The class as an organization, now dying out under the in- fluence of the elective systems and secret and other inter-class societies, had its golden period in the first three-fourths of the last century. The very term classmate suggested lifelong ties when the class was small enough so that all members were mutually acquainted, and reunions, triennials, class-books, histories, gifts, and memorials to the Alma Mater represented a form of comradeship especially valuable because of the wide range of types represented. Sheldon thinks three-fourths of the conversation in this charmed circle was of each other, and that to judge character and eternally revise estimates of in- dividuals is a great school of human nature. Again, subordi- nation of educational stages, each lower to the next higher, favors docility, keeps open sutures which might close pre- maturely, brings pliability, offsets tendencies to precocity and a sense of attainment and finality, keeps the psychophysic organism young and growing, and impresses humility without humiliation, because self-respect can keep itself in countenance, if endangered, by turning to the stage below. Again, and what is perhaps more important, this tends to widen sympathy hori- 406 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE zontally, as it were, so that the tendency to exhaust at each stage all its possibilities before advancing to the next is favored. The American Greek letter fraternities are an unique or- ganization, developing to some extent at the expense of the old debating societies, a little as the Corps grew from the Burschenschaften. Sheldon estimates that there are now one hundred and thirty thousand fraternity men; thirty- eight different organizations for men and fourteen for women, with more than five million dollars expended in buildings. Few things were once so hotly debated as their net good or evil. All the anti-Masonic sentiment has been directed against them, and it was this that compelled the Phi Beta Kappa to drop its secrecy. By students outside them, they often are called undemocratic, exclusive, and clannish as developing closer friendship between those alike, narrowing sympathy and knowledge of other types and classes of men, and making life seem cold and hopeless. They are accused of unduly influen- cing college politics or of rivaling commencement exercises in attraction for visiting alumni, of developing luxurious habits, and perhaps worse, under the guise of secrecy, of injuring class sentiment, of short-circuiting the expressions of the powerful social instinct which might otherwise be turned into religious work or larger literary organizations, and of narrowing loyalty that ought to be broad enough to include the entire col- lege. On the other hand, many of the ablest and most judicious men in the country have not only been members, but keep up their interest by large subscriptions and annual visits to the society houses, and several experienced authorities, like Presi- dent White, have vigorously defended them.
Their strength is great. The effort of Purdue in 1881 to compel freshmen to sign a pledge not to join the fraternities met with disas- trous failure. California in.1896 was defeated in this issue. Vander- bilt strove to prevent members from competing for college honors. Michigan once expelled all members, and the Masons in retaliation expelled the president. Princeton, which abolished these organizations in 1855, is perhaps the only large college to prohibit them. In some small colleges they may have great power over the administration. The movements against these societies are spasmodic and sometimes, if organized, end in the formation of a new secret society. The charm of secrecy is great and the discipline of reticence perhaps has some- thing to be said in its favor. Its fascination is greatly heightened by SOCIAL INSTINCTS AND INSTITUTIONS 4° 7 wearing the badge somewhat concealed or by never referring to the organization to outsiders, as is the custom among members of the " Skull and Bones " and of the " Scroll and Key " societies of Yale.
I have elsewhere advocated at length as an experiment worthy of trial the appointment of some graduate member, who perhaps has specialized abroad and is waiting for a professorship, as resident tutor or mentor in a few of these larger society houses. The expense would be slight, and the presence of such a member would be a most salutary tonic to the morale of the organization; he could have ample time and opportunity for advancing his own studies and could set apart an hour for coaching fellow undergraduate members in his field. If several adjacent chapter-houses, representing different fraternities in the same college, each had such a member, a specialist in different branches, interfraternity cooperation, and exchanges might be arranged. In this way the strength and wealth of the fraternity might be made to support the academic work of the institution, the college might possibly find here suitable candidates for vacant places in its professorial staff, and the friction now often felt between the administration and the fraternity might be reduced. Again, the growth of these organiza- tions, if it continues, may develop ultimately into powerful institu- tions which may some day become the analogues of the colleges of Ox- ford and Cambridge, which the tutorial methods here might represent.
