Civilization in the United States: An inquiry by thirty Americans

by Unknown

SCHOOL AND COLLEGE LIFE

Should we ever entertain an intelligent explorer from Mars, we should of course importune him, in season and out, for his impressions of America. And if he were candid as well as intelligent, he might ultimately be interviewed somewhat as follows:

“At first I thought the most striking fact about you was your passion for education. While I have been enjoying your so thorough hospitality I have met a minority of Americans who express themselves less complacently than the rest about your material blessings; I have talked with a few dissidents from your political theory; and I have even heard complaints that it is possible to carry moral enthusiasm too far. But I have yet to meet that American who is sceptical about education as such, though on the other hand I have found few of your citizens quite content with the working of every part of your educational establishment. And this very discontent was what clinched my first impression that schooling is the most vital of your passionate interests.

“Yet as I have travelled from one to another of your cities, a second fact about you has struck me so forcibly as to contest the supremacy of the first. You Americans more and more seem to me to be essentially alike. Your cities are only less identical than the trains that ply between them. Nearly any congregation could worship just as comfortably in nearly any other church. The casts of almost any two plays, the staffs of almost any two newspapers, even the faculties of almost any two colleges could exchange ‘vehicles’ with about the same results that would attend their exchanging clothes.

“And in nothing are you so alike as in your universal desire to be alike—to be inconspicuous, to put on straw hats on the same day, to change your clothes in Texas in accordance with the seasons in New York, to read the books everybody else is reading, to adopt the opinions a weekly digests for you from the almost uniform opinions of the whole of the daily press, in war and peace to be incontestably and entirely American.

“Now, I should scarcely make bold to be so frank about these observations if some of my new friends had not reassured me with the information that they are not novel, that a distinguished Englishman has put them into what you have considered the most representative and have made the most popular book about your commonwealth, that in fact you rather enjoy having outsiders recognize the success of your efforts in uniformity. There is, of course, no reason why you should not be as similar to each other as you choose, and you must not interpret my surprise to mean that I am shocked by anything except the contradiction I find between this essential similarity and what I have called your passion for education.

“On Mars it has for a long time been our idea that the function of the school is to put our youth in touch with what all sorts of Martians have thought and are thinking, have felt and are feeling. I say ‘put in touch’ rather than ‘teach,’ because it is not so much our notion to pack their minds and hearts as to proffer samples of our various cultures and supply keys to the storehouses—not unlike your libraries, museums, and laboratories—that contain our records. We prefer to think of schooling as a kind of thoroughfare between our past and our present, an avenue to the recovery and appreciation of as many as possible of those innumerable differences between Martian and Martian, those conflicting speculations and cogitations, myths and hypotheses regarding our planet and ourselves that have gone into the warp and woof of our mental history. Thus we have hoped not only to preserve and add to the body of Martian knowledge, but also to understand better and utilize more variously our present minds. So it seems to us perfectly natural, and has rather pleased than distressed us, that our students should emerge from their studies with a multitude of differing sympathies, beliefs, tastes, and ambitions. We have thought that such an education enriched the lives of all of us, lives that ignorance could not fail to constrict and subject to hum-drum monotony.

“So when I return to Mars and report that I found Earth’s most favourable continent inhabited by its most literate great people, a people that has carried the use of print and other means of communication to a point we Martians have never dared dream about; that this people has at once the most widely diffused enthusiasm for education and the most comprehensive school equipment on Earth; and finally that this people is at the same time the most uniform in its life—well, I fear I shall not be believed.”

On subsequent visits the Martian might, as a wise man does who is confronted by a logical impasse, re-examine the terms of his paradox.

As regards our uniformity, fresh evidence could only endorse his first impressions. The vestigial remnants of what regional cultures we have had are rapidly being effaced by our unthinking standardization in every department of life. The railroad, the telephone and telegraph, the newspaper, the Ford, the movies, advertising—all have scarcely standardized themselves before they have set about standardizing everything within their reach. Not even our provinces of the picturesque are immune, the places and things we like to think of as “different” (word that betrays our standard sameness!) and glamorous of our romantic golden age. In the Old South, Birmingham loves to call herself the Pittsburgh of the South; our railroads have all but hounded the packets from the Mississippi; it is notorious that our apostles to the Indians, whether political, religious, or pedagogic, wage relentless war on the very customs and traditions we cherish in legend; the beautiful Missions that a kindlier evangelism bequeathed to them are repeated and cheapened in every suburb and village of the land, under every harsher sky; those once spontaneous fêtes of the plains, the “Stampede” and the “Round-Up,” have been made so spurious that the natives abandon them for a moth-eaten Wild West Show made in the East; and in only a year or two even New Orleans’ Mardi Gras will be indistinguishable from its counterfeits in St. Louis and elsewhere.

