My parents didn’t go to college,

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 My parents didn’t go to college, but they saved up so that their children could, and in 1975 I arrived with enthusiasm and some trepidation for my first year at Wesleyan University. At that time, my image of college students was that of young people demanding rights while chanting slogans and holding up protest signs. I had no idea that commentators were already lamenting that my generation of undergrads was so much less focused on politics and the public sphere and that we were “grinds” working away to climb the meritocratic ladder. For me, there was no ladder; being a student was about rebellion and freedom.

I didn’t know then how far back this idea of student freedom went. Town-gown tensions are as old as higher education itself. In medieval universities, there were already complaints that students—small groups of young people learning from master theologians—were not following the rules of host cities like Bologna and Montpellier. In the first decades of the 19th century, American students were notorious for their unruliness. At schools like the University of Virginia and Princeton, they caroused, brawled and rode horses through the campus in the middle of the night.

And they made a show of their independence through insolence. Typical pranks played on instructors included locking them in their rooms, dousing them with water and trying to make them trip and fall as they moved about campus. The perpetrators of these shenanigans saw themselves as members of a new type, “the college man.” The pious American hope to use higher education to instill morals and develop character in students seemed to result in its opposite: young people determined to create a lifestyle defined by their own enthusiasms.

These well-heeled young men were the ancestors of the fraternity brothers of the 20th century. As historian Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz has shown, fraternities were often driven by their fight against the authority of the faculty and administration. They demanded personal freedoms like the right to drink and spend time with women, and they rejected the idea that they should have to work hard to get decent grades on their way to professional school or the business world. They depended, we might say, on the rights of legacy, and they insisted that what they learned through friendship and sports was more valuable than anything professors might devise.

Each generation of students sees itself in opposition to established authority.

Images of the student as a college man or “frat boy” gave way during the civil-rights movement and the Vietnam War to that of the student radical marching in the street. The ends sought by each generation were very different, of course, but each saw itself in opposition to established authority.

That was the image of the student I had when I arrived at college, but by the time I graduated it seemed that students had become more concerned with the personal liberties of sex, drugs and rock ‘n‘ roll. Unruly protesters were giving way to careerists interested in getting good grades and positive recommendations to professional schools. One could still find campus radicals—I certainly found my share at Wesleyan—but the energy had shifted to libraries, science labs and the kinds of lifestyle experiments that could be conducted in the privacy of one’s own dorm.