This article is not intended in any sense as a reply to the
_Confessions of a Harvard Man_ published several months ago in THE
FORUM by Mr. Harold E. Stearns. The importance of those articles, as
Mr. Stearns had reason to point out, lay not so much in what they told
about Harvard as in what they told about him. Precisely. Analyses of
the temper of Young America have their place. The temper of Harvard
itself, however, is something quite apart, and it is to that alone
that this article is devoted. The importance of it lies only in the
number of significant and true things it tells about Harvard.
And that, perhaps, is importance enough. I say this in none of that
college spirit which makes a man believe that his college, because it
is his, is singled out for the peculiar attentions of the high gods
who brood over academic welfare. A change, such as I am describing, if
it took place at any other college, would be quite as important. The
fact is that it could have taken place nowhere else.
Which brings us to the old Harvard and the popular misconceptions of
its character. It was supposed to create a type of man, effeminate,
detached, affecting superiority, incapable, and snobbish. Certainly
men of this order did graduate from Harvard, but the great truth is
that there was no Harvard type; there were always Harvard men, but
there was never a “Harvard man.” The importance of this distinction is
inestimable, because it points to the fundamental thing in the older
Harvard life: its insistence upon individuality. In that the old
Harvard struck deep through superficial things and came at once upon
the fundamental thing identical in democracy and in aristocracy. It
bestowed each man in accordance with his deserts and, following
Hamlet’s dictum, according to its own nobility; and gave him according
to his needs and according to his powers. Like every truly democratic
institution, Harvard was aristocratic; like every truly aristocratic
institution, Harvard was democratic. At the very moment when it was
supposed to be breeding aristocratic snobs, Harvard was fulfilling the
great mission of _democratic_ institutions in encouraging each man to
be himself as greatly and completely as he could. At the very moment
when it was supposed to exercise a mean and narrowing influence over
its students, it was fulfilling the great mission of _cultural_
institutions in helping each man to a ripening of his powers, to
enlargement of his interests, and to widening of his sympathies. Its
effeminates went to war against dirt and danger and disease; its snobs
devoted themselves to the advancement of social justice; its detached
men became bankers and mill-owners and journalists; one of its
weaklings conquered the world. The great thing was that in all of them
the old impulse to a deep and full life remained; the tradition of
culture was beginning to prosper. So that Harvard could send out a
statesman who was interested in the Celtic revival, a littérateur with
a fondness for baseball, a financier who appreciated art and a
philosopher who appreciated life. At the same time it graduated
thousands of men who took with them into professional life and into
business life a feeling, perhaps only a memory, of the variety and
excellence of human achievement—men who without pride or shame, which
are equally snobbish, tried to substitute discipline and cultivation
for disorder and barbarity. It is no petty accomplishment.
To achieve it Harvard had to stand with bitter determination against
the current sweeping toward the practical, the immediate, the
successful. At the same time it bought its cherished democracy of
thought at the price of social anarchy. The college as a body made
very little effort to protect or to comfort its individuals. It was
assumed that he who came could make his own way; if the way were hard,
so much the better! The triumph would be sweeter. The great
fraternities grew in strength, possibly because there was no
countervailing force issuing from the college itself. But there was
never a determined organized attempt to make the individual life of
the undergraduate happy or comfortable. In its place there was a huge,
inchoate, and tremendously successful attempt to make the intellectual
life of the individual interesting and productive. Each man found his
own; fought to win his place, struggled against loneliness and
despair, and emerged sturdier in spirit, younger and braver and
better. Some fell. They were the waste products of a civilization
which was harsh, selfish in its interests, generous in its
appreciations, a microcosm of life. A pity that some should have to
fall! But it would be a greater pity if for them the battle should
cease. Because the fighting was always fair. The strength which
developed in many a man in his efforts to make a paper, or a club, or
even in qualifying to join some little group of men, was often the
basis of a successful life. With it came an intensification of
personality; the absence of a set type made the suppression of the
individual at Harvard almost impossible. I am certain that no one with
a personality worth preserving ever lost it there.
I wonder whether those who speak and write about democracy at our
colleges ever realize the importance of this intellectual freedom. Mr.
Owen Johnson is not unconscious of it, yet his whole attack upon the
colleges, practically unchallenged, was on account of their lack of
social democracy. It is considered a dreadful thing among us that rich
A should not want to talk to poor B; but it would never occur to us to
be shocked if they had nothing to say to each other except small talk
about baseball or shop talk about courses. And if the choice is
between social promiscuity and intellectual freedom, we must say, “Let
their ways be apart eternally, so long as they are free.”
