Foreign Correspondent

FROM THE PEOPLE who brought you Lamont Library comes this addled admixture of hysteria and laborious detail called Campus Shock, which leaves you with what Daniel Webster called that "miserable interrogatory". "What is all this worth?" Well, not a whole lot. Lansing Lamont '52 has written a book which will be noteworthy, if at all, only in the quickness of its declension to the remainder heap over at Barnes & Noble, or its ability to heat a small room at Fahrenheit 451.

Lamont gives us what his publishers call "a firsthand report on college life today." Feeling around with his First Hand, Lamont discovered that there was a "dark side" to college life, that people didn't just row to Ivy Championships--they had problems, suffered from career pressures, sexual pressures. Just like anyone else. Eureka! Aflush with the joy of discovery, Lamont set his wisdom machine to work and came up with a program involving the end of grade inflation (a grade recession?), the fostering of alternate career routes, the institution of single-sex dorms, God-Knows-what-else...

Admittedly, this is not a complete exposition of Lamont's argument. But that argument seems inherently worthless because it is not, as touted, "first hand," but secondhand, the result of "more than 650 interviews." Throughout, Lamont comes across as an interloper, a strange wanderer on the outside looking in. The punch line goes, "I was there--I know." Well, Lamont wasn't there, and it results in some embarrassing misperceptions. Lamont repeatedly yaps about the "crush in the libraries." What crush? The only crush I've ever seen at Harvard is in Q-world's pinball arcade during reading period.

Even worse, Lamont's interloping secondhand technique results in some slanderous inaccuracies. For example, Lamont scorns a professor at Brown who taught students about espionage but "never asked (the students) to consider the morality of it all." That professor is Lyman Kirkpatrick, former executive director of the CIA and perhaps the most moral man ever to serve in a high echelon there. Moral considerations were central to the course, and moral discussions were so long and so frequent that someone half-jokingly suggested the course be offered in the Philosophy Department. Welcome to journalism, fella.

Part of the problem stems from the people Lamont seems to have talked to, or enjoyed talking to, or remembered talking to. This man has radar for the asshole and sonar for the emotional cripple. Consider this quote from a Harvard sophomore: "Taking on a girl is like taking on a fifth course." Or this passage:

"You throw up just before a test, then spend four days in the bathroom with diarrhea waiting for your score," said a Columbia senior. Others wake up before dawn in cold sweats or were seized with hallucinations. One member of Harvard's class of 1978 tossed on his bed all night before a math final, imagining himself as King Richard in Ivanhoe, doomed to a perpetual spear-throwing contest in which he always had to outdistance his opponents or suffer, death.

What can you say about these people? This isn't campus shock, this is inbreeding, or UFOs maybe.

But you reach a point when you can't blame UFOs anymore, when the caveman comes out of the closet without Marx or Jesus, when the politically retrograde bare their fangs and call it a smile. Here's Lansing Lamont, who can dismiss the entire sixties as "a media-orchestrated protest revel," call the return of protest to college campuses "ugly," and homosexuality a "problem to be surmounted." Lamont yearns for the days when Harvard and the "elite universities" were one big Finals Club, enjoying "comfortable, if snobbish, intimacy" and "benign" parietal rules, all blond hair and blue eyes and a sure guarantee of The Big Coin after graduation. About a third of the way through it hits you: you flip to the picture on the back jacket and, with his brow ridge and prognathous jaw and small cranial capacity--that's where you've seen him before! National Geographic!

ENOUGH OF SUBSTANCE: Lamont's style evolved from years of writing for that most homogenized of magazines, Time. Campus Shock is a Time cover story filled with water and wood pulp, a distended magazine article--the very titles wail with the self-justifying banshee pitch of the media-hyped Big Story: "Campus Shock," "Sexual Anarchy," "Grade Frenzy." And the vignettes, written in the best lurid style of not even Time, but True Detective:

No one on the Cornell campus saw Alex Rubens "gorge out" on a cold October night in 1977...No one heard his body strike the boulders more than a hundred feet below, or saw it being swept from the rocks by the current and sent cascading down the gorge toward the lake, a mile away, where the next day a fisherman spotted it floating face down twenty yards from shore.

As narrated by Jack Webb.

Maybe no one should worry, or even notice, when a book like Campus Shock appears. But Lansing Lamont comes out of the same generations as most of America's movers and shakers, and it's quite possible that they share his distorting lenses. While Lamont might be scribbling away unheard in his high-rent New York apartment, the deans and university bureaucrats who really wrote the book, by talking with Lamont and by providing him with students to interview, are making almost all the decisions that shape out lives. People like Derek Bok and Archie Epps, they're still out there.