The Freshman Year: Education by Trauma

The mystique surrounding Harvard education rests on a tacit agreement that none shall inspire too closely just how the College changes schoolboys into Harvard men: the mystery must be preserved to maintain the power of Harvard's uniquely successful system.

This deep-seated conviction is reflected in the many debates on educational policy tend to center on what the student should be taught rather than what he actually winds up learning, and in the resounding resolution with which Faculty members will assert that they have no influence over either the interests or the efforts of undergraduates. The same attitude makes admissions most important problem of the College. If Harvard only offers opportunities rather than holding attitudes and talents, the raw material the most important part of the educational .

Perhaps the most succinct, if exaggerated, statement of this myth of importance was made a harried administrator. Accused of seeking turn every undergraduate into a library- graduate student, he snapped, "I wish I how to make one student spend as much one more hour in Lamont."

Yet existing studies of College life suggest the decisions of Faculty and governing , the specific regulations of the Administration, indeed, they very day-to-day attitudes values of the Faculty, shape the development of new Freshmen. Beyond direct influence, College determines by its physical structure, its rules, and by its daily operation the way Freshman picks up ideas and discards about the College. A Harvard man does at just happen by accident.

Almost every student comes to the College a particular personal utopia, challenge, opportunity, and almost none finds what he expects. Many are fortunate and never realize badly they guessed; others are blessed with accurate enough to be changed without pain; some are so little committed that they can change their ideas easily. But for the majority, the discovery that Harvard is not what they anticipated is critical in forming their attitudes toward the College and toward higher education.

The first week is often remembered as the most crucial time of the Freshman year, for then the newness and confusion of Harvard is most expected and noticed. But a week of physical dislocation and uncertainly is superficial compared to the continuing demands of adjustment to Harvard's values and requirements.

The disillusion so evident in Freshmen may be precipitated by the grading system and course assignments, but often the intellectual tone of the Freshman environment and the social structure of the class are equally important. The particular source of discord is likely to be determined by what the Freshman looks for rather than where Harvard fails to meet general expectations: a student who is looking for an intellectual atmosphere and finds one will be far less disturbed by academic difficulty, even if he led his school class.

More often, however, the academic system is the arena of conflict. One descriptive explanation divides the class into 'linear' and 'diffuse' students. Linears study everything on the reading list and attend all the lectures, or try to. The diffuse dabble, without much plan, through the course material, often achieving very little. As the Fall progresses, linears divide into a group which works ever more intensively and one which begins to learn the ropes and read selectively. The diffuse split into a segment which appears to be learning the ropes--actually begins to work fairly intensively along lines of personal interest--and one which achieves almost nothing, eventually leaving College or adopting an entirely different approach if they are not so talented that they do not need to study.

When mid-term grades arrive about Thanks-giving, which is also the first break from classes, many students find themselves forced to reappraise not only their study habits, but also their intellectual self-image, and, by implication, what they seek from education.

In study habits, change is fairly visible, largely reflecting the way grades measure up to expectation, but, when forced to abandon their own habits as inadequate, Freshmen do not rely on Harvard experience, for they have not been around long enough, or been sufficiently at ease to absorb the approaches characteristic of Harvard.

Instead, reaching back into school years, they dredge up the alternatives they once rejected, looking for a solution to the present problem in a reconsideration of the past decision. The situation is easier for the prep school product, for he is often more accustomed to accepting a B as a satisfactory grade, something which is harder for the high school graduate who has always led his class. But since preppies generally do not work as hard as their high school confreres, the difference tends to even out.

In psychology, coping with a present crisis by reverting to a past critical decision is known as regression, usually with highly perjorative overtones. There need be nothing wrong with reconsidering high school decisions--often it is essential if the Freshmen is not to become bogged down in an intellectual dead end--but it is ironic that he often is forced to change those attitudes which originally led him to Harvard: his views on the meaning of education, his own intellectual pretensions, and the relation of intellect to his own social outlook.

Possibly the classic example of this irony is the "Exeter Syndroms". Among the best prepared students in the country, Exeter graduates reject academic values, rebel against the system, and leave Harvard in greater numbers (and percentages) than any other group. These graduates of a tough sink-or-swim system much like Harvard rate themselves highly, and especially prize their own sophistication. Many of those most dependent on this self-esteem are attracted to the College.

Convinced that they are only continuing in the same kind of education, they expect to do well with the same low-work system that succeeded in school, a system peculiarly adapted to Exeter's unique teaching and testing system. When Harvard gives them C's instead of B's, and they are not taken as a superior species despite their conspicuous sophistication, they tend to react by doubting the worth of Harvard's system, pointing out its weaknesses and defects, and thus refuting its rejection of their performance. Substituting independent intellectual activity and creativity, both subjectively defined, they become mere academic hangers-on, and dissatisfaction frequently terminates in departure.

A clearer case of regression is the "Andover Syndrome." From a school where a majority of the top of the class is bound for Yale, Harvard receives a group which has thought of itself as an intellectually oriented and superior minority. On arrival they find that the grading system does not endorse their superiority, that people with the same social outlook they rejected at Andover are quite successful at Harvard, and Harvard is not quite as ready as they had hoped to embrace all intellectuals with unqualified social success.

Finding their image of the place of learning has become unworkable and that intellectual success no longer comes easily, the Andover graduates often reject their intellectual role, join clubs, and start behaving much like the students they refused to associate with at Andover. They complete the protective change by forgetting their erstwhile intellectual pretensions and remembering a far more social outlook than they actually held at school.

Since Exeter and Andover are nearly academic twins, it is tempting to suppose that these syndromes are just the results of big intensive boarding schools. But what is attributed to the individual schools is actually neither confined to their graduates not universal among them. Moreover, the two cases, though parallel, are quite different, and other parallels can be found which owe no scholastic allegiance.

Prospective scientists, for example, comprise almost half the entering class, but little more than a quarter graduate as science concentrators. It is true that Harvard does exert various kinds of indirect pressure against science, but the change is also the natural result of the easy form science takes in school. Science is one area where the talented student can show clear and measurable competence and be drawn into a orientation toward college which produces a clear articulation of the relation between education and life.