The terrible fact is that the undergraduate in his effort to attain
social unity has sacrificed the liberty of thought. It would be
indelicate for a Harvard man, however generous, to condemn other
colleges. Let Mr. Johnson speak for Yale: “It is ruled by the tyranny
of the average, the democracy of a bourgeois commonplaceness.” And an
undergraduate wrote in _The Yale Literary Magazine_ that “we are
accounted for as one conglomeration of body first, head next, and last
and least, soul. As one we go to chapel, as one our parental
authorities would like to see us pastured at Commons, and as one we
are educated.” For Princeton _The Nassau Lit_ writes this
significant editorial: “It is not long before the freshman learns that
a certain kind of thinking, too, is quite necessary here, and from
that time on, until graduation, the same strong influence is at work,
until the habit of _conforming_ has become a strongly ingrained second
nature…. Four years of this … results in a certain fixity of ideas….
We are brought up under the sway of what seems to us a rather
bourgeois conventionality.”
Apart from the fact that the term “bourgeois,” contradictory to the
aristo-democratic ideal in essence, occurs in two of these statements,
I do not think that they call for extended comment. These things, at
least, no man has been able to say of Harvard; even to this day there
remains a fierce, jealous, almost joyous tradition of intellectual
freedom—in spite of all!
I say “in spite of all,” because I am now leaving the old Harvard and
am about to record the deep conversion of recent years which says a
prosperous and Philistine No to everything the old Harvard has said,
and which is surrendering its spirit to the very forces against which
the old Harvard made its arm strong and its heart of triple brass. I
do not mean that Harvard will cease to be great; I do mean that it may
cease to be Harvard. It is hard to deal with a phenomenon of this sort
solely by means of actualities. I am describing the disintegration of
a social background, the subsidence of one tone and the emergence, not
yet complete, of another. But, yielding to the present insistence upon
“facts,” I shall name a number of significant developments which
indicate the nature of what I have called the changing temper at
Harvard.
They are of two orders, social and intellectual. In the first group we
have the senior and freshmen dormitories; a new insistence upon class
lines; a new emphasis upon college spirit and with it a disquieting
resurgence of that great abomination, “college life”; a change of
attitude toward our much maligned “Harvard indifference” and “Harvard
snobbery.” In the second class come the group system as opposed to the
free elective system, the failure of cultural activities, the contempt
for dilettantism, the emergence of the scholar. The last phenomenon is
mentioned out of no overbearing desire to be either thorough or fair;
it has a significance of its own.
Superficially the most striking of these changes is the extraordinary
importance attached to class lines. It will be remembered that when
President Wilson tried to reform Princeton with the Oxford system as a
model, he was balked by precisely this feeling of class unity. At
Harvard the thing was not unknown; but it was not important. Princeton
men rejoice that their freshmen are compelled to wear caps, black
shirts and corduroy trousers for the first three months of the year,
so that no snobbery may develop! To the healthy Harvard man this seems
sheer insanity—democracy run to seed. Such solicitude for promiscuity
seems to intend a horrible mistrust of something, and certainly a
beautiful misapprehension of what democracy means. I am speaking not
from mere personal experience, but from that of generations of Harvard
men, when I say that it has been possible for a man to go through his
four years without knowing more than ten men in his own class
intimately, yet acquiring all that college could give by knowing the
finest spirits in a whole college cycle. The new order will change all
this. It will not forbid a man to seek his acquaintances outside his
class; but it will suggest and presently it may insist that his duty
to his class can only be fulfilled by cultivating the acquaintance of
all who entered college on the same day as he. We may live to see the
time when Harvard will emulate the Yale man’s boast that he knew all
his classmates (but one) by their first names!
The outward forms of this change are the senior and freshmen
dormitories. The former resulted from the great schism of 1909 when
the Gold Coast was defeated in the vote for class officers by the
poorer men living in and about the Yard. It was considered intolerable
that a class should be so divided and a decided effort was made to get
the rich society men to live in the Yard, beside their poorer
fellow-students, during their senior year. This has been a great
success! A group of men, friends for three years, bound by steady
companionship and natural affinities, occupy one entry of Hollis.
