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2 Background I: The Cultural Scene in 1977

Elvis Presley died on August 16, 1977; in the same month the Holly­wood film Star Wars was released to record crowds. In retrospect it is easy (probably all too easy) to read the two events as twin signs of the psychic and material stresses that seemed endemic to American life in 1977. Elvis’s death denotes for us now yet another endpoint to the 1960s. Elvis and his once-promising era having degenerated together by 1977 into a rather bloated, drug-stupefied, generally aimless, perceptibly aging, terminally ill shell of a decade now come to ruin: the hopeful and revolutionary counter-culture he in some respects represented having been commodified into cynical Las Vegas glitz. Writing in the Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock ‘n’ Roll a year before Elvis’s death, music critic Peter Graining bemoaned the physical, mental, and moral decline of The King—a decline that seemed to mirror the political and cultural stagnation of the time:

His hair is dyed, his teeth are capped, his middle is girdled, his voice is a husk, and his eyes film over with glassy impersonality. He [. . .] cannot endure the scorn of strangers, [and] will not go out if his hair isn’t right, if his weight—which fluctuates wildly—is not down. He has tantrums onstage and, like some aging politician, is reduced to the ranks of grotesque. (qtd in Rohter and Zito)

Shortly after Elvis’s death, Esquire painfully juxtaposed the glamour of his public appearance with the physical and psychic degeneration of his person and period: he “occasionally wore dark glasses with ELVIS spelled out on the sides in diamonds [. . . and] owned a gold lamé suit that weighed more than twenty pounds,” even though he actually hated the suit, suffered from glaucoma and colitis, and, in recent fits of temper, “was known to smash up television sets and pool tables” (Bradshaw 97). Star Wars, meantime, in its characters, setting, and plot nostalgically looked backward to the 1960s. Luke Skywalker, his friends and their adventures provided the wistful cinematic reenactment of a lost children’s crusade, flower-powered and anti-establishment (Woodstock Nation This Time Victorious), even as the film offered in Darth Vader the menacing specter of politically conservative forces already poised to sweep out 1960s’ liberalism, optimism, prosperity, and interest in social justice. Together the two cultural events testify (if superficially, we know) to how by 1977 the hopes of the previous decade had come mostly to lost promise if not to a sense of outright waste and failure, even to a sense of cultural exhaustion, crisis, and anxiety.

For anxieties there were aplenty in 1977. (For that reason, we should perhaps be using Woody Allen’s all-about-anxiety movie Annie Hall as the prototypical 1977 cultural artifact, not Star Wars.) Political events were still shadowed by the specter of the Watergate era and the crisis in leadership associated with the legacy of Richard Nixon. It is hardly necessary to rehearse how thoroughly Watergate dissipated political power and hope in government in the mid-1970s. That it seems impossible today to recall a single achievement of the Gerald Ford administration—or even to remember anything that happened during the Ford administration, except for the pardon of Nixon—speaks to the sense of political ennui that followed Nixon’s disgrace, the loss of the war in Vietnam, and the erosion of confidence in 1960s-style national legislation. That Jimmy Carter could defeat Ford in the 1976 election largely on the slogan “I will never lie to the American people” testifies to how demoralized the electorate had become and how character seemed more important than the possibility of social progress through legislative achievement. When he took up the Presidency in 1977, Carter held to a high moral tone, committed himself to human rights initiatives around the world, and achieved a successful peace initiative in the Middle East; but he nevertheless contributed to the crisis in leadership by being unable to act effectively to reverse the nation’s serious economic problems and energy shortages. Though unemployment (7.4 percent when Carter took office in January) dropped somewhat during the Carter years, double-digit inflation continued to plague the nation, and the energy predicament seemed so serious and so intractable that in April 1977 the new President created the Department of Energy and declared the situation to be “the moral equivalent of war” and “the greatest challenge our country will face during our lifetime” (418). Carter seemed impotent when he could not get an energy bill through Congress in the summer of 1977 and when, to solve the problem, he urged people to lower thermostats and wear sweaters.

