Lehigh: Mountain Monolith Of 'Cultured' Engineering

Flaming starkly in cold October air, the white fires of steel processing burn inexorably into the small hours of the morning. At the foot of South Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, a Lehigh Valley R. R. Co. freight train hisses steam for ten minutes and then continues along the shore of the Lehigh River. One of many steelworkers on the night shift of the Bethlehem Steel Company, a huge plant which stretches out of the city for almost five miles, lifts his goggles and sits on an iron pig to eat a supper of cold pork and white bread. For him, and thousands of others, the presence of gigantic Bethlehem Steel in a relatively small city is virtually unignorable.

About a half a mile from the industrial monolith, the campus of 2,500-student Lehigh University, stands above and apart from Bethlehem, on the steep slope of South Mountain.

Bar-stool regulars at a hotel near the railroad tracks occasionally like to tell a story about the Lehigh professor who set off to shop in North Bethlehem on a windy day, started across the bridge, turned around to light his pipe, and walked back to the campus.

But the town and the university generally have little to do with each other and it is difficult not to notice the absence of the type of stores which usually spring up around a university. Bethlehem is simply not a "college town."

But there are points of contact between the town and gown. Each night, students drink beer in the booths at the Tally-Ho, which are equipped with intimate green lanterns and a sign that reads "No Stags Or Loiterers." Behind the bar, English tavern scenes appear under glass panes on the wall and quart beer bottles are displayed on the liquor shelves. When a student ambles over from the shuffleboard machine to order a sloe gin fizz, the curiosity shown toward this beverage by the others at the bar may compel him to pass the drink around, but he is repaid by the management with a free glass of beer.

At the Office of the Dean of Students, it is pointed out that Bethlehem juveniles sometimes resent Lehigh freshmen who "come in and pick off the girls and take them to dances." But these youthful machinations are a minor matter, and it seems that the only apparent town-gown problem which concerns the University is that of the off-campus fraternities.

In September, the Bethlehem Globe-Times published a Letter to the Editor charging that fraternity men are nuisances to their neighbors. The letterwriter stated that the University should build "a huge pit" on the campus, and continued: "Here these animals can congregate and act like the dunces they apparently crave to be."

But last Friday Brown and White, the Lehigh student newspaper, came up with an interesting answer to this letterwriter. After conducting a thorough survey, the paper found that 75 per cent of Bethlehem residents whose homes are contiguous to Lehigh fraternities have no serious complaints against them, and that many even prefer to have "the Greeks" as neighbors. Moreover, the University is giving heavy financial support to an on-campus building program which will eventually bring all the houses up to South Mountain.

On the Mountain, below 15 other fraternity houses, the University occupies 25 buildings. Academically, Lehigh is three colleges: Engineering, Arts and Sciences, and Business Administration. The majority of Lehigh students are in the Engineering College, the reminder equally divided between Arts and Business. Forty per cent of the Faculty teach in the College of Arts and Sciences, and certain very significant points of relation exist between Arts and Engineering.

From its inception in 1865, Lehigh had to face the problem of resolving conflicts between the educational values attached to arts, and to engineering. Founder Asa Packer (who is described in the catalogue as "one of America's pioneer captains of industry") had wanted to build a technical institution but was convinced by "educational advisers" to widen the scope of his new school. Although an old edition of the Oxford Directory might call engineering a trade, Herbert Hoover would say it is a profession, and Lehigh educators have consistently agreed with Hoover.

Lehigh handles the problem of educating the engineer in the arts according to the philosophy of the American Society for Engineering Education, a group which can only be criticized for taking its own suggestions too seriously. It is assumed that the engineering student can give only a limited amount of time to non-technical subjects, and will derive the most return from highly integrated humanities and social sciences courses. Thus the general education program follows a nationally familiar pattern: freshman English, followed by courses each year in contemporary civilization, Great Books, History of Western Thought, or Practical Economics and Sociology. The aim of these courses, according to one dean, is "to develop conceptual sophistication."

The most straightforward appraisal of Lehigh's liberal arts program for technical students probably can be credited to Loyal Vivian Bewley, Dean of the College of Engineering. He states: "The general studies program doesn't make them cultured, but it does give them a good smattering...An engineer is an engineer and if you try to make him everything else in the catalogue, you end up with nothing."

Another dean says that "every college has to fight to destroy false public images" and regrets that the Lehigh football team is known in its conference as the "Engineers."