As with these adventitious and perhaps not very important regional differentiations, so with the one fundamental demarcation our people have all along recognized as conditioning the give-and-take of American life. The line between the East and the West, advancing from the Alleghanies to the Rockies and then part of the way back, has never stayed long enough in one zone to be precisely drawn, but it has always been sharply felt. Since Colonial times the East has meant many things—wealth, stability, contacts with Europe, refinement, industry, centralized finance—and the West has meant many things—hardship and adventure, El Dorado, outlawry, self-reliance, agriculture, vast enterprise; but they have never been so close to meaning the same things as to-day. To-morrow they will merge. Even now the geographical line between them may be drawn anywhere in a belt two thousand miles wide, in which it will be fixed according to the nativity of the critic rather than by any pronounced social stigmata. East or West, there is a greater gulf between the intelligent and the unintelligent of the same parish than divides the intelligent of different parishes. East or West, Americans think pretty much the same thoughts, feel about the same emotions, and express themselves in the American tongue—that is, in slang. If the slang, the accent, the manner differ noticeably, as they still do, there are not wanting signs that another generation will obliterate these differences too. Publishing, to be sure, tends to concentrate in the East, though without impoverishing the West, since all notable circulations have to be national to survive. The very fact that the country’s publishing can be done from New York, Philadelphia, and Boston demonstrates our national unanimity of opinion and expression.

Before it overleapt the geographical walls, this national unanimity had wiped out every class distinction but one, which it has steadily tended to entrench—the money line. Families may continue to hold their place only on the condition that they keep their money or get more; and a moderate fortune, no matter how quickly come by, has only to make a few correct strokes, avoid a few obvious bunkers, and it will found a family by inadvertence. The process is so simple that clerks practise it during their vacations at the shore.

Besides money, there is one other qualification—personal charm. Its chief function, perhaps, is to disguise the essentially monetary character of American social life. At any rate, Americans are almost as uniformly charming as they are uniformly acquisitive. For the most part it is a negative charm, a careful skirting of certain national taboos: it eschews frank egoism, unfavourable criticism, intellectual subtlety, unique expressions of temperament, humour that is no respecter of persons, anything that might disturb the status quo of reciprocal kindliness and complacent optimism. The unpopular American is unpopular not because he is a duffer or a bore, but because he is “conceited,” a “knocker,” a “highbrow,” a “nut,” a “grouch,” or something of that ilk. We do not choose, as the Martian suggested, to be as similar as possible; we choose not to be dissimilar. If our convictions about America and what is American sprang from real knowledge of ourselves and of our capacities, we should relish egoists, disinterested critics, intellectuals, artists, and irreverent humourists, instead of suppressing them when we cannot mould them. That we do not relish them, that we protect ourselves from them, is evidence that we fear them. What reason should we have to fear them save a secret distrust of our asseverated convictions? Our unanimity, then, would seem to the Martian to be an artificial substitute for some natural background we lack but should like to have; and a most dangerous wish-fulfilment it is, for it masks our ignorance of what we are and what we may reasonably become. Far from being self-knowledge, Americanism would seem to him to be a hallucination, an article of faith supported only by our determination to believe it, and to coerce others into believing it. The secret of our uniformity would be a stubborn ignorance.

At which point our critic would have to re-examine his earlier impressions about our “passion for education,” and strive to understand the uses to which we actually put our educational establishment, to appraise its function in our life.

