Haverford College - Record Yearbook (Haverford, PA)

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and the faculty hold him to. To achieve, a student may turn his great ambition and his suppressed capacities for action and self-determination to other areas of concern, particularly extracurricular, but without ever abandoning his basic value in the importance of academic achievement. The Haverford youth is much more intellectually mature than many others his age. But this is not enough. He remains discontent with the academic way of life as his only model. He finds it produces tension, worry, competition, loneliness, and only a partial sense of wholeness and fulfillment. Even Haverford ' s most brilliant seniors (of whom Haver- ford has many more than it is willing to recognize in its awards of departmental and College honors) poignantly express their sense of incompleteness, their sense of alienation from their own emotional and impulse life. They publicly chastise the College for its intransigent and felt punitive demands; they frequently seek to flee the stern career de- cision they have earlier staked out for themselves by flirting with courses and occupational possibil- ities far removed from their vocational interests. In private, they wistfully wish they felt certain that the intellectual ideal they plan to follow in graduate school is the way for them. While basically neither an ebullient and dy- namic extrovert nor a sexclusive and monastic introvert, the Haverford youth of today does seem to be more preoccupied and less playful than those youths of former years. He doesn ' t smile in response to a friendly hello as frequently. Stu- dents say of other students, They aren ' t very friendly. They aren ' t unfriendly either. They just are not with you. Feelings of isolation and loneliness hover close by on the fringes of aware- ness for many. Sucli feelings are always with youth, but they seem to be more frequently ex- pressed today than yesterday. It is easier to feel lonelier on the campus nowadays anyway. Students feel more bottled-up, more pressed upon, less free, less caring about others. They seem to feel un- comfortable in close intimate emotional relation- ships. Friendships are more instrumental and con- venient than bonds of respect and devotion. Love of a woman is not with carefree abandon, but with a stylized tentativeness. The typical student dates only infrequently; he feels his energies ab- sorbed by more pressing duties. Nor does one sense in the student of today that same loyalty and devotion to the College that many alumni seemed to feel when they were students. The College is a place to pass through, not a community to which to become too attached. To experience intimacy not only with one ' s own thoughts and more pre- EXDUGLAS HEATH cious feelings but also with those of another does not seem to be as highly valued. Certainly many students do not have the time and leisure for spontaneity and play, they seldom seem freed from the ever-present shadow of guilt over a paper left undone, an exam yet to take. Perhaps our typical student reflects the temper of an age (or of his faculty) that values intellectualism, ac- celerating specialization, and continuous measure- able achievement. He finds it it safer to play it cool, rather than to allow himself to become en- twined within the emotional life of another person or within the grips of a belief. He remains an observer, not quite willing to commit himself. Paradoxically, the Haverford man ' s reluctance to allow :himself to be drawn into dependent rela- tions with either his friends or his faculty only screens a deeper and less conscious wish to be so involved, to be given affection and respect, con- tinued reassurance and guidance. A student ' s most bitter source of dissatisfaction with his college is that it is not motherly enough! He things (un- realistically so?) its administration wilfully does not understand him, its faculty is indifferent to him, and its cooks don ' t feed him properly. A Haverford student consciously values his free- dom and autonomy. He prizes the lack of group and social pressure to make him into that which he is not. He values personal integrity and in- dividuality and the opportunity to express what he is, although he may not know what he is. He knows that he does not have to appear what he isn ' t — except to appear, if he can ' t be, an individualist knowing what he is. But once he lets you know him, he is, in fact, the real person he is trying to appear to be. He turns out to be a delightfully shy and warm person almost at home with his intellectual talents but less sure what to do with his more sensitive and affectionate feelings. 27

