conformity is the desiderate virtue, as used (at least) to be the
case in Yale. Sometimes the type will go in for individualism, as at
Harvard a decade ago, where the thing to conform to was non-conformity.
One tradition is probably universal: is there anywhere in America a
college which does not boast that it is more “democratic” than others?
Democracy undergoes some engaging redefinition in support of these
conflicting claims, but at bottom it refers to an absence of snobs,
arrogant critics, incomprehensible intellectuals, bouncing wits,
uncomfortable pessimists--in short, the discouragement of just such
individual tastes and energies as the Martian found discouraged in our
social life at large. The money line remains. Theoretically, the poor
may compete in athletics and in other student enterprises and reap the
same social rewards as the rich: practically, they may compete and go
socially unrewarded, precisely as in the outside world. It is natural
and seemly that this should be the case, for the poor cannot afford
the avenues of association which are the breath of society to the
rich. There have been football heroes whom the well-to-do have put
in the way of acquiring wealth after they left college, but this is
patronage, not democracy. There are also colleges proud to be known as
poor men’s colleges, and for that very reason devoid of the democracy
they boast. Not long ago the president of Valparaiso had to resign, and
it developed that among the counts against him were the deadly facts
that he had attended the annual alumni dinner in dress clothes and
had countenanced “dances, athletics, fraternities, and such.” No, all
that we really mean by democracy in college is the equal opportunity
to invest one’s inoffensive charm and perfectly good money in a
transient society, to be neighbourly across geographical and family
lines, to cultivate the local twist of the universal ideal--to be a
“regular fellow.” Which is very much what we mean by democracy outside.
Whatever the precise type of man a college exalts, its characteristic
virtues are those that reflect a uniform people--hearty acceptance
of unexamined ideals, loyal conformity to traditional standards and
taboos, unassuming modesty in “playing the game,” and a wholesome
optimism withal.
But as for genuine democracy, the unrestricted interplay of free
spirits against a common background, what college can boast that its
social organization approaches even the measure of equality enjoyed
by its disinterested scholars? There was a modicum of it in the
free elective system that obtained in Dr. Eliot’s Harvard. There
was an indifference to seniority that sorely puzzled the graduates
of other colleges. Alas, freshman dormitories descended upon it,
treacherously carrying the banners of “democracy”; and a “group system”
of courses began to externalize intellectual interests to which the
elective system, abused as it was, had offered every opportunity
for spontaneity. It may be that the Amherst of Dr. Meiklejohn’s
experiments, or the Smith that President Neilson envisages, will
recapture opportunities now fled from Cambridge. These cases, after
all, are exceptional. For the typical American college, private or
public, marshals its students in two caste systems so universal and
so familiar that it never occurs to us to scrutinize the one and we
are liable to criticize the other only when its excesses betray its
decadence.
The former, the divisioning and tagging of every recruit with the
year of his graduation, looks to be an innocent convenience until
you have surveyed its regimental effect. Freshmen are green; so we
clap ridiculous caps on them, dub them “Frosh” or “Fish,” haze them,
confine them to a York Street of their kind or impound them in freshman
dormitories, where we bid them save themselves, the which they do in
their sophomore year at the expense of the next crop of recruits. It
is not so much the occasional brutality of hazing parties and “rushes”
that should arrest us here, nor yet such infrequent accidents as the
probably insane despair of that Harvard freshman whose phobia for
eggs drove him to suicide to escape the inflexible diet of his class
commons, as it is the remorseless mob invasion of personality and
privacy which either leaves the impressionable boy a victim of his
ingrowing sensibility or else converts him into a martinet who in his
turn will cripple others. In the case of the Cornell freshman who was
ducked for stubbornly refusing to wear the class cap and was saved
from more duckings by an acting president who advised him--“in all
friendliness,” said the newspapers!--to submit or to withdraw from
college for a year, it is not necessary to applaud what may have been
pig-headedness in the victim, or to flay what may have been wisdom in
the executive, in order to admire the single professor who stood ready
to resign in order to rebuke his college for her bigotry. What was
really significant here, however, and what is everywhere characteristic
of this sort of benevolent assimilation, was the tone of the university
daily’s editorial apologia:
“Complete liberty of action has never been recognized by any
but avowed anarchists; granted the validity of the law, there
can be no charge of intolerance in the enforcement of it.”
