AN IRONIST reviewing higher education in
America since 1920 would find himself struck by three
things.
First, perhaps, he would appreciate the gargantuan
inflation of pedagogic lore, with its elaborate formalism,
its pretensions to precise measurements of mind and character,
its blowing up “scientific method” into a meticulous
ceremonial with the efficacy of a church ritual. Second, the
overgrowth of the educational plant might captivate him:
the immense accretion of endowment, the blowsy additions
to properties, and the multiplication by millions of teachers
and students. Lastly, our ironist might admire a wide
and spreading unrest about the effectiveness of the system
as an instrument of education. He would take note of
much fuss and ferment respecting “progressive education”
and “adult education.” He would overhear oracles by
parents, teachers, and college presidents on why students
do anything but study and on how to make them study.
He would discern how the prescriptions vary, all the way
from Mr. Lowell’s house-system at Harvard University to
Mr. Meiklejohn’s “experimental college” at the University
of Wisconsin. As a popular alternative, the suggestion
would intrigue him that far more students are enrolled
than are “fit” for the higher education, and that this
aristocratic privilege should be limited to the “fit” alone;
the “fit,” of course, being those young people who are
shown to be as nearly like their teachers as differences of
age, income and interest permit.
“The idea that going to college is one of the inherent
rights of man,” President Lowell wails, “seems to have
obtained a baseless foothold in the minds of many of our
people. To select the fit and devote our energies to them
is our duty to the public for whose service we exist.” And
President Comfort of Haverford bemoans how the diversions
which are college life “have cut deep into the serious
purpose for which the colleges exist.”
Obviously the searching of the heart concerning the
values of a college education does not reach to the essentials
of the academic tradition. The ancient notions remain
ineffable and inviolable. They presume that students exist
for the sake of the school, not the school for the sake of
the students. Hence the inquiry treats only of who shall
be admitted to the sacred fane and by what steps. That in
any issue between system and student, the system might
be wrong is inconceivable. The pedagogues, like the prohibitionists,
find it unbelievable that their engines of grace
can be tools of darkness; that they fail, not because those
to whom they are applied are intransigently bad, but because
their own methods and ideals are intransigently
false....
As I see them, the ideals and methods which are dynamic
in our institutions of higher learning are false. They are
false to the students, false to the social purpose which
nourishes them, false to the inward nature of education
itself. They are false because they are irrelevant. And they
are irrelevant because they are for the most part unabsorbed
survivals from a pre-industrial past in an industrial
age. But in the eyes of the academicians the
failure of the colleges is caused by the deficiencies of the
environment, not by their own inherent incapacities. To
save themselves, therefore, they reaffirm anew the invidious
ideals of a bygone social economy, and appeal to a persisting
snobbism to offset their own growing desuetude. So
they complain about the elevation of going to college into
an “inherent right” and about the droves of undergraduates
whose heedless ways cut deep into “the serious
purpose” for which college exists.
But if a new “inherent right” has been born into the
world, if undergraduate life is in conflict with the “serious
purpose” of higher education, the causes thereof are
better understood and faced than ignored or belittled. For
they are constant causes, and their scope and intensity do
not lessen with the days. Though the colleges remain tangent
to the realities, they have been far from untouched....
Of these realities, one is the constant, if obstructed,
drive toward democracy, based on the dogma of natural
rights which animated the wars and works of the founding
fathers: free public education is a primary, if abated,
attainment of this drive. Another is the correlated growth
of population, cities, and natural resources: the dropsical
school systems, public and private, are by-products of
this increase. In a century the wealth of the United
States has multiplied by inconceivable ratios. Even in
1932, at the very trough of a signal deflation, national
wealth and income must be stated in figures that have no
empirical living meaning. They are merely symbols of
indefinitely extending power—manpower and machine-power;
and of the organization of this power in dynamic
patterns that constitute a social economy.
With this organization, there has come an increase in
essential security. In spite of the business-cycle, in spite
of unemployment, social waste, and all the rest of the
major evils of industrial civilization, its individual citizens
are better fed, better housed, in better health, and
have better times than their pre-industrial ancestors.
Their average expectation of life has increased from
forty-seven years to fifty-eight. The society they compose
is physiologically more adult, more aged, than the society
of their forbears. More of its members are over forty,
fewer of them are under seventeen. During the century of
industrialization the proportion of children to adults has
decreased by more than a half. This does not mean that
the same number of children are born and more die. It
means that fewer are born and far fewer die.