In Harvard's more rigorous competition and more competitive atmosphere, once-impressive talent is devalued, and the careerist orientation it engendered weakens. Instead, the image of Harvard as center of liberal education, which draws scientists to the College, becomes the dominant theme in their approach to learning. The outsider's view of liberal education becomes their guide in an effort to attain one.

For many others, the discovery that Harvard is not an intellectual utopia and that brilliance is not tantamount to social acceptance brings a crisis in the whole attitude toward knowledge. A vision of Harvard which anticipates social success arising from intellectual ability is often reason for coming, and the discovery that no synthesis exists, that the academic conscience which drove them through school does not bring adequate rewards, and that, more intelligent or no, others are clearly more sophisticated, all can be profoundly disturbing.

Since the intellectual often feels some guilt at hoping for acceptance through intellectual skill, which he may regard as a corruption of knowledge, any failure to attain this success is likely to have fairly subtle repercussions.

The all-around-boy who combined academic, athletic, and social virtues at school may quickly abandon illusions of being well-rounded when he discovers how many fields he can enter only as a second-rater.

Innumerable bits of confusion can be added to this emerging pattern: the advanced standing student, who, having received recognition of his ability, becomes more sensitive to failure, but, because he has moved into a higher level of competition, can also excuse failure more adequately. Similar in some ways is the erstwhile student leader who may come to College without expecting his accustomed success, but is still peculiarly sensitive to success and failure in this field.

This is only a sketch of the way pre-College experience reappears during the Freshman year, but it virtually discredits the frequent claim that the first year is good because it forces students to reexamine themselves, draw on their inner resources, and grow in stature. In fact, many of the changes a Freshman goes through are progress only because the Freshman year is considered a time of progress.

A suggestion that illusions could be broken more gently is not simple humanitarianism. The shock of newness does not always a bring reactions best suited to overcoming barriers, and often it results in retreat from competition.

For all this, however, one should not slip into the delusion that the student without expectations is best off. The same expectations which, unfulfilled, are so disturbing, are the foundation of any interest in education. Without idealistic hopes, a student would be little more than a memory bank, useful perhaps, but scarcely worth Harvard's time or effort.

Although the Freshman year often strikes the new student as a series of disillusionments, it has a positive aspect as well. For in addition to focing him back on his own past, it provides him with certain attitudes and characteristics which are the hallmark of a Harvard education. Like any human institution, the Freshman year is more than the sum of its parts: it has a culture of its own and is a meeting ground for tradition and official culture as well. It is as important for what it makes of the student as for what it forces him to make of himself.

Student culture can do more to determine matters about education and what the means than all the efforts of Faculty and administration. But the studies of student have been made in relatively homogeneous " institutions" which so control the environment that activities, goals, and rewards are held in common. Despite emphasis on standing, and honors, and despite the experience of living in the Yard and eating the Union, Harvard certainly lacks the uniformity of, say, a medical school.

In an honors thesis, Robert W. McCarley studied the Freshman year with extensive and examined the "total institution" . Although his conclusions suggested reservation on the "totality' of the Freshman year, he a student culture, and found that rather representing the upper class values of the Harvard stereotype, the College was dominated by a middle class outlook. Indeed, showed that their emphasis on ascribed and experiencing college put students from upper class backgrounds under greater stress than middle class contemporaries who emphasis achieved status and looked at the College opportunity for further achievement.

Yet it is astonishing that a perceptible should exist in such a diverse, diffuse, and group as the Freshman class. The would seem few ways for this culture, admitting its existence, to penetrate the circles of friends which dominate the beginning of the year, the time when McCarley found greatest changes. One of the best explanation can be found in the traditional references to impersonality of the Union, the living in the Yard, and the inchoate nature most other common Freshman experiences.

The official pre-digested explanations of General Education convey little to a Freshman familiar with either the actual historical of the program or the way concentration and he is almost forced to look elsewhere for explanation. The Union does little to bring R-

Perhaps the most succinct, if exaggerated, statement of this myth of importance was made a harried administrator. Accused of seeking turn every undergraduate into a library- graduate student, he snapped, "I wish I how to make one student spend as much one more hour in Lamont."

Yet existing studies of College life suggest the decisions of Faculty and governing , the specific regulations of the Administration, indeed, they very day-to-day attitudes values of the Faculty, shape the development of new Freshmen. Beyond direct influence, College determines by its physical structure, its rules, and by its daily operation the way Freshman picks up ideas and discards about the College. A Harvard man does at just happen by accident.

Almost every student comes to the College a particular personal utopia, challenge, opportunity, and almost none finds what he expects. Many are fortunate and never realize badly they guessed; others are blessed with accurate enough to be changed without pain; some are so little committed that they can change their ideas easily. But for the majority, the discovery that Harvard is not what they anticipated is critical in forming their attitudes toward the College and toward higher education.

The first week is often remembered as the most crucial time of the Freshman year, for then the newness and confusion of Harvard is most expected and noticed. But a week of physical dislocation and uncertainly is superficial compared to the continuing demands of adjustment to Harvard's values and requirements.

The disillusion so evident in Freshmen may be precipitated by the grading system and course assignments, but often the intellectual tone of the Freshman environment and the social structure of the class are equally important. The particular source of discord is likely to be determined by what the Freshman looks for rather than where Harvard fails to meet general expectations: a student who is looking for an intellectual atmosphere and finds one will be far less disturbed by academic difficulty, even if he led his school class.

More often, however, the academic system is the arena of conflict. One descriptive explanation divides the class into 'linear' and 'diffuse' students. Linears study everything on the reading list and attend all the lectures, or try to. The diffuse dabble, without much plan, through the course material, often achieving very little. As the Fall progresses, linears divide into a group which works ever more intensively and one which begins to learn the ropes and read selectively. The diffuse split into a segment which appears to be learning the ropes--actually begins to work fairly intensively along lines of personal interest--and one which achieves almost nothing, eventually leaving College or adopting an entirely different approach if they are not so talented that they do not need to study.

