Letter from America

Extract

The sociologist's view of the American university consisted until recently of an institutionalized football team hampered by an environment of classrooms, libraries and bewhiskered and bespectacled professors attempting to pursue the life of scholarship. This notion has been going out of fashion for many years now—very slowly but very surely. The war reached its hand into our seats of sport and carried the young gladiators away to battlefields of greater length than 100 yards—and the young philosophers too. Now our college population consists in large part of young heads of families trying to live on a monthly income of about £22 10s. (with a purchasing power much reduced by wartime inflation) and to get through their studies and into the world as soon as possible. Nuclear physics has recently become a thickly populated field of study but it is not only in the laboratories that we are busy. There has been some extraordinary musical activity at one of our eastern seats of learning.