Many intellectuals sensed the dawning of a "new generation" in the activism, idealism, and moral pronouncements of the student movement of the 1960's. This movement seemed to be reaching fruition with the "revolutionary" tremors that the youth culture let loose on college campuses and throughout American society in the wake of Cambodia, Kent State, and Jackson State during the spring of 1970.

But less than six months later, the "sounds of silence" on the college campuses became deadening, and the savants of the "new society" expressed disillusionment and bewilderment.