Far fewer die because all receive a great deal better
care than even the children of the richest used to get a
hundred years ago. This care comes only somewhat accidentally
and in a disordered way from the parents. It
comes systematically from the community. The average
parent of the working class deals with his children much
as his own parents dealt with him. He in the main realizes
that the child requires and somehow receives absorbed attention
in extreme infancy. Past that stage, he leaves it
more and more to itself. All that he asks of it is to make
itself as little troublesome and as largely convenient as
possible. For the rest, it is out on the street to grow its
way into adulthood for itself, troubled by only occasional
irruptions of disciplinary or exploitative parental interest,
and by admonitions from the cop on the beat.
To the socially-minded part of the community this is a
dangerous situation. They fear disease and crime. They
talk about corner gangs; about the break-down of family
life. They regard it as of supreme importance “to get
the children off the street.” Social settlements, boys’
clubs, scouting, playgrounds, and other semi-public and
public enterprises have come up largely as instruments
toward this end. But the chief instrument has become the
school.
Since 1900, the school, more than any other social
agency, is conceived first as supplementing, then as replacing,
the home, and as exercising its function. The
school authority is established in a practically complete
jurisdiction over the child. Its field expands from indoctrination
in the three R’s and patriotism to teaching personal
hygiene; from teaching personal hygiene to official
supervision over the details of health—the care of the
teeth, ears and eyes, the adequacy of diet; and finally to
keeping an eye on the personal relations of children with
their parents themselves. In a word, the school invades
the home and takes over more and more of its functions.
By its means the control of the child is “socialized.”
Now on the face of it, this socialization appears unconnected
with the drive and intent of industry as such.
It looks rather like a defense against industry. Its animus
is humanitarian, not economic; its effect is to delay the
functional installation of the child in the economic system.
Child labor is quite properly frowned on and hemmed
in with rules and restrictions. Schooling is imposed and
prolonged to later and later years; where it cannot be
made exclusive it is made concurrent with the work-life by
means of the continuation schools. And high schools and
state universities extend the possibility of schooling as a
free public function right up to the voting age and beyond.
The immense national wealth makes this possible
and easy; it enables the upkeep and expansion of an educational
system whose per capita cost is greater than that
of any other country in the world. Whether any connection
obtains between these superiorities and the fact that
Americans also enjoy a corresponding superiority in juvenile
delinquency and crime I cannot say. The paradox
is the more interesting because, as schoolmen are likely
to boast, the school is often used by the child as a refuge
from home and the street, as a place of sanctuary and
safety.
Explanation is not easy. On the face of it, the socialization
of child-control tends to defeat its own ends. And it
tends to defeat its own ends because its instrument is an
unnatural environment which offers no field for the assumption
and discharge of natural responsibilities such
as develop in the circle of an adequate family life. It keeps
the young in a state that is tantamount to an artificial
prolongation of infancy.
Now, in terms of the mechanics of the social economy,
infants are parasites upon the body politic. They are
sheer consumers, producing nothing; and in the world of
nature they absorb the time and attention of adults only
until they are ready to produce for themselves what they
consume. The more complex the organism, the more highly
organized the nervous system and the social life of a
species, the longer the period of gestation, and the more
prolonged the dependence of the new-born and the young
on the parents. A dog will reach adulthood in about a
year. A human infant takes from eleven to fifteen years,
if we mean by adulthood what constitutes it biologically—namely,
sexual maturity. Birds and animals are ready
and able to fend for themselves some time before sexual
maturity sets in, and data are not lacking in the record
that manchildren—like Russia’s bezprizorny or waifs—also
can if need presses. But for all species alike, puberty
sets a term. It is the very latest season for the young to
leave the parental nest, to live their own lives and build
their own nests for themselves. This holds true also for the
vast majority of the human young, even under the protection
of industrialized society. At puberty they leave
school and go to work like their fathers before them, and
it is not long until they are entirely on their own, and
found families and repeat the cycle again like their fathers.
If the practice of society carries their social infancy
over into their physiological maturity, it does not
do so for very long. In essentials they enter into the heritage,
such as it is, of adulthood, while custom compels
the young of the privileged residual population to remain
in personal and social swaddling clothes.
