Allowing for the small differences of tradition and maturity, the situation is the same in the colleges. The ways of an undergraduate community are determined by standards which do not apply to men and women of the same age who must work for their livings. For example, there survives from the Middle Ages an antagonism between gown and town. When this began it involved all the members of the academic community—faculty even more than students. It turned on conflicts over the very structure of the municipal economy in the course of which “gownsmen” established and vindicated their autonomous jurisdiction over the persons, properties, and actions of their “own.” College or university became a city within a city, sovereign over all affairs affecting it, and privileged in the national life. Today, faculty is for practical purposes a part of “town.” “Gown” consists only of the body of undergraduates. These often stand in a predatory relationship to the residual community. They may steal signs, fences, garments, and whatnot; they may destroy dishes, furniture, and other property not their own—academic or lay; they may brawl on the public street and on occasion beat up policemen and citizens without being held responsible as workers of the same age would be. They may endeavor in every way to “beat the game” in relation to their studies—wangle more cuts than they are entitled to, hand in work as their own which is not their own, cheat at examinations, and in every other possible way “put it over” on the faculty. For an undergraduate to be serious about the “serious purpose” of college, to be academically law-abiding, to show an interest in studies, is at best to be slightly declassé, at worst to be a greasy grind. Any manifestation of friendliness to a teacher is “boot-licking.” The total impression which undergraduate conduct makes in the mass is of an underground class war between student and faculty; and the traditional undergraduate code is a warlike code, requiring students under all circumstances whatsoever to stand by each other and against the faculty. Even under an “honor system” a “squealer” is as total a loss among students as among gangsters.
In sum, tradition allows the college man certain privileges and protects his abuse of them. Like the infant, he is held not accountable for violations of the adult social code. He is maintained in a state of infantile irresponsibility. This state is even more significant, if not so conspicuous, in the matter of the basic economy of life. For the representative undergraduate does not keep himself. He is kept. He does not earn his food and clothing and shelter and entertainment. Again, like the infant, he is sheer consumer, not producer; Veblen would call him an instrument of “conspicuous consumption” and a foremost avatar of the leisure class.
As a community of consumers merely, a student body is no more homogeneous than a community of producers. Within the frame of similarity generated by the condition of dependence there exist both the formal academic gradations dividing year and year as rank and rank, and the non-academic but “collegiate” gradations of caste and class, interest and attitude. Every college, for example, has its tiny liberal group, its sparse collection of students who trouble themselves with social problems, international relations, disarmament, and the like. This group is usually looked upon as a troublemaking nuisance by the college administration (the high point of this attitude may be found in the University of Pittsburgh), and as “lousy” by the arbitres elegantiae of undergraduate opinion. “Political and social agitation,” declares a Yale senior who had degraded himself by concern with such agitation, “is frowned upon by undergraduate leaders, and consequently relegated to the obscurity of almost clandestine off-campus coteries.”
To no small degree such coteries are made up of students who are working their way through college, and what is worse, Jews count heavily among them. Yet Jews are the exception that prove the rule. Between 1920 and 1930, the tradition of a love of learning which they brought to college has been dissipated. The adult responsibility which they felt for the problems of their own people and of the community at large, and which was signalized by their membership in such organizations as the Menorah Societies, the Zionist, the Liberal, or the Social Questions Clubs, has been destroyed. As their numbers grew, their fields of interest and modes of behavior conformed more and more to the prevailing conventions of undergraduate life. Although excluded by expanding anti-Semitism from participation in that life, they reproduce it, heightened, in an academic ghetto of fraternities, sororities, and the like. And they emulate the invidious distinctions they suffer from by projecting them upon the Jews too proud, too poor, or too Jewish to be eligible for “collegiate” secret societies of Jews.
Because the dynamic distinctions within the academic community are invidious only. College is not a republic of letters but a plutocracy of fraternities, sororities, clubs, and “activities.” Scholarship is no attribute of merit for a student. Athletic prowess, especially if conspicuous, could be; but the prepotent properties are wealth, sectarian affiliations, and “contacts and connections.” These delimit members of the fraternities and sororities. Since initiation fees run from $50 to $1000, and membership is correspondingly expensive, a rich father is the prime qualification for the prospective “pledge.” Before pledging, such a prospect is courted like a bride. Pledging is followed by initiation, which often lasts months. It begins in hazing and may grow into sadistic torture, recalling the rites of the primitives. It culminates in a solemn self-dedication with highfalutin’ vows whose practical application to the subsequent daily life amounts to training in the amenities (à la Emily Post); “loyalty” to “brothers” in the competition for the cream in undergraduate activities such as class-politics, proms, athletics, and the like; collaboration, mostly illicit, with brothers and sisters to insure their passing examinations or any other kind of test; and most of all, in the facilitation of “contacts.”
Thus the academic aristocracy are indoctrinated in the academic “traditions” and equipped to watch over them. These have primarily to do with the mores of garb and conduct ordained for freshmen, with the prerogatives of upperclassmen, such as wearing shorts and slickers, and similar matters reminiscent of the primitives. If they are moved by social and political questions at all, it is at times of presidential elections, when national committees—Republican, mostly—have been known to put a good deal of money into corralling “the college vote.” In times of strike, as during the Boston street railway strike, some of the better-class Harvard undergraduates had almost as much fun strike-breaking as they used to have rioting after a rare football victory over Yale. But the record hardly ever shows considered idealism, spontaneous, generous giving of goods and self, such as one finds among the students in Europe and Asia. The American undergraduate makes the impression of a self-centered and selfish creature, absorbed in trivialities, comfort-loving, reactionary and irresponsible; in a word, infantile.