http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/03/arts/03camp.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin

The '60s Begin to Fade as Liberal Professors Retire

By PATRICIA COHEN
Published: July 3, 2008
MADISON, Wis. -- When Michael Olneck was standing, arms linked with other protesters, singing "We Shall Not Be Moved" in front of Columbia University's library in 1968, Sara Goldrick-Rab had not yet been born. When he won tenure at the University of Wisconsin here in 1980, she was 3. And in January, when he retires at 62, Ms. Goldrick-Rab will be just across the hall, working to earn a permanent spot on the same faculty from which he is departing.

Together, these Midwestern academics, one leaving the professoriate and another working her way up, are part of a vast generational change that is likely to profoundly alter the culture at American universities and colleges over the next decade.

Baby boomers, hired in large numbers during a huge expansion in higher education that continued into the '70s, are being replaced by younger professors who many of the nearly 50 academics interviewed by The New York Times believe are different from their predecessors -- less ideologically polarized and more politically moderate.

Already there are signs that the intense passions and polemics that roiled campuses during the past couple of decades have begun to fade. At Amherst, where military recruiters were kicked out in 1987, students crammed into a lecture hall this year to listen as alumni who served in Iraq urged them to join the military.