This compulsion is usually identified with “having advantages.”
It is exercised upon the young of the rich and
protected, not of the poor and unprotected. But because
the notion prevails that education is the chief if not the
sole instrument of democracy, and that every man, if he
has a chance, can be as good as his betters and is entitled
to the same rights and privileges, the number whom the
compulsion reaches has increased, since the beginning of
the century, well-nigh geometrically. Thus, between 1900
and 1930 the high school population has multiplied ten-fold;
the total number of pupils today is between five and
six million. And more than a million young men and
women are enrolled in the colleges and universities. High
school and college are considered “advantages,” and the
essence of the advantage is a social infantilism imposed
upon a biological maturity.
Though education is customarily described as “preparation
for life,” the ways and works of high schools and
colleges are so irrelevant to “life” that their prime
achievement remains perforce the prolongation of infancy.
They make adulthood harder to reach, not easier.
What, socially, adulthood consists in, varies a good
deal from civilization to civilization and from age to age.
But everywhere, and at all times, it is grounded upon
sexual maturity and maintained on personal responsibility
for winning food, clothing, and shelter, and defending
one’s self against enemies and disease. Among primitive
people, adulthood is initiated by puberty and established
and confirmed by means of certain cruel and terrifying
rites through which boys and girls are inducted into the
society of men and women. Of these rites there survives
among us today only that form of sadism and schadenfreude
known as hazing, practiced by upperclassmen on
newcomers and by fraternity brothers on neophytes. In
the school tradition these cruelties are meaningless, but in
the rites of the primitive they compose a part, perhaps
a major part, of all the formal direct “education” the
young savage ever gets. They impose bitter fear and
exquisite pain which the elders require shall be unflinchingly
endured. During three weeks, more or less, primitives
torture their young. When they have finished, the
young are utterly initiate, finally and completely adults,
fully responsible members of their communities.
Classical antiquity prolonged and rationalized this
initiatory period. Pain and endurance were imposed less
directly but, in one way or another, they were exacted.
The boys of Sparta were segregated from their women
folk in their seventh year and made charges of the state.
From their twelfth year to their eighteenth, they were in
the constant company of their elders, often their elders’
favorite company. They collaborated in purveying food,
in hunting and in worship. In what time remained, they
prepared to practise war, the primary vocation of the
citizen. At eighteen, war became their exclusive concern.
In Athens, as in Sparta, formal schooling began at the
age of seven and ended with puberty at about sixteen.
Then the boy was presented at the Agora. He associated
freely with his contemporaries and elders, he trained at
the gymnasium, attended the law courts and the theatre.
He was an ephebus, and after two years he took the oath
of the ephebus and his name was written on the list of
free citizens. He had thereby left the jurisdiction of his
parents for the jurisdiction of the state. In Rome, a boy
entered upon the responsibility of manhood when he doffed
the toga praetexta and put on manhood’s dress. This was
during puberty, at about the age of fifteen. Before then
he had learned at home and in the Forum the arts of war
and the law of the Twelve Tables. After Roman life became
Hellenized, schools acquired a vogue; but unless a
boy was destined for public life, schooling ended at puberty.
Otherwise, a boy entered the Rhetoric School and
trained for his vocation. Among the Jews, a boy assumed
adult responsibility (he still does so, though it is now
merely religious) upon entering adolescence. He was then
Bar Mitzvah. He, and not his father, had become responsible
for his fulfilling the law and the commandments. He
underwent a short, formal, preliminary training, and on
the Sabbath following his birthday his father took him to
the synagogue and formally renounced responsibility for
his son’s life and works.
So, among the primitives and the ancients, physiological
maturity was the occasion for signalizing and
establishing social responsibility, of entering into adulthood.
This is still the case among the churches. Ecclesiastical
citizenship is reached at puberty. Puberty is the time
when Catholic boys and girls are initiated by the priests
into the mystery of salvation and are endowed with the
responsibilities of the adult members of the religious community.
They undergo confirmation. Puberty is the time
arranged for the young of the evangelical sects to be convicted
of sin, to enter into grace, and to join the church.
Puberty is the time when secularized Jews celebrate Bar
Mitzvah as a merely religious event. In the definition of
adulthood, the churches are at one with the ancients.
