Boomers: The Cold-War Generation Grows Up (17 page)

Finally, college presidents agonized over the approval of desperately needed expansion projects before financing had been completed, and raided other schools for faculty
while attempting to foil raids against their own institutions. College executives who only a few years earlier had worried about smaller enrollments than expected now spent most of their waking hours dealing with the needs of a new generation whose numbers could barely be accommodated.

Even before Boomers were exposed to the social ferment of the campus of the late sixties, these students could see an era of change coming that would make their collegiate experience different from that of their older siblings. Yet the face of this change varied substantially across the range of the higher-education spectrum.

One of the most significant instructional developments in the period was directly related to the surge in student numbers. As colleges searched for new instructors to meet the growing need, graduate students were increasingly pressed into service as teaching fellows and teaching assistants. While many of them were young and energetic, they were also still students who had to manage their own assignments and examinations. Thus they often viewed their teaching duties as an imposition on their time. Also, a growing number of assistants and fellows in the sciences and mathematics were arriving in the United States from foreign nations with excellent minds but poor English-language skills, which made for torturous instruction in classes where concepts and facts were difficult to understand in perfect English. As class sizes grew and senior faculty avoided undergraduate classes in favor of research and doctoral seminars, more than a few students experienced the depersonalized atmosphere of huge lecture halls in which classes were taught by distracted, distant professors, with examinations graded by mechanical devices.

The gender makeup of classes was just beginning to change in a number of universities and colleges. Unlike early-twenty-first-century students who enter a higher education system where only 1 percent of institutions are open to a single gender, the Boomers entered college when nearly half of private schools were single-sex institutions and coeducation was still spotty and erratic at numerous public institutions. In 1964, for example, six of the eight Ivy League schools accepted only male undergraduates. The University of Pennsylvania featured coeducational classes with separately administered colleges for men and women, and only Cornell University accepted women with no restrictions. Outstanding female students who desired an Ivy education outside of Penn or Cornell could opt for “coordinate” women's colleges such as Radcliffe (Harvard), Pembroke (Brown), or Barnard (Columbia), or attend other “Seven Sister” schools such as Mount Holyoke, Bryn Mawr, and Vassar. Prominent Catholic universities, such as Notre Dame, Georgetown, and Villanova, were either exclusively male or allowed women into only a handful of majors. Villanova enrolled five thousand men in its Arts, Sciences, Business, and Engineering colleges while two hundred women enrolled in the School of Nursing were allowed to enroll in English, history, and science courses limited to their gender. Even some state universities separated men and women whenever possible. While the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill was open primarily to undergraduate males, females were expected to attend the Greensboro campus, which was essentially a women's college. The state of Florida was in the process of making both the University of Florida, formerly a men's school, and Florida State University, a women's
school, into coeducational institutions, with emphasis on the budding sports rivalry just beginning to develop at the two schools.

Students attending the majority of colleges that were coeducational by the mid-sixties discovered that differences in career goals continued to create classes that were dominated by one gender. Pennsylvania's flagship state school, Penn State, featured extensive programs in agriculture, mining, engineering, and business, which produced a campus where males outnumbered females by more than two to one. On the other hand, the commonwealth's fourteen “state teachers' colleges” focused on elementary education, library science, and home economics, which guaranteed a heavily female student population. While girls were already beginning to dominate high school honor societies and honor rolls, they were entering college at a time when selecting a major outside traditional fields such as nursing, education, or home economics was still something of an adventure. Yet by 1964 the career “rules” were no longer etched in stone, and walls of gender separation were just beginning to crumble in school and workplace.

As gender roles changed, so did social relationships, even if that trend was not fully noticeable early in the Boomer college experience. Unlike the somewhat amorphous and shifting social patterns of twenty-first-century universities, where “hanging out” and “hooking up” carry different meanings for different situations, the first Boomers entered a college environment where most students were actively seeking opposite-sex partners and at least tacitly auditioning candidates for marriage and family formation.

Coeducational colleges offered numerous opportunities to form dating relationships through common classes, university
or club social events, and joint social functions sponsored by men's and women's dormitories. At many schools fraternities and sororities were quite active. The 1970s film
Animal House
, which is set in 1962, offers a reasonable if exaggerated approximation of the fraternity system in place when the Boomers arrived at college.

While Greek organizations could be welcoming for students who successfully navigated the rush system, and provided a ready pool of potential boyfriends or girlfriends, there were generally not enough openings to accommodate all the students interested in auditioning for membership. Thus students on some campuses were forced into a potentially demeaning “independent” status, which forced them to craft a social life largely as outsiders, since the all-welcoming Delta House in the film was generally not an option on the real campus of the time.

The large minority of students attending single-sex colleges faced a more daunting task: attempting to meet appealing partners during a finite number of social encounters. Virtually every single-sex college sponsored “mixers,” in which bands, refreshments, and dancing attracted members of the opposite sex to come to the school for the evening. Even most rural colleges had a counterpart institution of the other gender within a reasonable distance, and, when necessary, buses could be dispatched to transport guests. One relatively remote New Jersey women's college offered students from men's schools free hors d'oeuvres, dinner in the college's baronial dining hall, and a free admission to the dance to compensate visitors for the distance traveled. Men's colleges in urban areas sponsored mixers that attracted not only female college students but similarly aged “working girls” who had entered careers after high school
and often found the prospect of meeting a “college man” an exciting idea.

