In Recent Years the term "alienation" has become popular among sophisticated and radical college students. The word expressed their sense of not feeling at home or "involved" either on the campus or in the larger world.

Today things have changed according to an editor of The Michigan Daily. "Alienation is becoming passe.

"The new trend is toward 'involvement'—in university affairs, the community, and national and international issues.

"The traditional idea of the university as a 'community within the community,' a place where students are sheltered in an ivory tower world for four years to become educated and to learn about the world, is out of focus with what, this new breed of student is searching for in a university.

"In effect, what today's university is facing is the students pounding on the door of the ivory tower. They want to get out, play an active role in the world, in a word, to become 'involved.' But the university is having a difficult time loosening its hold on students and revising traditional concepts of education and the role of students.

Report issued

"The National Student Association (NSA), a national union of students and student governments representing about 350 colleges and universities, recently issued a report in which it recommended that credit should be offered for off-campus experiences in such things as hospitals, the Peace Corps, the civil rights movement or the anti-poverty programme.

"With this idea in mind, San Francisco State College student government has initiated a Community Involvement Project (CIP) which has offered an opportunity for over 600 students to become involved in off-campus activity.

"Through the project. students have organised tenant unions in housing projects, worked on a community planning project, and provided youth counselling and recreation for children in the city's slum areas. The more than 300 tutors involved in the Tutorial Programme devote four hours a week tutoring culturally deprived youngsters.

"Community involvement is providing the students with opportunities to relate classroom knowledge directly to the outside world and to make the community itself a classroom. They are discovering important roles they can play in society even while students, rather than feeling alienated and apart from the real world."

Enthusiasm

In their enthusiasm to become involved in community affairs, have students forgotten the university? Quite the contrary, according to the editorial writer of the University of Michigan campus newspaper.

"Students are more concerned than ever about the role and meaning of the university both for students and the rest of society, and likewise are eager to become more involved in the university at all levels.

"In the same report, NSA recommended that 'students should be more responsibly involved in the management of college affairs, such as in helping to identify effective teachers and rewarding them with tenure.

"Not only in rewarding teachers, but in all areas and at all levels, from departmental to administrative, students are demanding a more important voice in the decision-making processes of the university."

And in this demand, they are being supported by educators like Harold Taylor, author and past president of Sarah Lawrence College (New York), who agrees that they should be actively involved in their own education. The Minnesota Daily student newspaper reported the views expressed by Dr. Taylor at a recent journalism conference:

"Students — particularly those in teachers' olleges—should be involved in arts, politics or current events of any sort. Use the world as a campus. Two years of living abroad or tutoring slum children or working in rural areas would be ideal, he said.

Sent abroad

"In addition to this plan, he, proposed that every faculty member sent abroad should take along 25 students. For education students, he suggests a series of freshman seminars, taught by undergraduates. Seminars would go into detail on one particular subject's introductory phase a student might take only psychology, physics and English as a freshman. 'They'd get the feeling that teaching is natural—that everyone does it. The only way to learn how to teach is to do it.' said Dr. Taylor.

Addiction

"Judgment by performance, not test or grades, is what is needed. Hunger for good grades is addiction to a bad habit. Schools have such different standards on grading that grades are practically meaningless, he said. Grades also tend to limit the student to the fields in which he feels safest.

"I would like to see an open forum to report lousy teaching on each campus. Students are rarely wrong about their teachers, particularly if asked as responsible adults," said Dr. Taylor.

"There's also no need for large lectures. You can certainly break down groups into 3 smaller seminars or independent study groups.

"Many of these ideas—freshman seminars, field work, no grades, criticism of teachers — worked well at Sarah Lawrence. Taylor said."