Civilization in the United States: An inquiry by thirty Americans

by Unknown

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.