A Yale Review

Misconception brewed by generalities and much nonsense has distorted the common picture of undergraduate life. For one acquainted with the mass of reading matter on College Life in America there is little to be observed in New Haven to strengthen the validity of the usual assumptions. "Collegiatism" as popularly conceived is heartily despised. Old graduates bemoan the passing of something known as College Spirit, while the old-Ford-rah-rah-painted-slicker figure of collegiate mythology has not been replaced by that of the passionate scholar, a new figure has arisen, drawing its life from within the confines of York and College Streets, that, with allowances made for the evitable caricature resulting from generalities, may be fairly described as the Yale undergraduate.

"If a man by his years at Yale learns to live more richly and more happily, he has not spent his time in vain. The measures of success is not a lot of canned knowledge, but the ability to get out and do something. The social side of his life at Yale is often more important to his development than his classes." It is essential that this point of view, one recently expressed in an editorial in the Yale Daily News, be fully grasped with all its implications.

If the aim of four years of college is to create socially pleasant young men able to get along with their follows, ready to accept the mode of living as they find it, to shoulder the burdens such acceptance implicitly imposes upon them, then Yale, by affording opportunity for training in community life, does its duty well. Undergraduate Yale knows very well what it is about. Education is a necessary stumbling-block to be tripped over willy-nilly on the path toward the real things of Yale. Philosophically, however, the undergraduate feels some good may come of it all. He has great faith. He has faith in the good that may be derived from Pictorial Art, Geology, Classical Civilization, and Elementary, Economics, indiscriminately. Each, if marks are kept up--it really doesn't matter how--will turn into credits. Credits mean a diploma. A diploma means education. That a certain amount of education is good, America, swarming with packed universities, home-study courses, and five-foot book shelves will testify. Under new systems actual study seems to be increasingly demanded. The student is willing that it should be so, provided not too much time is required. Education must be kept in its place lest it should become confusing.

For the normal undergraduate, then, the all-mighty and non-existent average man, somewhat immature, frankly uninterested in books and their offerings, Yale does and pretends to be very little intellectually. That a university B. A. or Ph. B. degree is of purely social significance is generally recognized. But here too it must be realized that Yale, contrary to the practice of many of her contemporaries, at least provides the outline of a liberal education that does not sink to the fantastic absurdities of salesmanship and, to borrow from Flexner, ad hoc courses. Yale standards are such that the feels content if she can turn out thoroughly sound and worthwhile members of American society. She must provide for men whose intellectual diet has been a preaching of conformity, hard, clean playing on athletic fields, and good citizenship, from earliest boarding-school days on. Such is the conception of "leader" manufacture in America.

But there is another side of undergraduate Yale which has not been touched upon until now because it can contribute only the finer shadings to a blatantly general portrait. There are those at Yale who have become firmly convinced, not of the value of its social training, not of the spurious importance of costly buildings, but of the purely intellectual and educational opportunities it affords. If such men can live through the first two years of banal "prep"-school routine and generally low grade instruction without experiencing a revulsion of vicious disgust toward the university and the pretentiousness of its very name, they will be amazed to find themselves in a place where a genuine interest is taken in them and in their aims. And if they are lucky enough to come in contact before this with some of the more forward-looking men on the faculty, they may even be spared any long period of disillusionment. Yale does provide for its scholars. And this is important. It is a fact seldom taken into account in many of the criticisms most pardonably launched at its system in general. --R. S. Childs in "The Nation"