The biggest domestic issues outside the economy and energy seemed to be women’s rights and civil rights, but there were setbacks and disappointments in that area too. Over 14,000 women attended the National Women’s Conference in Houston in the fall of 1977, but the event was at least as acrimonious as it was invigorating (the abortion issue was particularly divisive); and opposition to the Equal Rights Amendment was now gaining so much support—Phyllis Schlafly was an especially vigorous opponent—that the amendment would ultimately be defeated two years later. In March 1977, an unprecedented number of Americans—probably more than 100,000,000—tuned into the ABC television mini-series Roots: The Saga of an American Family, a version of Alex Haley’s best-selling (and Pultizer-winning) book of the previous year. But despite the broad appeal of a mini-series devoted to slavery and civil rights, affirmative action programs designed to benefit women and minorities according to Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 were coming under serious attack. (Indeed, it could be argued that the heroic bootstrap efforts depicted in Roots made an implicit and ironic argument against the need for affirmative action.) The most celebrated affront to affirmative action was mounted in the case of Alan Bakke, who sued after his application to medical school at the University of California was rejected in 1974 even as the university had been affirmatively admitting a number of minority students: by 1977, the widely publicized case had reached the Supreme Court.6 In a not unrelated case, four families living in public housing in Ann Arbor, Michigan, sued the local school district in 1977, charging that lower-class, African American children were not being afforded equal opportunity but were being placed erroneously and disproportionately in special needs classes. The case drew widespread attention, and the racialized meaning of “standard English” came to public consciousness when the plaintiff’s attorney drew upon Geneva Smitherman’s research on Black English to argue that the language needs of African American children were not being attended to in the schools. And while these controversies were playing out in the news, Anita Bryant, spokeswoman for the Florida orange juice industry, was expressing the views of many by blaming many of the nation’s ills on gay citizens and thereby compromising the movement for gay rights. That movement in many ways received its impetus from the famous Stonewall riot in New York City of June 28, 1969, and gay rights parades during the decade frequently commemorated Stonewall as they made their case for civil rights for gays, lesbians, and bisexuals. After 1978, the intensity of those demonstrations intensified because in that year Harvey Milk, an openly gay San Francisco supervisor, was murdered along with the mayor of the city by a notorious bigot, Dan White.

Pennsylvania, the political and economic backdrop of Penn State, offered a microcosm of the nation’s political and economic difficulties. State House Speaker Herbert Fineman, in a local reenactment of Watergate, was convicted of obstructing justice for hampering investigations into bribery and the sale of student admissions to professional schools. Governor Milton Shapp, beset by various administrative scandals and rumors that would sweep Republican Richard Thornburgh into office in 1978, fired Commonwealth Secretary C. Dolores Tucker, the highest ranking African-American female state official, on the grounds that she had used her official position as a clearinghouse for personal speaking engagements. This move exacerbated political and racial tensions, as many Pennsylvania residents saw the dismissal of Tucker as racially motivated. Racial and political troubles intensified in Pennsylvania’s urban areas as well. In Philadelphia, second-term mayor Frank Rizzo stirred racial tensions by advocating (as early as 1976) the striking of a city charter that prohibited him from serving more than two terms as mayor. The debate around the elimination of the charter was fraught with racial divisiveness. In response to what he interpreted as attempts by black leaders to persuade black voters to reject the proposed city charter amendment, which was to appear on the 1978 ballot, Rizzo asserted that “Whites are going to vote for Rizzo” (qtd. in Featherman and Rosenberg 17). Although Rizzo claimed that his statement was merely an observation about voting habits, his words were widely interpreted as a call for bloc voting by race. In the end the proposed change to the city charter lost by a wide margin, due largely to the resistance of black voters, 96 percent of whom voted against it (2). In 1978 racial tension would express itself again when Philadelphia police, in an attempt to remove members of the African American group MOVE from their communal residence, destroyed whole city blocks in a fire; in the ensuing shootout a police officer was killed and several members of MOVE were injured.

Economically the state epitomized the economic stagnation that in 1977 was plaguing all the states in the nation’s industrial “Rustbelt.” Despite some good years for agricultural industries and an agreement with Volkswagen to establish a new plant near Pittsburgh in 1976, unemployment in Pennsylvania hovered around the 10 percent mark—or even exceeded it—in many chronically depressed areas (R. Elgin 397). Record-breaking cold in January and February of 1977 depleted natural gas supplies in Pennsylvania, forcing shutdowns at more than 300 plants and temporarily stalling the efforts of over 265,000 workers. In July heavy rains caused a dam to burst near Johnstown, and the subsequent flood killed at least 76 people and caused damage to homes and businesses in excess of $200 million. Confronted with economic problems like these and with diminishing tax revenues consequent upon them, and unable to resolve differences over its budget and necessary tax increases, the state legislature—hopelessly stalemated in the face of the crisis—left the state completely without a budget in 1977. Interstate highways and roads alike were left to rot because the state could not afford repairs. Dead animals piled up on highways and rest areas were closed; citizens began to joke that the state ought to welcome travelers at the borders with the motto “Welcome to Pennsylvania! No Facilities.” By August legislators had come up with a partial budget to pay state workers and welfare recipients, but lawmakers continued to debate funding for universities and colleges until early 1978, forcing schools and universities to cut back services and take out temporary loans to meet payrolls. Those loans in turn only compounded budgetary crises for state-funded schools and universities, several of which defaulted because they were unable to make interest payments.

