Moffatt (Anthropology/Rutgers U.) switched his field work from
South India to North Jersey and produced this ethnography of the
rituals and beliefs of white middle-class college students. Posing
as a freshman, Moffatt experienced the disorientation of
orientation, then lived in a dorm one night and day each week for a
year ill the late 70's and again in the mid-80's. Here, field
observation and anonymous surveys yield a picture of the academic
experience that is far from that portrayed by Allan Bloom; Moffatt
indicates that students learn what they think is pertinent to the
lives they'll lead. A central observation is that college culture,
rather than being the elite self-contained culture it had been
since file 1850's, now derives from the international,
mass-media-inspired youth culture of sex, music, and pop icons.
(The students' own image of college is rooted more in movies like
Animal House than traditions passed down from class to class.)
Weighted by the student's own values, the book is concerned more
with social life than with academics: after Moffatt's "entry tale,"
and a chapter describing the shape of modern student life, there
follows one on society and changing friendships in a freshman dorm;
one concerned with the same in a dorm half black, half white; two
chapters on sex (students range from libertines to traditionalists
- just like the rest of us); and a final, shorter chapter on "the
life of the mind." Flawed by a near-total silence on drugs (Moffatt
didn't want to be labeled a narc); still, informative,
entertaining, and very readable, a possible campus best-seller.
(Kirkus Reviews)
"With Kinseyesque diligence Moffatt] catalogues the sexual habits
and fantasies of his students. . . . His book vibrates with quirky
authenticity." --New York Times Book Review "Useful for
understanding the student experience . . . throughout the United
States. . . . Beautifully written, carefully researched . . . a
classic."--John Thelin, Educational Studies "Michael Moffatt is a
multitalented, multidisciplinary scholar . . . who writes without a
trace of gobbledygook. He deserves a wide following." --Rupert
Wilkinson, Journal of American Studies "One of the most
thoughtfully crafted case studies of undergraduate culture . . .
ever written . . . a book every professor should read." --Paul J.
Baker, Academe Coming of Age is about college as students really
know it and--often--love it. To write this remarkable account,
Michael Moffatt did what anthropologists usually do in more distant
cultures: he lived among the natives. His findings are sometimes
disturbing, potentially controversial, but somehow very believable.
Coming of Age is a vivid slice of life of what Moffatt saw and
heard in the dorms of a typical state university, Rutgers, in the
1980s. It is full of student voices: naive and worldy-wise, vulgar
and polite, cynical, humorous, and sometimes even idealistic. But
it is also about American culture more generally: individualism,
friendship, community, bureaucracy, diversity, race, sex, gender,
intellect, work, and play. As an example of an ethnography written
about an anthropologist's own culture, this book is an uncommon
one. As a new and revealing perspective on the much-studied
American college student, it is unique.
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