If this chapter reads like the front page of a newspaper – full of bad news – well, I hope you won't be too depressed. The fact is that the 1970s were a miserable decade for the United States, for most of its citizens, and especially for its professionals. For personal reasons, the Galambos family shared in this misery. The high points (and there were only three) made the rest of the decade look especially bleak by comparison. It was an unpleasant time for those who lived through it and it's still a difficult era for an optimistic historian to discuss.

I began the decade teaching at Livingston College, in Rutgers University. I had finished my postdoc at Johns Hopkins, and I left Rice and Houston to be on the East Coast, where much of my research was focused. Livingston College provided an open window on the turmoil of the 1970s. The College was designed to be a revolutionary institution, perhaps the only state-subsidized revolutionary movement in modern American history. The College was initially shaped by the demands that higher education be responsive to the civil rights movement, to the New Left's antibureaucratic creed, and to the need to throw open admission to young people whose education had suffered under America's class system.