Part 14

At Harvard, where the evil has long been recognized, a remedy has been sought in increasing the membership of the great sophomore and senior societies, the Institute of 1770 and the Hasty Pudding Club. The result has been the reverse of what was intended. The larger the club the less compact its life and its influence,--what a few men have gained the club has lost. The tendency toward disintegration is confirmed by a peculiarity of the organization of the societies. The first half of the members of the Institute form a separate club, the D. K. E., or Dickey. From this the second half are excluded, becoming a sort of social fringe; they often form a part of the mob that dines at Memorial or of the cliques that dine in boarding-houses, and are only a shade less excluded than the rest from the centres of the college life. If this inner club, the Dickey, were the instrument of a united and efficient public spirit, the case would not be so bad, but its members in turn are split into a number of small clubs; as a social organization the Dickey is mainly a name. If now these small clubs took a strong part in the general life of the college, the case would still not be so bad; but each spends its main strength in struggling with the others to secure as many members as possible from the first ten of the Dickey. They are scarcely to be regarded as engines of public spirit.

The same is true of the great senior society, the Hasty Pudding. Its most prominent members belong to the few small clubs of upper classmen; the rest are as much a social fringe as the later tens of the Institute. And the senior clubs, like the clubs of the under classmen, are more interested in their private politics than in the policy of the college as a whole. At Yale the senior societies still exert a strong and generally wholesome influence, but at Harvard they have long ceased to do so, if they ever did. In proportion as a man is successful in the social world the system lifts him out of the body of undergraduate life. The reward of athletic distinction or of good-fellowship is a sort of pool pocket, upon getting into which a man is definitely out of the game. The leaders in the college life, social and athletic, are chosen on the superficial tests of the freshman year, and are not truly representative; and the organization of which they become a part is calculated only to suppress general and efficient public spirit. The outer layers are dead wood and the kernels sterile. This is at least one reason why Harvard does not oftener win.

In all this there is no place for a philosophy of despair. The spirit of the undergraduate, clubbed and unclubbed, is normal and sound. The efforts which the clubs themselves make from time to time to become representative are admirably public spirited; and there is no less desire on the part of the outsiders to live for the best interests of the college. On the day of an athletic contest the university is behind the team, heart and lungs; and when defeat comes it is felt alike by all conditions of men. From time to time ancient athletes journey to Cambridge to exhort the undergraduate body to pull together; and it is a poor orator indeed who cannot set in motion strong currents of enthusiasm. Half an hour of earnest talk on the strenuous life from Theodore Roosevelt has often been known to raise a passion of aspiration that has positively lasted for weeks. But the social system cannot be galvanized into life and functioning. The undergraduates aspire and strive, but every effort is throttled by a Little Old Man of the Sea. When all is said and done, the mob and the cliques remain mob and cliques; with discord within and exclusive without, there is small hope of organized efficiency.

At Yale the oligarchic spirit of the senior societies is compact and operative where that of the Harvard clubs is not; but Yale also is being swamped. The vast and increasing mob of the unaffiliated has several times within the last decade shown a shocking disrespect for the sacred authority of the captains; and the non-representative character of the sophomore societies, from which the senior societies are recruited, has been a public scandal. One result of this disorder is that the ancient athletic prestige is slipping away, or is so far in abeyance that it is again a question whether Harvard or Yale has--shall we say the worse team? The case of the older universities is typical. Other institutions are expanding as fast or faster, and it is only a question of time when the increase of numbers will swamp the social system.

That there is something rotten in the state of Denmark has of late been officially recognized, at least at Harvard. In order to create a general social and athletic life in the community a Union has been established, modeled on the Oxford Union. It would be pleasant to picture the College House of the future shaking hands with Claverly, the Phi Beta Kappa linking elbows with the Porcellian, and the fellows who now, in spite of a desire to be sociable, have lived through four years of solitary confinement each in his petty circle, enjoying the bosom friendship of all the men they may desire to know. It would be pleasant but perhaps not altogether warrantable, when one considers the essential nature of the Union.

