Americans -- England -- Oxford; Education -- United States; Education, Higher -- England -- Oxford; University of Oxford
The spirit of an old graduate somehow takes kindly to the idea of a
place like that. How the spirit of Bishop Brooks, for instance, would
enjoy slipping in of an evening for the cigar they have denied him in
the house erected in his memory! And for the graduate in the flesh the
club-house will be no less welcome, especially if he is unlucky enough
not to have a club of his own to go back to. To love one's alma mater
it is, of course, not necessary to have a club; but it somehow
interferes with the sentiment of a home-coming to be obliged to go
back to Boston by trolley for luncheon and dinner, and to eat it among
aliens. In the new Union it will even be possible to put up for the
night. A long step has been made in advance of the old unhappy order.
Yet the new Union leaves the vital evil in the community life as far
as ever from solution.
What the authorities have failed to do consciously may, according to
present indications, be accomplished, in some manner at least, by an
unconscious growth. When Memorial became inadequate to the mere demand
for seating-room, new dining-halls were established. In the future it
is possible that these new halls may be kept within the line where
community life becomes impossible and mob life begins. If they could
be, the problem would be at least one step nearer solution. But to
gain the highest effect of community organization, it is necessary
that the men who dine in the same hall shall live near one another.
Under the present system this rarely happens, and when it does, it
does not even follow that they know one another by sight. Until the
halls represent some real division in undergraduate life--separate and
organized communities--they must remain the resort of a student mob.
Fortunately, another movement is discernible in the direction of
separate residential organization. Already certain of the dormitories
in American universities are governed democratically by the inmates:
no student is admitted except by order of a committee of the members.
The fraternity houses so widely diffused in America offer a still
better example, almost a counterpart, of the halls of the golden age
of the mediæval university. Any considerable development of hall or
fraternity life in the great universities would result in a dual
organization of the kind that has proved of such advantage in England,
so that a man would have his residence in a small democratic
community, and satisfy his more special interests in the exclusive
clubs of the university. In such an arrangement the hall would profit
by the clubman as the clubman would gain influence through the hall.
All undergraduates would thus be united in the general university
life in a way which is now undreamed of, and which is unlikely, as I
think, even in the new Harvard Union.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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