Beginning with the kindergarten, it provides us a few hours’ relief from our responsibility toward our youngsters. Curiously, the Americans most given to this evasion are the Americans most inveterately sentimental about the “kiddies” and most loath to employ the nursery system, holding it somehow an undemocratic invasion of the child’s rights. Then somewhere in the primary grades we begin to feel that we are purchasing relief from the burden of fundamental instruction. Ourselves mentally lazy, abstracted, and genuinely bewildered by the flow of questions from only one mouth, we blithely refer that awakening curiosity to a harassed young woman, probably less well informed than we are, who has to answer, or silence, the questions of from a score to three score mouths. So begins that long throttling of curiosity which later on will baffle the college instructor, who will sometimes write a clever magazine essay about the complacent ignorance of his pupils.

A few years, and our expectation has shifted to the main chance. We begin worrying over grade reports and knotting our brows over problems in arithmetic by way of assisting our offspring to the practical advantages of education. For the child, we now demand of his teachers solid and lasting preparation in the things whose monetary value our office or domestic payroll keeps sharply before us—figures, penmanship, spelling, home economics. For us, the vicarious glory of his “brightness.” But we want this brightness to count, to be in the direct avenue to his career; so we reinforce the environment that gently discourages him from the primrose paths of knowledge. Nothing “practical” is too good for the boy at this moment—tool chests, bicycles, wireless, what not. Thank God, we can give him a better start than we had. As for arts and letters, well, we guess what was good enough for his dad is good enough for him. Meanwhile we are rather pleased than not at the athletics and the other activities in which the grammar school apes the high school that apes the college.

The long spiral of repetitive schooling in study and sport has now commenced its climb: year by year reviews and adds its fresh increment to last year’s subject-matter in the classroom and on the field. Is it so strange that when the boy meets his college professors he is cock-sure of knowing to a hair the limits of what is normal and important in life, beyond which lie the abnormal interests of the grinds? That mediocre C is a gentleman’s mark? Not his to question the system that, in season and out, has borne down on passing instead of on training, and that ends somewhere, soon or late, with a diploma and, amid family plaudits, graduation from family control.

The high schools are expected to fit ninety-five per cent. of their charges for life and five per cent. for college. If our boy and girl are of the ninety and five, we demand very early specialization toward their precious careers, wax enthusiastic over the school’s model mercantile and banking establishment, expand to know our children are being dosed with a course in “Civics,” generously admire the history note-books in which they have spread much tinted ink over a little stereotyped information, and in what we fool ourselves into believing are the margins to all these matters proudly watch them capture a class numeral or a school letter, grumblingly pay for real estate signs that have gone up in flame to celebrate some epochal victory, and bear with their antics during hazings and initiations. It’s a democratic country, and if the poor man’s son cannot go to college, why the college must come to him. Nor are we without a certain undemocratic satisfaction in the thought that he has stolen a four years’ march into business over the rich man’s son, who spends his college hours, we assure ourselves, acquiring habits that will leave him weak in the hour of competition.

Meanwhile the straddling masters are cramming the other five with all the dates and rules and verbs and prose passages which long and bitter experience has demonstrated to be likeliest on entrance examinations. From the classrooms, as term follows term with its endless iteration of short advances and long reviews, there rises the bruit of rivalry: masters decorously put forward the claims of their own colleges; pupils rejoice when their future alma mater notches another athletic victory to the well-remembered tally; the weak of heart are urging upon their bewildered parents the superior merits of the “back-door” route to some exacting university—by certificate to a small college and transfer at the end of the first year.

There are high schools in whose cases all this is understatement; and of course there are innumerable others, especially in these days when the most rigorous colleges have lost a little of their faith in entrance examinations, where it is absurd overstatement. Nevertheless your son, if he goes to a representative Eastern college from a representative high school, goes as a man steals second in the seventh. And his subsequent instructors marvel at the airy nonchalance with which he ignores “the finer things of life”!

The private secondary schools, save those that are frankly designed to relieve parents of recalcitrant boys when the public schools will have no more of them, are pretty much without the ninety-five per cent. of non-college men. Frequently they have their charges for longer periods. So they are free to specialize in cramming with more singleness of mind and at the same time to soften the process as their endowments and atmospheres permit. But at bottom the demand you make of the “prep school” is the same demand your bookkeeper puts on his son’s high school: you want your boy launched into college with the minimum of trouble for yourself and the maximum of practical advantage for him; your bookkeeper wants his boy launched into business with a minimum of frippery and a maximum of marketable skill. One boy is experted into college, the other is experted into business. You are both among those passionate believers in education who impressed the Martian on his first visit.

