A year or so ago the Stanford University Daily, having done some routine editorializing on student apathy, one by one ticking off, and rejecting, the standard explanations for that apathy, arrived at a painful conclusion: “The only logical reason we can think of as the cause of student dullness is that we are dull.”
The charge should be specified. Most students, I think, have become dull in their political aspect. That is to say, they are uninterested in the political world, and therefore uninteresting when they creak their minds to it. And too often those who are politically minded behave as though they had taken perpetual vows to banality. This may be the fault of our political system, where success seems more and more to require the ruthless suppression of intellectual or rhetorical discrimination (remember: Rockefeller, with those clichés, and with that mouth full of blintzes, is considered a comer!).
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