A stranger who tries to see Yale will be disappointed because so much of it and the best of it is invisible. I felt on the campus as I do in the dynamo room of a great power house. I knew that I was in the presence of forces obviously powerful but imperceptible to my senses. There is not enough tangible machinery about Yale to account for the work it is doing. The Yale undergraduates seem to train, control and discipline themselves, leaving little for the official authorities to do in this way. In fact President Hadley has explicitly recognized this in saying that “if the chairman of the Yale News Board is a man of the right type — and he almost always is — he is the most efficient disciplinary officer of the university.
However strained the relations between the officers of the university and the student body might become the News would never attack the President so bitterly as did the Harvard Crimson President Eliot or the Stanford Sequoia President Jordan last year. The Record never prints malicious jokes on the professors, as do so many “college comics.” The Yale men who have patiently endeavored to explain to me the influences which mold the undergraduate into the Yale type have laid great stress on the common dormitory life and the effect of the senior societies. There are three secret societies, Skull and Bones, Scroll and Keys, and Wolf’s Head, and it is the ambition of every normal College man to get into one of them. Toward this all his efforts are directed from his freshman year, and Tap Day marks for him the success or failure of his college career. As one graduate said to me: “I would willingly have sacrificed a year of my life if it had been necessary in order to make Bones.”
Since the ideals of the senior societies set the standard for the college it is important to know what are regarded as the qualifications for selection. In so far as I have been able to ascertain them from talking with Yale alumni these qualifications may be formulated as two, one passive and one active: First, conformity; second, achievement. The first requirement of eligibility is that the student “be a gentleman” according to the prevailing definition of that word; that he be clubbable; that he conform to Yale customs and violate none of its traditions. The second distinguishes the few men of prominence from the crowd of those who are merely negatively eligible thru conformity with establisht ideals of manners and conduct. A man must have done something, particularly something that has brought glory upon the college; he must be a leader among his mates in college activities, such as athletics, journalism, college politics, or religious work.
These criteria are on the whole good ones, at least very similar to those that measure a man’s success in the outside world, but some questions would arise as to their interpretation. Youth is naturally intolerant and exclusive, even, or perhaps especially, college youth, and probably too rigid a conformity is insisted upon and too narrow a definition given to the word “gentleman.” Then, too, the activities in which prominence is rewarded are rather apart from the purposes for which the university exists, and devotion to some of these activities may easily become so absorbing as to give rise to a general sentiment that high grades are indicative of a narrow mind.
The societies should in my opinion add scholarship to their list of undergraduate activities in which a student may legitimately attain distinction, and should take cognizance of the fact that a man who presents an original thesis, who discovers a new species of plant or writes a genuine poem, may be said in a sense to have brought glory upon his university as well as a man who has won a game.
That scholarship has very little weight in the question of eligibility to the senior societies was shown by Mr. Maurice F. Parmelee in the Yale Courant of December, 1906, from which I obtain the following figures:
The “Honor Men” are those that have received the highest marks in their classes and are, according to tradition, placed upon the commencement program for Philosophical Orations, High Orations and Orations, altho these are not now given. These men also become members of the Phi Beta Kappa, a national non-secret honorary society. The figures show that only one of the three secret senior societies contains a higher percentage of honor men than the College as a whole, and even that society had a less percentage than the student body outside. That is, if a blindfolded man had entered the crowd assembled around the oak tree near Battell Chapel on the third Thursday in May and tapped forty-five men at random, the chances are that he would have obtained men of higher standing than those actually chosen, after the long and anxious deliberations of the secret conclaves. Or, in other words, after the forty-five happy men had gone to their rooms there was better picking in the crowd than there was before, so far as scholarship goes.
But the faculty estimate of a man’s ability based on grades alone is as narrow as the student estimate based on activities which often interfere with the making of high grades. To get some light on this point, I asked seven Yale graduates in classes from 1872 to 1896, to mark in the directory of graduates the names of their classmates who had in some way distinguished themselves since graduation. No instructions were given as to the degree of prominence or the proportion of the class to be indicated, but they checked on an average 24 per cent. of the names on their class rolls. On comparing these with the lists of living graduates in these classes who are members of the three senior societies and of Phi Beta Kappa (the latter being Honor Men), the following results were obtained:
38 per cent. of the Phi Beta Kappa men became prominent.
37 per cent. of the Society men became prominent.
19 per cent. of the men not in Phi Beta Kappa became prominent.
18 per cent. of the men not in the societies became prominent.
Of course the question of which men in these classes had shown special ability depended upon the personal judgment of the men marking the lists and their knowledge of their classmates and the examination was not extensive enough to give accurate figures.* [* But two men marking the same class gave practically the same figures.] No allowance can be made for the fact that the honors conferred upon an undergraduate give him thereafter a certain prominence in the eyes of his classmates and may directly contribute to his success in life. Still we should probably be justified in concluding that the senior societies and the Phi Beta Kappa, tho their standards of judgment are different, are equally successful in picking out the men of superior ability and that a student belonging to either of these groups has twice the chance of future prominence as one belonging to neither. There are several interpretations that might be given to these figures. One is that the importance attached to non-scholastic activities in Yale draws a large proportion of the ablest students away from their university duties.
