This relation of student feeling to college authority was shown not long ago at West Point. The cadet corps was under arrest for having given the “silence” to an officer in the mess-hall during supper, for reasons deemed by the cadets to be vital to corps honor and dignity. The first silence occurred at supper. The whole corps of cadets, 450 men, were marched back to barracks supperless, and were placed under arrest in their rooms. Again at breakfast the cadets repeated the silence, for which they were returned to barracks, but not until they had been made to “double time” up and down the road for about twenty minutes. That morning the cadets had virtually no breakfast. At the next formation for midday dinner an incident occurred which struck a chord even deeper than discipline and authority, and broke the insubordination of the students. In the autumn one of the cadets had brought from home a graphophone, and among the comic-song cylinders was one which pictured a non-domestic husband about to slip quietly away from home for an evening at the club, when his wife confronted him with the command,
Put on your slippers; you’re in for the night.
This song was very popular with the cadets. They were drawn up in front of the barracks, every man indignant, obstinate, and determined to repeat the silence, and to continue it even at the risk of starvation and confinement. At this critical moment the graphophone, which had been set to begin its work five minutes after its humorous owner had left his room, began to sing in a high-pitched voice through the open window directly above the lines of cadets,
Put on your slippers; you’re in for the night.
Student Waiters in the Dining-Hall of an American College
The effect was irresistible. It was like the changing of a current in an electric battery. The eyes of the cadets, despite the fact that they were at attention, sought the eyes of their fellows; their faces relaxed, then broke into a smile. By the time they reached the mess-hall the whole corps was laughing, and their sense of humor had swept away the sense of anger and pride. This was the beginning of the restoration of the traditional West Point discipline. The campus had spoken to the classroom.
“GROWN-UP” COLLEGIANS
It is through an understanding of this spirit of the campus that the work of American undergraduates can be adjusted to modern demands. The work of the classroom and examination-hall makes for democracy, while the social life of the college makes for conservatism and aristocracy. Campus life is increasingly difficult to understand because of its growing complexity. The material needs of our time have created a class of undergraduates bent on becoming specialists, and these men have increasingly less time for either college work or college life; for them the undergraduate course is something to be hurried through as a short cut to professional efficiency. Even athletics and college affairs have only a slender hold upon these utilitarian specialists. They have a “grown-up” look on their faces as, eager for scientific research, they rush to and fro between their rooms and their laboratories.
Undergraduate life is now likewise influenced by the influx of students who are not the sons of college men, but who come from homes the chief ideals of which have been derived from counting-rooms and laboratories, from brokers’ and railroad offices. These students, scions of a property-getting class, in conjunction with the social and the scientific students in college, help to change the classical traditions. They emphasize the campus side of college life more than that of the lecture-room. Their eyes are upon the stadium rather than upon the library; the delights of scholarship influence them less than ambition for leadership and the importance of “making good” in student affairs. They are in college for “popular” reasons, and too often fail to learn how to think. But they are eager, versatile, adaptable, with a ready capacity for social adjustment and modern expression.