State Universities, IV
Bates, Ernest Sutherland
68 THE COMMONWEAL November 25, 1925 STATE UNIVERSITIES IV. THE YOUNG LOCHINVARS By ERNEST SUTHERLAND BATES (This is the fourth and last of a series of articles on state universities, by...
...Nevertheless, student politics is, if anything, more dishonest than national politics...
...Instead of possessing that trained intelligence, unperturbed in times of excitement and faithful to its own convictions, which is necessary to good citizenship, the graduate comes out with a mind empty of convictions, trained to accept without examination the ideas of his own group, and eager to run frantically after the first thrill that offers...
...the field of choice is also qualitatively superior...
...And if the fraternities have been instrumental in turning the universities into finishing schools, we may at least be thankful that they are good finishing schools...
...The pleasure of the Mentors in passing rules to govern the conduct of the students is as nothing to the ecstasy of the Young Lochinvar in the same occupation...
...The answers to the questions propounded in the first article of this series can no longer be in doubt...
...they are thrown into fountains, ponds, or streams, wherever these are available...
...All that the universities have accomplished has been to spread a transparent veil of .hypocrisy over their practices...
...And even the zeal of the fraternity man in this work is far surpassed by that of his sorority sister...
...I refer, of course, to athletics...
...The worst crime that a freshman can commit is to show any signs of striking individuality of thought...
...The standard of morality on the campus is just about the same as it is off the campus...
...It is the non-participant in athletics who is chiefly harmed by the present system...
...The freshmen are herded together in whatever degree of deshabille the taste of the community will permit and are then compelled to run the gauntlet between lines of upper-classmen armed with light clubs...
...and always at intervals spanking or "paddling" is a chief feature of the entertainment...
...The Middle-Aged Mentor may shirk faculty meetings for months at a time, but it is little short of sacrilege for a fraternity member to miss a weekly meeting of his "frat...
...For the students are, of course, the most important factors in the situation...
...Let the universities admit the professionalism of their athletics, pay their athletes openly instead of secretly, and keep their teams to represent them exactly as cities are represented by baseball teams...
...Of course, the social life of the campus is not confined to the fraternities and sororities, any more than the social life of a city is confined to its "four hundred...
...They have cried like Dante's Ulysses—"Virtue and knowledge be the goal ye set...
...With the tremendous energy of youth he has proceeded thoroughly to organize the campus in the most conventional manner possible...
...Another service which the university successfully performs in this connection is that of a matrimonial agency...
...The social life of the universities is dominated by the fraternities...
...the majority are educated—in so far as they are educated at all—by themselves...
...The change that comes over many a country bumpkin during his few years in college is little short of marvelous...
...There could be no greater mistake than to suppose that the students are any longer educated by the faculty...
...It would be hard to find more charming hosts...
...Today horsemanship has given place to other forms of athletics...
...Statistics of divorce would seem to indicate that "happy marriages" are more frequent between college students than elsewhere...
...Not that the Puritans and scandal-mongers who occasionally bring the charge of special immorality against the state universities are in the least correct...
...Yet all the time the remedy lies easily at hand...
...How could it be otherwise ? The Young Lochinvar knows nothing of any other life...
...Nowhere outside of an anthill can one find so much apparently wasted energy...
...Unless the freshman is uncommonly stouthearted, long before the year is out he has been molded into form...
...And the modern state university has become a place where his bellicose and amatory desires can be gratified collectively and on a large scale...
...Attempts to abolish intercollegiate athletics have been ignominiously defeated...
...It would require a constitutional amendment, and more, to persuade the American public to give up its football games...
...Ours have no walls, either physical or mental...
...The Young Lochinvar naturally gratifies his adolescent desires and ambitions in ways imitative of the society he sees about him...
...So much for the major activities of the Young Lochinvar...
...The real duties of the student officers are to support athletics and maintain college traditions...
...The boy or girl who goes to college is as safe as if he or she had remained in the parental town—and no safer...
...Formerly it was a part of their manual of etiquette to ignore the "coeds" of the university and bring to their entertainments damsels from foreign parts—the farther the more glorious—but with the growth of sororities this condition has largely changed so that now there are plenty of girls on the campus with whom the fraternity man may associate without danger of losing caste...
...In fact, his dispensation from the universal obligation of thinking usually ends by becoming so attractive that he is never willing to assume the obligation later on...
