such as survived are now so called. They had probably little in common
with the democratic English halls of the Middle Ages. Both at Oxford
and at Cambridge the halls of the seventeenth century were, as I have
said, mere pendants of the colleges; they must have had a separate
character as a social community and a certain independence; but if
they had separate endowments, they did not manage them, and each of
them depended for its instruction mainly on the college to which it
was affiliated. The printed records of the early American halls are
too meagre to warrant definite conclusions; but they seem to show that
the halls were conceived in the spirit of the English hall of the
seventeenth century, in that they provided for separate social and
residential communities without separate endowment or teaching force.
If the increase of students at Harvard had been rapid, it is not
unlikely that many new halls would have been established, each the
home of a complete community; but for half a century the number
fluctuated between fifteen and thirty. If we take the English estimate
of two hundred and fifty as the largest feasible size for a single
community, the limit was not reached until as late as 1840. By 1676
the timber "colledge" built at the charge of Mr. Harvard, which bore
his name, had been superseded by the first Harvard Hall, which
Hutchinson describes as "a fair pile of brick building covered with
tiles by reason of the late Indian warre not yet finished.... It
contains twenty chambers for students, two in a chamber, a large hall
which serves for a chapel; over that a convenient library." In these
ample accommodations it was found that the student body could be most
conveniently and cheaply fed as a single community. Thus, like the
idea of a group of colleges with separate finances and teaching
bodies, the idea of separate residential halls must have passed away
with the generation of divines educated in England. The American
college and the American university remained identical, not only
educationally and in their finances, but as a social organization.
This fact has caused a curious reversion in America toward the
mediaeval type of university, both socially and educationally.
As the university has expanded, it has declined socially: to-day the
residential life is only a degree better than that in the ancient
chamberdekyns. Educationally, the reversion has been fortunate: the
university is alive to the needs of the life about it. If it here
resembles the modern German universities, this is largely due to the
fact that both have more faithfully preserved the system and the
spirit of the Middle Ages: the resemblance is quite as much a matter
of native growth in America as of foreign imitation. In England, the
mediaeval idea of a multiplicity of residential bodies has survived,
and the educational idea of the mediaeval university has perished. In
Germany, the educational idea has survived, and the old community life
has perished. In America, the two ideas have survived by virtue of
their identity. But for the same reason both are in a rudimentary and
very imperfect state of development.
FOOTNOTE:
[3] William G. Brown in _The Nation_, vol. 61, No. 1585, p. 346.
V
THE PROBLEMS OF THE AMERICAN UNIVERSITY
I
THE SOCIAL AND ATHLETIC PROBLEM
The imperfection of the modern American university in its social
organization has been stated with the utmost clearness and authority,
at least as regards Harvard. The "Harvard Graduates' Magazine" for
September, 1894, published posthumously an article by Frank Bolles,
late secretary of the college, entitled "The Administrative Problem."
"In the present state of affairs," says Mr. Bolles, "student social
life is stunted and distorted.... There is something very ugly in the
possibility of a young man's coming to Cambridge, and while here
sleeping and studying alone in a cheerless lodging, eating alone in a
dismal restaurant, feeling himself unknown, and so alone in his
lectures, his chapel, and his recreations, and not even having the
privilege of seeing his administrative officers, who know most of his
record, without having to explain to them at each visit who he is and
what he is, before they can be made to remember that he is a living,
hoping, or despairing part of Harvard College."
Some of these men who fail to find a place in the social community
meet their isolation grimly and are embittered against life. Others,
after a few months or a year of lonesomeness and neglect, give up
their university career broken-hearted, and by so doing perhaps take
the first step in a life of failures. One man of whom I happened to
know confided to his daily themes a depth of misery of which it can
only be hoped that it was hysterical. At night when he heard a step on
his staircase he prayed that it might be some one coming to see him.
The tide of undergraduate life and of joy in living flowed all about
him and left him thirsting. If a man finds sweetness in the uses of
such adversity, it can only be by virtue of the firmest and calmest of
tempers. Sometimes fellows starve physically without a friend with
whom to share their hardship, living perhaps on bread, milk, and
oatmeal, which they cook over the study lamp. Occasionally one hears
disquieting rumors that such short rations have resulted in disease
and even death before the authorities were aware. If this be so, the
hardships of life in the earliest mediaeval university, though far
enough removed from us to be picturesque, could hardly have been more
real.
The sickness of the body politic has been portrayed with artistic
sympathy and veracity by Mr. C. M. Flandrau, in his "Harvard
Episodes," the wittiest and most searching of studies of undergraduate
life. It is no doubt for this reason that the book is both read and
resented by the healthy and unthinking college man.
