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Revenge of the Nerds
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11850 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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8 / 1987 |
2,845 Words |
| Author
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Edward Shapiro
Edward Shapiro is professor of history emeritus at Seton Hall
University. He is completing a book on the Crown Heights
(Brooklyn, New York) riot of 1991. |
CAMPUS LIFE
Undergraduate Cultures from the End
of the Eighteenth Century to the Present
Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz
Alfred A.Knopf, 1987
331pp., $24.95
William Gerhardie once remarked that "there are as many fools at the university as elsewhere. But their folly has a certain stamp - the stamp of university training, if you like. It is trained folly." The American public first became conscious of this in the 1920s when football became a national craze, F. Scott Fitzgerald published This Side of Paradise, and collegians took to wearing raccoon coats and swallowing goldfish. Collegiate culture came into its own as a widespread phenomenon during the 1960s, when the nation experienced (and suffered) the results of mass higher education. By the end of the decade, there were over six million American college students. A century earlier there had been only fifty thousand students, less than the total number of students currently attending several individual midwestern state universities. Even in 1929, there were only one million students. The percentage increase in college attendance was also impressive. While less than 2 percent of those in the 18-21 age group were in college in 1869, in 1969 the number grew to over 40 percent. England and France, in contrast, were sending less than 10 percent of their young to college.
In view of this purported vast increase in wisdom among the American young, the Twenty-sixth Amendment to the constitution took effect in 1971, lowering the national voting age to eighteen
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