Our Bicameral Colleges

...Will they give us more in the future ? Were these few merely accidental—not so much trained by the colleges, as unharmed by them...

...Unquestionably, the work of the classroom is the 68 THE COMMONWEAL November 24, 1926 first business of the college...

...The danger of alumni influence threatens at more points as their devotion to the old college becomes greater, and they desire to see it avoid "mistakes" in academic policy...

...Students too often can shrewdly watch the successful scholar graduate and detach himself from the world in a selfish enjoyment of his own intellectual pursuits, and the successful campus leader graduate and fight business battles with any weapons...

...success in student activities was measured, not in terms of classroom idealism, but by worldly standards...

...John-sum, t'fie author of the present paper, and well known as an educator and essayist, will conclude his views on American higher education in an early issue.—The Editors...

...We must persuade our democracy to convert itself voluntarily into an oligarchy of the intellectually trained...

...Curiously enough, it is sometimes due to the zeal of a certain type of graduate busybody that the "pointing" of the work of the classroom toward training for citizenship is prevented...

...Sometimes he succeeded...

...from fundamentalist if he be a modern...

...But if the army will not accept such trained leadership, then you are as far from an answer as ever...

...yet it is easy for the teaching specialist to think of campus life, not as a potential laboratory, but as a necessary evil, and his relation to it merely that of a drafted policeman...

...They are, as it were, mirrors in which we can see ourselves and our work...

...And teachers may be blind to the fact that this is a severe indictment of themselves...

...They succeeded so well that their students often turned against the state...

...It is as though all student speech and writing outside the classroom were totally unaffected by the practice within...

...Consciously or unconsciously, the colleges in this new land adopted a characteristic unknown in the old world—a residential social life that to some extent reproduced the civil organization outside, and yet was actually a part of the college...

...If they do not on their own initiative carry on activities springing out of their studies, then you may count on it, however well the tests are met, that the studies are of little value...

...Some time ago, a college president wrote: We need not forget that these [campus] activities are only accidental and that the real value lies in the studies and the teaching...

...Such executives may preside over colleges without teachers enough, without funds enough to pay their teachers decently, without enough standard reference books in the library to enable even small groups of students to study simultaneously, without playground enough to enable all students to play when they ought to...

...They recommended that fellow-countrymen coming to American colleges should come when much younger...

...I have said that the campus, which might be a laboratory for the practice of classroom ideals, itself draws away and tends to practise quite different things, thinking of itself as an almost independent institution...

...The man who taught Latin might as well teach German or geology, being transferred from one post to another for expediency's sake...

...Upon one criticism of our undergraduate colleges they all agreed—the immaturity of our students and the elementary character of their studies...

...For every one college trustee who might want to muzzle a professor there are hundreds of such graduates who would like to frighten him back again into the silence of a completely cloistered scholarship...

...They do not want to find out whether or not he is proselyting...

...It is too easy for campus life to be utterly unaffected by the theories and ideals taught even in those classrooms devoted to obviously related subjects...

...If this is true of some who were destined for a scholarly life, what of the rank and file...

...Again and again, student groups were the political trouble-makers of their day...

...and such thought as they can spare for general college problems they must give to a reconciliation of their own special interests within the faculty...

...That was in a golden age when an undisturbed devotion to abstract learning was frankly sought...

...Perhaps another has found an athletic system even more at variance, with college control over it nominal, and alumni control actual—and that control vicious and held with a grip he could not break...

...But we can consider whether our colleges attempt to fit as many as possible of their pitifully small percent for the great task, and whether they are equipped to provide the right training...

...I venture to guess that a score of college presidents in these latter days who have sought to harmonize the ideals of classroom and campus have been blocked by alumni...

...Why is there not more graduate aid for campus activities other than athletics...

...American students, they said, came out of these colleges intellectually immature, but surprisingly well-trained in a social way...

...The old universities of Europe, whence came our traditions, were designed to nurture thoughtful scholars...

...The college function then was to train new teachers, or a scholarly clergy which carried on the tradition of a pulpit ordinarily remote from mundane affairs...

...This little community of the campus is a part of the college...

...Often he had not been trained for teaching, but for the ministry...

...The colleges are to train leaders in the sort of thinking and doing that is necessary in a democracy...

...they might bear the same relation to our whole citizenship that a single military school may bear to a national army...

...and a Harvard professor today admits that until his senior year he did not know where the library was...

...We hear talk now and then of "academic freedom...

...One answer is obvious...

...Teachers who indulge in scholarly criticism of affairs as though the critics were somehow aloof and remote and bore no share of personal responsibility, tend to implant this sense of aloofness in the minds of their students...

...If they want to play at those things," say the alumni, "it is good for them to stand on their own feet...

...Students would surely like to have better newspaper offices, better stage scenery, better glee-club quarters, better orchestra equipment, better hired orchestras for important dances...

...Examine the records of our famous colleges, and find the answer...

...It is the former which have the handling of the entire 3 percent of our young people of college age and then send the bulk of them out into immediate citizenship...

...To sustain it they find themselves at war with campus life...

...College clubs and college politics aped outside manners indiscriminately...

...A scholarship that thinks of fellow-citizens in terms of the pronoun "they" rather than "we" is far too common...

...There are evidences that it refuses to become so converted, and this gives rise to a great deal of pessimism...

...Such teachers are more devoted to learning for its own sake than ever before...

...Here was drawing apart with a vengeance...

