Study? Here? This is a dorm!:
MacGloin, T P
THE LAST WORD Study? Here? This is a dorm! T.P. MacGLOIN I entered Trinity College, Dublin, in 1951, taking up rooms first in the lesser quad of Botany Bay and then in Parliament Square. The...
...Originally, the monastic, guild-spun universitas and college comprised the holistic professor-student paradigm...
...curfew-roll call, lofted the classical unmentionables on the university flagpole, and caught first Mass at the Franciscans religiously...
...They are not conducive to the spirit...
...The ambience would be gradually transformed from that Hobbesian game of wilding, defiance, and personal devices now rampant to a community of helpful, aspiring, and curious adults...
...The steps are few and practicable...
...and Sunday 2:00-10:00 p.m., makes a statement on priorities...
...And that is loudly manifest in the local college...
...or that last semester, three deaths occurred-all alcohol-related...
...rife with an astounding banality of the vulgar, obscene, and profane...
...If I recall them in the saving tradition of emigrant ways, it is to be astonished by their primal value, not to rattle my sons and daughters with mean-spirited comparisons: there is all too little joy in that...
...Their great crime is their perversion of the quest: the promise and honest purpose of the students...
...In my rag of a gown, I pledged life and divinity to the senior dean in exchange for library privileges...
...Despite all the promising figures, indexes, and indicators of American governmental fiction, what we are hearing is the knell of parting heydays...
...The magnificence of one fact of that bounty is the local college of the state university-over 500 hill-and-valley acres of lush sward and skirting waters-where I do my professing...
...Rubbing shoulders with faculty, in and out of lecture halls, would provide the quintessential of coherence-the friend, model, and standard of behavior...
...Residence-hall directors should ideally be recruited from faculty...
...The son of a peasant-farmer of Mayo, neither have I forgotten the four-to-a-bed, dirt-floors, barefeet, brook washes, black bread, and stirabout...
...there must have been a nurturing neglect...
...Dormitory-life, fraternities, sororities, clubs, sports, concerts, extramural diversion, etc., are incidental...
...Abolishing the elitist, subsidized residence-assistants system and replacing it with a general mandatory service by all students would promote an esprit de corps...
...But if my own lads and lasses were required to sprinkle salt on their porridge, it was so lest they completely forgot the existence of contrarieties in their own bountiful world...
...A recent Carnegie Foundation report on the college community noted the scandalous failure of the American student to study...
...The occasionally cited charge that the American student is inferior-lags some two-to-four years scholastically behind his European counterpart-is still galling to the citizen, but less preposterous with the years...
...From such a balanced institutional scenario, it would not have been easy to have foreseen that Rolling Stone magazine would cite the college as one of the ten "best" partying schools in the nation...
...A final measure that would reinforce the drive to regain the dormitories and which would further serve to address the national educational malady might be the doubling and trebling of study assignments- homework...
...Unhappily,, the quickening of Adam Smith's organizing, competitive compulsion and its symbiotic loss of humanistic vision have produced, particularly here in America, the dislocation and separation of teacher from pupil...
...Unpopularly, if by definition, the mission of an academic institution is study...
...How to deal with this defeat...
...How to restore a quiet, academic construction to the campus...
...A library-hardly an incidental-that closes on Friday at 5:00 p.m., reopens Saturday 1:00-5:00 p.m...
...And I studied, oblivious to the austerity of my world and the goodness of its people...
...They rob them of a rich, humanizing, and uplifting tradition, and threaten their future...
...A seasoned, competent, one-you-can-collar faculty, complemented by an administration that is benign, constitute the drive and direction of student learning and living...
...For a party-culture to have flourished the way it has-and it would seem to pervade the entire state and national systems-basic collegial principles had to have been lost...
...There, the truths of ancient and daily concern find their modern nuance bruited in impressive halls, a legacy of the ease of Governor Nelson Rockefeller's age of legislated philanthropy in New York State...
...a fulfilling and serious venture to the staff and student...
...briefer though not richer in sublimation...
...Later at Cambridge, life was essentially as sumptuous...
...I don't recall heat, toilet, or water in the ivied buildings...
...The faculty, cooped up in their rarified and wizening isolation, should be reintegrated with the students: faculty offices should be relocated in the residence-hall ground floor...
...MacGloin is a humanities professor at the State University of New York, Cobleskill.k, Cobleskill...
...The chair of European history, the senior proctor, and a brilliantly mad math-lecturer, together with other sundry academics, shared my staircases...
...Assigned one bath per seven days, I dined formally on commons, answered the junior dean's 9 p.m...
...They threaten the future of college...
...Getting down to the books in most of the residence halls is inconceivable: They are noisome, abused, deafening, and dangerous...
...This generation will not have it-is not having it-as good as their parents...
...there was a miasmic latrine and the sorriest of taps somewhere in the square...
...The mother of all cycles, the cycle, moves inexorably toward its full circle as discreetly as the dusk: my generation was-is-the last American ascendancy...
Vol. 122 • April 1995 • No. 8