Some educator has announced that the college course should not only provide preparation for life but should itself be a satisfactory portion of life. What college student so dull as not to know that? For the most part, he trusts the faculty to provide the preparation—sometimes it would seem that he dares it to—but he takes jolly good care that the four years shall give him life more abundantly. He has looked forward to them with an impatience not even the indignity of entrance examinations could balk; he will live them to the top of his bent; and he will look back on them tenderly, even sentimentally, as the purplest patch of his days. So the American undergraduate is representative of the American temper at its best. He is the flower of our youth at its moment of perfect bloom, its ideals not yet corrupted, its aspirations unwithered. As he thinks and feels, all America would think and feel if it dared and could.

At this point, therefore, the Martian’s inquiry into what we expect from our educational establishment would have to shift its point of view from the older to the younger generation. The Martian would be much in demand at our colleges, both as a sure-fire lecturer and as a shining target for degrees certain to attract wide publicity to the donors. Let us imagine him setting aside a page in his notebook for a scheme of undergraduate emphases, grouped and amended as his triumphant progress permitted him to check up on his observations.

Athletics would of course head the list. Regarded as play—that is, as they affect the spectator—college sports proffer a series of thrilling Roman holidays extending from the first week or so of term-time to the final base-ball game and crew race of Commencement week the next June, and for some colleges there may be transatlantic sequels in midsummer or later. It is by no means all play for the spectator, whose loyalty to his institution makes it his duty to watch the teams practise, follow the histories of the gladiators who are at once his representatives and his entertainers, and drill himself in songs and yells at noisy mass meetings; to bet on his college according to his purse and without any niggardly regard for his sober judgment as to the event; then to deck himself in the colours, march to the field, and watch the fray from the cheering section, where his attention will be perpetually interrupted by the orders and the abuse of a file of insatiable marionettes who are there to dictate when he may and when he may not give throat to his enthusiasm; and finally, if Providence please, to be one of the snake-dancing celebrants of victory. If he have the right physique or talent for one of the sports, he will find himself conscripted by public opinion to enter upon the long and arduous regimen that turns out the annual handful of athletic heroes—to slave on freshman squads, class teams, scrub and third and second teams, and finally perhaps, if he has been faithful, to play a dull minute or two of a big game that is already decided and so receive his coveted letter and side-line privilege as a charity. Or at the dizziest pinnacle of success, a “star,” to endure the unremitting discipline of summer practice, incessant training, eating with his fellow-stars at the training table, in season and out to be the butt of instruction and exhortation from all the experts of the entourage. As they affect the participant, then, college sports are to be regarded as work that differs from the work of professional sportsmen chiefly by being unremunerated.

The student’s next most vivid concern is the organization of the social life in the academic commonwealth of which he is a citizen. Every American college has, or fancies it has, its own tone, its ideal type of man; and good citizenship prescribes conformity to the spirit of the place and observance of the letter of its unwritten code. For the type is defined by a body of obligations and taboos transmitted from generation to generation, sometimes through the mouthpiece of the faculty, sometimes by way of the college “Bible” (to use the slang name for those handy manuals of what to do and what to avoid which the college Y.M.C.A. issues for the guidance of newcomers), but most often by a rough process of trial and error which very speedily convinces the freshman that the Fence is for seniors only, or that it is impracticable to smoke his pipe in the Yard, or that it is much healthier to take the air in a class cap than bareheaded. The cherished “traditions” of a college are for the most part a composite of just such privileges and prohibitions as these, clustering round the notion of the type and symbolizing it; and, curiously, the younger the institution, the more insistent it is likely to be about the sanctity of its traditions—a college feels the need of a type in much the same degree that a factory needs a trademark.

Conformity thus becomes an article in loyalty. Sometimes the mere 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.

