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Page 13 text:
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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
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