American College and University: A History

8. Academic Balance of Power

8 Academic Balance of Power The vigor of the extracurriculum was proof that the undergraduates had succeeded in assuming significant authority over college life and that as a result they had become a remarkably important element in the power structure of the American college. That they were able to do so was in part a function of the American tendency to favor the young, whatever their endeavors, but also operative was a conscious policy of laissez faire, an administrative acquiescence in, if not approval of, these student excursions into the world of the extracurriculum. Paternities and organized athletics especially disturbed many college authorities, but with few exceptions they learned not to interfere. Although the authorities did not intend to create the power vacuum that gave the students their opportunities, yet in adhering to the prescribed classical course of study, this was very much what they did do. For the classical course and all that went with it and that constituted the official collegiate scheme inspired vigorous young men to seek some better means of expressing their goals, their values, and their interests than the authorities were willing or able to provide. 157 Academic Balance of Power The extracurriculum which these young men developed— the agencies of intellect, the deeply embedded social system, the network of organized athletics—would become the repositories of their power. Through the extracurriculum the student arrived at a position of commanding importance in the American college. By opposing the literary societies, journals, and other clubs to the curriculum, by opposing the fraternities to the collegiate way, and by setting up in the athletic hero a more appealing symbol than the pious Christian , the students succeeded, although not really intentionally , in robbing the college professor of a certain element of prestige and of a sizable area of authority. Yet, the era of the colleges was in many ways the era of the professor, as it was the era of other simple and somewhat romantic figures—the steamboat captain, the Yankee peddler, the southern senator. The era of the colleges was the era of Professor George Blaetterman, the German-born professor of modern languages at the University of Virginia, who in the past had been subjected to stonings by his students and who in 1840 was dismissed from the Virginia faculty after having twice during the previous week beaten his wife, once on the public road. It was also the era of his perplexed successor, a Hungarian wanderer, Charles Kraitser, who also was dismissed. Said Kraitser, whose overpowering wife often turned him out of the house at night: "The Board of Visitors . . . were gentlemen whom it was hard to please. They had kicked Dr. Blaetterman out because he had whipped his wife, and they have kicked me out because I have been whipped by my wife. What did they really want?"1 What the American college really wanted and needed was someone like Alpheus Spring Packard, who taught for sixtyfive happy years at Bowdoin and there earned a reputation 1 Philip Alexander Bruce: History of the University of Virginia, 1819-1919 (New York, 1920-2), II, 159-62. THE AMERICAN COLLEGE A#D UNIVERSITY 158 as the students' "beau ideal of a Christian gentleman"; someone like Julian Sturtevant, who was appointed the first member of the faculty of Illinois College in 1829 and who enjoyed a tenure of fifty-six years before his retirement in 1885.* The American college wanted and revered men like Professor Fletcher O. Marsh, who in 1866 hauled manure all one day that the grounds of Denison College might in some way be made more beautiful; men of all work like John Smith of Dartmouth, whose appointment made him "Professor of English, Latin, Greek, Chaldee, etc., and such other languages as he shall have time for." What the American college wanted or needed was a man like Father William Stack Murphy of Fordham who in the 1840*5 would, while shaving and gesticulating with his razor, listen to his students practice orations and then go off to conduct classes which were a wonder of charm, interest, and successful teaching.8 In the professors, and only in the outstanding professors at that, the colleges located that effective Christian impulse, that kindly paternalism, that moral rectitude on which their best intentions rested. For one thing, only rarely were the professors scholars. When Thomas Jefferson in 1824 recruited a faculty, including four Englishmen and a...