His remarks are valid insofar as they point to a problem which has bothered Lehigh for many years. The university on South Mountain is not a stunted backwoods M.I.T., nor is it an undergraduate institute of technology which entertains the ease of a few unmotivated arts students. This is sometimes forgotten.

About five years ago, the continued existence of the College of Arts and Sciences was almost a moot question. Enrollment was continuing to skid badly, and it was rumored that a few of the faculty were seriously thinking of walking away from the campus. A group of "Young Turks" was vitally interested in taking positive steps to examine and correct the situation, and the older liberal arts men, among them the retiring dean, turned the task over to them.

Holding an open mandate from the university, and sparked by Glenn J. Christensen, who is now Dean of Arts and Sciences, the faculty committee looked into all aspects of the Arts program and has so far succeeded in raising freshman enrollment 300 per cent, and preventing the exodus of several of the most promising younger members of the faculty.

The administration is not quite ready to explain how they are doing it, but there is no doubt that the College of Arts and Sciences is getting stronger every year. One obvious factor has been the appointment of a more systematic admissions director, who was able to present a good case to the high schoolers for studying liberal arts at Lehigh. ("But how do principals and masters get to the point of recommending a certain college?" Dean Christensen asks. "I just don't know.")

Despite the university's engineering tag, several strongly felicitous points can be made about studying arts and sciences at Lehigh, and--at the same time--it can be shown that it is in the interest of an engineering-oriented university to support a healthy liberal arts program.

For example: the English Department would be inadequate, at best, if it had to hire men who wanted only to teach freshman English to engineering students. On the other hand, a 600-man liberal arts college (that is the number of students in Lehigh's Arts and Sciences College) would find it difficult to offer the salary and facilities which Lehigh, as a larger institution, can give to English instructors who are willing to spend a small amount of their time teaching the engineers.

Admittedly, the arts faculty can not line up against that of a great university. But there are several outstanding scholars at Lehigh: as John Leith, Dean of Students, sardonically says, "we've hung a few ostrich eggs in the hen-house for the girls to look at."

The American educational craving for "three-two programs" (three years spent at a liberal arts college, followed by two years at an engineering school, sometimes hundreds of miles away) seems to make more sense as it is set up at Lehigh. The great drawback of the usual three-two program is that students who find it difficult to tear up roots at the end of their junior year refuse to move on and, instead, stay where they are and graduate in applied science, dropping out of engineering altogether. By providing the "three" and the "two" on the same campus, Lehigh encourages the undertaking and completion of more liberally educating technology studies and turns out more engineers for American research and industry. (This, by definition, is good.)

There is the usual amount of intellectual division between the arts and the engineering students. However, engineer and humanist are stripped of their intellectual clothing and herded together again for Lehigh's next process of separation: fraternity rushing. (Upperclass figures--5, dormitory residents; .4, residents at one of the university's 30 national fraternity chapters; .1, commuters.)

According to Dean Leith, who is in a position to know, fraternities are "here to stay," "part of the American way of life," and "a functional arm of the University."

"But we do point out to the boys every now and then that certain rather good institutions get along without them," Leith continues. "And politically, the fraternity tail doesn't wag the university dog."

Another dean, when told that faculty members reside in the Harvard houses, drew an analogy with the house-mother system and commented that "I wouldn't want a mom in every frat."

Members of the university administration, when explaining why they are in favor of the fraternities, can usually be counted upon to begin by reciting figures. The average scholastic standing of frat members they state, is higher than that of the student body as a whole.

These figures should probably be taken with a grain of salt, however. First of all, the university average includes the marks of freshmen, which are very much lower than upperclassmen's. (Fraternities have no freshman members.) And, more important, most frats are very careful not to bid for students with low grades, since any "organized living group" which does not maintain a certain average will be placed on social probation. The fraternities are usually very careful to enforce their own "study hours" rules.

This week, the university is discussing Dean Leith's latest ideas for strengthening "the fabric of social organization" at Lehigh. Leith's proposals, which some think are rather radical, would make it possible for the university to shut down a fraternity which goes on probation three times in seven semesters, and ask its national organization to "re-colonize" it.

The "non-joiners" live in large dormitories and are required to take meals at The University Center. Living in the dormitories is not too communal, and the university has broken the dormitories into more intimate entry sub-divisions. To give dormitory groups more character and identity, they might consider a system of small dining rooms, and perhaps a highly modified form of "rushing" to select residents for each group.