Almost equally so are the military establishments of
states. Military duty comes at a much earlier age than
civil responsibility. Modern industrial nations continue to
conscript their young at from sixteen to eighteen. Also,
the taxing power defines the young as self-supporting
members of the economic order at eighteen; at that age
exemption on their account ceases. For tax gatherers and
armies, as for religious sects, adulthood and sexual readiness
lie close together.
And this readiness is recognized in women by custom
and law, which set the “age of consent” at puberty and
raise it nowhere beyond sixteen. Moreover the readiness
finds its purpose more largely than we imagine in marriage.
The United States census of 1920 shows that nearly
a quarter of all young people from fifteen to twenty-four
were married, and the proportion has not grown less since
then. Nor are these marriages confined to the poor. The
rich signalize their daughters’ readiness by “presenting
them to society” at from sixteen to eighteen; and there is
much rivalry among “debs” about getting married or at
least engaged during their first year “out.” The men of
this class, on the other hand, tend to marry much later,
while the average age of marriage for the “college bred”
of both sexes is unnaturally higher. The whole contrasts
sharply with the early marriage age of a hundred years
ago.
Personal distinction also seems to go with the assumption
of adulthood soon after puberty. Whether this is
attained through some special attitude or general ability
enchannelled by custom, opportunity, or accident in a particular
vocation, makes little difference. Poets, painters,
mathematicians, scientists, engineers, traders of distinction,
assume the professional attitude and the responsibility
of adulthood at an early age. Shelley, Keats, Bryant,
Peter Cooper, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin,
George Eliot, Thomas Edison, Maxwell, Galileo, and
countless others of the great, all began young. Nelson
went to sea at twelve and commanded a ship at fifteen. His
contemporary captains in the American merchant marine
were boys of eighteen and nineteen. Much of the work of
the world continues to be done by men and women under
twenty-five. Prizefighters are old at thirty. It is a favorite
doctrine of representative American employers, such as
Henry Ford, that workingmen over forty are antiquated,
and to be scrapped. Did not the great Osler advise euthanasia
for all men over sixty? Nevertheless, the ruling personages
in the ruling classes—the captains of industry,
the masters of finance, the public officials, the judges, the
generals—are progressively older and older now. They are
men whose minds had matured and set while their bodies
were young, and whose policies derive from the unconscious
premise that what was modern and advanced in
their youth is necessarily so in their old age. They are the
elder statesmen who in their prolonged infancy rule the
world....
If many of these elder statesmen rule by virtue of distinguished
ability and early adulthood, most do by virtue
of a privileged position that delays adulthood and prolongs
infancy more literally. The locus of this position is
the high school and the college, especially the college.
Owing to democracy, there has been a diffusion of some of
the privileges of this status to the children of the masses.
One of its marks is the war against child labor which we
have noted, and the progressively later age at which work
certificates are granted; another is the advancement, already
referred to, of the age of consent and the measures
for the protection of girls. Still another, and the most
signal, is the increase of the high school population from
the 300,000 of 1890 to the 5,000,000 of 1930, and the
corresponding growth of the body of college students.
Nevertheless the difference between the working young and
the young at school remains still the difference between
the responsibility of adulthood and the irresponsibility of
infancy. The difference increases with the income level.
The richer the class, the more likely are the young to be
kept in a state of social infancy, the longer is the time
delayed when they are permitted to assume the responsibilities
of adulthood.
The secondary school and the college are by tradition
and practice instruments pat to the social postponement
of adulthood and the prolongation of social infancy.
By and large, only those children enter high school who
do not need to work for a living. They enter about the
time that children of the residual world enter life, at
puberty. Their attending high school signalizes an invidious
distinction between them and their contemporaries,
for the high school has been from its beginning a mark of
“aristocracy.” Even the “commercial” high school, which
is yet of low esteem beside the high school preparing for
college, celebrates this invidious distinction. But the real
McCoy is the “college preparatory.” College sits in excelsis.
The topmost turn of the educational system, it sets
the standards and defines the ideal both of knowledge and
conduct. Secondary-school students consequently prepare
for college in a far completer way than is recognized. They
emulate and reproduce the whole pattern and structure of
“college life,” with its fraternities and other societies, its
athletics, its hidden sex interests, and all the rest. Indeed,
since the “educative process” worked by the schools is
defined from above downward, the colleges, which are for
the most part resorts where the well-to-do keep their
physiologically mature young in a state of personal irresponsibility
and social-economic dependence, set the
standard of education for the whole nation.
