Existentialism’s appeal led the most earnest students to drop out of academia

Evidence

By the 1960s, university teachers were aware of a change. The Heideggerian J. Glenn Gray, who taught philosophy at Colorado College, wrote an essay for Harper’s Magazine in May 1965 called ‘Salvation on the Campus: why existentialism is capturing the students’. He had noticed that recent students seemed more fascinated than ever by any philosopher who represented rebellion and authenticity, such as Socrates, who died for his intellectual freedom. They loved the existentialists, and especially Sartre’s idea of bad faith. ‘I’m sick of my own pretending,’ exclaimed a student one day. The best of them were also the most likely to drop out; they would vanish in search of a more meaningful path. It worried Gray, especially when one bright young man refused all help in applying to graduate school and simply wandered off, to be last heard of drifting around the country living by casual labour. — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 913

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the broader history of how radical philosophy translates into lived practice — echoes themes in Colin Wilson’s Outsider and the counterculture studies of the 1960s. — connects to: Existentialism is accused of teaching passive despair and quietism — Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism Is a Humanism, 2
• QUESTION: Gray’s Harper’s essay is a primary source on 1960s campus culture worth locating for a deeper dive.

Broader Connections

• Existentialism is accused of teaching passive despair and quietism #complicates (0.75) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism Is a Humanism, 2