The Oxford Union of celebrity, as has been pointed out in an earlier chapter, is a thing of the past. It was an exclusive institution, in which no attempt was made to foster universal brotherhood. When it was thrown open to the entire undergraduate world, it lost caste and authority. The elect flocked by themselves each in his own exclusive club. If the Harvard Union had been modeled on the old exclusive Oxford Union, it might perhaps have been equally efficient in bringing together a broadly representative body of men. But it was modeled on the modern democratic Union. Here is a plain case: When the Oxford Union ceased to be exclusive, its best elements flocked by themselves, and the result is a growth of small exclusive clubs. At Harvard the exclusive clubs and societies are both ancient and honorable, and, moreover, very comfortable, and it hardly seems likely that their members will rout themselves out of their cosy corners to join the merry rout at the Harvard Union.

This is not to cast a gloomy eye upon the new university club; it is rather by way of emphasizing the importance of the work it has to do, and will succeed in doing. Hitherto the lounging grounds of the unaffiliated (alas! that in such an alma mater so many are forever unaffiliated!) have been public billiard-rooms and tobacco shops. For the solace of a midnight supper one had to go to the locally familiar straw-hatted genius of the sandwich, and for the luxury of a late breakfast to John of the Holly Tree. And John the Orange Man! Great worthies these, ancient and most honorable. But even in the enchantment of retrospect they somehow or other explain why so many fellows choose to live, for the most part, in small cliques in one another's rooms and cultivate the deadly chafing-dish. For the unaffiliated--by far the larger part of each class--the new club-house will be a Godsend. It is much more fun to cut a nine-o'clock lecture if you are sure of a comfortable chair at breakfast and a real napkin; and even in the brutal gladness of youth, it is pleasant at a midnight supper to be seated. And then, after that athletic dinner at Memorial, a place to loaf quietly over a pipe with whatever congenial spirit one finds, and listen to the clicking of billiard-balls! It is also proposed that the 'varsity athletes have their training tables at the new Union, so that any fellow may come to know them clothed and in their right minds. I fancy that the new club will leave those old worthies a trifle lonesome, and will banish the chafing-dish forever.

The spirit of an old graduate somehow takes kindly to the idea of a place like that. How the spirit of Bishop Brooks, for instance, would enjoy slipping in of an evening for the cigar they have denied him in the house erected in his memory! And for the graduate in the flesh the club-house will be no less welcome, especially if he is unlucky enough not to have a club of his own to go back to. To love one's alma mater it is, of course, not necessary to have a club; but it somehow interferes with the sentiment of a home-coming to be obliged to go back to Boston by trolley for luncheon and dinner, and to eat it among aliens. In the new Union it will even be possible to put up for the night. A long step has been made in advance of the old unhappy order. Yet the new Union leaves the vital evil in the community life as far as ever from solution.

What the authorities have failed to do consciously may, according to present indications, be accomplished, in some manner at least, by an unconscious growth. When Memorial became inadequate to the mere demand for seating-room, new dining-halls were established. In the future it is possible that these new halls may be kept within the line where community life becomes impossible and mob life begins. If they could be, the problem would be at least one step nearer solution. But to gain the highest effect of community organization, it is necessary that the men who dine in the same hall shall live near one another. Under the present system this rarely happens, and when it does, it does not even follow that they know one another by sight. Until the halls represent some real division in undergraduate life--separate and organized communities--they must remain the resort of a student mob.

Fortunately, another movement is discernible in the direction of separate residential organization. Already certain of the dormitories in American universities are governed democratically by the inmates: no student is admitted except by order of a committee of the members. The fraternity houses so widely diffused in America offer a still better example, almost a counterpart, of the halls of the golden age of the mediæval university. Any considerable development of hall or fraternity life in the great universities would result in a dual organization of the kind that has proved of such advantage in England, so that a man would have his residence in a small democratic community, and satisfy his more special interests in the exclusive clubs of the university. In such an arrangement the hall would profit by the clubman as the clubman would gain influence through the hall. All undergraduates would thus be united in the general university life in a way which is now undreamed of, and which is unlikely, as I think, even in the new Harvard Union.

