And that, perhaps, is importance enough. I say this in none of that college spirit which makes a man believe that his college, because it is his, is singled out for the peculiar attentions of the high gods who brood over academic welfare. A change, such as I am describing, if it took place at any other college, would be quite as important. The fact is that it could have taken place nowhere else.
Which brings us to the old Harvard and the popular misconceptions of its character. It was supposed to create a type of man, effeminate, detached, affecting superiority, incapable, and snobbish. Certainly men of this order did graduate from Harvard, but the great truth is that there was no Harvard type; there were always Harvard men, but there was never a “Harvard man.” The importance of this distinction is inestimable, because it points to the fundamental thing in the older Harvard life: its insistence upon individuality. In that the old Harvard struck deep through superficial things and came at once upon the fundamental thing identical in democracy and in aristocracy. It bestowed each man in accordance with his deserts and, following Hamlet’s dictum, according to its own nobility; and gave him according to his needs and according to his powers. Like every truly democratic institution, Harvard was aristocratic; like every truly aristocratic institution, Harvard was democratic. At the very moment when it was supposed to be breeding aristocratic
snobs, Harvard was fulfilling the great mission of democratic institutions in encouraging each man to be himself as greatly and completely as he could. At the very moment when it was supposed to exercise a mean and narrowing influence over its students, it was fulfilling the great mission of cultural institutions in helping each man to a ripening of his powers, to enlargement of his interests, and to widening of his sympathies. Its effeminates went to war against dirt and danger and disease; its snobs devoted themselves to the advancement of social justice; its detached men became bankers and mill-owners and journalists; one of its weaklings conquered the world. The great thing was that in all of them the old impulse to a deep and full life remained; the tradition of culture was beginning to prosper. So that Harvard could send out a statesman who was interested in the Celtic revival, a littérateur with a fondness for baseball, a financier who appreciated art and a philosopher who appreciated life. At the same time it graduated thousands of men who took with them into professional life and into business life a feeling, perhaps only a memory, of the variety and excellence of human achievement—men who without pride or shame, which are equally snobbish, tried to substitute discipline and cultivation for disorder and barbarity. It is no petty accomplishment.
To achieve it Harvard had to stand with bitter determination against the current sweeping toward the practical, the immediate, the successful. At the same time it bought its cherished democracy of thought at the price of social anarchy. The college as a body made very little effort to protect or to comfort its individuals. It was assumed that he who came could make his own way; if the way were hard, so much the better! The triumph would be sweeter. The great fraternities grew in strength, possibly because there was no countervailing force issuing from the college itself. But there was never a determined organized attempt to make the individual life of the undergraduate happy or comfortable. In its place there was a huge, inchoate, and tremendously successful attempt to make the intellectual life of the individual interesting and productive. Each man found his own; fought to win his place, struggled against loneliness and despair, and emerged sturdier in spirit, younger and braver and better.
Some fell. They were the waste products of a civilization which was harsh, selfish in its interests, generous in its appreciations, a microcosm of life. A pity that some should have to fall! But it would be a greater pity if for them the battle should cease. Because the fighting was always fair. The strength which developed in many a man in his efforts to make a paper, or a club, or even in qualifying to join some little group of men, was often the basis of a successful life. With it came an intensification of personality; the absence of a set type made the suppression of the individual at Harvard almost impossible. I am certain that no one with a personality worth preserving ever lost it there.
I wonder whether those who speak and write about democracy at our colleges ever realize the importance of this intellectual freedom. Mr. Owen Johnson is not unconscious of it, yet his whole attack upon the colleges, practically unchallenged, was on account of their lack of social democracy. It is considered a dreadful thing among us that rich A should not want to talk to poor B; but it would never occur to us to be shocked if they had nothing to say to each other except small talk about baseball or shop talk about courses. And if the choice is between social promiscuity and intellectual freedom, we must say, “Let their ways be apart eternally, so long as they are free.”
The terrible fact is that the undergraduate in his effort to attain social unity has sacrificed the liberty of thought. It would be indelicate for a Harvard man, however generous, to condemn other colleges. Let Mr. Johnson speak for Yale: “It is ruled by the tyranny of the average, the democracy of a bourgeois commonplaceness.” And an undergraduate wrote in The Yale Literary Magazine that “we are accounted for as one conglomeration of body first, head next, and last and least, soul. As one we go to chapel, as one our parental authorities would like to see us pastured at Commons, and as one we are educated.” For Princeton The Nassau Lit writes this significant editorial: “It is not long before the freshman learns that a certain kind of thinking, too, is quite necessary here, and from that time on, until graduation, the same strong influence is at work, until the habit of conforming has become a strongly ingrained second
nature…. Four years of this … results in a certain fixity of ideas…. We are brought up under the sway of what seems to us a rather bourgeois conventionality.”
Apart from the fact that the term “bourgeois,” contradictory to the aristo-democratic ideal in essence, occurs in two of these statements, I do not think that they call for extended comment. These things, at least, no man has been able to say of Harvard; even to this day there remains a fierce, jealous, almost joyous tradition of intellectual freedom—in spite of all!
I say “in spite of all,” because I am now leaving the old Harvard and am about to record the deep conversion of recent years which says a prosperous and Philistine No to everything the old Harvard has said, and which is surrendering its spirit to the very forces against which the old Harvard made its arm strong and its heart of triple brass. I do not mean that Harvard will cease to be great; I do mean that it may cease to be Harvard. It is hard to deal with a phenomenon of this sort solely by means of actualities. I am describing the disintegration of a social background, the subsidence of one tone and the emergence, not yet complete, of another. But, yielding to the present insistence upon “facts,” I shall name a number of significant developments which indicate the nature of what I have called the changing temper at Harvard.