Another group, equally bound by totally different sympathies and
activities, occupy another. They nod to each other as they come from
class. If a man in one group is taking the same course in Engineering
as a man in the other, they may discuss a problem or denounce a
“stiff” hour exam. in common. There their ways part. It seems
inconceivable that the heads of a great college should have been able
to believe that the mere accident of adjacent rooms could actually be
the basis, or even the beginnings, of a true democratic spirit of
fraternity. And—let me anticipate—_if the college had not
ignominiously failed in its effort to supply a true basis of
fraternity, it would not now be driven to a method so childish and so
artificial as that of class grouping_.
But if the senior dormitories are merely silly, what can be said of
the plan to house all the freshmen together in a group of buildings
far removed from the centre of college activities? It is not here a
question of whether they “will work,” but of the spirit which prompted
their foundation. They will not be as bad as their opponents may
imagine, because nothing will break down the tradition of free
intercourse, and the man who writes or the man who jumps will
inevitably seek out his own. But it is certainly a weakening of
Harvard’s moral fibre that an effort should be made to “help along”
the freshmen, instead of compelling them to fight their own way. That
the change really drives into the spirit of Harvard can be judged by
these significant instances of the attitude taken toward the new
scheme by graduates, undergraduates, and by the college authorities.
First consider the testimony of an alumni organization secretary. In a
conversation he said, “We have found it the hardest thing in the world
to persuade graduates that Harvard needs freshmen dormitories. They
are perfectly willing to subscribe for dorms, but they balk at the
freshmen restriction.” Among the undergraduates there exists a
peculiar feeling of relief that they came to Harvard before the
buildings were up. Even those who defend them and say that they “will
be a good thing for the freshies,” do not regret that the “good thing”
was not for them. Articles have been written in undergraduate
publications defending them, but I do not know a single man in the
present (1914) senior class who passionately regrets that they were
not built four years ago. And finally from the college itself came
distinct and explicit denial that there is any intention of tucking
the freshmen into bed at nine o’clock each night. _Hein!_
And the result: a wonderful renaissance of the demand for “college
spirit.” College spirit is, of course, nothing in the world but
undergraduate jingoism. The desire to cheer his team is one which no
man can afford to miss, but it points to an undeniable falling off in
democracy when the “rah-rah” spirit can dominate a college and call
those who will not yield to it unfaithful and unworthy. Under that
tyranny Harvard is already beginning to suffer. Further, men are
beginning to be urged to do things not because they want to do them,
but for Harvard’s sake. They are urged to back their teams for the
sake of the college and its reputation. It will seem incredible, but
there actually appeared in the columns of an undergraduate publication
an ominous exhortation “not to be behind Yale” in showing our spirit.
Disagreeable as these things are, they are inconsidered trifles beside
the change of attitude which has taken place in regard to the serious
work of the college. I cling, in spite of successive disillusions, to
the belief that _the function of the college is to create a tradition of
culture_: it is not to create gentlemen or scholars unless it can effect
the combination of both, and it is certainly not to prepare men for
success _in business_. Success in life is a different matter. College
should not spoil a man for life; it should enable him to appreciate
life, make him “able and active in distinguishing the great from the
petty.” That is what culture means; and that is precisely what Harvard
has decided not to do. Emphasis there has borrowed from emphasis
everywhere. The advantage of President Lowell’s system of course
grouping is that the undergraduate is no longer able to take 17
uncorrelated courses and achieve a degree; he must know a good deal
about one thing at least. But aside from the obvious fact that a great
many freshmen are incapable of choosing their life work and choose
what is easiest for them, the group system has a terrible defect. It
has come about that men choose their group from worthy or unworthy
reasons and consider that they have acquired all the good of a college
career if they have done creditable work in that particular group. The
other courses are merely “fillers.” The majority of men are content to
concentrate, to narrow their interests, and the whole meaning of
college, which is to prepare the way for future enlargement of
sympathies, has been lost. Figures cannot be cited for or against this
assertion. But some tendencies now discernible at Harvard may be
illuminating.
First, the scholar has emerged. He has become respectable; he has also
become a specialist, Economics, Government and the practical sciences
being the favored groups. Second, there has grown up a great and loud
contempt for the dilettante and æsthete. I hope these words will not
be misunderstood. The dilettante at Harvard is any man who writes,
thinks, talks well, is not particularly athletic and does not go to
the moving-picture shows which have become the chief attraction at the
Harvard Union. (This last, by the way, is not fantasy but fact; the
“movie” has proved the great agent for class solidarity at Harvard).
