A few weeks ago, when I was in New Orleans, I was browsing through the higher education section at Beckham’s, a large, uber-musty used book store on Decatur just inside the Quarter, when I found A Blight on the Ivy by Robert and Katherine (Dr & Mrs, according to the inside flap) Gordon. Published in 1962, it is a book about a “crisis” on the modern campus. What kind of crisis, you ask? Well, check out the subtitle: “The flunkouts, the quitters and the emotionally disturbed…a study of COLLEGE STUDENTS (sic) under stress.”

Before I go any further, let me stress that this is not a good book. For reasons that will shortly become apparent, it comes under the heading of “I’m reading it so you don’t have to.” It’s hilarious, in many ways, but very much in the way that Mad Men was hilarious. You need a sense of humour about patriarchy for it to work.

Superficially, this is a book about mental health, though it’s a couple of decades too early for that term to be used. But the back cover teaser makes it reasonably explicit. “Many community colleges and state universities report that students are flunking out at the rate of 50% or more…psychiatric disorders among college students are increasing at an alarming rate…In the last ten years, young men of college age hospitalized with peptic ulcers has nearly doubled” (for those of you below a certain age: into the 1990s, medical orthodoxy held that peptic ulcers were stress-induced rather than virus-induced, so this factoid seemed relevant at the time). But once you spend more than a few minutes in the book, you’ll realize that the book is both more than that, and at the same time, much, much less.

Let’s start with the less. In the world described by the Gordons, students come in two genders: “boys” and “coeds,” with the latter sometimes described—with no hint of humour or irony—as having “whistle-inspiring” figures. Its use of statistical data is just plain embarrassing, with very little concern about the difference between absolute numbers and rates (saying the total number of cases of X are rising among young people that or the percentage of total cases of X represented by young people, without acknowledging you are in the midst of a large baby boom seems kind of bad, even given the weaker mathematical state of social sciences in the 1960s).

And of course, there’s the whole Mad Men aspect to this, which is nowhere more on display than in the chapter “Sex, marriage and the co-ed,” which is largely about answering the question “is it actually worth investing resources in female students because they all get married, have kids and leave the workforce anyway?” A question which is met with the unbelievably-this-was-liberalism-at-the-tie answer “but students with educated mothers tend to do better in school, so a generation hence this means more STEM students to meet the Soviet threat.”

Like I said, you need a sense of humour about patriarchy to read this book.

Anyways, what makes the book so deeply weird is that about two thirds of it isn’t social science at all. It’s fiction. Literally. Each chapter is 20-30 pages. It starts off with about 4 pages of description of a particular set of problems on campus, mainly but not exclusively ones that deal with the inability of universities to accommodate so many new students (the 50s were an era of vast expansion of higher education in the US, even more so than in Canada), particularly when so many of these students were first generation students who often lacked the socio-cultural capital to navigate the challenges of university. And the remainder of the chapter is then a meandering story, which across the ten or so chapters, introduces us to the lives of a half-dozen undergraduates of different backgrounds, plus a grad student, a high-flying member of the Economics department (and his long-suffering wife), and in one case, a parent who becomes a member of the counselling staff at the university. As the chapters go on, the characters start to interact with each other and the story builds until we reach the climatic point, which involves a rich but dissolute and dishonest student committing suicide after getting kicked out of school for trying but failing to get a much younger and richer co-ed pregnant so as to marry her.

I wish I were joking. Just as I wish I were joking about the portrayal of the Jewish graduate student who isn’t discriminated against because he’s Jewish, but just because he’s annoying. Oy.

Fundamentally, it’s not a book about mental health. It’s a book about the dissolution of a certain college ideal—one that involves residential living and enormous dollops of pastoral care from academics—under conditions of massification. As of the early 1960s, faculty were more concerned about research than teaching, which reduced the time for such activities just as the student to faculty ratio was exploding, and moreover exploding specifically with first-gen students who were not always equipped to handle university life. It’s a heartfelt plea not to throw students into the deep end, to give them more paternal(istic) guidance through their studies, to support them even in ways they might not realise they need. It’s a plea, in fact, not to create the modern university, but to retreat to a pre-massified idyll.

In that sense—and that sense only—it’s worth a read. To remember what we thought university might be, before we understood the economics of research, teaching and massification. And to imagine what a Mad Men set in a university might look like (not at all pretty).