Economic and political problems were only some of the difficulties facing higher education in 1977. Indeed, higher education in general was witnessing extreme instability in the middle 1970s, leading to changes that significantly altered curricula, institutional structures, and student populations. In the fifteen years before 1977, college enrollments had burgeoned, particularly among previously underrepresented groups. Pennsylvania alone witnessed a 21 percent increase in enrollments in higher education during the 1970s, with the greatest growth coming between 1973 and 1976. Widely discussed “open admissions policies” (started in 1970 at the City College of New York [CUNY]) along with federal, state, and local affirmative action policies put the highly charged issue of accommodating culturally diverse students at the center of debates in higher education.7 Enrollment for African Americans in higher education increased from 821,930 in 1974 to 960,804 in 1978; similar increases were recorded for Hispanics (287,432 to 370,366), Asians (114,266 to 203,250), and Native Americans (52,876 to 66,264)—numbers that would continue to increase through the 1980s (Deskins 20). Furthermore, federal measures such as Title IX (1972) were continuing to ease access for female students. For instance, although men still outnumbered women 61 percent to 39 percent in the student body at large, a majority of the 1977 freshman class at Penn State was female. Older students, or “returning adult students,” were also swelling the ranks: by 1976, learners over the age of 22 were the fastest growing segment in higher education, constituting 48 percent of the total national enrollment of 10 million (Munday 681). At the same time, administrators debated both the legality and the practicality of governmental measures to increase the numbers of previously underrepresented groups on campus. When places like Columbia, Cornell, Harvard, and Michigan faced threats from the federal government to withhold funding if they did not move more resolutely to increase enrollment of underrepresented groups, many in higher education lashed out against such “federal intrusion” (Brubacher and Rudy 79)8; but mostly universities moved to comply.

Demands for more accessible and professionally applicable higher education led to another trend in higher education in the 1970s: the increasing influence of community colleges, two-year junior colleges, and professional/technical schools, all of which brought higher education closer to increasing numbers of students. In a 1976 report, for example, the Pennsylvania Department of Education claimed that “both the number of community colleges and the increasing number of students at such colleges have constituted the greatest growth in post-secondary education in Pennsylvania” (i). Students at the community colleges either worked for associate degrees or transferred after two years to complete baccalaureate requirements: Temple University in Philadelphia was receiving over a thousand transfers a year in 1977, many from Philadelphia Community College (Pennsylvania Dept. of Education 6); and the Penn State system had grown to include 18 two-year campuses, many of whose students came to University Park from those Commonwealth Campuses to complete traditional undergraduate degrees.9 Proprietary schools and schools of technology grew even faster than community colleges during the 1970s. In Pennsylvania, for example, enrollment in proprietary and technical schools grew an astounding 184 percent from 1970 to 1979 (Pennsylvania Economy League 3).

Despite these increases in overall enrollment in the first half of the 1970s, many colleges and universities faced great economic challenges as they confronted inflation, rising energy costs, and a projected dearth in the number of college-age students (indeed, that anticipated dearth explains, as much as do the political forces left over from the 1960s, the willingness of colleges to reach out to under-represented groups and returning-adult students). Even as early as 1971, a survey of 41 institutions conducted by the Carnegie Commission found that 71 percent were either already in financial distress or were well on their way to it (Brubacher and Rudy 383). In Pennsylvania, for example, federal appropriations to higher education grew nearly 106 percent during the decade while state and local appropriations increased over 92 percent (Pennsylvania Economy League 3), but those increases could not keep pace with rising expenses. Costs for instruction rose nearly 110 percent, expenditures for operation and maintenance of university grounds and buildings climbed nearly 135 percent, and a Pennsylvania government struggling with hard economic times was reluctant to spend additional money on higher education. According to the Pennsylvania State Board of Education, the state ranked 20th—well above average—among the states in its per capita income, underutilized tax capacity, and level of employment but only 48th in terms of higher education appropriations as a percentage of state general revenue (45).