Practice under this standard maintains a gulf between
the curriculum and student interests. The school work, as
the teacher sees it, makes up the “serious purpose” for
which schools and colleges exist. Yet here is what a boy
who believes in this serious purpose writes to the New
York Times about his education:
“In a few weeks I will be handed a diploma, have my
hand shaken by sundry individuals, and then told that I
have been graduated from high school. I am supposed to
be educated. The city has provided me for some four years
with skilled teachers and expensive apparatus and told me,
‘Be conscientious in your studies and you shall know.’ I
know that I have been sincere, but I will tell a few things
I do not know.
“I know by heart several slices of Shakespeare and
Browning, but I do not know how to write an ordinary
form letter that would be accepted by any business firm.
I know some irregular French verbs but if I were lost in
the streets of Paris I would not be able to ask my way
home. I can, ‘amo, amas, amat,’ also ‘en to oikio ton
anthropon horo,’ but I cannot keep the ledger in my
father’s place of business nor send out his monthly statements.
I am a member of the tennis team and know all
the quirks and tricks used in hitting a tennis ball, but I
do not know how to build a woodshed nor shingle a roof.
“I know how to parse a sentence from Macaulay’s
essays, but I do not know how to light a match in the
wind or chop down a tree. I have studied economics until
my head is full of raw theories and long words, but I do
not know the name of the Alderman from our ward nor
the Congressman from our district, nor the political
creeds and platforms they have pledged themselves to
uphold. I can prove the square of the hypothenuse is
equal to the sum of the squares of the base and the perpendicular,
but I do not know how to hang a picture, put
in a pane of glass or paint a chair. I have studied chemistry
for a year and have received high marks, but I know
nothing of food values and gorge myself on what pleases
my palate. I received 85 per cent in English literature,
but I cannot get $15 per week writing news for a newspaper,
or write an acceptable advertisement, and my average
conversation is on the level of the tabloid. With the exception
of the Mayor, I do not know the names of the
other important officials of the City Government, but I
could at random name about 95 per cent of the prominent
movie actresses and actors, prizefighters and baseball
players.
“Surely, some vital element is wholly missing from our
social system which provided for only a classical but not
for a practical education. I am taught a multitude of subjects,
but I am not taught how to apply them so that I
will be able to make a success of myself in my struggle
for and with life. Life so far as I have viewed it is rose-colored,
mellow and delightful, but I know that life is far
different than I see it at present. None of life’s sorrows,
pains or struggles have been my lot to embitter and mature
my ambitious mind. I have been led to regard life as
a nut that must be cracked to succeed, not as a long hard
swim with the odds becoming greater against you every
moment and if you stop struggling you sink and are gone.
“I was educated according to the ancient formulas for
producing a scholar and a gentleman and I find I have
to work for a living. I have no taste nor love for hard
work, no habits for saving, no disposition to resist temptation
and no skill in doing anything the world is willing to
pay for. I am wholly untrained for efficiency, and before
I succeed in life I will have to undo most of what has been
taught to me in school.”
B. S.
And this boy is very exceptional. For the school work
as the average student sees it, is the price in boredom
and discomfort which the system exacts and which he
somewhat unwillingly pays in return for the pleasure and
excitement of the activities known (and not known) as
extra-curricular. These and not his studies are what touch
the life of the student. And these are what the curriculum
excludes and teachers ignore until they present themselves
as disciplinary problems. The age of high school
and college is the age of poignant laboring over the ever-renewed
questions of luck and destiny, good and God and
evil, of groping after first and last things. It is the age
of upsurging sexual energies, of inevitable preoccupation
with sex in all its degrees and forms, from romantic love
to promiscuity, from fantasy to perversity. So far, however,
as the mechanisms of curriculum and instruction are
concerned, students are not males, not females, but sheer
intellects, uncontaminated by such a vital propulsion, or
by any of the others whose development, gratification, obstruction,
deviation, realization, or repression, compose
the dynamic units of personality in the living adolescent,
determining its timbre, emotional quality and behavior
pattern.