Now, for instance, he is free to “go in for” some of the innumerable “student activities,” avocations as opposed to the preceding vocations. There are the minor sports which are not so established in popularity that they may conscript players—lacrosse, association football, trap shooting, swimming, and so on. There are the other intercollegiate competitions—chess and debating and what not. The musical clubs, the dramatic clubs, the magazines, and many semi-professional and semi-social organizations offer in their degree more or less opportunity to visit rival institutions. Then, too, there is in the larger colleges a club for almost every religious cult, from Catholic to Theosophist, whose devotees may crave a closer warmth of communion than they realize in the chapel, which is ordinarily non-sectarian; a club apiece for some of the great fraternal orders; a similar club for each of the political parties, to say nothing of a branch of the Intercollegiate Socialist Society, with another organization forming to supply the colleges with associated Liberal Clubs. Moreover, all the important preparatory schools, private and public, are certain to be represented by clubs of their alumni, some of which maintain scholarships but all of which do yeoman service scouting for athletes. Frequently there is a Cosmopolitan Club for foreign students and travelled Americans. And, finally, there are clubs to represent the various provinces of knowledge—the classics, philosophy, mathematics, the various sciences, and so on indefinitely. Then, in colleges in or near cities, there are well-organized opportunities for students who care to make a hobby of the Uplift and go in for social service. While, for amateur and professional sharks and grinds, there is the honour roll of prizes, scholarships, fellowships, distinctions, and other academic honours. Verily a paradise for the joiner. Day by day, the calendar of meetings and events printed in the university paper resembles nothing so much as the bulletin board of a metropolitan hotel which caters to conventions.

If at first glance all this welter of endeavour looks to be anything but evidence of uniformity, at second will appear its significant principle. Every part of it is cemented together by a universal institutionalizing of impulses and values. There is scarcely a college activity which can serve for a hobby but has its shingle and ribbon and certificated niche in the undergraduate régime.

Even the undergraduate’s extra-collegiate social life, which would probably stand next on the Martian’s list, is thoroughly regimented. Speaking broadly, it is incorrect to call on girls at the nearest girls’ college; and, speaking still more broadly, there is usually one correct college whereat it is socially incumbent to pay devoirs. In coeducational institutions the sex line is an exacting but astonishingly innocent consumer of time and energy, of which the greater part is invested in the sheer maintenance of convention. Along both these social avenues the student practises a mimicry of what seems to him to be the forms regnant in secular society and, intent on the forms, tends to miss by a little what neighbourly ease really exists there, so that he out-conventionalizes the conventional world. The non-college American youth, of both sexes, would scarcely tolerate the amount of formalism, chaperonage, and constraint that our college youth voluntarily assumes.

The word “fussing” is the perfect tag for the visiting, the taking to games and dances, the cherishing at house-parties, and the incessant letter-writing that are the approved communications across the sex line. You make a fuss over a girl, and there it ends; or you make a fuss over a girl and get engaged, and there it ends; or—and this is frequent only in the large Western universities where well-nigh all the personable youths of the State’s society are in college together—you make a fuss over a girl, you get engaged, and in due time you get married. So far as fussing is concerned, sex is far more decorous among collegians than among their non-collegiate fellows of the same ages and social levels. There is a place, of course, where it is indecorous enough; but that place is next on the Martian’s list.

Which now shifts its weakening emphasis to recreation. You will have thought that most of the foregoing attached to recreation and that all play and no work is the undergraduate rule. You will have erred. Above this point almost everything on the list is recognized by the student to be in some sort an obligation, a serious concern, a plough on which he finds his hand gently laid by custom but which he cannot decently relinquish till he has gained the end of the furrow.

“Nobody could be busier than the normal undergraduate. His team, his paper, his club, show, or other activity, sometimes several at once, occupy every spare moment which he can persuade the office to let him take from the more formal part of college instruction.”

The quotation is not from a baccalaureate sermon: it is from the Harvard class oration of 1921.

The prime relaxation is talk, infinite talk—within its local range, full of tang, flicking with deft satire the rumps of pompous asses, burlesquing the comic (that is, the abnormal) in campus situations, making of gossip a staccato criticism—and beyond that range, a rather desultory patter about professional sport, shows, shallow books, the froth of fashion, all treated lightly but taken with what a gravity! For the other relaxations there are, according to taste, the theatre of girls and music, the novel, bath-robed sessions at poker and bridge, late afternoon tennis or golf or handball (very nearly the only sports left to play for their own sake), and the bouts with Bacchus and Venus which, though they attract fewer college men than non-college men, are everywhere the moral holidays that insure our over-driven Puritanism against collapse.