Many universities therefore were reducing faculty and staff; articles in higher education journals were regularly offering administrators advice on “Managing Faculty Reductions” (e.g., Alm, Erhle, and Webster 153). A study of 163 institutions conducted in 1975 found that from 1971–1974, 74 percent of private four-year institutions, 66 percent of public four-year institutions, and 41 percent of two-year institutions had undergone staff reductions (Alm, Erhle, and Webster 153). In 1973–74, the University of Wisconsin sent lay-off notices to 88 of its tenured faculty; Southern Illinois dismissed 104 faculty and staff members, 28 of them tenured (Brubacher and Rudy 384); and Michigan’s public universities, in the face of setbacks in the auto industry that reduced tax revenues sharply, were under similar duress. Several institutions even faced the possibility of closing. In response to these pressing economic conditions, faculty and staff stepped up efforts to protect their jobs by unionizing. By June 1974, faculty had selected collective bargaining agents on 338 campuses and had successfully unionized on 29 (Brubacher and Rudy 392). Colleges and universities sought to manage budget problems not only by reducing their faculties but also by increasing part-time positions and graduate assistantships. According to the National Center for Educational Statistics, the five-year period from 1972 to 1977 saw a dramatic increase in the number of part-time faculty in higher education: in 1972, colleges and universities employed 3.17 fulltimers for every part-time faculty member; in 1977, the numbers had fallen to 1.26 fulltimers for every parttimer (Leslie, Kellams, and Gunne 23).

The panic over declining funds was exacerbated by frequent predictions of large enrollment drops—the general consensus was at least 15 percent—for the coming decade. According to the projections of the Pennsylvania Economy League, for instance, enrollments in higher education in Pennsylvania would drop 32.1 percent during the 1980s, with state-related institutions like Penn State losing close to 20 percent of their enrollment numbers (2–3). Another report issued by the Pennsylvania State Board of Education in 1978 suggested that, due to changes in the birth rate after 1960, “the number of college-aged youths 18–22 w[ould] drop by about 24 percent between 1975 and 1990” (43).

Economic conditions and projected declines in enrollment caused many potential students to reconsider the value of higher education. On the one hand, this convergence of crises resulted in a phenomenon known as “student consumerism.” To keep the customers coming, institutions of higher education had to please those customers. The Educational Record dedicated a series of articles in the Spring 1977 issue to “The Student Consumer Movement.” As their titles reveal, these articles explained how to maintain “Consumer Interest in Higher Education” (Hoy 180) and provided examples of how some institutions had been “Meeting Student Demands” (Moye 191). The Record also included a study of student views of good teaching, again reflecting the desire to please the students, who, the writers of the article claimed, “are the consumers of instruction” (Morstain and Gaff 300). Teacher training and “retraining” gained in popularity, again in response to the perceived changes brought about in the university by changing student populations and declining budgets, and “faculty development” became an academic buzzword. Jerry G. Gaff, Director of the Project for Institutional Renewal, boasted that, as of 1977, “a recent national survey estimated that approximately 50 percent of all institutions of higher education have a program or set of practices identified as faculty development” (Morstain and Gaff 299). Jon Wergin, Elizabeth Mason and Paul Munson, all involved at the time in educational planning and development at the Medical College of Virginia, directly linked faculty development emphases to the increasing call for public accountability and to the impact of student consumerism: “Faculty development is fast emerging as a priority in post-secondary education. Reasons for this surge of interest are numerous, but most center around traditionally nonacademic concerns. Demands from students and society are becoming increasingly strident for educational programs that are accountable to their needs” (289).

On the other hand, universities contemplated curricular changes in response to the economic situation and changed climate on campus. Humanities departments and colleges of liberal arts in particular faced immense challenges. With an unprecedented number of new students entering the academy, with the growing popularity of technical education, and with enrollments booming in community colleges and other two-year institutions, many in higher education worried about a decline in students’ appreciation of the value of a liberal arts education. In the Educational Record for Winter 1977, Edward Eddy (soon to become Provost at Penn State) forecasted a substantial decline in the fortunes of liberal arts education. According to Eddy, students in the 1970s were “less skilled and yet more pragmatic than their predecessors” (9). Students used to be concerned with “being better,” he lamented, but now they were just concerned with “being better off.” Eddy wasn’t alone in his beliefs. In a 1976 book, Geoffrey Wagner, a professor of English who taught basic writing at City College of New York (CUNY), called open admissions “The End of Education.” One reviewer scored the vehemence of such arguments against expanding higher education by explaining Wagner’s book as “a politically and educationally conservative polemic” (529) that promoted the university as “a place where knowledge is pursued objectively for its own sake, an institution concerned with higher things, free of mundane pressures” (Lane 529).

