Oh, shut up, you little whiners!

There was an article in The Boston Globe the other day (by Sarah Schweitzer) on how it's become more and more important for colleges to provide their students upscale living accommodations.

None of those prison-like, cement block dorms of the past.

Three hots and a cot won't do it for Generation-EZ.

Nope, these kids need dorms that are designer-designed, with posh common space (espresso machines, baby grand pianos, flat screen TV's) and personal living areas that are more like apartments - make that, nice, upscale apartments - than they are like anything that resembled the dorms of yore.

Those old time dorms!

To the current crop of students, those dorms must seem like prisons - or military barracks which, thanks to the all volunteer Army, 99.99% of them will never have to experience. (They're no doubt statistically more likely to end up spending the night in jail.)

The Globe article introduced us to some Tufts freshmen who were pretty ticked off because they didn't have a decent TV in their common room. I will give them some credit for gumption: a group of them chipped in and bought one, but what do they need a TV for in the first place?

Granted, there are a lot more channels now than there used to be, but hanging around the common room watching TV was not something that anyone did when I was in college. In fact, I remember watching common room television exactly once. That was my freshman year, when Lyndon Johnson announced he wasn't running for re-election. (Yip-pee, all us McCarthy supporters cried. Little did we know what was coming....)

Other than that, I don't recall ever watching TV while I was in school. I had an apartment senior year, and I think we may have had an old B&W TV that Joyce's mother had given us. I seem to vaguely remember watching a really bad cut and paste version of Marlon Brando in The Wild Ones.

No, college wasn't the time for watching TV. It was the time to sit around those cinder-block dorm rooms in bull sessions, discussing everything past-present-and-future we could think of. Sometimes, it was heavy-duty stuff: Vietnam, God is dead, abortion. Sometimes it was middle-ground: to be or not to be a virgin, summer jobs. Sometimes it was pure frippery - like whether to streak your hair or get your ears pierced.

But, what with minor demands like class, study, and spending-money jobs, and major demands like the hours required for interminable bull sessions, who had the time for or interest in watching television?

Oh, I forgot to mention that, if you watched TV, you wouldn't have as much time for brooding by yourself while listening to your Leonard Cohen album, or staring into a candle while endlessly replaying The Doors Light My Fire, with those deathless, mesmerizing lyrics:

The time to hesitate is through.
No time to wallow in the mire.
Try now, we can only lose,
And our love become a funeral pyre.

(I may not have had a boyfriend with whom to turn our love into a funeral pyre, but I could still brood along with Jim Morrison.)

Of course, I can't blame the kids for wanting to live as nicely as they did at home, or even upscaling things beyond that. (Think of the poor scholarship kids. On the other hand, those probably aren't the kids bitching about the dorm accommodations.)

But why give in to those wants?

Why not say, tough, college is for gaining some independence and experience, for making friends, for learning things - in and out of class - and you don't need a pimped out crib to do any of that. Those old cement block walls worked just fine.

And, while there wasn't much you could do about the communal bathrooms and other common areas, it's not as if you couldn't fix up those crummy little rooms.

My roommate and I started each year with a junket to a long-gone fun emporium/head shop, George's Folly, that sold funky things from Mexico and Jakarta before there were a lot of places selling such funky things - other than in college areas. At George's Folly, you could get an Indian-print bedspread for $3 (freshman year: cream, orange, and brown, with elephants to match our pale orange walls). You could also get a cheap vase and some straw flowers.

And once you'd taped up a few posters from the Museum of Fine Arts, you had a place to call your own.

Most important, it was a place where you parents weren't.

This, of course, seems far less of an issue with the current generation, who actually seem to get along with their parents well enough that they would happily move back in with them after graduation.

Not so the case with us first wave Baby Boomer.

Our parents may have been The Greatest Generation and all that, but, trust me, there was no way you wanted to deal with them once you'd tasted that savory bit of independence and freedom in college.

Think about it.

Would someone who'd landed on Normandy Beach be at all sympathetic to your sleeping bag getting soaked at Woodstock?

Would someone who'd had orders barked at him by General Patton take your side over that of a professor who wouldn't grant you an extension on your philosophy paper?

Would someone who'd spent three years at Brooklyn Navy Yard giving out skivvies and sailor caps give two hoots whether you thought your entry level job was boring and beneath the capabilities of a European Literature major? (Filing! They expect me to file, for godssake.)

And while your mother was not likely to have been on the Bataan Death March, she did experience The Great Depression. (Trust me, someone who'd put cardboard in the soles of her shoes when they got a hole in them was not going to stand by commentless when you wanted to take most of your pay check and buy a pink suede jacket, even if it was on sale.)

No, sympathy and understanding was not something you were ever going to get from The Greatest Generation. What you were going to get from them was something more along the lines of 'quit whining.'

If you wanted sympathy and understanding, if you wanted someone to tell you that Professor X is a monster; that it sucks to have to file; that it's more than reasonable to buy that pink suede jacket, that's what your friends were for. And you didn't need to be sitting around a nicely furnished common room, or a luxury suite living area to yack with them.

Trust me, those cement block dorm rooms worked just fine.