Civilization in the United States: An inquiry by thirty Americans

by Unknown

On the evils of the course system there is probably no new thing to be said. Such devices as the “group system” at Harvard interfere with liberty of election without appreciably correcting the graduate’s ignorance of the courses he has passed and cashed in for his degree. Recognizing this fact, certain faculties have latterly inaugurated general examinations in the whole subject-matter studied under one department, as notably in History, Government, and Economics; but thus far the general examination affects professional preparation, as notably for the Law School, much more than it affects the straight arts career, where it provides just one more obstacle to “pass.”

This business of passing is a seasonal nuisance. The early weeks of term-time are an Arcady of fetching lectures, more or less interesting assigned reading, and abundant “cuts.” Across the smiling sky float minatory wisps of cloud—exercises, quizzes, tests. Then up from the horizon blow the “hour exams,” first breath of the academic weather that later on will rock the earth with “mid-years” and “finals.” But to be forewarned is, for the prudent student, to get armed, and Heaven knows he is amply warned by instructor, registrar, and dean. So he hies himself to the armourer, the tutor, one of the brotherhood of experts who saw him through the entrance examinations; he provides himself with bought or leased notebooks and summaries; he crams through a few febrile nights of cloistral deprivations and flagellations; and the sun shines again on his harvest of gentlemen’s C’s, the proud though superfluous A or B, and maybe a D that bespeaks better armour against the next onset. Or, of course, he may have slipped into “probation,” limbo that outrageously handicaps his athletic or political ambitions. Only if he have been a hapless probationer before the examinations is there any real risk of his having to join the exceedingly small company of living sacrifices whom a suddenly austere college now “rusticates.” (For in America suspensions and expulsions are the penalties rather of irregular conduct than of mental incompetence or sloth.) In four years, after he has weathered a score of these storms and concocted a few theses, the president hands him a diploma to frame, he sells his other furniture, puts mothballs in his cap and gown, and plunges into business to overtake his non-college competitors.

Student opinion recognizes that the man enrolled in professional courses or headed for a graduate school faces more stringent necessities. He may devote himself to his more specific training without the imputation of being a “grind,” and if he pursues honours it will be in the line of business rather than of indoor sport. He will be charier of cuts, more painstaking as regards his notes and reading, and the professional manner will settle on him early. In every college commons you can find a table where the talk is largely shop—hypothetical cases, laboratory experiments, new inventions, devices for circumventing the income tax. All this, however, is really a quantitative difference, not a qualitative. Of disinterested intellectual activity he is if anything more innocent than his fellow in the arts school.

So much for the four great necessities of average student life—in order of acknowledged importance: athletics, social life, politics, study. Deans and other official but theoretical folk will tell our Martian that the business of college is study and that all the undergraduate’s other functions are marginal matters; but their own conduct will already have betrayed them to him, for he will not have missed the fact that most of their labour is devoted to making study as dignified and popular as the students have made sports and clubs and elections. These four majors hold their places at the head of the list of student emphases because no representative undergraduate quite escapes any of them; the next ones may be stressed more variously, according rather to the student’s capricious private inclinations than to his simpler group reactions.

Now, for instance, he is free to “go in for” some of the innumerable “student activities,” avocations as opposed to the preceding vocations. There are the minor sports which are not so established in popularity that they may conscript players—lacrosse, association football, trap shooting, swimming, and so on. There are the other intercollegiate competitions—chess and debating and what not. The musical clubs, the dramatic clubs, the magazines, and many semi-professional and semi-social organizations offer in their degree more or less opportunity to visit rival institutions. Then, too, there is in the larger colleges a club for almost every religious cult, from Catholic to Theosophist, whose devotees may crave a closer warmth of communion than they realize in the chapel, which is ordinarily non-sectarian; a club apiece for some of the great fraternal orders; a similar club for each of the political parties, to say nothing of a branch of the Intercollegiate Socialist Society, with another organization forming to supply the colleges with associated Liberal Clubs. Moreover, all the important preparatory schools, private and public, are certain to be represented by clubs of their alumni, some of which maintain scholarships but all of which do yeoman service scouting for athletes. Frequently there is a Cosmopolitan Club for foreign students and travelled Americans. And, finally, there are clubs to represent the various provinces of knowledge—the classics, philosophy, mathematics, the various sciences, and so on indefinitely. Then, in colleges in or near cities, there are well-organized opportunities for students who care to make a hobby of the Uplift and go in for social service. While, for amateur and professional sharks and grinds, there is the honour roll of prizes, scholarships, fellowships, distinctions, and other academic honours. Verily a paradise for the joiner. Day by day, the calendar of meetings and events printed in the university paper resembles nothing so much as the bulletin board of a metropolitan hotel which caters to conventions.

If at first glance all this welter of endeavour looks to be anything but evidence of uniformity, at second will appear its significant principle. Every part of it is cemented together by a universal institutionalizing of impulses and values. There is scarcely a college activity which can serve for a hobby but has its shingle and ribbon and certificated niche in the undergraduate régime.

Even the undergraduate’s extra-collegiate social life, which would probably stand next on the Martian’s list, is thoroughly regimented. Speaking broadly, it is incorrect to call on girls at the nearest girls’ college; and, speaking still more broadly, there is usually one correct college whereat it is socially incumbent to pay devoirs. In coeducational institutions the sex line is an exacting but astonishingly innocent consumer of time and energy, of which the greater part is invested in the sheer maintenance of convention. Along both these social avenues the student practises a mimicry of what seems to him to be the forms regnant in secular society and, intent on the forms, tends to miss by a little what neighbourly ease really exists there, so that he out-conventionalizes the conventional world. The non-college American youth, of both sexes, would scarcely tolerate the amount of formalism, chaperonage, and constraint that our college youth voluntarily assumes.

The word “fussing” is the perfect tag for the visiting, the taking to games and dances, the cherishing at house-parties, and the incessant letter-writing that are the approved communications across the sex line. You make a fuss over a girl, and there it ends; or you make a fuss over a girl and get engaged, and there it ends; or—and this is frequent only in the large Western universities where well-nigh all the personable youths of the State’s society are in college together—you make a fuss over a girl, you get engaged, and in due time you get married. So far as fussing is concerned, sex is far more decorous among collegians than among their non-collegiate fellows of the same ages and social levels. There is a place, of course, where it is indecorous enough; but that place is next on the Martian’s list.

Which now shifts its weakening emphasis to recreation. You will have thought that most of the foregoing attached to recreation and that all play and no work is the undergraduate rule. You will have erred. Above this point almost everything on the list is recognized by the student to be in some sort an obligation, a serious concern, a plough on which he finds his hand gently laid by custom but which he cannot decently relinquish till he has gained the end of the furrow.

“Nobody could be busier than the normal undergraduate. His team, his paper, his club, show, or other activity, sometimes several at once, occupy every spare moment which he can persuade the office to let him take from the more formal part of college instruction.”