When mid-term grades arrive about Thanks-giving, which is also the first break from classes, many students find themselves forced to reappraise not only their study habits, but also their intellectual self-image, and, by implication, what they seek from education.

In study habits, change is fairly visible, largely reflecting the way grades measure up to expectation, but, when forced to abandon their own habits as inadequate, Freshmen do not rely on Harvard experience, for they have not been around long enough, or been sufficiently at ease to absorb the approaches characteristic of Harvard.

Instead, reaching back into school years, they dredge up the alternatives they once rejected, looking for a solution to the present problem in a reconsideration of the past decision. The situation is easier for the prep school product, for he is often more accustomed to accepting a B as a satisfactory grade, something which is harder for the high school graduate who has always led his class. But since preppies generally do not work as hard as their high school confreres, the difference tends to even out.

In psychology, coping with a present crisis by reverting to a past critical decision is known as regression, usually with highly perjorative overtones. There need be nothing wrong with reconsidering high school decisions--often it is essential if the Freshmen is not to become bogged down in an intellectual dead end--but it is ironic that he often is forced to change those attitudes which originally led him to Harvard: his views on the meaning of education, his own intellectual pretensions, and the relation of intellect to his own social outlook.

Possibly the classic example of this irony is the "Exeter Syndroms". Among the best prepared students in the country, Exeter graduates reject academic values, rebel against the system, and leave Harvard in greater numbers (and percentages) than any other group. These graduates of a tough sink-or-swim system much like Harvard rate themselves highly, and especially prize their own sophistication. Many of those most dependent on this self-esteem are attracted to the College.

Convinced that they are only continuing in the same kind of education, they expect to do well with the same low-work system that succeeded in school, a system peculiarly adapted to Exeter's unique teaching and testing system. When Harvard gives them C's instead of B's, and they are not taken as a superior species despite their conspicuous sophistication, they tend to react by doubting the worth of Harvard's system, pointing out its weaknesses and defects, and thus refuting its rejection of their performance. Substituting independent intellectual activity and creativity, both subjectively defined, they become mere academic hangers-on, and dissatisfaction frequently terminates in departure.

A clearer case of regression is the "Andover Syndrome." From a school where a majority of the top of the class is bound for Yale, Harvard receives a group which has thought of itself as an intellectually oriented and superior minority. On arrival they find that the grading system does not endorse their superiority, that people with the same social outlook they rejected at Andover are quite successful at Harvard, and Harvard is not quite as ready as they had hoped to embrace all intellectuals with unqualified social success.

Finding their image of the place of learning has become unworkable and that intellectual success no longer comes easily, the Andover graduates often reject their intellectual role, join clubs, and start behaving much like the students they refused to associate with at Andover. They complete the protective change by forgetting their erstwhile intellectual pretensions and remembering a far more social outlook than they actually held at school.

Since Exeter and Andover are nearly academic twins, it is tempting to suppose that these syndromes are just the results of big intensive boarding schools. But what is attributed to the individual schools is actually neither confined to their graduates not universal among them. Moreover, the two cases, though parallel, are quite different, and other parallels can be found which owe no scholastic allegiance.

Prospective scientists, for example, comprise almost half the entering class, but little more than a quarter graduate as science concentrators. It is true that Harvard does exert various kinds of indirect pressure against science, but the change is also the natural result of the easy form science takes in school. Science is one area where the talented student can show clear and measurable competence and be drawn into a orientation toward college which produces a clear articulation of the relation between education and life.

In Harvard's more rigorous competition and more competitive atmosphere, once-impressive talent is devalued, and the careerist orientation it engendered weakens. Instead, the image of Harvard as center of liberal education, which draws scientists to the College, becomes the dominant theme in their approach to learning. The outsider's view of liberal education becomes their guide in an effort to attain one.

For many others, the discovery that Harvard is not an intellectual utopia and that brilliance is not tantamount to social acceptance brings a crisis in the whole attitude toward knowledge. A vision of Harvard which anticipates social success arising from intellectual ability is often reason for coming, and the discovery that no synthesis exists, that the academic conscience which drove them through school does not bring adequate rewards, and that, more intelligent or no, others are clearly more sophisticated, all can be profoundly disturbing.

Since the intellectual often feels some guilt at hoping for acceptance through intellectual skill, which he may regard as a corruption of knowledge, any failure to attain this success is likely to have fairly subtle repercussions.

The all-around-boy who combined academic, athletic, and social virtues at school may quickly abandon illusions of being well-rounded when he discovers how many fields he can enter only as a second-rater.

Innumerable bits of confusion can be added to this emerging pattern: the advanced standing student, who, having received recognition of his ability, becomes more sensitive to failure, but, because he has moved into a higher level of competition, can also excuse failure more adequately. Similar in some ways is the erstwhile student leader who may come to College without expecting his accustomed success, but is still peculiarly sensitive to success and failure in this field.

This is only a sketch of the way pre-College experience reappears during the Freshman year, but it virtually discredits the frequent claim that the first year is good because it forces students to reexamine themselves, draw on their inner resources, and grow in stature. In fact, many of the changes a Freshman goes through are progress only because the Freshman year is considered a time of progress.

A suggestion that illusions could be broken more gently is not simple humanitarianism. The shock of newness does not always a bring reactions best suited to overcoming barriers, and often it results in retreat from competition.

For all this, however, one should not slip into the delusion that the student without expectations is best off. The same expectations which, unfulfilled, are so disturbing, are the foundation of any interest in education. Without idealistic hopes, a student would be little more than a memory bank, useful perhaps, but scarcely worth Harvard's time or effort.

Although the Freshman year often strikes the new student as a series of disillusionments, it has a positive aspect as well. For in addition to focing him back on his own past, it provides him with certain attitudes and characteristics which are the hallmark of a Harvard education. Like any human institution, the Freshman year is more than the sum of its parts: it has a culture of its own and is a meeting ground for tradition and official culture as well. It is as important for what it makes of the student as for what it forces him to make of himself.

