The '60s begin to fade...

There is much talk in the RL and online circles in which I travel of the greying of the chancery middle management types, and the changing of the guard amongst the musical and liturgical PTB, a very strong feeling that the Spirit of VCII types have had their day, and the real work of liturgical reform can now commence.
I'm not so sure anything is happening yet in the Church at large, but wishful thinking or not, the idea is out there.
Apparently, there is some clear data on the same phenomenon in the groves of academe.
(The interest in data and empirical questions as opposed to subjective "narrative" described in contrasting the old and the new in this article strikes me as not unlike the divide between the less-than-intellectually honest "Spirit of...." types, and their, "no, this is what [name your authoritative document] REALLY says, and whether through ignorance or deliberately you've been feeding us a bill of goods" party, in Church circles.)

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/03/arts/03camp.html?_r=1&hp=&oref=slogin&pagewanted=all

Mr. Olneck said that today both the kinds of analyses and the theories that prevailed when he was in college have changed. Overarching narratives, societal critiques and clarion calls for change — of the capitalist system or the social structure — have gone out of style. Today, with advances in statistical methods, many sociologists have moved to model themselves on clinical researchers with large, randomized experiments as their gold standard. In their eyes, this more scientific approach is less explicitly ideological than other kinds of research.
Ms. Goldrick-Rab has embraced such experiments. A graduate course she created — partly based on her research of community colleges — focused on “educational opportunity and inequality” at community colleges, with an “emphasis on the critical evaluation and assessment of current up-to-date research.”
Another Wisconsin professor, Erik Olin Wright, a 61-year-old sociologist and a Marxist theorist, described it this way: “There has been some shift away from grand frameworks to more focused empirical questions.”
As for his own approach, Mr. Wright said, “in the late ’60s and ’70s, the Marxist impulse was central for those interested in social justice.” Now it resides at the margins.
A New Generation
“I was part of a new wave of hires,” Sara Goldrick-Rab said, peering over the top of her laptop at her favorite off-campus work site, the Espresso Royale cafe. She came to the University of Wisconsin in 2004 and, like Mr. Olneck, has a joint appointment in educational policy studies and sociology, both departments considered among the best in the country.
Now 31, she grew up in a Washington suburb, Fairfax, Va., when Ronald Reagan was in the White House and corporate mergers were the rage. At George Washington University she was active in a campaign to end the death penalty, but for most of her classmates the late 1990s were marked by economic growth, peace and student apathy.
“My generation is not so ideologically driven,” she said.
That doesn’t mean she doesn’t want to engage a larger audience and influence policy. She considers herself the “intellectual heir” of her senior colleagues — “It’s like working with your grandparents,” she said fondly — and she cares deeply about educational inequality, often writing about the subject on a blog she created with her husband.
But she also is aware of differences between the generations.

“Senior people evaluate us for tenure and the standards they use and what we think is important are different,” she said. They want to question values and norms; “we are more driven by data.”