An apt example of what “collegiate” has come to mean in these United States broke into public view during the fall of 1931. The occasion was an article from the pen of the editor-in-chief of the Spectator, which is the student daily paper at Columbia University in New York City. The article was a serious and intelligent endeavor by a student whose social maturity had by some stroke of chance kept pace with his physiological adulthood, to deal seriously with the realities of athletics, especially football, at Columbia. It called for the public recognition of football as the professional vocation it actually is, and for ordaining coaches as reasonably-paid instructors and not as super-salaried dictators. Of course the response was anger, denunciation, threats against the writer. Among the commentators was the alumni secretary. “The editorial is nonsense,” he said. “The matter is complicated but there are lots of reasons why the head football coach should get a larger salary than a professor. The editor of the Spectator is too serious-minded. He should be more collegiate.”
So standard is this usage of “collegiate” that the very students whose habits sustain it, admonish each other: “Oh, don’t be so collegiate,” and in one of the women’s colleges—women’s, nota bene—“Don’t be collegiate” is a commandment which upperclassmen deliver from the Sinai of their seniority to freshmen entering.
But so long as colleges are managed as they are managed, and college teaching continues as and what it is, it is impossible that students should not be, in one form or another, collegiate—that is, adults conducting themselves like children. For social adulthood consists in self-support and self-management, in moral responsibility and intellectual integrity. These are facilitated by physiological maturity but are by no means identical with it. Physiological maturity comes as an instinctive ripening, in the course of nature. Social adulthood is a learned mode of behavior in the social environment; a system of habits acquired, not a state of the body grown into. This is why bodies may grow up and grow old while minds and hearts remain infantile. And this is why adulthood cannot be learned in colleges as they are any more than swimming can be learned on dry land; the medium is too different, too alien. This is why such academic reformations as those at Harvard or Wisconsin or Chicago are futile jugglings of the same pieces, whereas what is required are new materials and new forms. Antioch comes closer to putting the student on his own as a self-supporting, self-managing adult, but in Antioch the work on the job and the classes in the college are far from the interfusion they require. Nevertheless, Antioch points the hopeful direction of change for colleges that desire to stop prolonging infancy and to begin educating adults.
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THE JOHN DAY PAMPHLETS
1. REBECCA WEST.
Arnold Bennett Himself.
2. STUART CHASE.
Out of the Depression—and After: A
Prophecy.
3. JOSEPH V. STALIN.
The New Russian Policy (June 23, 1931).
4. NORMAN E. HIMES.
The Truth About Birth Control.
5. WALTER LIPPMANN.
Notes on the Crisis.