Dormitory residents do most of their sitting around in Packer Hall, The University Center. Each night, they fill the snack bar and watch television. Channel selecting is controlled by the Dean's Office.

Every now and then, the attentive ear picks up sounds of criticism about food in the university dining halls. Refrigeration seemed to be a problem last spring and resident manager Wilbur Blew said, "we are working to have cold water and milk at the meals next semester."

Blew also explained the reason for the dining halls' "miserable job" on soft-boiled eggs:

"Because of the large quantity of eggs, they had to be cooked by steam. Steam in the morning varies; consequently, so do the eggs."

Packer Hall is nested on a ridge part way up South Mountain, and, architecturally, looks very much like a typical British dominion parliament building. Inside, long corridor lounges and spacious well-appointed dining rooms give Packer's basically functional layout a whiff of atmosphere not unlike that of a Parisian hotel built in the grand old manner.

The University Center also houses most of the undergraduate extra-curricular organizations, which are supported financially by the university. They sometimes find the going rough in an institution whose student body is so strongly oriented toward fraternity activity, and one person may hold positions in as many as six organizations.

A group like the Brown and White is in an understandably difficult position trying to recruit writers in a university where most undergraduates are studying engineering or business, even though course credit is given for work on the semi-weekly newspaper.

'Arcadia' on the Rise

Like papers at other colleges, the Brown and White heaps editorial column calumnies on other campus organizations and squabbles with the University administration about misquotations. Joe Varilla, the editor-in-chief, claims that he was once handed a written statement by a dean, published it, and then accused of misquoting him.

The student council--which for some reason is called "Arcadia"--is a laughing matter to some, but has increased its potency in recent years. A number of years ago, when Arcadia was at a low point in popularity, the council president became the first Lehigh student to have his head shaved by his classmates, a ceremony which is usually reserved for football weekend attacks on Lafayette freshmen. The next year, the council's prestige was restored somewhat by the election of athlete Joe Gratto as president. Gratto was a member of Lehigh's highly respected wrestling team.

Arcadia's mainstay, the Student Activities Committee, is hampered by a low budget, which has increased only $2,000 in 11 years, while tuition has almost doubled.

The Arcadia ship has occasionally sailed on stormy seas. On "Flagpole Day" (last May 16) a few students raised a German swastika over the campus. Three air force sergeants, two city electricians, and a hook and ladder crew were required to get it down.

'Greek Week'

Other precious incidents come up during the fraternity hazing period, known to locals as "Greek Week." Under the editorial title "Boycott the Barbarians," the Brown and White had this to say to freshmen about amusing fraternity activities:

"That suave, ivy league fraternity gentleman who pounds on your door Monday night may be pounding on your posterior before long.... Ask him if his is one of the large number of houses that are transformed into a prehistoric cave during that week. Let him tell you about the activities "which develop brotherhood." Let him tell you about the raw eggs that will be dropped into your mouth, about the pigly, nude races you will have, about the days you will be forced to remain awake."

Pranksters, frat brothers, and Brown and White editors seem to anticipate restrictive policy changes in the Dean's Office. Dean Leith, on the other hand, says this: "Lehigh is an educational institution dedicated to high quality performances. This proposition explains almost everything about the university, including the persistent intolerance of everything that is second-rate."

Two Social Blocks

No doubt, Max Shulman would have a fine time writing about Lehigh's two social blocks (dormers and Greeks), and the authors of "General Education in a Free Society" could sink their teeth into a study of its tri-college system.

On the one hand, fraternities are financially solvent, stepping more and more in time with the university administration, and moving out of the city and onto the campus. Bed and bread at the dormitories are steadily improving.

Academically, the engineering facilities and endowments are being maintained strongly, and the arts program is definitely on the upswing.

Now, when preparatory schools are sending more of their graduates to the smaller colleges, Lehigh can also increase selectivity in its admissions policy. And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?CRIMSONAlan H. GrossmanMembers of ALPHA TAU OMEGA and two of their friends relax in the fraternity living room before a date. The dog, 11 years old, is called "Tau." Seated, at right, is Larry Wright, president of Arcadia--Lehigh's student council--and program manager of the university radio station. In addition to the first floor rooms, A.T.O. has too floors of dormitory and study rooms, and a bar in the basement. Members of the fraternity and pledges are busy constructing steps from the house to a parking lot a few hundred feet down south Mountain.