the Culture of the University. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1995. 225,pages. $32.50 and $15.95.
In theory, college is voluntary: one consciously chooses to go. In reality few students understand why they're there. Some, of course, know they want to be doctors, lawyers, engineers, or architects. But that just changes the question. Even for these pursuits, bachelor's degrees weren't always required; in some countries they still aren't. Nor are they required for members of the corresponding trades: lab technicians, court stenographers, mechanics, carpenters. Yet the trades demand their own skills and sometimes even pay better. So, again, why college? Why am I, the future journalist, expected to be here, but not my cousin, the future pressroom foreman?
There are broad historical reasons, of course, just as there are reasons why people who would once have lived on farms or in urban enclaves now live in overdeveloped suburbs. In fact, the movement of the young into colleges might best be understood as another of our postwar mass migrations. Like any migration, it has created conditions we wouldn't otherwise have-new social arrangements that are now just the received state of things. In different ways, each of these recent books throws light on those arrangements, on campus and off; each is concerned with the tensions they flow out of and, often, help to make worse.
If there is a reason for being in college that most students have in common, it isn't exactly to please their parents, keep pace with peers, or train for better jobs. But it isn't quite anything else, either. I know some who would deny this-a colleague of mine, for instance, who claims that her students have come to learn "the System" so they can spend their lives fighting it. One thing Generation at the Crossroads does is confute such fantastical notions. Paul Rogat Loeb spent seven years...