For the most part there is no correspondence between
what the students spontaneously and directly want and
what the higher education provides. There is no opportunity
for the idealistic initiative, for generous self-discipline
and adventure, and for the accompanying responsibility
on matters of serious social import such as
adolescence craves and students do assume in backward
cultures like China or India or Russia or the countries of
continental Europe. Only athletics provides any occasion
for the play of emotion and the exercise of the responsibility
proper to an adult. But athletics is formally extra-curricular,
is a preoccupation of alumni, highly specialized
and professional among its practitioners, and to the
residual mass of the students a spectacle, not a vocation
or an activity.
In essence, the secondary and tertiary academic establishments
impose a double life on the students that enter
them. One life is defined by the so-called “serious purpose”
of the higher education: the course of study, the
examination, the diplomas, the degrees. The other life is
defined by the psychological traits, the wants and the
frustrations of young people between the ages of fourteen
and twenty-four. One life is the life of the classroom. The
other life is the life of the fraternity or the sorority, the
club, the prom, the press, class-politics, “contacts” and
all the rest, including the “bull sessions.” To these, curriculum
and professor are mostly irrelevant; president and
dean affect them only as policemen affect corner gangs.
Yet these are what is meant by “college life.” In a word,
the correlation between the “serious purpose” of the academic
establishment and the ruling passion of the youthful
psyche is negative. “College life” and “serious purpose” of
schools and colleges are in conflict.
Thus, authorities in secondary schools find obscene
notes being passed; notice masturbation, spy out chanceful
or organized petting parties; point to unnecessary
noises, desultory killing of time, smart-aleckism, and especially
to cheating. They make elaborate studies of disciplinary
situations and talk about bad home conditions,
natural meanness, and the like. But they ignore the fact
that they are themselves passing judgment on situations
in which they are active parties. How can the manifestations
of the overruling sex-urge be anything but illicit,
when school life is overtly organized as if sex were either
evil or non-existent? To whom are unnecessary noises unnecessary?
What else can one do with time but kill it
desultorily, when one’s ruling passions are ignored and
one is required to pay attention to matters one’s heart
cannot possibly be in? As for smart-aleckism and cheating—are
not those who succeed therein heroes in the eyes
of their peers? Do they not overcome an enemy and put
him in his place?
Allowing for the small differences of tradition and maturity,
the situation is the same in the colleges. The ways
of an undergraduate community are determined by standards
which do not apply to men and women of the same
age who must work for their livings. For example, there
survives from the Middle Ages an antagonism between
gown and town. When this began it involved all the members
of the academic community—faculty even more than
students. It turned on conflicts over the very structure of
the municipal economy in the course of which “gownsmen”
established and vindicated their autonomous jurisdiction
over the persons, properties, and actions of their “own.”
College or university became a city within a city, sovereign
over all affairs affecting it, and privileged in the
national life. Today, faculty is for practical purposes a
part of “town.” “Gown” consists only of the body of
undergraduates. These often stand in a predatory relationship
to the residual community. They may steal signs,
fences, garments, and whatnot; they may destroy dishes,
furniture, and other property not their own—academic or
lay; they may brawl on the public street and on occasion
beat up policemen and citizens without being held responsible
as workers of the same age would be. They may
endeavor in every way to “beat the game” in relation to
their studies—wangle more cuts than they are entitled
to, hand in work as their own which is not their own, cheat
at examinations, and in every other possible way “put it
over” on the faculty. For an undergraduate to be serious
about the “serious purpose” of college, to be academically
law-abiding, to show an interest in studies, is at best to
be slightly declassé, at worst to be a greasy grind. Any
manifestation of friendliness to a teacher is “boot-licking.”
The total impression which undergraduate conduct makes
in the mass is of an underground class war between student
and faculty; and the traditional undergraduate code
is a warlike code, requiring students under all circumstances
whatsoever to stand by each other and against the
faculty. Even under an “honor system” a “squealer” is as
total a loss among students as among gangsters.
In sum, tradition allows the college man certain privileges
and protects his abuse of them. Like the infant, he
is held not accountable for violations of the adult social
code. He is maintained in a state of infantile irresponsibility.
This state is even more significant, if not so conspicuous,
in the matter of the basic economy of life. For the
representative undergraduate does not keep himself. He
is kept. He does not earn his food and clothing and shelter
and entertainment. Again, like the infant, he is sheer consumer,
not producer; Veblen would call him an instrument
of “conspicuous consumption” and a foremost
avatar of the leisure class.