The legal “validity” of an arbitrary tradition! No “intolerance” in its
enforcement by Judge Lynch! The editor of the _Cornell Sun_ went on
to say that the existence of the “law” in question is “no secret from
the prospective Cornellian,” implying, no doubt, that to offer oneself
for matriculation at Cornell is _ipso facto_ to accept the whole body
of Ithacan tradition and taboos, along with their interpretation and
enforcement according to the momentary caprice of the majority, as
a _contrat social_. Small wonder he called the refractory freshman
a “red.” The young editor’s reasoning should recommend his early
appointment to a place in the greater _Sun_.
The caste system of academic seniority, like all caste systems, is
worst at its base. Such customs as the sequestering of the upper
classes in their private quads or ovals, the jealous protection of
senior privileges, and the calendrical elaboration of the alumni
programme serve to import a picturesque if rather forced variety into
our drab monotony. That men should choose to organize themselves to
protect some more or less irrelevant distinction is of no special
importance to outsiders so long as they do not use their organization
to dragoon minorities or to bully individuals. Yet, speak out against
the exploitation, and you will be accused of attacking the fellowship.
Criticize the shackling of freshmen, and there will not be wanting
college editors to call you a fanatic who cannot bear the jolly sight
of cap and gown.
The other system of caste, to which we give sharp attention when it
goes badly wrong, is of course the club hierarchy. Wherever there are
clubs their social capital will necessarily fluctuate with the quality
of the members they take in. The reformers who deplore the institution
of “rushing” have of course exaggerated its evils, but the evils
are there. In young colleges, and wherever clubs are insecure, the
candidates are liable to be spoiled for any club purposes before their
destination is settled; wherever the candidates must do the courting,
either brazenly or subtly, they tend to debauch the club. The dilemma
holds, in one form or another, all the way from the opposed “literary”
societies of the back-woods college to the most powerful chapters of
the national fraternities; and it is particularly acute where the
clubhouse is also the student’s residence. Any remedy thus far advanced
by the reformers is worse than the disease.
In many of the older colleges the equilibrium has been stabilized by a
device similar to the gentlemen’s agreement in industry. The important
clubs have gradually adjusted themselves into a series through
which the clubman passes, or into which he penetrates as far as his
personality and money will carry him. So the initial competition for
untried material is done away with or greatly simplified; one or two
large freshman or sophomore clubs take in all the likely candidates;
the junior clubs do most of their choosing from among this number;
and the senior clubs in turn draw on the junior. Meanwhile the member
turnover is perhaps trebled, and initiations and other gay functions
multiply.
It is to be remembered, however, that not all the brethren shift onward
and upward year by year. Many have to content themselves with clubs
already won, and those who pass on are a narrowing band, whose depleted
ranks are by no means restored in the eleventh hour recruiting of
“elections at large,” deathbed gestures of democracy after a career
of ballotting to exclude candidates who had not taken all the earlier
degrees. Thus increasing distinction is purchased through the tried and
true method of decreasing numbers. To be sure, the same end could be
served if all would remain in one club and periodically drop groups of
the least likely members. Initiations might be reversed, and punches
be given to celebrate the lightening of the ship: it would be no more
fantastic than a good part of the existing ceremonial. But--it would be
undemocratic! And, too, the celebrations might be fatally hilarious.
The present pre-initiation discipline is one that tests for regularity
and bestows the accolade on the inconspicuous, so that the initiates
turn out pretty much of a piece and the entertainment they provide is
safely conventional. But reverse the process, assemble in one squad all
the hands suspected of being exceptional--all the queer fish and odd
sticks--and there’s no predicting what capers they might cut as they
walked the plank.
The real evil of the club caste is its taste for predictability,
its standardization of contacts, its faintly cynical sophistication
where life might be a riot of adventures and experiments and
self-discoveries--in one word, its respectability. Not that it does not
provide much good fellowship and a great deal of fun (including the
varieties that have distressed its moral critics). But that everything
it provides is so definitely provided _for_, so institutionalized, and
so protected from the enrichment different types and conditions of men
could bring to it that it is exclusive in a more sinister sense than
the one intended by the critics of its alleged snobbery.