Student culture can do more to determine matters about education and what the means than all the efforts of Faculty and administration. But the studies of student have been made in relatively homogeneous " institutions" which so control the environment that activities, goals, and rewards are held in common. Despite emphasis on standing, and honors, and despite the experience of living in the Yard and eating the Union, Harvard certainly lacks the uniformity of, say, a medical school.

In an honors thesis, Robert W. McCarley studied the Freshman year with extensive and examined the "total institution" . Although his conclusions suggested reservation on the "totality' of the Freshman year, he a student culture, and found that rather representing the upper class values of the Harvard stereotype, the College was dominated by a middle class outlook. Indeed, showed that their emphasis on ascribed and experiencing college put students from upper class backgrounds under greater stress than middle class contemporaries who emphasis achieved status and looked at the College opportunity for further achievement.

Yet it is astonishing that a perceptible should exist in such a diverse, diffuse, and group as the Freshman class. The would seem few ways for this culture, admitting its existence, to penetrate the circles of friends which dominate the beginning of the year, the time when McCarley found greatest changes. One of the best explanation can be found in the traditional references to impersonality of the Union, the living in the Yard, and the inchoate nature most other common Freshman experiences.

The official pre-digested explanations of General Education convey little to a Freshman familiar with either the actual historical of the program or the way concentration and he is almost forced to look elsewhere for explanation. The Union does little to bring R-

Yet existing studies of College life suggest the decisions of Faculty and governing , the specific regulations of the Administration, indeed, they very day-to-day attitudes values of the Faculty, shape the development of new Freshmen. Beyond direct influence, College determines by its physical structure, its rules, and by its daily operation the way Freshman picks up ideas and discards about the College. A Harvard man does at just happen by accident.

Almost every student comes to the College a particular personal utopia, challenge, opportunity, and almost none finds what he expects. Many are fortunate and never realize badly they guessed; others are blessed with accurate enough to be changed without pain; some are so little committed that they can change their ideas easily. But for the majority, the discovery that Harvard is not what they anticipated is critical in forming their attitudes toward the College and toward higher education.

The first week is often remembered as the most crucial time of the Freshman year, for then the newness and confusion of Harvard is most expected and noticed. But a week of physical dislocation and uncertainly is superficial compared to the continuing demands of adjustment to Harvard's values and requirements.

The disillusion so evident in Freshmen may be precipitated by the grading system and course assignments, but often the intellectual tone of the Freshman environment and the social structure of the class are equally important. The particular source of discord is likely to be determined by what the Freshman looks for rather than where Harvard fails to meet general expectations: a student who is looking for an intellectual atmosphere and finds one will be far less disturbed by academic difficulty, even if he led his school class.

More often, however, the academic system is the arena of conflict. One descriptive explanation divides the class into 'linear' and 'diffuse' students. Linears study everything on the reading list and attend all the lectures, or try to. The diffuse dabble, without much plan, through the course material, often achieving very little. As the Fall progresses, linears divide into a group which works ever more intensively and one which begins to learn the ropes and read selectively. The diffuse split into a segment which appears to be learning the ropes--actually begins to work fairly intensively along lines of personal interest--and one which achieves almost nothing, eventually leaving College or adopting an entirely different approach if they are not so talented that they do not need to study.

When mid-term grades arrive about Thanks-giving, which is also the first break from classes, many students find themselves forced to reappraise not only their study habits, but also their intellectual self-image, and, by implication, what they seek from education.

In study habits, change is fairly visible, largely reflecting the way grades measure up to expectation, but, when forced to abandon their own habits as inadequate, Freshmen do not rely on Harvard experience, for they have not been around long enough, or been sufficiently at ease to absorb the approaches characteristic of Harvard.

Instead, reaching back into school years, they dredge up the alternatives they once rejected, looking for a solution to the present problem in a reconsideration of the past decision. The situation is easier for the prep school product, for he is often more accustomed to accepting a B as a satisfactory grade, something which is harder for the high school graduate who has always led his class. But since preppies generally do not work as hard as their high school confreres, the difference tends to even out.

In psychology, coping with a present crisis by reverting to a past critical decision is known as regression, usually with highly perjorative overtones. There need be nothing wrong with reconsidering high school decisions--often it is essential if the Freshmen is not to become bogged down in an intellectual dead end--but it is ironic that he often is forced to change those attitudes which originally led him to Harvard: his views on the meaning of education, his own intellectual pretensions, and the relation of intellect to his own social outlook.

Possibly the classic example of this irony is the "Exeter Syndroms". Among the best prepared students in the country, Exeter graduates reject academic values, rebel against the system, and leave Harvard in greater numbers (and percentages) than any other group. These graduates of a tough sink-or-swim system much like Harvard rate themselves highly, and especially prize their own sophistication. Many of those most dependent on this self-esteem are attracted to the College.

Convinced that they are only continuing in the same kind of education, they expect to do well with the same low-work system that succeeded in school, a system peculiarly adapted to Exeter's unique teaching and testing system. When Harvard gives them C's instead of B's, and they are not taken as a superior species despite their conspicuous sophistication, they tend to react by doubting the worth of Harvard's system, pointing out its weaknesses and defects, and thus refuting its rejection of their performance. Substituting independent intellectual activity and creativity, both subjectively defined, they become mere academic hangers-on, and dissatisfaction frequently terminates in departure.

A clearer case of regression is the "Andover Syndrome." From a school where a majority of the top of the class is bound for Yale, Harvard receives a group which has thought of itself as an intellectually oriented and superior minority. On arrival they find that the grading system does not endorse their superiority, that people with the same social outlook they rejected at Andover are quite successful at Harvard, and Harvard is not quite as ready as they had hoped to embrace all intellectuals with unqualified social success.

