Present discipline—proctors, fines, “hall,” “chapels.”
University discipline is in the hands of the vice-chancellor and his court,[346] and the proctors. College discipline in those of the dean[347] and tutors. Two proctors perambulate the town every night, each accompanied by two servants known to the undergraduate as the proctor’s “bull-dogs.” They take the name of any offending student and bring him up next morning if necessary before the vice-chancellor. They can also send men back to their college or rooms, enter lodgings, and exact fines. When the youth of 19 or 20 leaves the higher forms of a public school and comes to the university, he is treated as a man, and leads a man’s life guided by himself. But he becomes also a member of a great society, existing for certain purposes. If he is a man, he is a very young one; and if he guides his own life he has only just begun to do so. He lives in his own house—for his college room, like the Englishman’s dwelling, is his castle—but he must be at home by 10 p.m.
This is the first point of discipline. The gates of colleges and the outer doors of lodgings are shut at 10, and any one who presents himself after that hour, without his tutor’s permission, has his name taken by the college porter, or by the lodging proprietor who acts in loco janitoris. He must also dine in hall, if not every day at least five times in the week, which must include Sunday. The third restriction on his liberty is (or at least was originally) a care for his soul. The obligation to attend chapel so many times a week resolves itself now into two attendances in the week and generally two on Sunday. No means of enforcing this are however taken nowadays, and the men are generally left free to judge for themselves in this respect, though ‘moral suasion’ is exercised by the deans except in the case of nonconformists and conscientious objectors. Fifty years ago 8 “chapels” were expected; but if a pensioner kept 6 and a fellow-commoner 4, he was left untroubled by his dean. In New England at the same epoch no less than 16 attendances at chapel every week were required, seven at unseasonable hours; a burden which was tolerated with more cheerfulness by the New Englander than were the 8 “chapels” by his Cambridge contemporary.
Town licences. Expulsion “rustication”. “gating.”
The licensing of all lodgings and places of entertainment[348] to which undergraduates may go, is the hold which the university has over the town. Its sanctions for the undergraduate are fines and expulsion; breaches of