Normally the club system is by no means so snobbish as it is thought
to be; it dislikes, and is apt to punish with the black ball, the
currying of social favour and the parade of special privilege. For
youth is youth, and in the last analysis the enemy of caste. It is
the glory of college life that the most unexpected friendships will
overleap the fences run by class and club regimentation. It is its
pity that the fences, which yield so easily to irregular friendships
once they have discovered themselves, should nevertheless be stout
enough to herd their victims past so many unrecognized opportunities
for spontaneous association. The graduate who looks back fondly on his
halcyon days is very likely passing over the Senior Picnic and his row
of shingles to recall haze-hung October afternoons of tobacco and lazy
reminiscence on the window-seat of somebody who got nowhere in class
or club, or is wistful for the midnight arguments he had with that
grind who lived in his entry freshman year--nights alive with darting
speculation and warm with generous combat. Of these clandestine sweets
he will say nothing; he is a regular fellow; but he affords one of the
proofs that the well-worn social channels are not deep enough to carry
off all the wine of free fellowship. And that even the moderate caste
of college, securely established as it seems, must defend itself from
youth (even from its own youth!) is demonstrated by two phenomena not
to be explained satisfactorily on any other hypothesis. What is all the
solemn mummery, the preposterous ritual, the pompous processions to and
from temples of nightmare architecture, the whole sacrosanct edifice
of the secret fraternities, if it be not an embroidery wherewith to
disguise from present and future devotees the naked matter-of-factness
of the cult? And, on the other hand, what are the too early maturity,
the atmosphere of politely blasé languor, the ubiquitous paraphernalia
for comfort and casual hospitality that characterize the non-secret
and citified clubs of the “indifferent” college but so many disarming
confessions of the predictability of everything--the predictability,
and the necessity for quiet acceptance? Under all the encouraging
variations and exceptions runs the regimental command of our
unanimity: if you are to belong, you must conform; you must accept the
limits of the conventional world for the bounds of your reality; and
then, according to the caprice of your _genius loci_, you will play
the game as if everything, even the minutiæ of the ritual your club
has inherited from freer spirits, were of tremendous moment, or you
will play it no less thoroughly but with the air of one who knows that
nothing is of any moment at all. The clubs, that have so often been
criticized for their un-American treason to democracy, are only too
loyally American.
The third emphasis would be corollary to these two--the political
management of athletic and class and club affairs. The politics are
those of personal popularity, the management is that of administration
rather than legislation, the spirit is the American flair for petty
regulation. Where issues are in question the tone is almost certain to
be propagandist, conservatives and radicals dividing a field littered
with hard names. College life has accumulated an abundance of machinery
for the expression of the managing instinct, and most of it works.
Nowadays the lines of representation finally knot in a Student Council,
which is at once the Cabinet, the Senate, and the Supreme Court of
the undergraduate commonwealth. The routine of its work is heavily
sumptuary, and such matters as the sizes and colours and seasons for
hatband insignia, the length of time students may take off to attend
a distant game, the marshalling of parades, are decided with taste
and tact. Then, abruptly, it is a tribunal for major cases, just if
severe: a class at Yale fails to observe the honour rule, and upon the
Council’s recommendation twenty-one students are expelled or suspended;
it was the Student Council at Valparaiso that secured the president’s
withdrawal; and at Cornell it was the Student Council that came to
the rescue of tradition when a freshman refused to wear the freshman
cap. Invariably, one concludes, its edicts and verdicts will support
righteousness, as its constituents understand righteousness.
The constituents themselves are ordinarily on the side of light, as
they see the light. Not so long ago the faculty of a small New England
college decided to dispense with compulsory chapel: the students voted
it back. Moral crusades spring up like mushrooms and command the
allegiance of all but the recalcitrant “rough-necks,” whom student
opinion is sometimes tempted to feel are beating their way through an
education for which they make no equivalent return in public spirit. A
typical campaign of the sort was recently put in motion by the student
daily at Brown: the editors discovered that “the modern age of girls
and young men is intensely immoral”; they penned sensational editorials
that evoked column-long echoes in the metropolitan press; they raised
a crusade against such abominations as petting parties, the toddle
(“Rome,” they wrote, “toddled before it fell”), and “parties continued
until after breakfast time”; almost immediately they won a victory--the
Mothers’ Club of Providence resolved that dances for children must end
by eleven o’clock....
And now the undergraduate will emphasize study. But a sharp line must
be drawn between study that looks forward merely to the A.B. degree as
the end of schooling and the beginning of business, and study that is a
part of professional training, that looks forward to some professional
degree at Commencement or to matriculation in a graduate school. Both
come under the head of preparation for life; but in the former case
the degree itself is the preparation, whereas in the latter case it is
recognized that one must master and retain at least a working modicum
of the subject-matter of the professional courses and of the liberal
courses preliminary to them.
The arts man, then, recognizes only the same necessity he has faced
all the way up the school ladder--to pass. If he have entrance
conditions, they are mortgages that must be paid off, perhaps in the
Summer School; he must keep off probation to protect his athletic or
political or other activity status; beyond this, he must garner enough
courses and half-courses, semester hours or points, to purchase the
indispensable sheepskin. Further effort is supererogatory so far as
concerns study _per se_: prizes and distinctions fall in the category
of “student activities,” hobbies, and belong of right to the “sharks”;
scholarships, which in America are for the poor only, have to do
with still another matter--earning one’s way through--and are mostly
reserved for the “paid marks men,” professional studiers, grinds.