Initiations can best be treated as a class of subjections by them- selves. The more we know of savage life the larger we find the role of such ceremonies. Not only the great cycle of initiations, sometimes occupying weeks, by which boys are inducted to early manhood, but many a secret order constructs ceremonials of a very high degree of symbolic significance, designed to impress those without, and, of course, especially the candidates themselves, as well as the tribesmen within, of the great importance of membership. A ritual is composed mainly from such elements as we see unorganized in hazing, and to this a sacred character attaches. This was the case with the Eleusinian and other ancient mysteries. The novice is observed and studied, and his eligibility is the result of diverse comparative estimates. He then sometimes undergoes a period of probation, with certain duties or restrictions. The ceremonial is generally made up of two parts: one that is elaborately prescribed and must be followed with the utmost precision, and another that is extemporized and sometimes with special individual adaptations. The impressiveness, and sometimes the terrors, of mystery are always appealed to. There are perhaps elements from judicial procedure, like accusation and defense; statement of the candidate's good and bad traits; sometimes he is symbolically condemned, executed, nailed into his coffin, and perhaps buried and resurrected to a new life. These procedures are well concealed, but those I know bear plain traces of a depressive minatory or descending phase, which are sharply contrasted with an ascending, regenerative, and restorative one. The ethnopsychic relationship between these rights and those indicating the new birth of the soul, with a background to both of the 408 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE resurrection of spring following the death of autumn, or the Balder motive, is unmistakable.
The Nations were spontaneous and democratic associations of students in the great medieval universities, who came from the same place. They found themselves without political rights in a strange town, writh their property and even life insecure; hence they united for mutual protection, to tend the sick, defend the weak, help the poor, and soon succeeded in establishing a kind of artificial citizen- ship which obtained legal recognition. These were most fully de- veloped in Italy, where the power of student organizations was great- est and where the Cismontanes had seventeen and the Ultramontanes sixteen Nations. In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries they were strong in the University of Paris with its four Nations — French, Normans, Picards, and English or Germans. At Oxford they were feeble, and the two organizations — the Boreals and Australes — fused in 1274. In Aberdeen the Nations lingered until the nineteenth cen- tury, and traces of them are still found in the Finnish Universities of Helsingfors. In Prague and Vienna, the two oldest German uni- versities, these societies existed; in the former the Czechs and the Germans have been opposed for six centuries, and in 1409 the German students withdrew to Leipzig. In England in the fifteenth century the college slowly succeeded the Nation as a unit of student organization.
The Landsmannschaften, the German analogue of the Nations, after an eventful career, were forbidden in the eighteenth century, but dragged out a long subterranean existence. They were originally ter- ritorial and soon adopted some of the features of penalism for their novices inducted to full membership with initiation ceremonies, held a catechism on the beer Komment, with awful condemnations to infamy of all " renoncers " or betrayers of secrets or those who refused to obey orders of the council, and had their ribbons, caps, ciphers, and a cere- monial kiss. The Landsmann could be decreed dishonorable on sixteen points; knew no obligations to Philistines or townsmen; was a good swordsman, the best of them ambitious to score a hundred duels; must fight all former colleagues if he wished to enter another society; and was sometimes guilty of riots, marauding, and of excesses, occasionally almost bestial, in his beer duels and other drinking habits. It was two of these societies that the philosopher Fichte actually persauded to disband and give their regalia to him.
The Burschenschaften, which originated at Jena in 1816, sought to introduce higher and reformatory ideals. The famous Wartburg fes- tival was held in 1817, on the three hundredth anniversary of Luther's defiance of the Pope, just at the period of Germany's most intense re- action after the fall of Napoleon. The Burschen delegates partook of the sacrament, listened to an oration by a fellow tribesman, Riemann, already knighted by the Iron Cross for bravery in the French wars, who invoked Luther to hear his vow, in behalf of all, to serve the spirit of truth and justice, to repel invaders, and not to be dazzled by the splendor of the monarch's throne from speaking the strong free word SOCIAL INSTINCTS AND INSTITUTIONS of freedom and individuality. In the evening twenty-eight books, thought to contain un-German views, were burned, and not long after the Russian court chancellor, Kotzebue, whose book had been burned with the others, to the great scandal of the court, was stabbed by a Burschen theological student, Sand. Before this a small minority led by Carl Pollen, a leader of the blacks or extreme left wing, a disciple of Fichte, and who afterward taught gymnastics at Harvard College, advocated an appeal to force to accomplish at once a republican form of government, which the moral reason demanded. The government accordingly, in 1819, abolished the order, removed suspected profess- ors, appointed an inspector for each university, and banished or im- prisoned those who still maintained membership. Although the Tu- gendbund of 1822 sought to perpetuate the salvable part of the organ- ization, the Burschenschaften soon died out, after having greatly reduced gambling and dueling, and having otherwise moralized stu- dent life.