The tendency toward division in the dining-halls and the dormitories is evident also in athletics; but here it is very far from unconscious. The division by classes long ago ceased to be an adequate means of developing material for the 'varsity teams, and when the English rowing coach, Mr. R. C. Lehmann, was in charge of the Harvard oarsmen, he outlined a plan for developing separate crews not unlike the college crews of England. This system has since been effected with excellent results. Separate boating clubs have been established, each of which has races among its own crews and races with the crews of its rivals. Only one thing has prevented the complete success of the system. The division into clubs is factitious, representing no real rivalry such as exists among English colleges. To supply this rivalry, it is only necessary that each boat club shall represent a hall. The same division would of course be equally of benefit in all branches of sport. The various teams within the university would then represent a real social rivalry, such as has long ceased to exist. This could scarcely fail to produce the effect that has been so remarkable at the English universities. As in England, a multiplication of contests would on the one hand develop far better university material, and on the other hand it would lessen rather than exaggerate the excessive importance of intercollegiate contests.

II

THE ADMINISTRATIVE PROBLEM

The administrative evil of the American university, as typified in Harvard, Mr. Bolles described even more vividly than the social evil. The bare fact of the problem he stated as follows: "In 1840 the college contained 250 students; in 1850, 300; in 1860, 450; in 1870, 600; in 1880, 800; in 1890, 1300; in 1894, 1600." He then pointed out that the only means the authorities have found for meeting this increasing demand on the administrative office is, not to divide the students into separate small bodies each under a single administrator, but to divide the duties of administration among several officers. Thus each of the added officers is required to perform his duty toward the entire student body. It is apparently assumed that he can discharge one duty toward two or three thousand students as intelligently as in former years he could discharge two or three duties toward two or three hundred. By this arrangement the most valuable factor in administration is eliminated--personal knowledge and personal contact between the administrator and his charges. It is said that the members of the administrative board of the college--professors whose time is of extreme value to the university and to the world, and who receive no pay as administrators--sit three hours a night three nights in the week deciding the cases that come before them, not from personal knowledge of the undergraduates concerned, but from oral and documentary reports. "It is only by a fiction that the Recorder [or the Dean, or the member of the administrative board] can be assumed to have any personal knowledge of even a half of the men whose absences he counts, whose petitions he acts upon, and against whose delinquencies he remonstrates; yet the fiction is maintained while its absurdity keeps on growing.... If the rate of growth and our present administrative system are maintained, the Dean and Recorder of Harvard College will [in 1950] be personally caring for 6500 individuals, with all of whom they will be presumed to have an intelligent acquaintance."

Mr. Bolles lived through the period in which a brilliant band of German-trained American professors, having made over our educational system as far as possible on German lines, were endeavoring to substitute German discipline, or lack of it, for the traditional system of collegiate residence which aims to make the college a well-regulated social community. At one time these reformers rejoiced in the fact that Harvard students attended the ice carnival at Montreal or basked in the Bermudan sun while the faculty had no means of knowing where they were and no responsibility for the success of their college work. The Overseers, however, were not in sympathy with the Teutonized faculty, and soon put an end to this; but the reformers were, and perhaps still are, only waiting the opportunity to establish again the Teutonic license. "It is sometimes said," Mr. Bolles continues, "that Harvard may eventually free itself from all its remaining parental responsibility and leave students' habits, health, and morals to their individual care, confining itself to teaching, research, and the granting of degrees. Before it can do this, it must be freed from dormitories. As long as fifteen hundred of its students live in monastic quarters provided or approved by the university, so long must the university be held responsible by the city, by parents, and by society at large, for the sanitary and moral condition of such quarters. The dormitory system implies and necessitates oversight of health and morals. The trouble to-day is that the administrative machinery in use is not capable of doing all that is and ought to be expected of it.... If it be determined openly that the health and morals of Harvard undergraduates are not to occupy the attention of the Dean and Board of the college, then the present system may be perpetuated, but if this determination is not reached, then either the system must be changed or the present attempt to accomplish the impossible will go on until something snaps."

