Part 2

“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?

VII

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.

VIII

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.

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TRANSCRIBER’S NOTE:

Italicized text is surrounded by underscores: _italics_.