The mixer scene produced large numbers of budding relationships, but the somewhat forced, formal nature of the process could be less rewarding than the more informal relationships developed by lab partners or study group members in a coed school. And couples enrolled at two different schools could experience long periods without physical companionship and frequent phone calls on erratic dorm phone systems that offered little or no privacy. In some respects, Boomer students who attended single-sex schools in rural areas found their social lives lagging far behind those of high school classmates who had opted for the workaday world and were now developing relationships much more rapidly than their “luckier” college counterparts.

The Boomers who entered college and made the transition from secondary school to higher education without academic dismissal or major psychological trauma were now enrolled in institutions poised for massive change during their college careers. Since the end of Camelot in their senior year of high school, a new president, an expanding war in Vietnam, and new versions of social consciousness were pushing colleges and college students into an unexplored world of change and confrontation. Yet if this new Great Society produced unanticipated challenges, it also dramatically affected children's lives in a wide range of ways, from enhanced educational opportunities to the exuberance of Beatlemania.

ON NOVEMBER
22, 1963, John F. Kennedy became immortal, not just for what he had done in life but for what he stood for in death—an unfulfilled dream of a prosperous, confident, envied America moving toward the last third of the twentieth century and the new millennium. The first Boomers would link themselves in a special way to that dream as the president died in their own year of transition from high school to college or career. Yet far more postwar children would be affected by the fact that the stature of the slain president allowed his successor to initiate a new dream that in one way or another touched almost every young person in the nation.

Five days after the fatal shots were fired in Dallas, a somber Texan stood behind the lectern of the House of Representatives and observed that “the greatest leader of our time has been struck down by the foulest deed of our times. All I have I would have given gladly not to be standing here today.” Yet now Lyndon Baines Johnson was president of the
United States, and after the shock of his predecessor's death had begun to fade, he found the energy to declare, “Now the ideas and ideal which he [Kennedy] so nobly represented must and will be translated into effective action.” Soon this former elementary and high school teacher would propose the legislation necessary to implement a “Great Society” that would affect the lives of all 76 million Boomers. As politicians debated a flurry of bills and community leaders named airports, stadiums, and schools for the slain leader, young Americans passed the mantle of charismatic celebrity from John Kennedy to four young Englishmen.

On Friday, February 7, 1964, Pan Am Flight 101 landed at recently renamed John F. Kennedy Airport in New York, and four modishly dressed young men almost scampered down the aircraft steps as security personnel barely held back thousands of screaming fans, most of whom had skipped school to see Paul McCartney, John Lennon, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr officially launch a British invasion of American youth culture. Two days later a live audience of several hundred bemused adults and ecstatic teens and preteens, and a television audience of 73 million, watched a stiff but cordial welcome by host Ed Sullivan as the Beatles played the first of five songs. Between the first chords of “All My Loving” and the final crescendo of “I Want to Hold Your Hand” nearly an hour later, the younger members of the live audience and their counterparts at home endured Fred Kaps's magic tricks, Frank Gorshin's impressions of Hollywood stars, and Tessie O'Shea's medley of Broadway tunes in order to bask in just under fifteen minutes of performance by four mop-headed Liverpudlians who would quickly entrance nearly every Boomer over the age of five. Within days of their third appearance on Ed Sullivan, the
Beatles would hold the top-four-selling songs and provide a musical beachhead for dozens of other British groups who would take America by storm.

It is impossible to overstate the impact the Beatles and other British acts had on almost any Boomer old enough to enjoy music. If the vigor and magic of the Kennedy presidency defined much of youth culture in the early sixties, Beatlemania became a focal point for Boomers in the middle of this tumultuous decade. Beyond Beatles songs, concerts, movies, and television appearances, the British invasion encouraged more than a few boys to grow their hair longer and adopt at least some elements of British youth fashion while a growing number of American girls looked to London for “smashing” styles and hairdos that changed the appearance of much of young America.

As Boomers lined up outside theaters in the summer of 1964 to watch the Beatles cavort in their first film,
A Hard Day's Night
, President Johnson was energetically transforming the promise of Kennedy's New Frontier into the reality of the Great Society. Almost a year earlier, some 250,000 marchers, perhaps 60,000 of them white, had descended on the sultry national capital to join in peaceful witness to the cause of civil rights. The voice that captured their attention belonged to Martin Luther King, Jr. This was the first time that most Americans had watched King deliver a full-length address, and in many respects his words that day were directed at the emerging Boomer generation, which would dominate the future America of his dream. His initial remarks about the manacles of segregation, the poverty of African Americans, and the horrors of police brutality quickly gave way to a dream of a new beginning “where sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be
able to sit down at the table of brotherhood.” At that moment King offered the nation a vision in which the spirit of brotherhood would eventually heal the wounds of racism and slavery, and many of the expectant participants in this future vision were young people watching the drama unfold on flickering television sets on this hot, late-summer afternoon.