The more aristocratic Corps developed as this latter organization declined. These are the outgrowth of an extravagant chivalric sense of personal dignity, self-respect and honor, of the passion to enjoy life at the stage of it when hilarity is most attractive, of a desire to knit the ties of friendship as closely as possible and with a love of sentiment unknown to our American life. The Corps, almost as much as the Nations, had power to boycott. As representing the student body they could launch the ban of excommunication against a student, city, or landlord; they developed a beer-drinking Komment with an elaborate ritual, and held that dueling was the only dignified way of resenting an insult. Some American writers have defended it as preferable to hazing, but the code lapsed to decreeing as insults the most fanciful of offenses, and even to the arrangement of almost utterly causeless encounters for the delectation of spectators.
The duel was originally an invocation of a divine judgment and flourished on religious and romantic grounds. It assumed that victory proved righteousness. Now that we know that the bad often conquers, it means staking life upon one's honor. It appeals to youth. Although physical and moral courage do not always go together, the former is often a good fore-school for the latter. Jacob Grimm, Treitsche, Bis- marck, Paulsen, and the theologian Schrempf advocated it. In a country with a standing army which sanctions it, it has a certain nimbus which it lacks here. To refuse to give satisfaction for an insult is disgraceful, but a court of honor that could arbitrate and determine and declare dishonorable, might serve to keep alive the high chivalric sense of personal self-respect, which at no age is it so injurious to grievously wound. Secrecy has in the past given the duel an heroic glamour. In 1800, Ziegler tells us, a Corps of sixteen members fought two hundred duels in seven weeks. A wholesome course of physical training with real achievement and glory for the victors gives some hardihood in carrying off the slight and inevitable frictions of student life, which the habits of the Komment so aggravate. 65 410 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE Academic history abounds in illustrations of the instinct of combat. In 1345 the Oxford students disliked the wine which the college pro- vided. A mug was thrown at the head of the steward and the broil grew into a battle between town and gown, where books were torn, buildings pillaged and burned, students migrated, and the Pope with- drew privileges. As late as 1854, in a row, a Yale student stabbed a rioter; the mob tried to loot the college and to batter its building with a cannon, which was fortunately spiked by the police. For years the Yale bully club, captured in a scrimmage with the sailors, was trans- mitted from class to class to the strongest man. Residents of a college town, as a class, are often dubbed muckers, barbarians, philistines, and have always been victims of destructiveness, vandalism and sometimes outrage, especially where the town was too small to easily dominate morally and physically the hostile instincts of students. The latter as a class are more select, learned, clever, richer than the average resi- dents of their age, and are preferred by the young ladies who live there, so that jealousy in its most acrid form is almost inevitable on the side of the town, while this is repaid with contempt and anonymous and protected insult on the part of the better organized and usually more resourceful students. Between boarding-house keepers and their guests, tailors and the haberdashers of all sorts, and students, there is always a large surface of friction where antagonisms are gener- ated, and all is heightened by the license and irresponsibility of the more transient collegians, their exuberant animal spirits, practical jokes, etc.
