THE BLIGHT ON THE IVY

The happy college student is a myth. An enormous number of students are carrying emotional burdens which range from merely painful to agonizing. This is the blight on the ivy."" This too is the premise-pretext for a book which never gets past a few attention-getting statements on a subject which has caused considerable dismay- the college drop-out. Dr. Gordon (he is a psychiatrist) and his wife (she has an M.A. in social psychology) blame it all on ""stresses in education today"". But their successor to the ""best selling"" Split Level Trap doesn't indicate much academic stress; it's periodical literature expanded to book form. I.E. a one or two page discussion of certain features of undergraduate life, anti-intellectualism (viz. cars), sex and ""feminine fallout"", the overachievers, what the colleges are doing, etc. and then it sprays off into such questions as financing a college education, or ""Is the housewife a matriarch or a martyr?"". Actually most of the book is a sequence of fictional insets on campus types such as Walt Muller- Bookworm, Sam Taz- Faculty Firebrand. There's really not enough documentation for a high school term paper; a few statistics and an occasional pronunciamento chiefly from a Professor Black of Stanford.... Publish or perish or both?