To dwell on such individual instances would be unpleasant. The point
of importance is to show how the social chaos affects the health of
the community as a whole. As it happens, we have a barometer. For
better or for worse, the moving passion of the undergraduate body,
aside from studies, is athletic success. If athletics prosper, it is
because the life of the college finds an easy and natural expression;
if athletics languish, there is pretty sure to be some check on
wholesome functioning.
The causes of Harvard's abundant failures and the remedies have been a
fertile theme of discussion. One cause is obvious. The rivals with
distressing frequency have produced better teams. Every one knows that
what Cambridge chooses to call Yale luck is nine parts Yale pluck; and
the quality is well developed at Princeton, Pennsylvania, and
elsewhere. But why is it developed at these places more than at
Harvard? The explanations are legion. The first cry was bad coaching.
This was repeated until the fault was corrected, at least in part,
and until every one was wholly tired of hearing the explanation. Then
came the cry of bad physical training. This in turn was repeated until
it brought partial remedy and total weariness of the agitation. By and
by, all other complaints having been worn threadbare, Harvard's defeat
was attributed to the fog on Soldier's Field. It is not unlikely that
the fog will be dissipated and the athletes duly benefited. Yet it is
far from certain that this will make the athletic body sound.
The fault lies deeper than Yale pluck--or even the fog on Soldier's
Field. It is to be found in the conditions, social, administrative,
and even educational, which are at the basis of the life of the
university. If these conditions were peculiar to Harvard, it would
decidedly not be worth while to discuss them publicly. But they are
inherent in the type of university of which Harvard is the earliest
and most developed example, and are destined to crop out in every
American institution of learning in proportion as it grows, as Harvard
has grown, from the English college of a few decades ago into the
Teutonized university of the present and of the future. In considering
the causes, it is necessary to speak concretely of our one eminent
example; but the main fact brought out will be applicable in greater
or less degree to the present or future of any American college.
The sources of Harvard's weakness are mainly social. When the college
was small, it had its share of victory; but almost from the year when
it began to outgrow its rivals, its prowess declined. Forty years ago,
and even less, the undergraduate constitution of American institutions
was, roughly speaking, that of the colleges of Oxford and Cambridge: a
freshman was measurably sure of falling into easy relationship with
the fellows of his class and of other classes, and thus of finding his
level or his pinnacle in athletic teams and in clubs. Considered as a
machine for developing good fellows and good sportsmen, it was well
adjusted and well oiled; it worked. But it was not capable of
expansion. Two or three hundred fellows can live and even dine
together with comfort and an increase of mutual understanding; they
soon become an organized community. When a thousand or two live as a
single community and dine at one board (let us call it dining), the
social bond relaxes. Next door neighbors are unknown to one another,
having no common ground of meeting, and even the college commons fail
to bring them together. The relaxing influence of the hour spent at
table and in the subsequent conversation, during which social
intercourse should most freely flourish, is quite lost. The
undergraduate body is a mob, or at best an aggregation of shifting
cliques. If men live in crowds or in cliques, their life is that of
crowds or of cliques, and is unprofitable both to themselves and to
the community that should prosper by their loyal activity.
It is true that there are societies and clubs, but these also to a
certain degree have been swamped in the rising tide of undergraduates.
With freshman classes as large as those of to-day, the old social
machinery becomes incapable of sifting the clubable from the less
clubable, those who deserve recognition in the body of undergraduates
from those who do not. The evil is increased by the fact that as a
rule in America the social life is organized early in the
undergraduate course, so that the men who fail of election in the
first year or two have failed for good. There are, to be sure, cases
in which men who have later developed signal merit have been taken
into the all-important societies and clubs of the upper classmen, and
sometimes these societies make a special and most creditable effort
thus to remedy the failures of the system; but the men who are thus
elected are an exception, and an exception of the kind that proves
the rule. Unless a man has been prominent in one of the large
preparatory schools, or becomes prominent in athletics in the first
year or so, there is only one way to make sure of meeting such fellows
as he wishes to know, and that is both to choose friends and to avoid
them with an eye to social chances, a method which is scarcely to be
commended. As the incoming classes grow larger, there is an
increasingly large proportion of undergraduates who fail to qualify in
the first year or two in any of these ways. Throughout their course
they neither receive benefit from the general life of the university
nor contribute to it. They are often of loyal and disinterested
character, and they not infrequently develop into men of exceptional
ability in all of the paths of undergraduate life; not a few of them
have been 'varsity captains. But instead of exerting the influence on
the welfare of the university which such men might and should exert,
they find it impossible to get into the main currents, and revolve
impotently on the outside, each in the particular eddy where fate has
thrust him.
