Undergraduate Activities Look to Return Of Veterans for Peacetime Renaissance

Speaking to a group of students representing all the undergraduate organizations a few weeks ago, Dean Buck said, "Gentlemen, I envy you. We have just come through an irregular war period. We are in a period of transition, and we are finding that irregular too. Harvard will not be comfortable next term as it used to be, but all of you will be working with the finest bunch of men the College has ever seen. As I say, I envy you."

Dean Buck's lyrioism concerned the generation of veterans that is today returning to the University to pick up its loose ends. These veterans have already discovered that Harvard, as Gertrude Stein might say, is Harvard is Harvard is Harvard or is it. The place has changed, and you can't help noticing it.

Writing in the Atlantic Monthly in May, 1941, way back when, Archibald MacLeish pointed to the dangers facing American higher education, using the University as an example: "Harvard, for all its history, is endangered as are other universities by a European political revolution which attempts to substitute propaganda for science and mob emotion for disciplined thought: a revolution which would, if it could, grind Harvard with Yale and Princeton and Chicago and Pennsylvania and Stanford and the rest into the rubbish which was once the University of Prague and the University of Heidelberg and the University of Bonn."

Fortunately for most of them, and tragically for a few, American college students, even those who had signed the Oxford Pledge, emptied the temples of the higher learning after Pearl Harbor, and especially after the 18-year-old draft law was passed in the autumn of 1942. Enrollment plunged to a low of 671 in the College.

Since The Great Departure, some of the MacLeish warnings undoubtedly have proved justified. During the war years Harvard may be said to have been characterized by a lack of serious thinking, a judgment which is based on the conversational level of students. Even in the best of circles, people were making mostly Tech talk--about how many bombs a B-24 could carry, and the strategy of the Italian campaign.

Men were coming into the universities during the war "to get an education," most of them to be snatched out of this new academic atmosphere at the crisis of their developing maturity. MacLeish described John Harvard's Harvard as "a small pocket of godliness in a profane world.... Its lofty purpose was to preserve, in the midst of the barbarities of the new world, the morality, the manners, and the learning of the old." But Harvard did not keep too far above the profane.

The talk about literature, music, and politics, that characterized the old University, in the wartime bull sessions showed that American students just weren't thinking about those things. It wasn't their fault, really. They were younger than peacetime undergraduates; the faculty, especially that part of it which was closest to the students and which gave stimulation to so many of them, suffered shattering losses. The root of the problem, however, can be found in the instability and acceleration that began with the drafting of 18-year-olds.

Though Freshmen were entering the College at 16 and 17 and even younger, more significant to the explanation of the Intellectual vegetation was the collapse of the undergraduate organizations that in peacetime furnished the opportunities for intellectual, as well as social, association.

Student bodies in the war years consisted overwhelmingly of Freshmen; the upperclassmen from whom the Freshmen had formerly derived guidance and stimulation were gone; the few that were left were to a great extent concentrating in mechanical applications of the natural sciences, doing research in chemistry or physics for the war effort, or galloping through term after term with such concentrated loads of studies that there was no time for "irrelevant" thinking.

So the new Freshmen were left to themselves. For too many of them, College was just an extension of pre school book-learning and prep school thinking. Their existence was dominatingly conditioned by the imminence of military duty, and while their outlook was not one of "let's make merry for tomorrow we must go to boot camp," something was missing.

In his "envious" address at the Student Council dinner, Dean Buck expressed his belief in the value and need for independence of undergraduate organizations. The rest of University Hall appears to share the provost's stand; in fact, Thomas Matters '43--some of you will remember him--who has been made a dean, will be primarily concerned with "guiding properly the revival of extra-curricular activities." Matters was president of the Student Council in 1943.

But what the undergraduate organizations need is not a new dean. They need upperclassmen, veterans, and maturity, and now they shall have them.