Lost horizons.

• Author: Bresler, Robert J.
• Position: STATE OF THE NATION

FIFTY YEARS AGO, when young men graduated from college, they knew, whether they liked it or not, that manhood was beckoning. If you did not go on to graduate or professional school, you would be drafted in the Army. If you wanted the intimate companionship of a woman--physically and emotionally--you would marry her. She and her parents (and perhaps yours) were unlikely to permit anything else. So, off you went to the Army, graduate school, or marriage--or perhaps to all three. Hanging out with the guys in bars at all hours was in the past. Even if you wanted to, your friends were not available.

What beckoned was responsibility--long-term employment, a career, a wife, children, and a place in the adult community. The guideposts were marked clearly and the examples were plentiful: fathers who worked hard and stuck with their families; millions of men who had served their country in wars (World Wars I and II, as well as Korea) without much self-pity or -glorification. When 1 was a young professor entering the academic profession in the early 1960s, most of the senior men were WWII veterans who expected you to do your job without complaint. It was sink or swim. There were no mentors or junior leaves, and there were high expectations for teaching and research. Students of that era, if they needed emotional counseling, went to a psychiatrist, usually on their own or their parents' dime. The colleges were not in that business. It was a tougher world and largely a man's world.

College girls were to be protected by parietals--rules to be in the dorm by midnight with a fussy dorm mother watching over them. All this stemmed from tradition, perhaps centuries old, where, as one writer put it, "everything from clothes to sexual morality was rigidly determined and, if we did not always obey the roles, we knew what they were." Public behavior was quite proscribed. Film and broadcast codes kept obscenity and raw violence away from our eyes and ears. Serious movies and radio and television programs were available for all. A young boy in 1946 could see a film such as "The Best Years of Our Lives," as I did, in which adults dealt with the difficult problems of postwar adjustment without having his innocence violated. What you saw in that memorable movie were serious men, who had sacrificed for their country, facing their responsibilities to community and family in peacetime. It was one of many examples in the popular culture where a boy could learn once again...