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THIS HAS BEEN AN EXTRAORDINARY AND TUMULTUOUS DECADE FOR the Academy. Nor is there any reason to assume that the current lull in activity marks the end of discord on campus. One of the consequences has been a burgeoning corps of campus watchers and a voluminous increase in the literature dealing with students and the campus.
It is with some reluctance that I join this swell of "campusologists" and "studentologists." The hesitancy I feel is focused around two factors. The first is that I am in agreement with the critic who said that the massive literature of this field does not need yet one other "I was bravely there when the excitement happened" paper.
My second reluctance stems from the fact that I remain critical of the literature on youth. It is a presumably scientific literature—most of which is found in the daily press and popular magazines. It is essentially a polemic literature, one filled with exhortations, one that I would describe as scientists writing editorials. I have no quarrel with scientists trying to inform the general public of their scientific work; I consider that their duty. I have no quarrel with polemic among scientists, but I question scientists cloaking their editorial opinion in a spurious and misleading sense of scientism.
In this literature, students in general and radical students in particular are at one and the same time described as sick or sane; alienate