A favourite subject for college debates and Freshman themes argues the case for and against going to college. You could listen to scores of such debates, read thousands of such themes, without once meeting a clear brief for education as a satisfaction of human curiosity. Everywhere below the level of disinterested scholarship, education is regarded as access to that body of common and practical information without which one’s hands and tongue will be tied in the company of one’s natural peers. “Institutions of learning,” as the National Security League lately advised the Vice-President of the United States, “are established primarily for the dissemination of knowledge, which is acquaintance with fact and not with theory.” Consequently the universal expectation of the educational establishment has little to do with any wakening of appropriate if differing personalities, and has everything to do with a standard patina, varying only in its lustre, its brighter or duller reflection of the established scene.

Nevertheless, the essential Adam does break through and quiz the scene. Though it come lowest in his scale of emphasis, the typical underclassman knows the qualms and hungers of curiosity, experiments a little with forbidden fruit, at some time fraternizes with a man of richer if disreputable experience, perhaps strikes up a wistful friendship with a sympathetic instructor. Then the world of normal duties and rewards and certainties closes round him, and security in it becomes his first concern. Sometime he intends really to read, to think long thoughts again, to go to the bottom of things. Meanwhile he falls into the easy habit of applying such words as “radical” or “highbrow” to those infrequent hardier spirits who continue restless and unappeased. Later in life you will catch him explaining that radicalism is a perfectly natural manifestation of adolescence and the soundest foundation for mature conservatism. Wise churchmen still talk that way about religious doubt, and bide their time, and later refer to the “death of doubt”—which has really been buried alive. The Martian would conclude that the function of terrestrial education is to bury curiosity alive.

But could he now feel that this educational establishment, this going machine of assimilation, is responsible for our uniformity? Will not American school and college life now seem too perfect a reflection of American adult life to be its parent? Everything in that scale of college values, from the vicarious excitements of football to what Santayana has called the “deprivations of disbelief” has its exact analogue in our life at large; and neither any college tradition nor yet the “genteel tradition” is of so much significance as the will to tradition that both reveal. The Martian will long since have suspected himself guilty of a very human error, that of getting the cart before the horse.

For we have made our schools in our own image. They are not our prisons, but our homes. Every now and again we discipline a rash instructor who carries too far his private taste for developing originality; we pass acts that require teachers to sink their own differences in our unanimity; and our fatuous faith in the public school system as the “cradle of liberty” rests on the political control we exercise over it. Far from being the dupes of education, we ourselves dupe the educated; and that college men do not rebel is due to the fact that inside a world our uniformity dominates as easily as it dominates the school, the regimen works, college men really do get ahead, and the “queer” really are frustrate.

Then, what is the origin of our “desperate need to agree”? There is a possible answer in our history, if only we can be persuaded to give our history a little attention. When we became a nation we were not a folk. We were, in fact, so far from being alike that there were only our common grievances and a few propositions on which we could be got together at all, and the propositions were more like stubborn articles of faith than like tested observations: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal ... certain inalienable Rights ... Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness ... the consent of the governed ... are, and of Right ought to be, Free and Independent States.” That is not the tone of men who are partakers in a common tradition and who share reasonable and familiar convictions. Thus under the spur of our first national necessity we gave the first evidence of our capacity to substitute an arbitrary and not too exacting lowest common denominator to which men can subscribe, for the natural and rigorous highest common multiple that expresses their genuine community of interest. The device succeeded because we succeeded, but it was the propositions that got the credit. The device has continued to succeed ever since for the same reason that tradition succeeds in the modern college—nobody who has had any reason to challenge the propositions has been able to get at us.

Our proper job was to create a people, to get acquainted with each other and develop a common background. But the almost miraculous success of our lowest common denominator stood in the way of our working out any highest common multiple. Instead of developing a common background, we went on assimilating subscribers to the Declaration, our arbitrary tradition, “Americanism.” We have been so increasingly beset by aliens who had to be assimilated that their Americanization has prevented our own.

We now believe our national job was the Conquest of the West, as if scattering people over a continent were any substitute for creating a People. But we have never been seriously challenged. If our good luck should hold, the second or third generation after us will believe our job was the subjugation of a hemisphere, including the assimilation of genuine peoples who have done us less harm even than the Indians did. But, whatever our practice, we shall never admit that our theory has altered. Still lacking any common background, we shall still enclose ourselves against the void in the painted scene of our tradition.

But our luck may not hold. We may be challenged yet.

Clarence Britten