American College and University: A History

7. The Extracurriculum

7 The Extracurriculum The American college, for all of the pervasiveness of the Yale Report of 1828, was unable to stand still. To an increasingly disenchanted public, the American college continued to present itself as little more than a body of established doctrine, an ancient course of study, and a respectable combination of piety and discipline. Within the college, however, there was taking place what might readily be called the unseen revolution. For the American college, if it could not be reformed from the top, could be redefined from the bottom. If it was not seriously reshaped by the Jeffersons, Lindsleys, Ticknors, and Marshes, it was nonetheless significantly changed by now unknown and forgotten hosts of undergraduates. The college as construed by the officials might neglect intellect in the interest of piety. It might adhere to a regimen of discipline so constraining that the joys of this world were neglected in the interest of preparing for life in the next. It might ignore the body but be captivated by the career of the soul. It might do all these things, and did, but the American college became something more, much more than this. In the end it became a battlefield where piety and intellect fought for the right to dominate;it became an arena 137 The Extracurriculum in which undergraduates erected monuments not to the soul of man but to man as a social and physical being. When the students were finished they had planted beside the curriculum an extracurriculum of such dimensions that in time there would develop generations of college students who would not see the curriculum for the extracurriculum; who would not believe that the American college had any purpose other than those that could best be served by the vast array of machinery, organizations, and institutions known as student activities. To what had been a curriculum in the iSio's was added a vital extracurriculum by the 1870*8. The students were perhaps more effective in intruding manners and muscles into the life of the American college than they were in establishing the priority of the mind, but there is no question about whether student agencies were friendlier to intellect than they were to piety. The first effective agency of intellect to make itself felt in the American college was the debating club or literary society, as it was generally called. Children of the Enlightenment, these societies first appeared at Yale, beginning in 1753, and soon thereafter at Princeton and Harvard. Yale undergraduates established the tradition of two competing societies which, in New Haven, took the names of Linonian and Brothers in Unity. At Princeton, the debating clubs were called American Whig and Cliosophic. Harvard's clubs were finally absorbed into the American Institute of 1770. Nurturing its passion for difference, Harvard did not adapt its extracurricular debating and literary interests to two rival clubs.1 Elsewhere there was hardly a college that did not have a pair of debating clubs, usually with names that invoked memories of Greece: De1 Henry Davidson Sheldon: The History and Pedagogy of American Student Societies (New York, 1901), p. 93; William Lathrop Kingsley, ed.: Yale College: A Sketch of its History (New York, 1879), I, 78,95, 307-23; Thomas Jefferson Wertenbaker: Princeton 1746-1896 (Princeton , 1946), pp. 201, 206; Samuel Eliot Morison: Three Centuries of Harvard 1636-1936 (Cambridge,1936), pp. 138-41. THE AMERICAN COLLEGE AND UNIVERSITY 138 mosthenian, Philanthropic, Diognothian, Atheneum, Alexandrian , Philolexian, Philomathean, Philologian, Philotechnian, Philodemic, Philonomosian.* The first debating clubs probably owed something of their origin to the general atmosphere of colonial political debate that surrounded their birth and something to the continued lively political interest of the times. In debating clubs students could face squarely the exciting political issues of the day, issues that occupied the attention of their elders in the partisan press, at the village tavern, or around the cracker barrel of the country store. The tradition of the medieval disputation which had been declining as a commencement activity also found new lodgment in the debating societies, and the oratorical and declamatory exercises of the curriculum received new encouragement. But it was the Enlightenment faith in intellect, the commitment to reason, that most accounted for the development of the literary societies as a characteristic expression of undergraduate life. Nowhere else was reason so fully enthroned in the college as in the activities of the literary societies. The classroom, while officially...