Most conspicuous of the activities is, of course, athletics, which at Yale as in all the other American colleges, absorbs too much of the student’s time, energy, ,and enthusiasm. By athletics I do not mean physical exercise or even sport, for these two desirable elements of student life have been so overshadowed by other features of the intercollegiate contest system as to be negligible in the consideration of the question. Whenever the number of spectators exceeds the number of players the limit of true sport has been past, and when the spectators outnumber the players a hundred to one, the game becomes merely an exhibition. If there were some way by which the strength and agility, or rather the health and symmetrical development of the entire student body of one university could be matched against those of another, some good might come of it, but under present conditions success in intercollegiate contests does not prove that the winning university is superior to its rival in these important qualities nor does it do much to promote them. Young men got excited enough over their games naturally without outside pressure, and when they know that in every city of the United States crowds are assembled to watch and bet on their feats the pressure is too great. Overstrain, physical and moral, necessarily results, as in the boat race of last June, when, with a President rooting on one side and a future President on the other, a Yale student collapsed and has since died and two Harvard men broke the rules of the university and were expelled.
I find that I am expected to say something about democracy in this article on Yale. I will therefore take this opportunity of explaining that I have not been able to find out much about democracy in American universities because it means different things or takes different forms in the different institutions I have visited. In Yale, for example, the students resent the introduction of valets and automobiles as a menace to democracy. In Princeton the authorities regard the use of Greek letters in the name of a club as too dangerous to be tolerated. In Wisconsin it is thought democracy will be lost if the tickets to the junior Prom are raised from $3 to $5. In Michigan any system of marking grades except “passed” and “not passed” is considered undemocratic and it was only this year that that aristocratic institution, the Phi Beta Kappa, was allowed to be establisht. In Harvard the word “democracy” seems to mean “promiscuity” or else some spiritual condition altogether unaffected by external circumstances. When I started out on my quizzing tour I had at the head of the list of questions which I proposed to ask, in one form or another, “Does the spirit of democracy prevail in this university.
But I soon dropped that question as unnecessary and fruitless, because it was answered everywhere before I asked it, and always in the same way. There were two things about which faculty, students and alumni of each university visited agreed, that is on the purity of their democracy and the beauty of their campus. In admitting deficiencies in other respects they were usually frank enough and on some points even effusive, but on these two they would acknowledge no superiors. Therefore as the net result of a hundred conversations bearing on this subject I have left in my memory a hazy composite something like this: “There are other universities that are richer or older than ours; some that have at present more students. Our president is not all that he should be. The trustees do not always do the right thing. The faculty might be improved by process of elimination and substitution. But nowhere will you find a prettier campus or a more democratic body of students.” On the former point I was able to use my own eyes, and shall take the liberty of expressing my personal opinions, but on the latter I was obliged to rely on hearsay evidence. Having just given this evidence I shall dismiss the subject with the remark that in view of alarmist reports about the growth of luxury, narrowness and class distinction, it is distinctly encouraging to find that the democratic spirit is still regarded as a desirable thing to have in a university, even tho there may be a disposition to assume that it is already attained.
I have observed a curious difference between Eastern and Western colleges in regard to the influence of the alumni. In the West the alumni are always urging forward their Alma Mater into untried paths. Sometimes a State Alumni Association will take things into its own hands and, overruling president, trustees and faculty, will, by control of the legislature, force the university to take steps which it believes are necessary to bring it closer into touch with modern life. In the East on the contrary the alumni seem to be, as a whole, a conservative, even a reactionary influence, opposing almost any change, wise or unwise. I have asked many persons the reason of this and tho they generally have agreed that it is so, they have not given any explanation which, in my opinion, satisfactorily accounts for it. The most plausible of the explanations suggested to me is that the Eastern alumni are older on the average. But are not the freshly graduated about as reluctant to have their Alma Mater changed as the older men? Whatever the cause it raises the question whether the present movement to give the alumni a larger representation on the governing boards of State universities may not ultimately result in impeding rather than accelerating these institutions.
Eastern alumni are generous in the matter of financial support and certain individuals initiate important changes thru specific gifts, but as a body they are inclined to regard their Alma Mater as a relic of happy schooldays and as such to keep it intact and unaltered, so that when they return they may find it as they remembered it. In 1888 several thousand of the Yale alumni signed a petition to the corporation remonstrating against the removal of an old fence that was in the way of one of the new buildings, and what is worse, they celebrated twenty years later the anniversary of “the fight that failed.” It is the alumni, I believe, who are responsible for the preservation of Old South Middle, which makes Yale look like a full-grown rooster with a bit of the shell from which it was hatched stuck on its back. In important matters it is the same. If it were proposed to cut down the college course to three years or to raise the Sheffield course to four; to make the Sheffield boys go to chapel or to release the college boys from going; to abolish the senior societies or to have more of them, probably the majority of the alumni would oppose the change regardless of its advantages or disadvantages. I presume that Secretary Stokes, altho I have never heard him say so, is more often called upon in local alumni associations to explain why some things have been changed than why more have not been changed.
The finest thing about Yale is the student body. I do not think this is true of all the universities in this country. In some laboratories and libraries I have visited the students appeared out of place, unworthy of their beautiful buildings. In some classrooms 1 have pitied the instructors because they were expending so much good teaching on such poor material. But I did not pity the instructors in Yale. If they could not do something worth while with the earnest, energetic, wide-awake, well-ordered young men in the scats before them, they could not anywhere. The Yale students as a rule are not blase, cynical and prematurely aged, nor on the other hand are they awkward, unruly and obstreperous. They are not so studious and diligent as the average run of students in the State and city universities, but they come from more cultured homes and with more thoro preparation. After seeing the Yale boys in mass, I have come to think that the university gets more credit than it deserves for the achievements of its graduates. This educational machinery that we talk so much about is, after all, of minor importance. The product of the mill depends mostly on what kind of grain is poured into the hopper.
I liked the way a man would stroll across the campus in the evening, bareheaded and hand-pocketed, and call “Oh Billy Rogers!” to a four-story building, then hold a confidential conversation with the student who stuck his head out of one of the upper windows. I like the way they played diabolo and tops. I liked the way they heeled for the News. I liked the way they sang. Altogether they are a likable lot of fellows.
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