Men and women receiving their bachelor's degrees now have for the most part been those who entered college near the end of what has been the greatest boom period in American academic history. With accelerating momentum during the last four years, it can at least be suggested that the academic analogue of the Great Crash of 1929 has occurred. Universities are even more diversified than the securities listed on the stock exchanges; they are not so closely interlinked; hence, what is a depression in some institutions is a mild recession or a plateau in others, and perhaps a pause that refreshes in still others. There are surely some institutions (until recently, the University of Texas was one) so richly supported that they could use the slack market for faculty as a time for academic bargain-hunting.