At Harvard, where the evil has long been recognized, a remedy has been
sought in increasing the membership of the great sophomore and senior
societies, the Institute of 1770 and the Hasty Pudding Club. The
result has been the reverse of what was intended. The larger the club
the less compact its life and its influence,--what a few men have
gained the club has lost. The tendency toward disintegration is
confirmed by a peculiarity of the organization of the societies. The
first half of the members of the Institute form a separate club, the
D. K. E., or Dickey. From this the second half are excluded, becoming
a sort of social fringe; they often form a part of the mob that dines
at Memorial or of the cliques that dine in boarding-houses, and are
only a shade less excluded than the rest from the centres of the
college life. If this inner club, the Dickey, were the instrument of a
united and efficient public spirit, the case would not be so bad, but
its members in turn are split into a number of small clubs; as a
social organization the Dickey is mainly a name. If now these small
clubs took a strong part in the general life of the college, the case
would still not be so bad; but each spends its main strength in
struggling with the others to secure as many members as possible from
the first ten of the Dickey. They are scarcely to be regarded as
engines of public spirit.
The same is true of the great senior society, the Hasty Pudding. Its
most prominent members belong to the few small clubs of upper
classmen; the rest are as much a social fringe as the later tens of
the Institute. And the senior clubs, like the clubs of the under
classmen, are more interested in their private politics than in the
policy of the college as a whole. At Yale the senior societies still
exert a strong and generally wholesome influence, but at Harvard they
have long ceased to do so, if they ever did. In proportion as a man is
successful in the social world the system lifts him out of the body of
undergraduate life. The reward of athletic distinction or of
good-fellowship is a sort of pool pocket, upon getting into which a
man is definitely out of the game. The leaders in the college life,
social and athletic, are chosen on the superficial tests of the
freshman year, and are not truly representative; and the organization
of which they become a part is calculated only to suppress general and
efficient public spirit. The outer layers are dead wood and the
kernels sterile. This is at least one reason why Harvard does not
oftener win.
In all this there is no place for a philosophy of despair. The spirit
of the undergraduate, clubbed and unclubbed, is normal and sound. The
efforts which the clubs themselves make from time to time to become
representative are admirably public spirited; and there is no less
desire on the part of the outsiders to live for the best interests of
the college. On the day of an athletic contest the university is
behind the team, heart and lungs; and when defeat comes it is felt
alike by all conditions of men. From time to time ancient athletes
journey to Cambridge to exhort the undergraduate body to pull
together; and it is a poor orator indeed who cannot set in motion
strong currents of enthusiasm. Half an hour of earnest talk on the
strenuous life from Theodore Roosevelt has often been known to raise a
passion of aspiration that has positively lasted for weeks. But the
social system cannot be galvanized into life and functioning. The
undergraduates aspire and strive, but every effort is throttled by a
Little Old Man of the Sea. When all is said and done, the mob and the
cliques remain mob and cliques; with discord within and exclusive
without, there is small hope of organized efficiency.
At Yale the oligarchic spirit of the senior societies is compact and
operative where that of the Harvard clubs is not; but Yale also is
being swamped. The vast and increasing mob of the unaffiliated has
several times within the last decade shown a shocking disrespect for
the sacred authority of the captains; and the non-representative
character of the sophomore societies, from which the senior societies
are recruited, has been a public scandal. One result of this disorder
is that the ancient athletic prestige is slipping away, or is so far
in abeyance that it is again a question whether Harvard or Yale
has--shall we say the worse team? The case of the older universities
is typical. Other institutions are expanding as fast or faster, and it
is only a question of time when the increase of numbers will swamp the
social system.
That there is something rotten in the state of Denmark has of late
been officially recognized, at least at Harvard. In order to create a
general social and athletic life in the community a Union has been
established, modeled on the Oxford Union. It would be pleasant to
picture the College House of the future shaking hands with Claverly,
the Phi Beta Kappa linking elbows with the Porcellian, and the fellows
who now, in spite of a desire to be sociable, have lived through four
years of solitary confinement each in his petty circle, enjoying the
bosom friendship of all the men they may desire to know. It would be
pleasant but perhaps not altogether warrantable, when one considers
the essential nature of the Union.
The Oxford Union of celebrity, as has been pointed out in an earlier
chapter, is a thing of the past. It was an exclusive institution, in
which no attempt was made to foster universal brotherhood. When it was
thrown open to the entire undergraduate world, it lost caste and
authority. The elect flocked by themselves each in his own exclusive
club. If the Harvard Union had been modeled on the old exclusive
Oxford Union, it might perhaps have been equally efficient in bringing
together a broadly representative body of men. But it was modeled on
the modern democratic Union. Here is a plain case: When the Oxford
Union ceased to be exclusive, its best elements flocked by themselves,
and the result is a growth of small exclusive clubs. At Harvard the
exclusive clubs and societies are both ancient and honorable, and,
moreover, very comfortable, and it hardly seems likely that their
members will rout themselves out of their cosy corners to join the
merry rout at the Harvard Union.
