They are of two orders, social and intellectual. In the first group we have the senior and freshmen dormitories; a new insistence upon class lines; a new emphasis upon college spirit and with it a disquieting resurgence of that great abomination, “college life”; a change of attitude toward our much maligned “Harvard indifference” and “Harvard snobbery.” In the second class come the group system as opposed to the free elective system, the failure of cultural activities, the contempt for dilettantism, the emergence of the scholar. The last phenomenon is mentioned out of no overbearing desire to be either thorough or fair; it has a significance of its own.
Superficially the most striking of these changes is the extraordinary importance attached to class lines. It will be remembered that when President Wilson tried to reform Princeton with the Oxford system as a model, he was balked by precisely this feeling of class unity. At Harvard the thing was not unknown; but it was not important. Princeton men rejoice that their freshmen are compelled to wear caps, black shirts and corduroy trousers for the first three months of the year, so that no snobbery may develop! To the healthy Harvard man this seems sheer insanity—democracy run to seed. Such solicitude for promiscuity seems to intend a horrible mistrust of something, and certainly a beautiful misapprehension of what democracy means. I am speaking not from mere personal experience, but from that of generations of Harvard men, when I say that it has been possible for a man to go through his four years without knowing more than ten men in his own class intimately, yet acquiring all that college could give by knowing the finest spirits in a whole college cycle. The new order will change all this. It will not forbid a man to seek his acquaintances outside his class; but it will suggest and presently it may insist that his duty to his class can only be fulfilled by cultivating the acquaintance of all who entered college on the same day as he. We may live to see the time when Harvard will emulate the Yale man’s boast that he knew all his classmates (but one) by their first names!
The outward forms of this change are the senior and freshmen dormitories. The former resulted from the great schism of 1909 when the Gold Coast was defeated in the vote for class officers by the poorer men living in and about the Yard. It was considered intolerable that a class should be so divided and a decided effort was made to get the rich society men to live in the Yard, beside their poorer fellow-students, during their senior year. This has been a great success! A group of men, friends for three years, bound by steady companionship and natural affinities, occupy one entry of Hollis. Another group, equally bound by totally different sympathies and activities, occupy another. They nod to each other as they come from class. If a man in one group is taking the same course in Engineering as a man in the other, they may discuss a problem or denounce a “stiff” hour exam. in common. There their ways part. It seems inconceivable that the heads of a great college should have been able to believe that the mere accident of adjacent rooms could actually be the basis, or even the beginnings, of a true democratic spirit of fraternity. And—let me anticipate—_if the college had not ignominiously failed in its effort to supply a true basis of fraternity, it would not now be driven to a method so childish and so artificial as that of class grouping_.