...The question is always a pertinent one, because education seems to be the only final cure for any of the ills of a democracy...

...We found, if such a thing is conceivable, a machine that was divided against itself...

...I cannot recall," says one, "that in all my undergraduate days I ever voluntarily visited the college library...

...Here again a certain graduate pressure is in the wrong direction...

...He was a cultured gentleman, trying to pass his gentle culture on to the next generation...

...Victorian graduates began to take a new and sentimental interest in alma mater and recalling that the campus was their best friend in undergraduate days, threw their influence one-sidedly in favor of the campus...

...But instead of drawing together, it appears that often they have drawn further apart...

...Those young women who went to Europe during and immediately after the war were the products of the campus more than of the classroom...

...The faculties of this time boasted few specialists, as we now define the term...

...The classroom was dominant...

...Our American colleges were not bicameral at the very beginning...

...the campus can train successful men of affairs, and it is doing that...

...That omnipresent person, General Public, is always seeking and accepting leadership of some sort, and occasionally from men of the finest scholarship...

...Perhaps one has found a fraternity system so constituted that it fought against every college ideal...

...They had noted, for instance, that young women college graduates newly fledged from these immature classrooms could go into devastated sections of Europe and, single-handed, undertake matters of organization or management which perplexed many an older European official and which mature European women did not dream of facing...

...Then came a government which was the outworking of popular will and more general intelligence...

...It might become the whole business, if the campus could be considered as an outgrowth of it...

...Is there some reason why the man in the street resents the very accents of scholarship...

...But there was another point upon which they agreed, and they could not reconcile it with the first criticism...

...November 24, 1926 THE COMMONWEAL 67 Then there came a middle—a Victorian—period, and I speak, of it diffidently, for generalizations are so dangerous...

...Campus life was a meagre although a rebellious thing...

...The classroom undoubtedly can develop scholars, and it does so...

...Then the howl goes up—from radical graduate if the teacher be a conservative...

...They object because he voices an opinion, instead of thanking God that he is a man with a mind and a sense of citizenship in this world...

...HOW can our American colleges, which train but a meagre 3 percent of all our young people, help greatly to solve any national problem...

...It must conform to our standards or be abolished," says the president, and beats out his zeal against a solid wall of graduate opposition...

...Soon we found in these new-world colleges certain problems hitherto unknown, which arose from an ancient conflict, waged now between college life in the classroom and college life on the campus, each having a different objective...

...Some time ago, there was a small conference of certain foreign students here in America...

...but he demands that they shall possess at the same time an ability to lead, and a belief in democracy...

...No one can answer such questions...

...At the same time, campus life began to lose all of its cloistered character, and as it did so it took on many undesirable characteristics of the life outside...

...But the two are so easily non-identical...

...It is this campus experience at our colleges which is providing one kind of training, while the curriculum is providing another...

...They had come from one little country, the seat of an ancient university, and they wished to formulate advice for any young fellow-countrymen who might follow in their footsteps...

...Here was a great opportunity to adjust learning to living, or living to learning, with a campus laboratory at the door of the classroom for training in public service...

...These Victorian graduates began to succeed in business and affairs, and to assert that their only debt is owed the campus rather than the classroom...

...Many graduates of the eighties and 'nineties who now rank high in learning, while acknowledging a social debt to their colleges, admit that in scholarship their real debt is to post-graduate work...

...But their sports make a holiday for us...

...venality entered into games...

...But far commoner than aloofness from national affairs is aloofness from campus affairs...

...and yet able to build stadiums worth many millions of dollars so that the graduates may have enough seats at the games...

...But there is no anomaly about this...

...It is as though a student debate upon immigration utilized no information gained in the study of economics or political science...

...I am sure that my generalizations are true enough to prove that the two sides of our American college life have each had a distinct existence, and each has performed a separate service...

...Of course, I speak of our undergraduate colleges, and not our post-graduate schools...

...Graduates of that period are fond of saying that they got little or nothing from the classroom, but much from contact with their fellows and from social contacts with their teachers who were frequently more effective outside the classroom than in it...

...There is nothing similar to our campus life at a European university...

...We could easily get along without colleges in a democracy if these separated types were to be their only products 1 If classroom and campus are to work together for one product, it is not campus life alone that must make overtures...

...Their pressure to add new courses or to eliminate old ones may become a real embarrassment to the experts in education who are directing the classroom...

...But none the less it is true that these activities reveal to us, far better than any examinations can do, the success or failure of the classroom itself...

...Our freshman and sophomore years, they said, corresponded to the high schools in their homeland, rather than to any class in their university...

...while graduates vaguely interested in education gave lavishly to student clubs and arenas...

...The collective heart of a zealous graduate group may speak louder than its collective head when educational problems are concerned...

...The teacher who would urge the responsibilities of every-day life in connection with the material of his classroom is sure to reveal his own private opinions, social and political...

...Surely they should work together if the colleges are to do their best to provide men of scholarly mind trained to take a useful part in the life of a democracy...

...If we want to know the effect of what we are doing in the classroom, let us look to see what the students are doing outside of it when they are free to follow their own desires...

...The broadly cultured gentlemen of our Victorian faculties have gradually given place again to specialists highly trained in narrow fields...

...But our classrooms were inherited from an old world where the pursuit of learning was a selfish pursuit...

...but these things they must provide as best they can for themselves...

...The colleges have given us comparatively few such men...