The College Scene

Famous is the name of Harvard College: famed its teachers, famed its books, its buildings, and its attitudes. But a name is legend, nothing more; the student is the meaning, the living organism that passes on the ideas and the morality current in Cambridge. The worth of the College is the worth of its graduates, fresh-escaped from their four-year imprisonment in the mold. Who they were when they first saw the Square, how they got here, what exactly is the unformed Freshman medium--that is the subject of College Scene Number II. After that comes the deluge of influences: the sticks and stones of academic and social and moral forces.

Whatever the impact of those forces, they produce a student body which is subtle as Sphinx, many-sided and totally lacking in unity of approach or opinion on almost any subject. This breakdown of the undergraduates into group after self-sufficient group is probably the most significant psychological factor in the College today. Schizophrenia, it might be called, and it is unique and potent: not even the most basic conception of "school spirit" serves in Cambridge as it does at New Haven or Princeton to tie atomized particles of the student body together. Here one proud band isolates itself behind the classic walls of its clubhouse, another huddles around its extra-curricular typewriter, a third feeds rich tears to its social conscience twice a day; only the haphazard democracy of the monitor and the lecturer's cold harangue brings them together.

The Split Personality

Such a split College personality does not materialize of a sudden in the sophomore year of every class. It starts with the mass that pours through Memorial Hall for the first time every September, a mass that beneath the conglomerate look of be-wilderment already contains the seeds of its own division. Groups of Freshmen filter through--some alone and distant, some bred in the suburbs of Boston, some marked with the imprint of New England's boarding schools. Before the lines disappear, the little knots of conversation have started to coalesce into shadowy outlines of the independent masses they are destined to become.

At the starting gate of the process lies the Committee on Admissions, which every spring filters out three-fourths of its applicants, leaving an accepted residue of its own composition. Since the advent of Chairman Richard M. Gummere in 1934 the criteria used in the filtering have moved slowly but surely in the direction of President Conant's "democratization." The College Board has eliminated the specialized examinations which were the joy of carefully prepared prep-schoolers; scholarships, including Mr. Conant's new National variety, have mounted; geographical distribution has been emphasized.

When Mr. Gummere and Company weigh in the balance each spring the legions of high school presidents, football captains, and geniuses, they rely chiefly on the results of the College Board Achievement Tests. But along with the democratization and the testing remains an unbending remnant of past glories, a significant segment which finds the path of admission strewn with the roses of one of about twenty New England schools. The last class admitted to the College under normal peacetime standards--1945--found itself when it arrived in the fall of 1941 with the usual 50-50 ratio of public and private school graduates; but out of that private half better than three-fifths came from Groton, St. Paul's, St. Mark's, Middlesex, Milton, or a companion institution.

Mr. Gummere will point out that boys at these "Grottlesex" schools are well prepared, but he and his committee have no illusions or misgivings about the frequently found product, the "gentleman's C man," as Gummere phrased it last year in a speech made at the fiftieth anniversary celebration of the Choate School.

"Many of these men," he said, "turn into not only constructive citizens, but also most generous alumni."

Fine Alumni, but . . .

They will surely make fine alumni, but the mass centering around the hard core of the gentleman's C are not in line with Gummere's other category of "the promising potential winner of scholarships . . . , an editor or Council official." Not that they should be in line--the complexity only makes the job of learning that much harder.

Out of this beginning grows the multi-faceted organism that is Harvard College. Under the blows of his sophomore year the student takes his place in the social scale; after that his development can be called almost to the last attitude. Down the corridor he trails, stumbling here and there over an academic problem, an idea on the loose, or a dissident personality. The College, with all its weapons, faces an enormous problem before it can hope to unseat the hard-riding stereotypes of its raw material.