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The 1959 yearbook said, On this campus, where almost no one does what anyone ELSE is doing at ANY time, the task of trying to make some sense and intelligible order out of random occurrances must be considered impossible. How more impossible is it to condense four hundred and sixty different individuals into some typical, if not quite real, Haverford student? Whoever the typical Haverford man is, he is something like an intellectual: mentally quick, alert, sharp-witted, critical, and certainly very verbal. He works hard though inefficiently. He is conscientious, competitive, self-driving, and am- bitious, and of course he is bright! He prefers theory, abstraction, and broad generalization to fact, rote learning, and the discipline of detail. Above all else, he wants to be certain that what he thinks about is significant and relevant. In contrast to other college men, the Haverford student is much more reflectively, if not phil- osophically and idealistically, inclined. He values the world of thought much more than the world of action. It is through self-knowledge rather than through action that he seeks his identity. Prag- matic comprises, economic values, . manipulative power and political machinations and complexities scarcely appeal to the Haverford youth. It is through intellectualism and a cultivated coolness that our typical student gains both power and security in his relations with others. He is not afraid to complain, to be sharply critical of any- one and everyone, even of himself, to argue with the most high or even the alumni! More often than not, his words are used like rapiers; his in- tellectual thrusts are refined, pointed, clean, crisp. Students have a marvelous way of using humor and sarcasm to carry on an attack. Their letters to THE NEWS and their frequently epigrammatic comments in Meeting reveal a penetrating wisdom, a sharpness of insight, that is unexpected in most young men. But our students are also studiously irreverent, calculatedly cynical, fearful of senti- mentality, unusually inhibited and restrained. They plan to become lawyers, medical specialists, labora- tory researchers, and scholarly professors, but not commanding figures in industry, driving young junior executives that lead United Fund cam- paigns, nor charismatic politicians. The typical Haverford youth is not a highly masculine assertive male with a deep sense of vital- ity and aggressive drive — marked by dash and adventurousness. He wears his beard almost shyly! He is sensitive, not quite tough, and perhaps more passive, if not less self-sufficient and emotionally independent than many other college males. He is not an earthly, socially initiating, tough-mind- ed, aggressive male of strong passions and au- THE HAVERFORD STUDENT OF 1964 thoritative dominating stature. Nor is he the a- nonymous organization man or the mousey bureau- crat on the way up. Conscious of himself, if not centered in himself, perhaps awkward around others, he does sense a distinctive identity, though he may not know what it is. He is thoughtful, intense, sincere, honest, but too criti- cal of himself. The Haverford student doubts himself in a way many college males do not. He doubts his ability, his values, his feelings. These doubts, not unusual in entering freshmen, become magnified in his early college years as he finds he never does quite well enough. He forgets he compares himself to an unusually talented group of young- sters. What often appears as insufferable vanity ( The College is so good, it can only get worse. ) is only an unconscious defense against a deepen- ing and, for some, devastating lack of self-confi- dence. By identifying with the imagined reputation of the college, he justifies himself publicly, al- though he continues to blame and deprecate him- self privately for not fulfilling his or the college ' s expectations of himself. This obsessive self-doubt breeds guilt and depression; it leads him to ques- tion the worth of his education, of his decision to come to Haverford. He thinks of leaving but can think of no other place as good where he can do better. And since he values doing a mediocre job in an excellent college more than doing an excellent job in only a mediocre college, he re- luctantly stays on. Students do not want Haverford to be any less demanding than it is. They don ' t respect gut courses, although it is clear that given a demand- ing five-course system, they need some. The typical student comes to the college open to the facul- ty ' s intellectual standards ; he accepts many faculty as intellectual models, but he too seldom finds that he develops the level of competence both he 26

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GENIUS LOCI MARCEL GUTWIRTH The first thing we are compelled to say ahout Haverford is soothing to the local pride — and since the second thing I mean to say is not, let us have it out at once, and then dwell on it for a reassuring moment or two. Haverford has a GENIUS LOCI. This is no small tribute to a college, large or small, young or old. The place has character, and it is a character which manages to mold successfully the generations that pass through it, to permeate the many operations — intellectual, administrative, janitorial — which go into an education. Perhaps the most important element in the Haverford milieu is, quite simply, the physical environment: the quiet beauty of a landscaped English park closed off from the blatancies of the suburban sprawl. In the quietness, of course, lurks a threat, of a diminishing vitality which indeed mars our idealized community. Men who loved nature and cared for their fellows, men like Edward Woolman, a manager, Albert Wilson, a professor, toiled with their own hands to enhance our pleasure in the Nature Walk. Men like Arnold Post poured the same loving care into the thought- ful management of their dahlias as they did into the ordering of Greek aorists in their students ' minds. The knowledge that there is that of God in every man may make at times for a sloppy kind of permissiveness. When it is buttressed by the testimony of trees nobly spaced, as by one who knows nature ' s business and man ' s place in it, it gathers a kind of grandeur, from the surge of nurturing love — compounded of strength and grace — which such an achievement bespeaks. The sense of beauty, alas, stops at the bound- ary of nature. By some tragic flaw in the Quaker tradition, where man is concerned, drabness takes over. This drabness, lavished upon our living and working arrangements at the College, spills over into the minds of students and faculty alike. The spirit of Philistinism is the summation and con- summation of the Haverford education. I am sorry to say. This is the reverse of the Quaker coin, the negative inheritance, the incubus which those few of us who care cannot seem to manage to shake off the student ' s back. Great virtues exist side by side with the atrophy of the sense of beauty, with the adamant prosiness of the Haverford mind. There are impressive feats of intellect, and nowadays an awakened sense of CAUSE, of social obligations running beyond the respectable channels of action — AFSC, the week-end work camp, — skirting, in fact, social disruption and courting jail. Such is the positive Quaker inherit- ance. There is also, rather unexpectedly, and extraordinarily, a truly Saturnalian release of in- ventiveness, grace, and vitality one night in the year — on Class Night. Wit. music, and dance, an outpouring of creativity of soul. mind, and body sometimes occurs on that one occasion which leaves the faculty limp and envious at the thought that so much youthful spirit lurks in the rigid husks that lend themselves patiently to the classroom procedures on every other day of the year. 28