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Prologue: “Here’s the Syllabus”
- University Press of Mississippi
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XIII PROLOGUE “Here’s the Syllabus” by the time students graduate from college, they accumulate plenty of courses but are not given enough credit for the traditions they bear. Sure, students are usually in college only a few years, and the locations of their education vary widely, but I argue that undergraduates in their hallowed halls, more than in any other place of their scholastic experience, embrace distinctive traditions because campuses constitute transitional spaces and times, precariously between childhood and adulthood, parental and societal authority, home and corporation,and play and work.One might falsely presume that the business of obtaining a degree precludes the handing-down work of tradition, but in fact, I find that campuses are hotbeds of expressive traditions fitting under the rubric of folklore, and even more so, rather than less, as universities have become engines of mass society. The idea of tradition on campus refers inevitably to connection—to the past, to people, to place—whether this idea comes through in customs known to have been repeatedly enacted or to cultural practices designed to spread across space and maybe recur in the future. In both these cases, collegiate denizens recognize the feature of tradition allowing participants to socialize and feel a part of something larger than themselves. Tradition evokes a feeling of groupness, usually implying cultural work of participants’ own making and less than official or corporate involvement. Sure, college authorities often have a hand in organizing campus events, but many, if not most, traditions embraced by students suggest their appropriation of customs or narratives for their own purposes. Often students intend to foster smaller identities within the corporate whole outside of the job of coursework, and even to subvert, transgress, or at least question the organizational control over students. Other consequences of their campus traditions might not be as evident to them— ritualizing coming-of-age, simultaneously separating from and longing for childhood and home left behind, adjusting to place, anticipating an uncertain future, realizing sexual and emotional profiles—but they are important in comprehending the repeated urge to folklorize college campuses by every generation of students. XIV PROLOGUE:“HERE’S THE SYLLABUS” In this book, I trace historical changes in the traditions of college students, especially as the predominant context has shifted from what I call the “oldtime college” marked by its emphasis on its “we-ness” in size and sense of community to mass society’s “mega-university,” an organizational behemoth that extends beyond the central campus to multiple branches and offshoots throughout a wide region, and sometimes the globe. With the common association people make of folklore to small groups, one might assume that the mega-university has dissolved collegiate traditions and displaced the old-time college, but I find the opposite. Student needs for social belonging in large university centers and a fear of losing personal control have given rise to distinctive forms of lore in the sprawl of the skyscraper mega-university and a striving for retaining the pastoral “campus feel” of the old-time college. What the two types of institutions share in common is a need for social and psychological adaptation for students in transition between one stage and another, usually regarded as the most significant of their lives. In the moderate-size campuses between the two poles, students also share this adaptation and often a balancing act of small college feel with large-scale aspirations. The folkloric material students spout, and sprout, in response to these needs is varied—including speech, song, humor, legendry, ritual, custom, craft, and art—but it is tied together by its invocation of tradition and social purpose.Beneath the veil of play,student participants in campus traditions work through tough issues of their age and environment. They use their lore to suggest ramifications, if not resolution, of these issues for themselves and for their institutions. Although the college experience of taking courses, getting through exams, and working with institutions is global, sharp cultural differences are evident in national systems. In this book, I focus on the United States because of the immense proportion of the population pursuing postsecondary degrees and the pivotal role of college life in shaping American culture.The American context is important to consider in the development of campus traditions because of the oft-reported lack of ritual passage into adulthood in American society and the varieties of collegiate experience that citizens in the United States expect to access in one way...