Finding their image of the place of learning has become unworkable and that intellectual success no longer comes easily, the Andover graduates often reject their intellectual role, join clubs, and start behaving much like the students they refused to associate with at Andover. They complete the protective change by forgetting their erstwhile intellectual pretensions and remembering a far more social outlook than they actually held at school.

Since Exeter and Andover are nearly academic twins, it is tempting to suppose that these syndromes are just the results of big intensive boarding schools. But what is attributed to the individual schools is actually neither confined to their graduates not universal among them. Moreover, the two cases, though parallel, are quite different, and other parallels can be found which owe no scholastic allegiance.

Prospective scientists, for example, comprise almost half the entering class, but little more than a quarter graduate as science concentrators. It is true that Harvard does exert various kinds of indirect pressure against science, but the change is also the natural result of the easy form science takes in school. Science is one area where the talented student can show clear and measurable competence and be drawn into a orientation toward college which produces a clear articulation of the relation between education and life.

In Harvard's more rigorous competition and more competitive atmosphere, once-impressive talent is devalued, and the careerist orientation it engendered weakens. Instead, the image of Harvard as center of liberal education, which draws scientists to the College, becomes the dominant theme in their approach to learning. The outsider's view of liberal education becomes their guide in an effort to attain one.

For many others, the discovery that Harvard is not an intellectual utopia and that brilliance is not tantamount to social acceptance brings a crisis in the whole attitude toward knowledge. A vision of Harvard which anticipates social success arising from intellectual ability is often reason for coming, and the discovery that no synthesis exists, that the academic conscience which drove them through school does not bring adequate rewards, and that, more intelligent or no, others are clearly more sophisticated, all can be profoundly disturbing.

Since the intellectual often feels some guilt at hoping for acceptance through intellectual skill, which he may regard as a corruption of knowledge, any failure to attain this success is likely to have fairly subtle repercussions.

The all-around-boy who combined academic, athletic, and social virtues at school may quickly abandon illusions of being well-rounded when he discovers how many fields he can enter only as a second-rater.

Innumerable bits of confusion can be added to this emerging pattern: the advanced standing student, who, having received recognition of his ability, becomes more sensitive to failure, but, because he has moved into a higher level of competition, can also excuse failure more adequately. Similar in some ways is the erstwhile student leader who may come to College without expecting his accustomed success, but is still peculiarly sensitive to success and failure in this field.

This is only a sketch of the way pre-College experience reappears during the Freshman year, but it virtually discredits the frequent claim that the first year is good because it forces students to reexamine themselves, draw on their inner resources, and grow in stature. In fact, many of the changes a Freshman goes through are progress only because the Freshman year is considered a time of progress.

A suggestion that illusions could be broken more gently is not simple humanitarianism. The shock of newness does not always a bring reactions best suited to overcoming barriers, and often it results in retreat from competition.

For all this, however, one should not slip into the delusion that the student without expectations is best off. The same expectations which, unfulfilled, are so disturbing, are the foundation of any interest in education. Without idealistic hopes, a student would be little more than a memory bank, useful perhaps, but scarcely worth Harvard's time or effort.

Although the Freshman year often strikes the new student as a series of disillusionments, it has a positive aspect as well. For in addition to focing him back on his own past, it provides him with certain attitudes and characteristics which are the hallmark of a Harvard education. Like any human institution, the Freshman year is more than the sum of its parts: it has a culture of its own and is a meeting ground for tradition and official culture as well. It is as important for what it makes of the student as for what it forces him to make of himself.

Student culture can do more to determine matters about education and what the means than all the efforts of Faculty and administration. But the studies of student have been made in relatively homogeneous " institutions" which so control the environment that activities, goals, and rewards are held in common. Despite emphasis on standing, and honors, and despite the experience of living in the Yard and eating the Union, Harvard certainly lacks the uniformity of, say, a medical school.

In an honors thesis, Robert W. McCarley studied the Freshman year with extensive and examined the "total institution" . Although his conclusions suggested reservation on the "totality' of the Freshman year, he a student culture, and found that rather representing the upper class values of the Harvard stereotype, the College was dominated by a middle class outlook. Indeed, showed that their emphasis on ascribed and experiencing college put students from upper class backgrounds under greater stress than middle class contemporaries who emphasis achieved status and looked at the College opportunity for further achievement.

Yet it is astonishing that a perceptible should exist in such a diverse, diffuse, and group as the Freshman class. The would seem few ways for this culture, admitting its existence, to penetrate the circles of friends which dominate the beginning of the year, the time when McCarley found greatest changes. One of the best explanation can be found in the traditional references to impersonality of the Union, the living in the Yard, and the inchoate nature most other common Freshman experiences.

The official pre-digested explanations of General Education convey little to a Freshman familiar with either the actual historical of the program or the way concentration and he is almost forced to look elsewhere for explanation. The Union does little to bring R-

Almost every student comes to the College a particular personal utopia, challenge, opportunity, and almost none finds what he expects. Many are fortunate and never realize badly they guessed; others are blessed with accurate enough to be changed without pain; some are so little committed that they can change their ideas easily. But for the majority, the discovery that Harvard is not what they anticipated is critical in forming their attitudes toward the College and toward higher education.

The first week is often remembered as the most crucial time of the Freshman year, for then the newness and confusion of Harvard is most expected and noticed. But a week of physical dislocation and uncertainly is superficial compared to the continuing demands of adjustment to Harvard's values and requirements.

The disillusion so evident in Freshmen may be precipitated by the grading system and course assignments, but often the intellectual tone of the Freshman environment and the social structure of the class are equally important. The particular source of discord is likely to be determined by what the Freshman looks for rather than where Harvard fails to meet general expectations: a student who is looking for an intellectual atmosphere and finds one will be far less disturbed by academic difficulty, even if he led his school class.

