NYT Estimates College Includes 5% Intellectuals

Intellectuals "whose horizons stretch beyond graduate school and career" constitute only five per cent of the Harvard student body, a teacher at New York University said yesterday.

Writing in the New York Times Magazine, David Boroff, an associate professor of English, said that Harvard nevertheless qualified as a university where such intellectuals "flourish." "Scholar-gypsies who follow not the curriculum but their own intellectual bent" also thrive at Columbia, Berkeley, Wisconsin, and N.Y.U., Boroff reported.

"The mood of the college intellectual is a curious mixture of hedonism and careerism, skepticism and small faith, Coolness and decency, social commitment and political caution," he said. Although the intellectuals are "far too sophisticated" for the beast' "simple-minded gestures" of revolt, bohemianism "has been assimilated into the main stream of their life," he added.

One sign of this is "a middle-aged worldliness about sex" in which "the prevailing philosophy is a mixture of sexual celebration and cautions clinicism." Pornography "has become part of the cultural landscape...but young people are no longer exercised about it as an issue," Boroff found.

"If there is one thing that unites college intellectuals...it is their recognition of intellectual abundance and of the multiplicity of their options." Boroff continued. Because intellectuals feel that they have inherited "an affluent world," he said many show a "decline of standards of dress and a casualness in behavior sometimes verging on rudeness."

He attributed the decline partly to "changing class composition" at many colleges. At Harvard, he said, "lower-middle-class students...no longer feel a need to ape upper-class politesse" because they are "conscious of their statu