As a community of consumers merely, a student body
is no more homogeneous than a community of producers.
Within the frame of similarity generated by the condition
of dependence there exist both the formal academic gradations
dividing year and year as rank and rank, and the
non-academic but “collegiate” gradations of caste and
class, interest and attitude. Every college, for example,
has its tiny liberal group, its sparse collection of students
who trouble themselves with social problems, international
relations, disarmament, and the like. This group is usually
looked upon as a troublemaking nuisance by the college
administration (the high point of this attitude may be
found in the University of Pittsburgh), and as “lousy” by
the arbitres elegantiae of undergraduate opinion. “Political
and social agitation,” declares a Yale senior who had
degraded himself by concern with such agitation, “is
frowned upon by undergraduate leaders, and consequently
relegated to the obscurity of almost clandestine off-campus
coteries.”
To no small degree such coteries are made up of students
who are working their way through college, and
what is worse, Jews count heavily among them. Yet Jews
are the exception that prove the rule. Between 1920 and
1930, the tradition of a love of learning which they
brought to college has been dissipated. The adult responsibility
which they felt for the problems of their own
people and of the community at large, and which was
signalized by their membership in such organizations as
the Menorah Societies, the Zionist, the Liberal, or the
Social Questions Clubs, has been destroyed. As their numbers
grew, their fields of interest and modes of behavior
conformed more and more to the prevailing conventions
of undergraduate life. Although excluded by expanding
anti-Semitism from participation in that life, they reproduce
it, heightened, in an academic ghetto of fraternities,
sororities, and the like. And they emulate the invidious
distinctions they suffer from by projecting them upon the
Jews too proud, too poor, or too Jewish to be eligible for
“collegiate” secret societies of Jews.
Because the dynamic distinctions within the academic
community are invidious only. College is not a republic of
letters but a plutocracy of fraternities, sororities, clubs,
and “activities.” Scholarship is no attribute of merit for
a student. Athletic prowess, especially if conspicuous,
could be; but the prepotent properties are wealth, sectarian
affiliations, and “contacts and connections.” These
delimit members of the fraternities and sororities. Since
initiation fees run from $50 to $1000, and membership is
correspondingly expensive, a rich father is the prime qualification
for the prospective “pledge.” Before pledging,
such a prospect is courted like a bride. Pledging is followed
by initiation, which often lasts months. It begins in
hazing and may grow into sadistic torture, recalling the
rites of the primitives. It culminates in a solemn self-dedication
with highfalutin’ vows whose practical application
to the subsequent daily life amounts to training in
the amenities (à la Emily Post); “loyalty” to “brothers”
in the competition for the cream in undergraduate activities
such as class-politics, proms, athletics, and the like;
collaboration, mostly illicit, with brothers and sisters to
insure their passing examinations or any other kind of
test; and most of all, in the facilitation of “contacts.”
Thus the academic aristocracy are indoctrinated in the
academic “traditions” and equipped to watch over them.
These have primarily to do with the mores of garb and
conduct ordained for freshmen, with the prerogatives of
upperclassmen, such as wearing shorts and slickers, and
similar matters reminiscent of the primitives. If they are
moved by social and political questions at all, it is at times
of presidential elections, when national committees—Republican,
mostly—have been known to put a good deal of
money into corralling “the college vote.” In times of
strike, as during the Boston street railway strike, some
of the better-class Harvard undergraduates had almost
as much fun strike-breaking as they used to have rioting
after a rare football victory over Yale. But the record
hardly ever shows considered idealism, spontaneous, generous
giving of goods and self, such as one finds among
the students in Europe and Asia. The American undergraduate
makes the impression of a self-centered and
selfish creature, absorbed in trivialities, comfort-loving,
reactionary and irresponsible; in a word, infantile.
Graduates, recalling their college life, tend to fall into
two groups. One group see college as the happiest time of
their lives—and why should they not? This group composes
the backbone of the alumni associations, forever
whoops it up for “dear ol’ Whatsis,” and proves the life
of the party at alumni reunions, especially those where
good liquor is poured out in the hopeless effort to make
the man a boy again, while he stays a father too.
