American College and University: A History

5. The Collegiate Way

7 The Collegiate Way William Tecumseh Sherman, who would be remembered for marching through Georgia, began his career in the South as president of a military college that became Louisiana State University. Reporting on the opening of the institution in 1860 he remarked: "The dullest boys have the most affectionate mothers and the most vicious boys here come recommended with allthe virtues of saints. . . . Of course I promised to be a father to them all." A Princeton alumnus, searching in 1914 for some way to define the Princeton spirit, decided that he could best convey his meaning by describing Princeton asa place "where each man . . . may enter dozens of rooms whose doors are never locked nor their tobacco jars empty." In despair, the personnel counselors of a large urban university reported to their administrative superiors in 1938: Our students are markedly lacking in social skills, the ability to meet people and to get along with them. They frequently feel ill at ease in a social group and cannot engage in conversation in other than argumentative fashion. Our students are constantly being frustrated by financial difficulties, by their immaturity, by their social awk- 87 The Collegiate Way wardness and by their lack of practical and social experience . . . . All these remarks have in common one of the oldest traditions of the American college, a tradition so fundamental, so all-encompassing, that to call it merely a tradition is to undervalue it. For what is involved here is nothing less than a way of life, the collegiate way.1 The collegiate way is the notion that a curriculum, a library , a faculty, and students are not enough to make a college . It is an adherence to the residential scheme of things. It is respectful of quiet rural settings, dependent on dormitories, committed to dining halls, permeated by paternalism. It is what every American college has had or consciously rejected or lost or sought to recapture. It is William Tecumseh Sherman promising to be a father to an entire student body; it is comfort and full tobacco jars in a Princeton dormitory; in an urban university it is counselors helping the socially inept to overcome their weaknesses. Imported with so much of everything else from England, the collegiate way in America was from the beginning the effort to follow in the New World the pattern of life which had developed at the English colleges. Had the first American colleges been the work of Scotchmen or of continental Europeans , perhaps a curriculum, a library, faculty, and students would have been enough. But, then, Americans would have had to wait longer for their colleges. For the developmentof the English pattern in the New World was not simply a conscious effort to adapt the collegiate system to American circumstances . It was at first the only solution to the absence of large concentrations of population. Not to have the collegiate way would have required cities—cities that could offer up sufficient numbers of students and that could find rooms in their attics and in their basements for students attracted to the 1 Walter L. Fleming: Louisiana State University 1860-1896 (Baton Rouge, 1936), p. 47; Varnum Lansing Collins: Princeton (New York, 1914), p. 368; S. Willis Rudy: The College of the City of New York: A History, 1847-1947 (New York, 1949), p. 398. THE AMERICAN COLLEGE AND UNIVERSITY 88 college from the surrounding countryside. In the absence of cities and knowing the English pattern, the founders of Harvard and other colonial colleges naturally subscribed to the collegiate way. By the time that the colleges in Philadelphia and New York were under way, the collegiate pattern was not a necessity, for there were cities. But by then what had been a necessity had become a tradition, and from then on the founders of American colleges either adhered to the tradition or clumsily sought a new rationale. For the adherents of that tradition, the college was "a large family, sleeping, eating, studying, and worshiping together under one roof." The claims made for it were often extravagant , but they became so much of the language of the colleges that in time it was difficult to separate the real thing from the myth which collegians and college officials created out of the collegiate way. Who would challenge President Eliot in 1869 when he would claim: "In spite of the familiar picture of the moral dangers which environ the student...