Halls of Honor: College Men in the Old South by Robert F. Pace (review)

84 OHIO VALLEY HISTORY Halls of Honor: College Men in the Old South Robert F. Pace In Halls of Honor: College Men in the Old South, Robert F. Pace explores the lives of southern college students in the antebellum United States. He argues that earlier studies of antebellum colleges were either too geographically narrow in focus or too concerned with institutional history to explore the culture of college students in detail. Seeking to understand college culture across the Old South, Pace examines twenty-one colleges in eleven Old South states (though Virginia is slightly overrepresented in his sample, with one-third of the schools). Pace utilizes traditional institutional histories but he also turns to the diaries and correspondence of students and faculty members to reveal the lived experiences of students. Pace concludes that antebellum southern college culture was shaped by the intersection of adolescent development and the southern code of honor. Employing psychological theory, Pace argues that the average student, who entered college around the age of fifteen, was experiencing the phase of cognitive development known as adolescence, a period marked by the ability to think abstractly. He contends that adolescent thinking allowed college students to manipulate the southern code of honor to fit their needs in a college setting composed of other adolescents. While many of their actions remained childish , they nonetheless strived for independence, incorporating components of their parents’ culture into the world they were creating. Pace employs Bertram Wyatt-Brown’s Southern Honor (1982) as a guide and framework for his study. According to WyattBrown , the code of honor, which permeated all levels of southern society, placed a premium on appearances; southerners deemed shameful those who appeared to neglect their duties to family and community. Pace argues that southern honor as refracted through adolescence shaped the southern college experience. Thus, Halls of Honor explores various aspects of college life, including academics, the campus environment , social life, violence, and the coming Robert F. Pace. Halls of Honor: College Men in the Old South. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2011. 168 pp. ISBN: 9780807138717 (paper), $17.95. Book Reviews BOOK REVIEWS WINTER 2011 85 of the Civil War. Each context provided young southerners the opportunity to become honorable men. Pace’s discussion of how adolescence and southern honor impacted academics challenges previous interpretations which contend that the primary tension between faculty and students arose from sectional prejudices in schools in which many northern faculty members taught a student body that hailed mostly from the South. Pace argues instead that tension existed between professors and students because professors had the ability to strip students of their honor by shaming them. Academic success ensured that a scholar enjoyed honor. Yet students could secure good grades and honor through means other than hard work. Students often cheated—a practice many deemed acceptable because it enabled them to outsmart the professor. Other students faced the academic challenges and devoted time to their studies. Occasionally, undergraduates resorted to open defiance of their professors, acting as if they did not care about academic success. This diminished the professor’s ability to embarrass them in front of their peers. Whatever coping mechanisms they employed, successful students made it to commencement where they earned the opportunity to show off their rhetorical skills to fellow students, faculty, parents, and the community , stepping out of the liminal stage of college life and into full manhood. Pace’s study also incorporates Eugene Genovese and Elizabeth Fox-Genovese’s view of a static, preindustrial Old South that showed little change over time. In The Mind of the Master Class (2005), Genovese and Fox-Genovese argue that antebellum southern elites looked to the past, particularly the ancient world, as a model for their own society. This interpretation of southern society , and Pace’s reliance on European student protests as the model for southern student uprisings, leads him to downplay the important role politics played in young men’s lives, especially during the secession crisis. Pace’s study would have benefited from incorporating Peter Carmichael’s contention that this cohort was deeply concerned with politics, supporting secession long before their fathers’ generation (see The Last Generation, 2005). Indeed, Pace demonstrates that during...