I recently enjoyed Neal Stephenson’s The Big U. One of his early works, it’s not as polished as his other novels, but it’s still quite a fun read. It delves into the subject of geek culture (a prelude, if you will, to the more expansive treatment in Cryptonomicon) and ends with the obligatory riot /slash/ full-scale armed confrontation.
It reminded me of another novel, Kampus, by James E. Gunn, which I read twice as a teenager (and people wonder why I was a bit apprehensive about going away to college!) but haven’t picked up since.
While they are very different books, they share a similar premise: the campus in chaos. The students run roughshod, ignoring the norms of the outside society. The role of the administration has shifted form enducation to containment. In both books, this is expressed in a literal, architectural form: the “Kampus” is surrounded by a high wall, and “the Big U” has been designed from the start to be a self-contained monstrosity. (And there’s some kind of a parallel between the Kampus Kops and the Crobobaltislovakians, though I can’t quite put my finger on it. Need to reread Kampus.) Kampus is a parody of the studet radicalism of the 60’s and 70’s, while The Big U is more of an attack on the smug entitlement of the 80’s, but in both cases the students are reveling in good old-fashioned hedonism and anarchy.
I can’t help but think this is an almost archetypical idea. College students are in a weird limbo between a childhood tightly controlled by parents and school, and an adulthood where we have the maturity and responsibility to be full participants in normal society. Young people naturally want to exploit their new freedoms and experiment, challenging the assumptions of the rest of society, but the place that they stretch their wings is a a strange, artificial setting, walled off from the rest of the world, with its own attitudes and rules of behavior. It has nurturing elements that allow the extension of childhood (dormatories, cafeterias, mentor/instructors) but few of restrictions of childhood. These lax restrictions are further eroded by society’s attitude toward students (Oh, let them be young! Boys will be boys. &c.) and the tendency of the administration to want to handle discipline in-house, dodge bad publicity and avoid the wrath of parents.
Two authors that I know of have exploited the theme, but it seems like there must be more books in this “genre.” Can anyone suggest some?