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Show Movie View of College By JEFF GREENFIELD The Collegiate Press Service Does anybody want to know the greatest threat to the health of the American college? The greatest threat to the health of the American' college is that almost everyone who is part of the college community is sure that the campus is the center of drunken brawls, pagan dancing, sexual acrobatics, and general moral rot. And the source of this view is the college col-lege movie. Now most of you are familiar famil-iar with these products of 1935-45 Hollywood from your phony - headache - stay-home-from-school and watch-daytime-TV childhood. The campus was always State or U. or Jones, the actors were Dick Powell and Ruby Keeler and George Murphy and Jack Oakie as the dumb football player and the profs were all square eggheads (ignore the contradiction) contra-diction) except the kindly old English teacher who fixed the exam so Jack Oakie could pass and be eligible and beat anti-State anti-State or U. or Jones. As far as I could tell, the only one Who ever studied was the goofy, four-eyed freshman with the funny adams apple who got thrown into the fountain foun-tain after State beat anti-State. O.K. This was 20, 30 years ago and now we have Sputnik and everybody's bugged about American education and people don't figure college kids walk across the campus singing at each other with a brass band stick in every bush. Right? I was up late one night recently re-cently and chanced to leave the TV on after the news. On comes this late movie about college and there is this cam pus with Greek columns and Greek statues and in the first scene this girlt who is there to catch a husband knocks down a couple of profs with her bicycle bi-cycle and they look up and bam! out comes a brass band and 400 kids in letter sweaters singing and dancing down the campus carrying the basketball team on their shoulders. shoul-ders. (It was a liberal movie, so one of the players was a Negro.) The basketball player falls passionately in love with the girl who is out to get him (they sing to each other in the moonlight) moon-light) and they have to get married mar-ried because they can't wait to have at each other only he doesn't have any money so he cheats on the exam and flunks it and is ineligible for the big game so they burn the prof in effigy who flunked him, and . . . This movie is not more than four years old, and it nowhere occured to the writer that maybe may-be (a) a campus wouldn't get tight to a man because its team might lose a game, or (b) that the two lovers might send the orchestra and moonlight home and quietly go to bed with each other or (c) that you wouldn't have to be Clark Kerr to call out the cops the first time a basketball pep rally was held smack in the campus in the middle of classes. Once again several hundred thousand viewers learn that the campus is the Golden Land of Oz; once again a feast has been prepared for the Philistines who delight in feeding on tales of juvenalia and trivia amid the Groves of Academe. Once again not a single important question about American education edu-cation has graced an almost two-hour feature about college life. |