More often, however, the academic system is the arena of conflict. One descriptive explanation divides the class into 'linear' and 'diffuse' students. Linears study everything on the reading list and attend all the lectures, or try to. The diffuse dabble, without much plan, through the course material, often achieving very little. As the Fall progresses, linears divide into a group which works ever more intensively and one which begins to learn the ropes and read selectively. The diffuse split into a segment which appears to be learning the ropes--actually begins to work fairly intensively along lines of personal interest--and one which achieves almost nothing, eventually leaving College or adopting an entirely different approach if they are not so talented that they do not need to study.

When mid-term grades arrive about Thanks-giving, which is also the first break from classes, many students find themselves forced to reappraise not only their study habits, but also their intellectual self-image, and, by implication, what they seek from education.

In study habits, change is fairly visible, largely reflecting the way grades measure up to expectation, but, when forced to abandon their own habits as inadequate, Freshmen do not rely on Harvard experience, for they have not been around long enough, or been sufficiently at ease to absorb the approaches characteristic of Harvard.

Instead, reaching back into school years, they dredge up the alternatives they once rejected, looking for a solution to the present problem in a reconsideration of the past decision. The situation is easier for the prep school product, for he is often more accustomed to accepting a B as a satisfactory grade, something which is harder for the high school graduate who has always led his class. But since preppies generally do not work as hard as their high school confreres, the difference tends to even out.

In psychology, coping with a present crisis by reverting to a past critical decision is known as regression, usually with highly perjorative overtones. There need be nothing wrong with reconsidering high school decisions--often it is essential if the Freshmen is not to become bogged down in an intellectual dead end--but it is ironic that he often is forced to change those attitudes which originally led him to Harvard: his views on the meaning of education, his own intellectual pretensions, and the relation of intellect to his own social outlook.

Possibly the classic example of this irony is the "Exeter Syndroms". Among the best prepared students in the country, Exeter graduates reject academic values, rebel against the system, and leave Harvard in greater numbers (and percentages) than any other group. These graduates of a tough sink-or-swim system much like Harvard rate themselves highly, and especially prize their own sophistication. Many of those most dependent on this self-esteem are attracted to the College.

Convinced that they are only continuing in the same kind of education, they expect to do well with the same low-work system that succeeded in school, a system peculiarly adapted to Exeter's unique teaching and testing system. When Harvard gives them C's instead of B's, and they are not taken as a superior species despite their conspicuous sophistication, they tend to react by doubting the worth of Harvard's system, pointing out its weaknesses and defects, and thus refuting its rejection of their performance. Substituting independent intellectual activity and creativity, both subjectively defined, they become mere academic hangers-on, and dissatisfaction frequently terminates in departure.

A clearer case of regression is the "Andover Syndrome." From a school where a majority of the top of the class is bound for Yale, Harvard receives a group which has thought of itself as an intellectually oriented and superior minority. On arrival they find that the grading system does not endorse their superiority, that people with the same social outlook they rejected at Andover are quite successful at Harvard, and Harvard is not quite as ready as they had hoped to embrace all intellectuals with unqualified social success.

Finding their image of the place of learning has become unworkable and that intellectual success no longer comes easily, the Andover graduates often reject their intellectual role, join clubs, and start behaving much like the students they refused to associate with at Andover. They complete the protective change by forgetting their erstwhile intellectual pretensions and remembering a far more social outlook than they actually held at school.

Since Exeter and Andover are nearly academic twins, it is tempting to suppose that these syndromes are just the results of big intensive boarding schools. But what is attributed to the individual schools is actually neither confined to their graduates not universal among them. Moreover, the two cases, though parallel, are quite different, and other parallels can be found which owe no scholastic allegiance.

Prospective scientists, for example, comprise almost half the entering class, but little more than a quarter graduate as science concentrators. It is true that Harvard does exert various kinds of indirect pressure against science, but the change is also the natural result of the easy form science takes in school. Science is one area where the talented student can show clear and measurable competence and be drawn into a orientation toward college which produces a clear articulation of the relation between education and life.

In Harvard's more rigorous competition and more competitive atmosphere, once-impressive talent is devalued, and the careerist orientation it engendered weakens. Instead, the image of Harvard as center of liberal education, which draws scientists to the College, becomes the dominant theme in their approach to learning. The outsider's view of liberal education becomes their guide in an effort to attain one.

For many others, the discovery that Harvard is not an intellectual utopia and that brilliance is not tantamount to social acceptance brings a crisis in the whole attitude toward knowledge. A vision of Harvard which anticipates social success arising from intellectual ability is often reason for coming, and the discovery that no synthesis exists, that the academic conscience which drove them through school does not bring adequate rewards, and that, more intelligent or no, others are clearly more sophisticated, all can be profoundly disturbing.

Since the intellectual often feels some guilt at hoping for acceptance through intellectual skill, which he may regard as a corruption of knowledge, any failure to attain this success is likely to have fairly subtle repercussions.

The all-around-boy who combined academic, athletic, and social virtues at school may quickly abandon illusions of being well-rounded when he discovers how many fields he can enter only as a second-rater.

Innumerable bits of confusion can be added to this emerging pattern: the advanced standing student, who, having received recognition of his ability, becomes more sensitive to failure, but, because he has moved into a higher level of competition, can also excuse failure more adequately. Similar in some ways is the erstwhile student leader who may come to College without expecting his accustomed success, but is still peculiarly sensitive to success and failure in this field.

This is only a sketch of the way pre-College experience reappears during the Freshman year, but it virtually discredits the frequent claim that the first year is good because it forces students to reexamine themselves, draw on their inner resources, and grow in stature. In fact, many of the changes a Freshman goes through are progress only because the Freshman year is considered a time of progress.

A suggestion that illusions could be broken more gently is not simple humanitarianism. The shock of newness does not always a bring reactions best suited to overcoming barriers, and often it results in retreat from competition.

For all this, however, one should not slip into the delusion that the student without expectations is best off. The same expectations which, unfulfilled, are so disturbing, are the foundation of any interest in education. Without idealistic hopes, a student would be little more than a memory bank, useful perhaps, but scarcely worth Harvard's time or effort.