...Here and there may be found simple souls who rejoice that the scholarship of athletes has so risen that they are no longer flunked out of college, but most people understand that grades can be changed more easily than athletic scholarship...
...they are compelled to lie down and kiss something or other...
...One may occasionally find some peculiarly studious individual or some luckless foreigner who feels shut out from student life, but, for the most part, the Young Lochinvars are a happy lot who thoroughly enjoy their mutual relations...
...The professional life of the Young Lochinvars may be handled more briefly...
...If any mind-reader would tell us the exact proportion of maidens who go to college with the thought of securing some attractive Young Lochinvar as husband, the result would probably be most flattering to masculine egotism...
...They have caught some passing vision of the beauty of truth and, following it, have come to the university...
...If there is anything sacred to the modern college student, it is his fraternity...
...This of course does not prevent their constantly adding to the tradition...
...It would be difficult to find a spiritual loneliness greater than that of the real student on the modern campus...
...Listen to the students as they leave the lecture-room...
...This type of existence is not, however, imposed by the authorities of the university as a punishment, but is regarded as a high honor...
...It sends out its graduates with no more sense of ideal values than when they entered...
...they might profitably devote a little of it to the potential Shelleys who are suffering under our own very similar system...
...This organization, as that of society at large, may conveniently be discussed under three main heads—social, political, and professional...
...College traditions are chiefly concerned with the subjugation of the freshmen...
...In the present article I propose to consider just what state education actually does to the student, and what the student does to state education...
...Questions of cheating in examinations sometimes come under their supervision, but since today no one but an incorrigible blockhead would ever need to cheat, this is a very minor matter...
...Much sympathy has been wasted by American writers on Shelley's suffering under the fagging system at Eton...
...But his vital interests are elsewhere...
...The Young Lochinvar learns to meet and manage his fellow-men for his own interest—which is the essence of commercial training...
...least of all is he ever permitted to think by himself...
...Before every game there is a rally, at which all students are supposed to be present, to encourage the team...
...The Old Visitors must be sent home, the Middle-Age Mentors must be raised from their state of legal peonage, the Young Lochinvars must be saved from the tyranny of standardization, and the present exclusively quantitative ideals must be abandoned...
...The majority of such exhibitions do not give one a high idea of the Young Lochinvar's sense of humor...
...They have definitely served to establish the tradition of good manners on the American campus...
...The life of the campus has become a microcosm of the great world outside...
...They simply follow and reflect the general social trend, upward or downward as the case may be...
...The talk is of the dance, the rally, or the rush...
...Listen to them as they walk about the campus, follow them to their fraternity houses, hang about them like familiar spirits, but you will not hear a word of free intellectual discussion or debate...
...If he becomes a member, he usually lives in the fraternity house with from ten to fifty other members and ceases to have any private life of his own...
...Where there is a considerable degree of "student self-government," these officers occasionally fulfill the function of mediation between students and faculty...
...If the aim of the universities is to be the purely hedonistic one of giving its members some years of pleasant living, it should be acknowledged that the students have realized this aim...
...Perhaps some inherent sense of the realities of the case lies back of the fiction by which fraternities always "rush" a candidate, going through the formalities of a veritable courtship for a week or so, although both parties understand that the courted student will usually capitulate at the first suggestion...
...In the meantime every effort to improve the situation has failed...
...Faculties, in this instance supported by public opinion, have Indeed in most institutions succeeded in supressing acts of physical violence likely to result in death or physical injury...
...everyone knows that they are trained by professional coaches who often receive much larger salaries than any member of the faculty...
...Thus it comes about that the nonathlete spends almost as much time on athletics as does his professional brother...
...Everyone knows how "amateur" athletes are paid professional salaries by means of purely nominal and fictitious jobs that are created for them...
...Or perhaps it is a preliminary atonement for the fact that after initiation, the freshman, heretofore treated like a visiting monarch, suddenly becomes the abject slave of the upper-classmen in the fraternity...
...To meet this peril, drastic measures were long since introduced so that now the self-interest of the upper-classmen naturally cloaks itself in loyalty to tradition...
...Perhaps we shall soon find the universities openly advertising their services as matchmakers...
...It is an excellent matrimonial agency, anj excellent finishing school in good manners, and, in every activity, first, last, and all the time, an excellent business college...
...They can, and do, make of the university what they will...
...A few of the latter sometimes arouse a mild interest during the time he spends in class...