By the other group, college is recalled as a waste of
time. The transition from the position of a kept and protected
favorite child into that of a grown man under the
imperative of having to earn his own keep has worked a
disillusionment. Instead of getting the job he believes his
degree entitles him to, he finds himself a superfluity in the
labor market. Employers are likely to speak of him as
bumptious, immature, undeveloped, a cub. He finds, even
for the simplest tasks, either that he must unlearn what
he has learned, or, if he is lucky, that he has no training
at all. He begins to regret his college life and to consider
that college has failed him. Thinking about it, as did
Philip Wylie, he realizes that “the serious purpose” of
college not only was not serious to him, but could not
have been. For, as the New York boy found already in
high school, the curriculum offers him no momentous living
option. The subject matter is irrelevant to all that is
dynamic in him, it lacks vital links with both the passions
of his heart and the actual world where, after college, he
must live and move and have his being. It is presented
mostly by persons to whom teaching is as much a disagreeable
penalty for the amenities of “scholarly” life as learning
is to the student for the amenities of college life.
Hence, the student seeks to pay the minimum penalty,
which is to pass his examination by any means whatsoever.
Sometimes the disillusion rises during undergraduate
years. Then there are editorials in the college papers.
Administrations are criticized, professors are graded,
courses are scored, abuses are denounced. Deans and faculties
squirm and are glad when the student interest in
education subsides. Fortunately such bursts of interest are
rare interludes. For the most part, it is faculties, not
students, who are agitated about education.
And why should students be agitated about anything
still so monastic, that isolates nearly all of those who
enter upon it from the realities among which they expect
to spend their lives, and sustains them in a state of irresponsibility
and irrelevance? At an age when body and
mind cry out against infancy, “the higher education” prolongs
infancy; it sets up and maintains a conflict between
psychobiological adulthood and social childishness. In this
conflict “college life” has its fertile soil. It nourishes all
those psychological expressions which fall into the patterns
of undergraduate attitudes and behavior that are
designated by the word “collegiate.”
An apt example of what “collegiate” has come to mean
in these United States broke into public view during the
fall of 1931. The occasion was an article from the pen
of the editor-in-chief of the Spectator, which is the student
daily paper at Columbia University in New York
City. The article was a serious and intelligent endeavor
by a student whose social maturity had by some stroke
of chance kept pace with his physiological adulthood, to
deal seriously with the realities of athletics, especially
football, at Columbia. It called for the public recognition
of football as the professional vocation it actually is,
and for ordaining coaches as reasonably-paid instructors
and not as super-salaried dictators. Of course the response
was anger, denunciation, threats against the writer.
Among the commentators was the alumni secretary. “The
editorial is nonsense,” he said. “The matter is complicated
but there are lots of reasons why the head football coach
should get a larger salary than a professor. The editor
of the Spectator is too serious-minded. He should be
more collegiate.”
So standard is this usage of “collegiate” that the very
students whose habits sustain it, admonish each other:
“Oh, don’t be so collegiate,” and in one of the women’s
colleges—women’s, nota bene—“Don’t be collegiate” is a
commandment which upperclassmen deliver from the Sinai
of their seniority to freshmen entering.
But so long as colleges are managed as they are managed,
and college teaching continues as and what it is, it
is impossible that students should not be, in one form or
another, collegiate—that is, adults conducting themselves
like children. For social adulthood consists in self-support
and self-management, in moral responsibility and intellectual
integrity. These are facilitated by physiological maturity
but are by no means identical with it. Physiological
maturity comes as an instinctive ripening, in the course
of nature. Social adulthood is a learned mode of behavior
in the social environment; a system of habits acquired,
not a state of the body grown into. This is why bodies
may grow up and grow old while minds and hearts remain
infantile. And this is why adulthood cannot be learned in
colleges as they are any more than swimming can be
learned on dry land; the medium is too different, too alien.
This is why such academic reformations as those at Harvard
or Wisconsin or Chicago are futile jugglings of the
same pieces, whereas what is required are new materials
and new forms. Antioch comes closer to putting the student
on his own as a self-supporting, self-managing adult,
but in Antioch the work on the job and the classes in the
college are far from the interfusion they require. Nevertheless,
Antioch points the hopeful direction of change for
colleges that desire to stop prolonging infancy and to
begin educating adults.
