Students: Surf, Snow, Sex & Protest

The opportunities of spring-vacationing students are a bit broader this year. They can pursue beer, surf, snow, sex —or the repair of bombed Negro churches. Those who choose carpentry, however, may have a problem: a group at St. Louis’ Washington University canvassed the South, could not find a burned-out church that had not already been claimed by other students.

Hundreds of college students devoted part of their vacation to the mass march on Montgomery, Ala. An air charter service in Boston got 900 applicants for flights to Alabama, but had space for only 318. Yale dispatched students to St. Augustine, Fla., to continue remedial teaching among Negroes, begun last summer. The action in the South was a bit distant for most Californians, but a Claremont senior helpfully pointed out that they could “always go right down to the courthouse in Los Angeles” to demonstrate.

Unstructured Reading. More students than ever before are putting their vacation to such serious purpose. Out of sympathy for the migrant worker, 100 University of California students plan to pick crops in the North Central Valley and help unionize the workers. With increasing pressure on high school seniors to compete for college admissions many plan to stay home and study. At the college level, too, there are signs of growing preoccupation with studies. Students at Reed concentrate on “unstructured reading.” “Let’s face it—if you don’t get working now, you don’t get working,” notes a Mount Holyoke girl.

Yet for the vast majority of students, the spring break is still a time for the pursuit of pleasure. Thousands of kids are streaming into the Florida beach towns of Fort Lauderdale (where boys express their goal as “beach, broads and booze”) and Daytona Beach (where the theme is “sex, sand, suds and sun”), even though the Ivy League considers such places to be Out. “Cliffies look down on the kind of orgy that goes on in some sections of Florida,” explains Radcliffe Junior Ellen Lake. Stephen Cotler, an editor of the Harvard Crimson, observes that it’s not chic to be seen in Florida but concedes that Harvard has “an element that goes down just to see what the people from Duke are doing.”

Even to New York. For East Coast students, San Juan and the Bahamas are big this year, along with Jamaica, the Virgin Islands and the Grand Strand of South Carolina, centered on Myrtle Beach. A discerning set likes Bimini (where they can sleep on the beaches), Guadeloupe and Tobago. By pushing four students into a double room at $15 for all, arranging cheap air flights, and serving free hot dog and barbecue lunches, Bermuda helps a student get by for less than $100 a week.

Midwestern students are turning to the ski slopes of Aspen, Colo., and Taos, N. Mex., while West Coast kids like Mammoth Mountain in the Sierras, which is now so swamped that skiers wait 45 minutes for a lift. A few students, here and there, are going all the way to Italy or Spain. And, as ever, there is also a small clique of connoisseurs who insist on going to a great place called New York.