This is not to cast a gloomy eye upon the new university club; it is
rather by way of emphasizing the importance of the work it has to do,
and will succeed in doing. Hitherto the lounging grounds of the
unaffiliated (alas! that in such an alma mater so many are forever
unaffiliated!) have been public billiard-rooms and tobacco shops. For
the solace of a midnight supper one had to go to the locally familiar
straw-hatted genius of the sandwich, and for the luxury of a late
breakfast to John of the Holly Tree. And John the Orange Man! Great
worthies these, ancient and most honorable. But even in the
enchantment of retrospect they somehow or other explain why so many
fellows choose to live, for the most part, in small cliques in one
another's rooms and cultivate the deadly chafing-dish. For the
unaffiliated--by far the larger part of each class--the new club-house
will be a Godsend. It is much more fun to cut a nine-o'clock lecture
if you are sure of a comfortable chair at breakfast and a real napkin;
and even in the brutal gladness of youth, it is pleasant at a midnight
supper to be seated. And then, after that athletic dinner at Memorial,
a place to loaf quietly over a pipe with whatever congenial spirit one
finds, and listen to the clicking of billiard-balls! It is also
proposed that the 'varsity athletes have their training tables at the
new Union, so that any fellow may come to know them clothed and in
their right minds. I fancy that the new club will leave those old
worthies a trifle lonesome, and will banish the chafing-dish forever.
The spirit of an old graduate somehow takes kindly to the idea of a
place like that. How the spirit of Bishop Brooks, for instance, would
enjoy slipping in of an evening for the cigar they have denied him in
the house erected in his memory! And for the graduate in the flesh the
club-house will be no less welcome, especially if he is unlucky enough
not to have a club of his own to go back to. To love one's alma mater
it is, of course, not necessary to have a club; but it somehow
interferes with the sentiment of a home-coming to be obliged to go
back to Boston by trolley for luncheon and dinner, and to eat it among
aliens. In the new Union it will even be possible to put up for the
night. A long step has been made in advance of the old unhappy order.
Yet the new Union leaves the vital evil in the community life as far
as ever from solution.
What the authorities have failed to do consciously may, according to
present indications, be accomplished, in some manner at least, by an
unconscious growth. When Memorial became inadequate to the mere demand
for seating-room, new dining-halls were established. In the future it
is possible that these new halls may be kept within the line where
community life becomes impossible and mob life begins. If they could
be, the problem would be at least one step nearer solution. But to
gain the highest effect of community organization, it is necessary
that the men who dine in the same hall shall live near one another.
Under the present system this rarely happens, and when it does, it
does not even follow that they know one another by sight. Until the
halls represent some real division in undergraduate life--separate and
organized communities--they must remain the resort of a student mob.
Fortunately, another movement is discernible in the direction of
separate residential organization. Already certain of the dormitories
in American universities are governed democratically by the inmates:
no student is admitted except by order of a committee of the members.
The fraternity houses so widely diffused in America offer a still
better example, almost a counterpart, of the halls of the golden age
of the mediaeval university. Any considerable development of hall or
fraternity life in the great universities would result in a dual
organization of the kind that has proved of such advantage in England,
so that a man would have his residence in a small democratic
community, and satisfy his more special interests in the exclusive
clubs of the university. In such an arrangement the hall would profit
by the clubman as the clubman would gain influence through the hall.
All undergraduates would thus be united in the general university
life in a way which is now undreamed of, and which is unlikely, as I
think, even in the new Harvard Union.
The tendency toward division in the dining-halls and the dormitories
is evident also in athletics; but here it is very far from
unconscious. The division by classes long ago ceased to be an adequate
means of developing material for the 'varsity teams, and when the
English rowing coach, Mr. R. C. Lehmann, was in charge of the Harvard
oarsmen, he outlined a plan for developing separate crews not unlike
the college crews of England. This system has since been effected with
excellent results. Separate boating clubs have been established, each
of which has races among its own crews and races with the crews of its
rivals. Only one thing has prevented the complete success of the
system. The division into clubs is factitious, representing no real
rivalry such as exists among English colleges. To supply this rivalry,
it is only necessary that each boat club shall represent a hall. The
same division would of course be equally of benefit in all branches of
sport. The various teams within the university would then represent a
real social rivalry, such as has long ceased to exist. This could
scarcely fail to produce the effect that has been so remarkable at
the English universities. As in England, a multiplication of contests
would on the one hand develop far better university material, and on
the other hand it would lessen rather than exaggerate the excessive
importance of intercollegiate contests.
II
THE ADMINISTRATIVE PROBLEM