Radcliffe College - Yearbook (Cambridge, MA)

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RANDOM THOUGHTS ON FIFTY YEARS By ELLIOTT PERKINS '23 The origin of the following remarks was a request that I contribute something along the lines of Fifty Years of Harvard'' (it's actually forty-nine) to the Yearbook; what it's been like, and what people have thought about it; how it has changed, and not changed. The undertaking has been more complex than I had anticipated — which, since I hadn't anticipated any complexity at all, is not surprising. Lots more has’ happened that I know something about than I realized, and excision has been a problem. My first idea was to follow out a line developed last year in a casual conversation in which someone posed the question How many Harvards do you think there have been since we were Freshmen? We ultimately fixed on five. The first was the Harvard of the '20's and '30's, which stands all of a piece because it was the Harvard in which Mr. Lowell's great measures to save the College, Concentration, General Examinations and Tutorial, which reached full stature in the '20's, and the House Plan, which was not wholly effective until the mid-thirties, under Mr. Conant, dominated the scene. The second was War Harvard, which really began in 1943, when full mobilization transformed the College, and was followed by the Reconstruction Harvard, that fantastic Harvard of veterans and recent schoolboys all jumbled together in fantastic overcrowding, optimism, and achievement. The fourth was Harvard of the '50's, which the pundits christened apathetic and I found sensible, and, finally, that Harvard for which I am writing this, a Harvard dating from, I guess, 1965, and much too close for christening. But it will not be called apathetic . A nice line, I think, but not one to pursue here. Space and the reader's patience forbid. So in the end I have taken as my base the first of these Harvards, a good point of reference for much that concerns us today, when people are questioning the operation, and even the validity, of General Examinations, Honors Theses, and residential education. When you start taking a machine apart it helps to know something about why and how it was first put together. Harvard College of 1919 was, to me and my companions. Old Harvard, rock-solid, rooted in tradition and excellence. To Mr. Lowell, and I know now but did not suspect then, it was in shaky shape. Ten years before it had emerged from the Presidency of Mr. Eliot, who cherished the University and, according to some, endured the College, with a lackadaisical attitude toward study and a weak social structure. In his Inaugural Address Mr. Lowell had laid down his lines of campaign. The opening paragraph reads: Among his other wise sayings, Aristotle remarked that man is by nature a social animal: and it is in order to develop his powers as a social being that American colleges exist. The object of the undergraduate department is not to produce hermits, each imprisoned in the cell of his own intellectual pursuits, but men fitted to take their places in the community and live in contact with their fellow men. This may sound trite in 1968, but it didn't in 1909, when strong currents of American opinion urged that the object of the undergraduate department was to train prospective graduate students without wasting time or effort on the development of their powers as social beings. Later in his address Mr. Lowell spoke of the chasm that has opened between college studies and college life. The instructors believe that the object of the college is study. Many students fancy that it is mainly enjoyment, and the confusion of aims breeds irretrievable waste of opportunity. The undergraduate should be led to feel from the moment of his arrival that college life is a serious and many-sided thing, whereof mental discipline is a vital part. So were his objectives defined. Ten years later the first post-war Freshman class found a college considerably, but subtly, affected by his ideas. I don't know how many, if any, of us took much note of the Lowell changes. Harvard had a strong atmosphere of opportunity and tradition, opportunity to make about what you liked of your Harvard experience, tradition to guide you in the ways of doing it. I was more conscious of opportunity, and the responsibility for using it, than of restraints unknown before The War. In his annual welcome to newly registered Freshmen classes Mr. Lowell often likened Harvard to a buffet, a set-out of many-flavored dishes from which they not only might but must pick, and the soundness of choice was up to the picker. He could get advice, but he must weigh the advice. Nor were the dishes all academically flavored; Harvard was a many-sided place, and they should look to get something like thirty-five percent of tbeir education outside the curriculum. Whether or not he said that to '23, that was the attitude we early acquired. That Harvard was akin to this in many essentials. It had no approved pathways to success, to being Big Man on Campus. For one thing, we never used campus in connection with Harvard, for another we didn't think in terms of Big Men. To illustrate terminology and attitude: a militant President of the Crimson once said to me, God damn it; down at Yale the President of the News is the uncrowned king of the campus. Up here the President of the Crimson is crowned by everyone around the College. Then as now Harvard was a place in which men of varied interests followed their own lines for their own reasons. Then as now the public acclaim man, the would-be shaker, did appear — and in time disappear. But there were differences. One was in the attitude toward study, and it is important, affecting the whole attitude of the student to his college experience. In this first Harvard , which endured until 1943, men did not feel the community compulsion to graduate with honors that they feel today. There are understandable reasons for today's attitude; but it does bring a sense of strain. The acceptance of a direct correlation between academic achievement in college and ultimate achievement in 7

