It was almost as if each of the students at the Stump encampment had come with some personal grievance, and in the airing of these grievances there emerged a general, generational, miasma of discontent: about Webster, the country, the way things were, that simply hung over the Billings Lawn and the campus itself, and represented, as Betty Friedan might have said, a problem that had no name.
-- Narrator (Prologue paragraph 3)

Importance: This quote introduces the reader specifically to the construction of the Webster Dissent, but also hints at the wider significance of contemporary student activism. The Webster Dissent uses the specific grievance of Nicholas Gall's denial of tenure to communicate a more general dissatisfaction about "the way things were." Gall's denial leads to questions of the wider problem of institutional racism, but then also issues of academic, administrative, and governmental authorities giving lip-service to progressivism while allowing conservatism to reign. The narrator's comparison of...