Upon his programme of courses the student will often expend as much
mental energy as would carry him through an ordinary examination: he
will pore over the catalogue, be zealous to avoid nine o’clocks and
afternoon hours liable to conflict with games, make an elaborate survey
of the comparative competence of instructors, both as graders and as
entertainers and even (quaintly enough) as experts in their fields,
and enquire diligently after snap courses. Enrolled in a course, he
will speedily estimate the minimum effort that will produce a safe
pass, unless the subject happens to be one that commends itself to
his interest independently of academic necessity. In that case he
will exceed not only the moderate stint calculated to earn a _C_, but
sometimes even the instructor’s extravagant requirements. There is, in
fact, scarcely a student but has at least one pet course in which he
will “eat up” all the required reading and more, take gratuitous notes,
ask endless questions, and perhaps make private sallies into research.
The fact that he holds most of this labour to be self-indulgence will
not temper his indignation if he fails to “pull” an _A_ or _B_, though
it is a question whether, when the grade has sealed the course, he will
be much the wiser for it than for the others.
On the evils of the course system there is probably no new thing to
be said. Such devices as the “group system” at Harvard interfere with
liberty of election without appreciably correcting the graduate’s
ignorance of the courses he has passed and cashed in for his degree.
Recognizing this fact, certain faculties have latterly inaugurated
general examinations in the whole subject-matter studied under one
department, as notably in History, Government, and Economics; but
thus far the general examination affects professional preparation, as
notably for the Law School, much more than it affects the straight arts
career, where it provides just one more obstacle to “pass.”
This business of passing is a seasonal nuisance. The early weeks of
term-time are an Arcady of fetching lectures, more or less interesting
assigned reading, and abundant “cuts.” Across the smiling sky float
minatory wisps of cloud--exercises, quizzes, tests. Then up from the
horizon blow the “hour exams,” first breath of the academic weather
that later on will rock the earth with “mid-years” and “finals.” But
to be forewarned is, for the prudent student, to get armed, and
Heaven knows he is amply warned by instructor, registrar, and dean.
So he hies himself to the armourer, the tutor, one of the brotherhood
of experts who saw him through the entrance examinations; he provides
himself with bought or leased notebooks and summaries; he crams through
a few febrile nights of cloistral deprivations and flagellations; and
the sun shines again on his harvest of gentlemen’s _C_’s, the proud
though superfluous _A_ or _B_, and maybe a _D_ that bespeaks better
armour against the next onset. Or, of course, he may have slipped
into “probation,” limbo that outrageously handicaps his athletic
or political ambitions. Only if he have been a hapless probationer
before the examinations is there any real risk of his having to join
the exceedingly small company of living sacrifices whom a suddenly
austere college now “rusticates.” (For in America suspensions and
expulsions are the penalties rather of irregular conduct than of mental
incompetence or sloth.) In four years, after he has weathered a score
of these storms and concocted a few theses, the president hands him a
diploma to frame, he sells his other furniture, puts mothballs in his
cap and gown, and plunges into business to overtake his non-college
competitors.
Student opinion recognizes that the man enrolled in professional
courses or headed for a graduate school faces more stringent
necessities. He may devote himself to his more specific training
without the imputation of being a “grind,” and if he pursues honours
it will be in the line of business rather than of indoor sport. He
will be charier of cuts, more painstaking as regards his notes and
reading, and the professional manner will settle on him early. In
every college commons you can find a table where the talk is largely
shop--hypothetical cases, laboratory experiments, new inventions,
devices for circumventing the income tax. All this, however, is
really a quantitative difference, not a qualitative. Of disinterested
intellectual activity he is if anything more innocent than his fellow
in the arts school.
So much for the four great necessities of average student life--in
order of acknowledged importance: athletics, social life, politics,
study. Deans and other official but theoretical folk will tell
our Martian that the business of college is study and that all the
undergraduate’s other functions are marginal matters; but their own
conduct will already have betrayed them to him, for he will not have
missed the fact that most of their labour is devoted to making study
as dignified and popular as the students have made sports and clubs
and elections. These four majors hold their places at the head of the
list of student emphases because no representative undergraduate quite
escapes any of them; the next ones may be stressed more variously,
according rather to the student’s capricious private inclinations than
to his simpler group reactions.