An American at Oxford

by John Corbin

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 mediæval 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.