Barnard College - Mortarboard Yearbook (New York, NY)

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PROLOGUE Aristotle said that the function of drama was to imitate nature. He meant by imitate not mere photographic reproduction, but to express the meaning, the essence, implicit in otherwise random or dis- organized sensations . We think that college has much the same pur- pose, and for this reason we liken our undergraduate years to a play. We believe that the aim of drama is in a sense the aim of college life. A play presents a world in miniature, of which the particular parts, such as plot, characterization, setting, need have no reference to actual situations outside the play; that is, they have an internal con- text. A play is the composition of an artist who has a specific purpose in writing, a definite idea to express; hence it is a means towards un- derstanding and does not have its end in its action. Since it is instru- mental, the structure of a play should contain no matter extrinsic to its end: it must highlight those aspects of nature or humanity which are pertinent to the idea behind the work. There is no attempt to present real life , life as it is lived, for that would be an agglomeration of undifferentiated elements, interrelated, it is true, but not all necessarily purposive or ordered by some end. It is the task of the artist to dispose the elements of nature into a functional pattern by stripping away the extraneous aspects so that the essence, the core of meaning, is that which the members of the audience take away from the play, that which they return to their daily lives as a working principle or intel- lectual attitude. The analogy to college life seems plain. Barnard too, is self- contained in regard to its particular parts, such as our form of student government, our academic reguirements, our library rules. Yet these have a larger meaning in virtue of their end: the imitation of life. Our pursuits at college do not mirror actuality: instead, from the or- dinarily diffused elements of life they distil the essence, the central meaning, which we are to apply in turn to our modes of living after college. Undergraduate activities served only to throw light on real life — they are a means to understanding what is to be lived when our term here is at an end. Just as a play attempts to choose certain ele- ments from the complexity of life in order to give to its audience a spe- cial attitude or feeling which it was the aim of the artist to enunciate, so college demonstrates to us by especially-designed procedures and practices those fundamental principles and intellectual tools which otherwise we would have to dissect out of the surrounding material of life. — N. E. A.

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Act I Scene i Orientation Program Plot: Barnard greets Freshman, Freshman meets Columbia . . . Freshman decides to stay.