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life demands from many men scholarly effort unaccompanied by scholarly interest, and brings many, perhaps all, to sec their college years in terms of exploitation of an opportunity, like it or not. The earlier attitude was more that college should be savored, not exploited. Adequate academic achievement was of course demanded; you couldn't stay here long with less than three C's and a D, but high academic achievement was a matter of taste, the individual's choice from the buffet. So the men who took corns did so for their own reasons, usually a late-awakened interest in a subject, but not from any sense that C grades and a pass degree connoted inadequacy, now or later. Corns were likely to have achieved well outside the curriculum. Magna and somma men were, of course, more naturally inclined to scholarship. They made that choice from the buffet early, but then as now, leading men in athletics and activities were often leading scholars. Often, but not as often as in the twenty years just ending. It is instructive, in these years when well over half (what will it be this year, seventy percent?) of a senior class takes com or better, to contemplate the percentages of the early '20's. In 1922 twenty-one percent took honors, in 1923 twenty-four percent, in 1924 twenty-nine, at which point things levelled off for a while, but not for long. The trend continued steadily upward through the '30’s, and in our recent times has, of course, zoomed. However, the significance of those figures of forty-odd years ago is perhaps less their relation to what has followed than their relation to what had gone before. The Classes of 1922 and 1923 were the first to experience full operation of tutorial instruction, general examinations, and honors theses. Before then, with the exception of a few special areas, the path to honors was the path of course grades, and a great many men had simply declined to be bothered. After all, a pass degree was a passport to a job in business, to the Harvard Law School, and to the still somewhat unorthodox Business School, and business or law were the generally contemplated careers. Piling up course grades was caviar to the general, deficient in challenge and charm. It appealed only to those who knew early what they were about, then, as always, a minority. But the idea of mastering a subject, writing one's own thesis about some part of it, and knocking back a general did, as it proved, challenge and charm many who had, under the older system, shopped for snap courses at convenient hours and settled for comfortable C's. The honors degree men of the early '20's were not many, but they were a break-through in the effort to strengthen the college experience, to make the A.B. truly a certificate of membership in the fellowship of educated men. And they denote the effective accomplishment of one of Mr. Lowell's objectives. Accomplishment of the other took longer: laissez-faire in residence lasts longer than laissez-faire in study, and it was dangerous, for under it the social cohesion of the college was disintegrating. One of Harvard's principal sources of strength was, even then, a big. heterogeneous student body, one which throws together men of varied origins, outlooks, ambitions, and abilities, knocking off corners and widening perceptions. The trouble with the '20's was that it had the varied types but it couldn't throw them together. There were, to be sure, the Freshman Dormitories — Core, Standish, Smith, and, after 1926, McKinlock, each with its own dining hall — in which Freshmen must live and eat (or at least pay board) and in which the different types were thrown together. They accomplished a good deal, as I can testify, for my wide acquaintance in the Class was made in the Dorms; but one year is not long, and the upper class years tended to narrow, not widen, contacts. Most people tended to get into a rut — crew. Crimson, Lampoon, Advocate, debating, what have you — and see mostly those in it with them. There were no upperclass dining halls, and so no places in which one habitually saw the same people, who also belonged and in time, for all the Harvard reticence, came to know some of them. Residence, for Sophomores and Juniors, was round about in the dormitories and lodging houses between the river and the Yard. It was not unsupervised, for there were proctors about, but it was without identity. Claverly and Randolph, for example, had no identity. Various individuals and groups of individuals lived in them, but they rarely mixed, unless they had known each other in the Freshman Dorms. Again, this was a consequence of changing conditions, of the growth of the student body, of the invasion of the area about the Yard and the Square by non-University elements, of the opening of restaurants, which led to the desertion of the once heavily used commons in Mem. Hall. It was logical, but it was breaking up the college. Not until the House Plan burst upon us, in 1928, was anything effective done, or could anything effective have been done. And what, one may ask, was the effect of this apparent social desert upon its inhabitants? Speaking for the generation of '23, we liked it, and judging the generation of '28 by their violent objection to the announcement of the House Plan, they liked it. Club men of course liked it, and those without clubs made their own lives to what was, apparently, their satisfaction. But, looking back, one can see that Harvard was on the road to loss of character. What is the good of a widely varied community that isn't a community but a collection of self-contained enclaves? We weren't there, by a long shot, but the trend was clear. The Houses, when they took hold, and it took five or six years for them to do so, provided what I think was the best Harvard College of the half-century. Each House, until 1943, was a community small enough to be comprehended by the individual, large enough to comprehend individuals of all shapes and sizes. One of the most striking changes of the later 9