Send in the Adults

By Richard N. Weltz

These days on America's campuses, where they ought to be sending in some adults, they are instead sending in the clowns. One of the strictest university rules at Princeton when I was studying there in the '50s was that incitement to or participation in a riot was sure and certain grounds for immediate expulsion. The infraction ranked right up there with the rules against having a woman in your dorm room past a certain hour, cheating on exams, maintaining/driving a car on or near the campus, or "behavior unbecoming a gentleman and scholar." Nevertheless, on one balmy evening in 1955, a riot did occur. The rock movie Blackboard Jungle had just closed its run in the local cinema -- and that evening, precisely at 11:00, photograph loudspeakers in dormitory windows throughout the campus begin blaring at top volume the film's raucous theme song, "Rock Around The Clock." Within a half-hour, thousands of students swarmed the campus lawns and walkways "releasing water hydrants, setting fires in ash cans, lobbing rolls of.... (Read Full Article)