They are of two orders, social and intellectual. In the first group we have the senior and freshmen dormitories; a new insistence upon class lines; a new emphasis upon college spirit and with it a disquieting resurgence of that great abomination, “college life”; a change of attitude toward our much maligned “Harvard indifference” and “Harvard snobbery.” In the second class come the group system as opposed to the free elective system, the failure of cultural activities, the contempt for dilettantism, the emergence of the scholar. The last phenomenon is mentioned out of no overbearing desire to be either thorough or fair; it has a significance of its own.
Superficially the most striking of these changes is the extraordinary importance attached to class lines. It will be remembered that when President Wilson tried to reform Princeton with the Oxford system as a model, he was balked by precisely this feeling
of class unity. At Harvard the thing was not unknown; but it was not important. Princeton men rejoice that their freshmen are compelled to wear caps, black shirts and corduroy trousers for the first three months of the year, so that no snobbery may develop! To the healthy Harvard man this seems sheer insanity—democracy run to seed. Such solicitude for promiscuity seems to intend a horrible mistrust of something, and certainly a beautiful misapprehension of what democracy means. I am speaking not from mere personal experience, but from that of generations of Harvard men, when I say that it has been possible for a man to go through his four years without knowing more than ten men in his own class intimately, yet acquiring all that college could give by knowing the finest spirits in a whole college cycle. The new order will change all this. It will not forbid a man to seek his acquaintances outside his class; but it will suggest and presently it may insist that his duty to his class can only be fulfilled by cultivating the acquaintance of all who entered college on the same day as he. We may live to see the time when Harvard will emulate the Yale man’s boast that he knew all his classmates (but one) by their first names!
The outward forms of this change are the senior and freshmen dormitories. The former resulted from the great schism of 1909 when the Gold Coast was defeated in the vote for class officers by the poorer men living in and about the Yard. It was considered intolerable that a class should be so divided and a decided effort was made to get the rich society men to live in the Yard, beside their poorer fellow-students, during their senior year. This has been a great success! A group of men, friends for three years, bound by steady companionship and natural affinities, occupy one entry of Hollis. Another group, equally bound by totally different sympathies and activities, occupy another. They nod to each other as they come from class. If a man in one group is taking the same course in Engineering as a man in the other, they may discuss a problem or denounce a “stiff” hour exam. in common. There their ways part. It seems inconceivable that the heads of a great college should have been able to believe that the mere accident of adjacent rooms could actually be the basis, or even the beginnings, of a
true democratic spirit of fraternity. And—let me anticipate—if the college had not ignominiously failed in its effort to supply a true basis of fraternity, it would not now be driven to a method so childish and so artificial as that of class grouping.
But if the senior dormitories are merely silly, what can be said of the plan to house all the freshmen together in a group of buildings far removed from the centre of college activities? It is not here a question of whether they “will work,” but of the spirit which prompted their foundation. They will not be as bad as their opponents may imagine, because nothing will break down the tradition of free intercourse, and the man who writes or the man who jumps will inevitably seek out his own. But it is certainly a weakening of Harvard’s moral fibre that an effort should be made to “help along” the freshmen, instead of compelling them to fight their own way. That the change really drives into the spirit of Harvard can be judged by these significant instances of the attitude taken toward the new scheme by graduates, undergraduates, and by the college authorities. First consider the testimony of an alumni organization secretary. In a conversation he said, “We have found it the hardest thing in the world to persuade graduates that Harvard needs freshmen dormitories. They are perfectly willing to subscribe for dorms, but they balk at the freshmen restriction.” Among the undergraduates there exists a peculiar feeling of relief that they came to Harvard before the buildings were up. Even those who defend them and say that they “will be a good thing for the freshies,” do not regret that the “good thing” was not for them. Articles have been written in undergraduate publications defending them, but I do not know a single man in the present (1914) senior class who passionately regrets that they were not built four years ago. And finally from the college itself came distinct and explicit denial that there is any intention of tucking the freshmen into bed at nine o’clock each night. Hein!
And the result: a wonderful renaissance of the demand for “college spirit.” College spirit is, of course, nothing in the world but undergraduate jingoism. The desire to cheer his team is one which no man can afford to miss, but it points to an undeniable falling off in democracy when the “rah-rah” spirit can dominate
a college and call those who will not yield to it unfaithful and unworthy. Under that tyranny Harvard is already beginning to suffer. Further, men are beginning to be urged to do things not because they want to do them, but for Harvard’s sake. They are urged to back their teams for the sake of the college and its reputation. It will seem incredible, but there actually appeared in the columns of an undergraduate publication an ominous exhortation “not to be behind Yale” in showing our spirit.
Disagreeable as these things are, they are inconsidered trifles beside the change of attitude which has taken place in regard to the serious work of the college. I cling, in spite of successive disillusions, to the belief that the function of the college is to create a tradition of culture: it is not to create gentlemen or scholars unless it can effect the combination of both, and it is certainly not to prepare men for success in business. Success in life is a different matter. College should not spoil a man for life; it should enable him to appreciate life, make him “able and active in distinguishing the great from the petty.” That is what culture means; and that is precisely what Harvard has decided not to do. Emphasis there has borrowed from emphasis everywhere. The advantage of President Lowell’s system of course grouping is that the undergraduate is no longer able to take 17 uncorrelated courses and achieve a degree; he must know a good deal about one thing at least. But aside from the obvious fact that a great many freshmen are incapable of choosing their life work and choose what is easiest for them, the group system has a terrible defect. It has come about that men choose their group from worthy or unworthy reasons and consider that they have acquired all the good of a college career if they have done creditable work in that particular group. The other courses are merely “fillers.” The majority of men are content to concentrate, to narrow their interests, and the whole meaning of college, which is to prepare the way for future enlargement of sympathies, has been lost. Figures cannot be cited for or against this assertion. But some tendencies now discernible at Harvard may be illuminating.
First, the scholar has emerged. He has become respectable; he has also become a specialist, Economics, Government and the practical sciences being the favored groups. Second, there has