An æsthete at Harvard is one who has any diversity of interests and
activities. At Harvard it is almost a crime to be interested in art,
anarchism, literature, music, pageantry, dancing, acting; to write
poetry or fiction, to talk English, to read French (except de
Maupassant) for pleasure. Mr. Eric Dawson, whose article in _The Yale
Lit_ I have already quoted, advises the Yale man to keep it darkly
secret “if he cares for etchings, prefers Beethoven to Alexander’s
Ragtime Band, and Meredith to Meredith Nicholson.” It is a terrible
commentary on Harvard’s intellectual life that the words should be
applicable now.
They are. Within the past three years the degeneration of every
cultural activity has been persistently rapid. _The Lampoon_ alone
resists, and it is marked by its satire on all the new movements. The
Socialist Club was founded in 1909. Its boast that it included the
active intelligence of the college was always a gross exaggeration,
but it was in itself active and intelligent. This year it is
practically dead; free, incisive thinking has gone out of fashion. The
Dramatic Club started at about the same time with high ideals and even
higher achievement. Its record for the past two years has been one of
protracted failure. (There is some excuse; other organizations have
taken some of its most talented actors.) The activity is too
“detached” for Harvard men of the brave new stripe. Even more
disastrous has been the career of _The Harvard Monthly_—_The Atlantic
Monthly_ of the colleges—which was founded about thirty years ago and
has had on its boards such men as George Santayana, Professor George
P. Baker, Robert Herrick, Norman Hapgood, and a host of other
distinguished men. It always lacked popular appeal, but there were
always enough men at Harvard to produce a superior magazine and almost
enough readers to make the production worth while. Within the last few
years it has been found almost impossible to keep the _Monthly_ going,
and its dissolution is imminent. It may combine with _The Advocate_,
another paper of other ideals, once graced with infinite wit, now
failing because that too is out of fashion. It is possible that these
activities may revive, that succeeding generations will take up the
slack. That is the work of individuals. The creation of a receptive
body is the work of the college, and that has been forgotten.
And if you ask what the Harvard man is doing, what he is talking
about, while these activities are being ruined before his eyes, the
answer is not merely as Mr. Stearns gave it, that the Harvard man
talks smut. So do most other men. The terrible thing is that the
Harvard man talks very little else that is worth listening to.
Lectures, cuts, assignments, exams, and shows; baseball, daily news (a
mere “Did you see that?” conversation), steam engines; girls, parties,
class elections, piffling nonsense—that is the roster of the college
man. I am terribly conscious of the intolerable stupidity of
“intellectual” conversation; I do not wish that conversation at
college should consist of nothing but considerations of the Fourfold
Root. But it does seem rather unfortunate that the men who are,
theoretically, to be the leaders of the next generation, should never
talk or think about art, should have _no_ interest in ideas, should be
ignorant of philosophy and impatient of fine thinking, should use
their own tongue as a barbarous instrument, should be loud and vulgar
of speech, commonplace in manner, entirely lacking in distinction of
spirit and mind.
The college has failed to make intelligent activity the basis of
democracy; there is no community of interest in things of the mind or
spirit and that is why artificial means, with the peril they bring to
the individual, are resorted to. How far President Lowell is
responsible for that which has happened in his administration is a
question I cannot answer. He has seen the signs of his time; he has
warned Harvard of the terrible danger which has come to it with the
decadence of individual study and independent reading. He is trying to
make intellectual activity the basis of Harvard’s democracy at the
very moment when he is the ablest of those who in reality help to
sustain all that I have here ventured to criticise.
It has been in no reactionary spirit. I have not intended to say that
Harvard actually produces the type I have described. The truth is that
it does so little to refine what it gets. The care of the superior
individual, which always results in the greatest benefit to all, has
ceased to engross the college. The new order will not be of the same
heterogeneous excellence. That change all suffer, and all resent.
Granted that the new Harvard will be glorious and great, was there not
room, besides all the State colleges and the technical schools, for
its intransigeant detachment, its hopeless struggle for a “useless”
culture? It will be said that for such a training men should go to
smaller colleges, like Amherst, where they will receive the special
attention they may deserve. But I think of what William James said
once of Harvard, and I wonder what Harvard men, and what the country,
will do when they realize that it can never be said again:
“The true Church was always the invisible Church. The true Harvard is
the invisible Harvard in the souls of her more truth-seeking and
independent and often very solitary sons…. As a nursery for
independent and lonely thinkers … Harvard still is in the van….
Our undisciplinables are our proudest product!”