Title: College prolongs infancy
Author: Kallen, Horace Meyer
Language: English
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INFANCY ***



  25 cents          (35 cents in Canada)

  _THE_ JOHN DAY _PAMPHLETS_--No. 16

  COLLEGE
  PROLONGS INFANCY

  _by_

  HORACE M. KALLEN


“... 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.

“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.”

       *       *       *

  _See back flap for the complete list of_
  THE JOHN DAY PAMPHLETS.

  THE JOHN DAY COMPANY
  386 Fourth Avenue, New York



  COLLEGE PROLONGS INFANCY



  COLLEGE PROLONGS
  INFANCY

  by
  HORACE M. KALLEN

  _New York_
  THE JOHN DAY COMPANY



  Copyright, 1932, by HORACE M. KALLEN

  Printed in U. S. A.
  by The Stratford Press, Inc.,
  New York City


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.


II

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.


III

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.


IV

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.


V

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....


VI

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?


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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