Since Mr. Bolles's day there has been much earnest effort to solve the administrative problem; but the difficulties have increased rather than diminished. The duties of the Dean are still much the same as when the freshman class numbered one hundred instead of five. Only the Dean has been improved. He is at least five times as human and five times as earnest as any other Dean; but the freshman class keeps on growing, and when he has satisfied his very exacting conscience and retires (or, not having satisfied his conscience, perishes), no man knows where his better is to be found. Of the Secretary and the Recorder and his assistants Mr. Bolles has spoken. A Regent has among other duties a general charge of the rooms the fellows live in, and usually makes each room and its occupant a yearly visit--which the occupant, in the perversity of undergraduate nature, regards as a visitation. Then there is the physician. So large a proportion of the undergraduates were found to be isolated and unhappy in their circumstances, and remote from the knowledge of the authorities, that it became necessary to appoint some one to whom they might appeal in need. Thus the details as to each undergraduate's residence are in the hands of seven different officials, each of whom, in order to attain the best results, requires a personal acquaintance with the thousands of undergraduates. Furthermore the entire body of undergraduates changes every four years. If every administrator had the commodity of lives commonly attributed to the cat, the duties of their offices would still be infinitely beyond them.

Mr. Bolles suggested a solution of the administrative problem: "If the college is too large for its dean and administrative board to manage in the way most certain to benefit its students, it should be divided, using as a divisor the number ... which experts may agree in thinking is the number of young men whom one dean and board should be expected to know and govern effectively."

When Mr. Bolles wrote, one class of administrative officer and one only was limited in his duties to a single small community: in each building in which students lived, a proctor resided who was supposed to see that the Regent's orders were enforced. Since then another step has been taken in the same direction; a board of advisers has been established, each member of which is supposed to have a helpful care of twenty-five freshmen. These two officials, it will be seen, divide the administrative duties of an English tutor. That they represent a step toward Mr. Bolles's solution of the administrative difficulty has probably never occurred to the authorities; and as yet it must be admitted the step is mainly theoretical. The position of both, as I know from sad personal experience, is such that their duties, like those of all other administrators, resolve into a mere matter of police regulation. The men are apt to resist all friendly advances. In the end, a proctor's activities usually consist in preventing them of a Sunday from shouting too loud over games of indoor football, and at other times from blowing holes through the cornice with shotguns. The case of the freshman adviser is much the same. His first duty is to expound to his charges the mysteries of the elective system, and to help each student choose his courses. According to the original intention, he was to exert as far as possible a beneficial personal influence on newcomers; but the result seldom follows the intention. Beyond the visit which each freshman is obliged to make to his adviser in order to have his list of electives duly signed, there is nothing except misdemeanor to bring the two within the same horizon. When the adviser takes pains to proffer hospitality, the freshman's first thought is that he is to be disciplined. When, as often happens, a proctor is also a freshman adviser, he unites the two administrative duties of an English tutor; but his position is much less favorable in that his duties are performed toward two distinct bodies of men. With time, tact, and labor, he might conceivably force himself into personal relationship with his fifty-odd charges; but the inevitable ground of meeting, such as the English tutor finds in his teaching, is lacking. An attempt to become acquainted is very apt to appear gratuitous. In point of fact, such acquaintance is scarcely expected by the university, and is certainly not paid for. What little an administrator earns is apt to be so much an hour (and not so very much) for teaching. A gratuitous office is so difficult that one hesitates to perform it gratuitously. If the young instructor is bent on making himself unnecessary trouble, there is plenty of opportunity in connection with his teaching; and here, of course, owing to the characteristic lack of organic coördination, he has to deal with a body of men who, except by rare accident, are quite distinct both from those whom he advises and those whom he proctorizes. The system at Harvard may be different in detail from that at other American universities; but wherever a large body of undergraduates are living under a single administrative system, it can scarcely be different in kind.

Enough has been said to show that the only office which an administrator can perform is a police office. Where the college and the university are identical, the element of personal influence is necessarily eliminated. But if the college were divided into separate administrative units, the situation would be very different. The seven general and two special offices I have indicated might be discharged, as regards each undergraduate, by a dean and a few proctor-advisers; and as the students and their officers would be living in the same building, personal knowledge and influence might become the controlling force. The solution of the administrative problem is identical with the solution of the social and athletic problem, and in both cases a movement toward it is begun. If the student body is eventually divided into residential halls of the early mediæval type, much good will result, and probably nothing but good, even if the tutorial function proper is absent. As to the addition of the tutorial function, that is a question of extreme complexity and uncertainty, in order to grasp which it is necessary to review the peculiar educational institutions of American universities.

III

THE EDUCATIONAL PROBLEM