...All this was brought out twenty years ago...
...Since the entering class is always much larger than any of the others, the upperclassmen live in terror of losing their authority and prestige...
...November 25, 1925 THE COMMONWEAL 69 Yet the ant has his virtues, and I am far from maintaining that fraternities have none...
...but the Young Lochinvar's interests are still substantially the same...
...and the feudal capture of a bride to milder acts of chivalry known as "queening," "pigging," or "necking...
...If one would know the American university he.must dismiss from his mind all thought of the high walls, inner quadrangles, and distinctive university spirit of European institutions...
...HITHERTO we have been mainly concerned with what may be called the legal and theoretical aspects of the university—with what it is supposed to be and is not, and just why it is not...
...Opportunities of acquaintance are usually far wider than in the home-town...
...You will not hear the subject of the lecture mentioned...
...If this is not all that we wish the universities to be, if we wish them to be universities in more than name, fundamental changes must be made...
...The chief activities of these organizations are to support athletics, maintain college traditions, and dictate the social tone of the student body...
...Without accepting the fraternity ideal that good manners are more important than good minds, one must still admit that the fraternities are much more successful in cultivating the former than the Middle-Aged Mentors are in developing the latter...
...The actual accomplishments of the university are not the ones that are avowed...
...it is especially during the long days of monotonous training that the team needs to be supported by his presence on the side-lines...
...THE YOUNG LOCHINVARS By ERNEST SUTHERLAND BATES (This is the fourth and last of a series of articles on state universities, by Mr...
...The student's social standing is determined by whether or not he "makes" one of these societies...
...The fond parent need no longer be troubled by his son's question whether he should enter business or go to college...
...after every victory there is a celebration to reward the team, and after every defeat there is a celebration to show the team that the college is still behind them...
...Those who are not taken into the national Greek-letter societies either form "locals" of their own or enter into less pretentious and less permanent groups...
...Nor should the loyal collegian support his team only on the occasions of its public appearance...
...The state university does not attain either of its avowed aims, to produce good citizens or to produce scholars...
...The number of marriages in the University of So-and-so is this year the largest in the history of the institution...
...they are compelled to climb up on some eminence—steps, tree, or lamp-post—and there make silly speeches...
...After a little time, the suggested change would be welcomed by the athletes themselves, relieved of the bother of attendance upon classes, and it would be of infinite value to the nonathletes, who would be relieved once for all of the frightful necessity to spend most of their time "supporting athletics...
...he is not permitted to eat, sleep, or work by himself...
...These elections are taken with more seriousness by the students than national or state elections are by the general public...
...The public has so long been fully apprised of the athletic situation that there is no reason for going into detail...
...This has now taken the form of lowering the respect of the freshman by making him publicly ridiculous on every possible occasion...
...the son enters business in either case...
...they are not leaders in anything...
...The political life of the campus centers about the election of class and student-body officers...
...The very people for whom the universities were first founded are the ones whom they are now incompetent to serve...
...This is exactly what any sensible person would expect...
...Standards of scholarship would then no longer need to be kept down to the level of intelligence of the dullest football player...
...His leisure hours he spends on his studies...
...The amount of skill shown in wire-pulling, underhanded trading, distribution of patronage, and suppression of news would startle many a professional boss...
...Certainly there are a few, a very few, students who really deserve the name...
...They have purchased this victory, however, at the cost of legalizing the custom of hazing in itself...
...During the last few years they have thronged across the ramparts in such overwhelming numbers that all the barriers of tradition are down...
...Bates.—The Editors...
...While the Old Visitors are busy with their trimestrial meetings, and the Middle-Aged Mentors are hard at work on grades and credits, it is the Young Lochinvars who give its living character to the institution...
...These are the things by which their lives are molded...
...What then is their will ? When, according to the story, Young Lochinvar came out of the West, his chief interests are reported to have been in his steed and in a certain young lady...
...When they discover that they must substitute football for virtue, and college tradition for knowledge—on pain of ostracism, physical indignity, and general contempt—is it any wonder if they become warped and bitter...
...He may even grind away dutifully in writing papers or in preparing for examinations—in which case he is considered a good student...
...American universities are not leaders in immorality...
...Thinking is a luxury reserved for his student-masters, although they themselves generously refrain from using it...
...Mild hazing of freshmen is now practically universal...
Vol. 3 • November 1925 • No. 3