Although the Freshman year often strikes the new student as a series of disillusionments, it has a positive aspect as well. For in addition to focing him back on his own past, it provides him with certain attitudes and characteristics which are the hallmark of a Harvard education. Like any human institution, the Freshman year is more than the sum of its parts: it has a culture of its own and is a meeting ground for tradition and official culture as well. It is as important for what it makes of the student as for what it forces him to make of himself.

Student culture can do more to determine matters about education and what the means than all the efforts of Faculty and administration. But the studies of student have been made in relatively homogeneous " institutions" which so control the environment that activities, goals, and rewards are held in common. Despite emphasis on standing, and honors, and despite the experience of living in the Yard and eating the Union, Harvard certainly lacks the uniformity of, say, a medical school.

In an honors thesis, Robert W. McCarley studied the Freshman year with extensive and examined the "total institution" . Although his conclusions suggested reservation on the "totality' of the Freshman year, he a student culture, and found that rather representing the upper class values of the Harvard stereotype, the College was dominated by a middle class outlook. Indeed, showed that their emphasis on ascribed and experiencing college put students from upper class backgrounds under greater stress than middle class contemporaries who emphasis achieved status and looked at the College opportunity for further achievement.

Yet it is astonishing that a perceptible should exist in such a diverse, diffuse, and group as the Freshman class. The would seem few ways for this culture, admitting its existence, to penetrate the circles of friends which dominate the beginning of the year, the time when McCarley found greatest changes. One of the best explanation can be found in the traditional references to impersonality of the Union, the living in the Yard, and the inchoate nature most other common Freshman experiences.

The official pre-digested explanations of General Education convey little to a Freshman familiar with either the actual historical of the program or the way concentration and he is almost forced to look elsewhere for explanation. The Union does little to bring R-

The first week is often remembered as the most crucial time of the Freshman year, for then the newness and confusion of Harvard is most expected and noticed. But a week of physical dislocation and uncertainly is superficial compared to the continuing demands of adjustment to Harvard's values and requirements.

The disillusion so evident in Freshmen may be precipitated by the grading system and course assignments, but often the intellectual tone of the Freshman environment and the social structure of the class are equally important. The particular source of discord is likely to be determined by what the Freshman looks for rather than where Harvard fails to meet general expectations: a student who is looking for an intellectual atmosphere and finds one will be far less disturbed by academic difficulty, even if he led his school class.

More often, however, the academic system is the arena of conflict. One descriptive explanation divides the class into 'linear' and 'diffuse' students. Linears study everything on the reading list and attend all the lectures, or try to. The diffuse dabble, without much plan, through the course material, often achieving very little. As the Fall progresses, linears divide into a group which works ever more intensively and one which begins to learn the ropes and read selectively. The diffuse split into a segment which appears to be learning the ropes--actually begins to work fairly intensively along lines of personal interest--and one which achieves almost nothing, eventually leaving College or adopting an entirely different approach if they are not so talented that they do not need to study.

When mid-term grades arrive about Thanks-giving, which is also the first break from classes, many students find themselves forced to reappraise not only their study habits, but also their intellectual self-image, and, by implication, what they seek from education.

In study habits, change is fairly visible, largely reflecting the way grades measure up to expectation, but, when forced to abandon their own habits as inadequate, Freshmen do not rely on Harvard experience, for they have not been around long enough, or been sufficiently at ease to absorb the approaches characteristic of Harvard.

Instead, reaching back into school years, they dredge up the alternatives they once rejected, looking for a solution to the present problem in a reconsideration of the past decision. The situation is easier for the prep school product, for he is often more accustomed to accepting a B as a satisfactory grade, something which is harder for the high school graduate who has always led his class. But since preppies generally do not work as hard as their high school confreres, the difference tends to even out.

In psychology, coping with a present crisis by reverting to a past critical decision is known as regression, usually with highly perjorative overtones. There need be nothing wrong with reconsidering high school decisions--often it is essential if the Freshmen is not to become bogged down in an intellectual dead end--but it is ironic that he often is forced to change those attitudes which originally led him to Harvard: his views on the meaning of education, his own intellectual pretensions, and the relation of intellect to his own social outlook.

Possibly the classic example of this irony is the "Exeter Syndroms". Among the best prepared students in the country, Exeter graduates reject academic values, rebel against the system, and leave Harvard in greater numbers (and percentages) than any other group. These graduates of a tough sink-or-swim system much like Harvard rate themselves highly, and especially prize their own sophistication. Many of those most dependent on this self-esteem are attracted to the College.

Convinced that they are only continuing in the same kind of education, they expect to do well with the same low-work system that succeeded in school, a system peculiarly adapted to Exeter's unique teaching and testing system. When Harvard gives them C's instead of B's, and they are not taken as a superior species despite their conspicuous sophistication, they tend to react by doubting the worth of Harvard's system, pointing out its weaknesses and defects, and thus refuting its rejection of their performance. Substituting independent intellectual activity and creativity, both subjectively defined, they become mere academic hangers-on, and dissatisfaction frequently terminates in departure.

A clearer case of regression is the "Andover Syndrome." From a school where a majority of the top of the class is bound for Yale, Harvard receives a group which has thought of itself as an intellectually oriented and superior minority. On arrival they find that the grading system does not endorse their superiority, that people with the same social outlook they rejected at Andover are quite successful at Harvard, and Harvard is not quite as ready as they had hoped to embrace all intellectuals with unqualified social success.

Finding their image of the place of learning has become unworkable and that intellectual success no longer comes easily, the Andover graduates often reject their intellectual role, join clubs, and start behaving much like the students they refused to associate with at Andover. They complete the protective change by forgetting their erstwhile intellectual pretensions and remembering a far more social outlook than they actually held at school.

Since Exeter and Andover are nearly academic twins, it is tempting to suppose that these syndromes are just the results of big intensive boarding schools. But what is attributed to the individual schools is actually neither confined to their graduates not universal among them. Moreover, the two cases, though parallel, are quite different, and other parallels can be found which owe no scholastic allegiance.

