Mr. Boroff Examines American Colleges Without Much Skill

A little learning is a dangerous thing. In his new book, Campus U.S.A., David Boroff shows the effects of trying to apply a smattering of knowledge to an extremely difficult task. Armed with snatches of conversation overheard at the NYU faculty mixer, Boroff analyzes 10 American colleges, some great and some ungreat, and comes to several shattering inconclusions.

Boroff's main devices in illuminating the characters of the institutions he visits are the Meaningful Remark and the Significant Event. Always, when Boroff is trying to prove to a point, up pops "a pretty girl," "a usual observation," or "a symbol" to support him. This is not to say he is dishonest; but there is a great danger in treating an isolated remark or incident as typical of an entire institution.

Evidently, Boroff heard somewhere that American women often waste their talents. With this as his basis for discussion, he really does Smith dirt. "Smith professors view their students with a kind of exasperated admiration," Boroff says. "They respect the girls' skills and commitment to work, but they are deeply offended by their tendency to sell themselves short and settle for the drab goals of husband and ranch house."

He then has "a renegade Smithy who transferred to Sarah Lawrence" cattily observe, "They study hard and they suffer so. They take no pleasure in their work. That's why they run off to Yale on weekends. And they don't connect the academic with their lives." An equally nasty remark from "a sharp-eyed Brooklyn College senior" prefaces this insult from "a faculty member": "I sometimes imagine that I see these girls on a conveyor belt which shuffles them through four years of college... to the altar and the kitchen."

As part of the attack on marriage, Boroff damns Smith girls for "tame monogamy" in their dating habits, and accuses them of "intellectual pallor" and hopelessly middle-class tendencies.

Now there may be a lot of things wrong with Smith, but it is hard to see why girls between the ages of 18 and 21 aren't supposed to want to get married. (And why should a transfer student and a girl from Brooklyn College who may well envy that hopeless middle class be quoted as authorities.) Boroff has taken what may have begun as a reasonable contention, and distorted it into an irrational cavil. The time is not yet upon us when marriage and the bearing of children are considered ignoble goals. Boroff himself admits that "Smith alumnae are impressively productive, alert, and far-flung."

In a chapter on the University of Michigan graduate school, in which he concentrates on women, Boroff again paints a gloomy picture. He relates "the hideous portrait of the hungry female': around thirty, with a Ph.D. or close to it, and no husband. She throws parties to which she invites young men in the hope they will come alone... The hapless hostess...almost invariably 'ends up on the floor quite tight, snuggled up to one of these young men.'

Boroff blames matters like this on general prejudice, and predicts, "As more women join the ranks of graduate students, it will no longer seen a heresy when they devote themselves to the intellectual life. The gates of the ghetto will swing open." But nothing, not even the great enlightenment Boroff hopes for, is going to keep an unmarried, 30-year-old female Ph.D. candidate from feeling that she is missing something.

The author proposes a few other mangled theories. Somebody once told him that all this talk about low student faculty ratios is nonsense, so he tends to condemn colleges that have them. And for some reason, he equates campus Bohemian movements with intellectual awareness.

Though Campus U.S.A. suffers from amateur theorizing, and though it has most of the faults shared by books based on a series of magazine articles, it occasionally raises a telling point. Boroff is most effective when he writes of the lack of life and enthusiasm in college teaching. His attacks on scholarly journals and the pressure to publish are bright spots in an uneven but occasionally useful book.