Dr. Henry Noble MacCracken, G. '05, President of Vassar College, has written for the New York Times his views on the present student movement toward greater self-government and self-expression in American colleges. His article, reprinted from the Times, follows:
The student movement, long deferred, is beginning to make headway in America, but powerful influences have delayed its appearance.
The original American college was patterned rather after Eton College than Oxford University. It was a superior school with a few masters, by whom morals and manners could be carefully watched. It was under the strict control of the Church and subject to visitation. Until the middle of the last century library and laboratory facilities were almost non-existent. Text books were few and poor. The student gained a passing acquaintance with twenty standard texts, scarcely more. Standards inevitably suffered from the poverty and remoteness from cultural centres. The college of 1850 had developed scarcely higher than the best boarding schools of today.
These handicaps proved blessings in disguise. Had America taken over the fully developed European forms there would not have been the originality that our system displays today. The American college, because of its very poverty, turnel its gaze to the instant need of things. It struck deep root in American soil and found the fertile springs of action.
More than one hundred years ago Stephen Van Rensselaer founded at Troy the first undergraduate engineering college. In 1841 the University of Michigan set up its Utopian heaven of a university in a democracy. Nearly one hundred years ago the college for women first saw light in the South. At the same time coeducation became the practice of the majority of American institutions. By the Morrill act of 1863 the agricultural and preferred positions in the university curriculum. These innovations were peculiar to America in the system of higher education.
Collegiatism Not European
Most striking of all was the incorporation in the university scheme of the undergraduate college with courses of a broad informational character filling out the scanty background in the American student's home training. This purely collegiate living, in the midst of university environment has been the cause of much shaking of heads by educational leaders whose eyes are fixed upon European models. They ignore the fact that without these undergraduate bodies the moral and financial strength of the university would not exist, and even the tremendous pressure that great educational foundations can bring to bear will never uproot this truly American feature.
The introduction of these elements into American higher education has occupied nearly a century. The increase in the number and the power of colleges, the immense sums raised for their maintenance, the overwhelming tide of students, the rapid turn in Faculty personnel, the incessantly expanding campus, the extending of the idea of going, to college to all classes of the commonwealth these and other improvements have made education a rather perplexing thing. Standards have been built up with enormous difficulty Weathering financial and other perils, the college has made its President a captain at the helm with complete power over his ship's crew. In the midst of this adjustment the student's life outside of his classroom appointments, his leisure day, has perforce been excluded from the scheme of things. This has been most fortunate, for he has been permitted to turn it to his own account. He has devised a life of his own.
Most of the American colleges were originally situated in the smaller villages. As the body of students grew they were forced to provide their own housing accommodations and thus the fraternity--in form stimulated by the Free Mason movement; in substance, the substitute for the college hall of residence--came into being. The women's colleges, however, having always provided halls of residence for practically all of the students, have escaped the fraternity.
Societies Gain Loyalty
These societies, like the "nations" of the medieval university, still preserved at Upsala in Sweden and elsewhere, were in form a college within a college. Many American students are more loyal to them than to their college. The attitude taken by the fraternity on moral and social questions determines its members' attitude with more finality than chapel addresses or Sunday sermons. In recent years university authorities have wisely recognized this fact, and by stimulating a sense of responsibility in fraternities for the academic standing of their members, have secured the most helpful cooperation in improving the general habits of study among the fraternity members. The national officers of the great American college fraternities frequently exercise a stricter control and demand a severer conformity to accepted social behavior form their undergraduate brothers than the college authorities themselves feel able to enforce.
Next to the development of the fraternity the student movement in the United States has occupied itself with the development of collegiate and intercollegiate athletics. Various games have been developed and standardized sports and training have been brought under systematic development, and immense sums of money expended. As far as the students themselves are concerned, the movement has been almost wholly beneficial. Many an unwilling student has studied hard in order to make his team, many a law-breaking student has conformed to social custom in order to make good on the field, many an injurious habit has been given up for the Spartan regimen of the training table. Moral qualities of leadership and teamwork, the tough muscle and the steady eve are the reward of American athletes. And as in the case of the fraternity, the faculty which ignored the existence of this great institution has come to realize that unless it makes of athletics its friend and aid in the scheme of American education, athletics like the fraternity, may put an end on the college itself.
Faculty at Fault
It is the fault of the Faculty. If the professor had really concerned themselves with the students' leisure day they would not be in the predicament so eloquently described by the recent report of university professors condemning intercollegiate football as now conducted. That report reads like the expressions of dismay of the "wets" on the morning after prohibition. The professor engaged in his Addison walk of contemplation has bumped into the stadium and cannot imagine how it came into existence. Fear, which is the child of ignorance, cries. "Down with it," but second thought suggests that the institution is here and that the sooner it is brought into line with the general purpose of the college the better it will be.
The fraternity and the stadium are expensive necessities. Neither could have come into existence without the aid of in third party to the college contract, the graduate. He has furnished the funds, he has taken title to the property, he has controlled the details of the organization. Having no responsibility to the college administration and even openly contemptuous of its half-understood aims, the graduate has often worked completely at odds with the college with the sublime disregard of truth and has told the students that what they learned in the classroom was of no importance to them. It was the habits they formed outside the classroom which would be of value to young graduates. He has then shown his own worst side, half sentimental, half debauched, as a guide to their future course. He has professionalized the boy's idealistic love of sport; he has encouraged the student in wanton extravagance in the organization and maintenance of fraternity houses.