Prospective scientists, for example, comprise almost half the entering class, but little more than a quarter graduate as science concentrators. It is true that Harvard does exert various kinds of indirect pressure against science, but the change is also the natural result of the easy form science takes in school. Science is one area where the talented student can show clear and measurable competence and be drawn into a orientation toward college which produces a clear articulation of the relation between education and life.

In Harvard's more rigorous competition and more competitive atmosphere, once-impressive talent is devalued, and the careerist orientation it engendered weakens. Instead, the image of Harvard as center of liberal education, which draws scientists to the College, becomes the dominant theme in their approach to learning. The outsider's view of liberal education becomes their guide in an effort to attain one.

For many others, the discovery that Harvard is not an intellectual utopia and that brilliance is not tantamount to social acceptance brings a crisis in the whole attitude toward knowledge. A vision of Harvard which anticipates social success arising from intellectual ability is often reason for coming, and the discovery that no synthesis exists, that the academic conscience which drove them through school does not bring adequate rewards, and that, more intelligent or no, others are clearly more sophisticated, all can be profoundly disturbing.

Since the intellectual often feels some guilt at hoping for acceptance through intellectual skill, which he may regard as a corruption of knowledge, any failure to attain this success is likely to have fairly subtle repercussions.

The all-around-boy who combined academic, athletic, and social virtues at school may quickly abandon illusions of being well-rounded when he discovers how many fields he can enter only as a second-rater.

Innumerable bits of confusion can be added to this emerging pattern: the advanced standing student, who, having received recognition of his ability, becomes more sensitive to failure, but, because he has moved into a higher level of competition, can also excuse failure more adequately. Similar in some ways is the erstwhile student leader who may come to College without expecting his accustomed success, but is still peculiarly sensitive to success and failure in this field.

This is only a sketch of the way pre-College experience reappears during the Freshman year, but it virtually discredits the frequent claim that the first year is good because it forces students to reexamine themselves, draw on their inner resources, and grow in stature. In fact, many of the changes a Freshman goes through are progress only because the Freshman year is considered a time of progress.

A suggestion that illusions could be broken more gently is not simple humanitarianism. The shock of newness does not always a bring reactions best suited to overcoming barriers, and often it results in retreat from competition.

For all this, however, one should not slip into the delusion that the student without expectations is best off. The same expectations which, unfulfilled, are so disturbing, are the foundation of any interest in education. Without idealistic hopes, a student would be little more than a memory bank, useful perhaps, but scarcely worth Harvard's time or effort.

Although the Freshman year often strikes the new student as a series of disillusionments, it has a positive aspect as well. For in addition to focing him back on his own past, it provides him with certain attitudes and characteristics which are the hallmark of a Harvard education. Like any human institution, the Freshman year is more than the sum of its parts: it has a culture of its own and is a meeting ground for tradition and official culture as well. It is as important for what it makes of the student as for what it forces him to make of himself.

Student culture can do more to determine matters about education and what the means than all the efforts of Faculty and administration. But the studies of student have been made in relatively homogeneous " institutions" which so control the environment that activities, goals, and rewards are held in common. Despite emphasis on standing, and honors, and despite the experience of living in the Yard and eating the Union, Harvard certainly lacks the uniformity of, say, a medical school.

In an honors thesis, Robert W. McCarley studied the Freshman year with extensive and examined the "total institution" . Although his conclusions suggested reservation on the "totality' of the Freshman year, he a student culture, and found that rather representing the upper class values of the Harvard stereotype, the College was dominated by a middle class outlook. Indeed, showed that their emphasis on ascribed and experiencing college put students from upper class backgrounds under greater stress than middle class contemporaries who emphasis achieved status and looked at the College opportunity for further achievement.

Yet it is astonishing that a perceptible should exist in such a diverse, diffuse, and group as the Freshman class. The would seem few ways for this culture, admitting its existence, to penetrate the circles of friends which dominate the beginning of the year, the time when McCarley found greatest changes. One of the best explanation can be found in the traditional references to impersonality of the Union, the living in the Yard, and the inchoate nature most other common Freshman experiences.

The official pre-digested explanations of General Education convey little to a Freshman familiar with either the actual historical of the program or the way concentration and he is almost forced to look elsewhere for explanation. The Union does little to bring R-

In an honors thesis, Robert W. McCarley studied the Freshman year with extensive and examined the "total institution" . Although his conclusions suggested reservation on the "totality' of the Freshman year, he a student culture, and found that rather representing the upper class values of the Harvard stereotype, the College was dominated by a middle class outlook. Indeed, showed that their emphasis on ascribed and experiencing college put students from upper class backgrounds under greater stress than middle class contemporaries who emphasis achieved status and looked at the College opportunity for further achievement.

Yet it is astonishing that a perceptible should exist in such a diverse, diffuse, and group as the Freshman class. The would seem few ways for this culture, admitting its existence, to penetrate the circles of friends which dominate the beginning of the year, the time when McCarley found greatest changes. One of the best explanation can be found in the traditional references to impersonality of the Union, the living in the Yard, and the inchoate nature most other common Freshman experiences.

The official pre-digested explanations of General Education convey little to a Freshman familiar with either the actual historical of the program or the way concentration and he is almost forced to look elsewhere for explanation. The Union does little to bring R-

Yet it is astonishing that a perceptible should exist in such a diverse, diffuse, and group as the Freshman class. The would seem few ways for this culture, admitting its existence, to penetrate the circles of friends which dominate the beginning of the year, the time when McCarley found greatest changes. One of the best explanation can be found in the traditional references to impersonality of the Union, the living in the Yard, and the inchoate nature most other common Freshman experiences.

The official pre-digested explanations of General Education convey little to a Freshman familiar with either the actual historical of the program or the way concentration and he is almost forced to look elsewhere for explanation. The Union does little to bring R-

The official pre-digested explanations of General Education convey little to a Freshman familiar with either the actual historical of the program or the way concentration and he is almost forced to look elsewhere for explanation. The Union does little to bring R-