Similar concerns were evident in controversies over increasing disciplinary specialization. An editorial in the Educational Record for Winter 1977 attacked the “divisiveness” of academic specialization and called for an end of “fractionization” that was harming the holistic benefits of a “total system” of liberal arts education (Heyns 4). Summing up the panic over the place of liberal arts in 1970s higher education, Stephen Bailey, Vice President of the American Council on Education, lamented, “How can liberal learning accommodate the twin necessities of educating specialists and educating generalists, of turning out experts who are not merely technicians?” (250). In the struggle to accommodate the new students brought in by expanding admissions and to respond to growing public concern about the ultimate goals of higher education, the 1970s generated much curricular reform. Attempts to establish core curricula and programs in “basic skills” which might equalize and unite the increasingly diverse student population grew in popularity. Bailey, for example, advocated a “liberal core” of courses and attention to “basic skills” (which, for him, meant “spelling and grammar” [251]). Support for such centralized “essential” curricula received a boost when Harvard shifted from general education requirements to a core curriculum, even though that curriculum promised to exclude many of the “new students.” In the February 7, 1977 issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education, the team of curriculum evaluators from Harvard defended their move to a core curriculum by identifying six “basic” characteristics of the educated person, including “the ability to think and write clearly”; “an awareness of other cultures”; “good manners and high aesthetic and moral standards”; and “depth in some field of knowledge” (10). The ideal student, then, would be both a specialist and a generalist—and maintain the manners and aesthetic values associated with the Ivy elite.

From faculty pens and mouths across the country came nostalgic laments about the “State of the Humanities” (Reager 148). In the February 1977 Harper’s, English professor Reed Whittemore sounded a gloomy death knell for the humanities, which he predicted would all too soon “go the way of the classics” (qtd. in Gregg 13). Penn State liberal arts faculty, in the spirit of the national mood, clearly felt these pressures and responded in the spring of 1977 by convening a faculty conference at University Park to ponder the future of “The College of Liberal Arts in the 1980’s.” The published proceedings of the conference, which involved over 600 faculty from 20 campuses, reflected the concerns plaguing humanities scholars across the nation. Penn State Liberal Arts faculty concerns were heightened by 1977 figures that showed a 32 percent relative decline in College of Liberal Arts enrollments over the course of the 1970s (Coelen 40). Liberal Arts Dean Stanley Paulson’s “Introduction” to the published proceedings set the tone for the papers and discussions to follow and clearly linked the concerns fronted at the conference to larger issues in higher education:

The readers of this volume will no doubt be struck with the way questions and problems outnumber the answers and solutions. For it to have been otherwise would have been to evade or oversimplify the complex changes underway in the larger society as well as in a university of 50,000 students. [. . .] Though the Conference participants looked unblinkingly at the problems liberal education now confronts, the ability of the liberal arts to deal with the developing educational needs was affirmed again and again. While they recognized the current pressures toward vocationalism and technological specialization, the long range importance of preparation for life rather than simply to make a living was stressed. (2)

Mirroring the concerns expressed by Provost-elect Eddy and the Vice President of the American Council on Education, Stephen Bailey, Paulson stressed the conference’s importance in maintaining the unity of the liberal arts in the face of increasing demands for job-related education. Bailey, in fact, delivered the keynote of the Penn State Conference. Defending the need for liberal education, Bailey described the tenuous human condition to the conference participants in a way that speaks to the unhappy temper of the time and situation:

Perched on a whirling planet, blind to our origins, blind to our reasons for being, we wander between a desolate sense that we are bits of transient nothingness, and a strange sense of presence of ineffable innuendoes that mock our despair. Whatever the long-range fate of the universe, we have a continuing commitment in education to discover and transmit truths that are in fact fertile hypotheses about the reality, and the latent possibilities, of the existence we know and of the existence we can anticipate for our children. (11)