Group antagonisms with each other are still more frequent and take many forms from the elaborate code of the duello in its several academic forms, rushes between classes, cane fights, bowl fights as in the University of Pennsylvania, and the personal scrapping involved in these and actually incited by football, especially when between sophomore and freshman classes. Class battles under various names, now only a survival, are still sometimes carefully arranged by seconds and set rules enforced, whereby the parties are equally matched. Wrestling contests which once played an important role are now prac- tically extinct, and pugilism has never flourished save under the strict control of the gymnasium as boxing. At Princeton, freshmen, for generations, challenged the sophomores to fight, in immense posters surreptitiously placarded at night in letters that could be read a mile off, although interest centered mainly in the challenge and its efface- ment. Personal dignity, honor, prescriptive and traditional rights, a factitious and testy honor still arouse hostile sentiments, now generally kept in leash. The same propensity in a still more attenuated form is seen in the tendency of debates to lapse into petty wrangles and per- sonalities, in the rivalries and competitions of emulation between the various organizations, and in intercollegiate contests of various kinds.
Sedentary habits predispose to every kind of outbreak and excess especially in youth, and the evolution of the college gymnasium from the feeble beginnings a few decades ago at Amherst, Princeton, and SOCIAL INSTINCTS AND INSTITUTIONS 411 Yale, and the athletic movement, have proven the best safety-valve and aid to college discipline. The best ideal in this respect is now seen in England, where many if not all of the colleges of Oxford and Cam- bridge often have their own crews as well as other teams and inter- collegiate races, which attract great attention and in which the repre- sentatives of the university teams are selected « here all types of mankind meet and mingle in the most democratic fashion, and, in general, the position of a college on the river is the best index of its intellectual status. Before this ideal is realized, we have a long way yet to travel in the abandonment of all secret practise and tricks, the cultivation of a true spirit of sportsmanship, the appreciation of the real points of the game by the public, too often animated by the same zest that has sustained ancient gladiatorial contests in modern bull-fights and pugilism, active participation of larger numbers of students through this entire course in the benefits of these forms of exercise, and the more complete subordination of the passion for individual distinction to that of winning honor for the team and of making the glory of the team tributary to that of the college, on the principle that the larger and higher the unit toward which the loyalty is de- veloped, the better the moral training of athletics. The removal of the real dishonor so often revealed by the disqualification of men tainted with professionalism, less perfervid Americanitis at games and in celebrating victories, less newspaper exploitation and a better regula- tion of the rapidly growing pecuniary side of these spectacles — these yet remain to be accomplished here.
The ideal relations between student and professor are those of the antique friendship as described by Socrates, Aristotle, and Cicero. The teacher, as it were, incubated the pupil's soul, loved him and was loved in return. The joy of infecting the youthful mind with the insights of maturer years is, as Phillips has shown, the culminating function of parenthood. Induction into the mysteries of the universe more than the transmission of information was the ideal. The instructor dealt out knowl- edge as stages of initiation into the esoteric mysteries of life, and thus not only was youth taught, but the inculcator himself felt inspiration to avoid everything unworthy in word, deed, or manner, and to be an heroic ideal, if not an object of worship, for his protege.
Academic teaching has lapsed far from this ideal, partly because it is no longer individual but in ever enlarging groups, partly because, instead of being chiefly ethical guidance and inspiration, it has declined to merely conveying information, or lower yet, to lesson setting and tests for assigned tasks 412 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE prescribed in laboratories and libraries. Now pupils are driven, not led. Their highest powers of endeavor were once evolved; now they are often suppressed. Hard as is the doctrine for us pedagogues, I am convinced that, in general, disciplinary troubles have been inversely as the power of teachers to rise to the ideal of their vocation. The history of academic life shows that just at those periods when curricula have been most impoverished, method most unnatural, and matter most remote from the great natural springs of human interest, student life has degenerated. Just in proportion as young men are absorbed in intellectual interests, and as professors are able and inspiring enough to dominate these, this antago- nism diminishes. It increases just in proportion as the chief interests of students are outside the special work of the class- room, laboratory, or seminary, and as the professor becomes arid and barren. We often see the spectacle of new men or new subjects acting as the nucleus of a radical change of senti- ment throughout the student body in this respect. Youthful sentiment is right. There is nothing more worthy of being the butt of all the horse play of ephebic wit or practical joke than an instructor from whose soul the enthusiasm of humanity has vanished, who has ceased to know and grow, and who serves up the dry husks of former knowledge and peddles second- and third-hand information warmed up from year to year, rather than opening new living fountains in which the burning thirst of youth can be slaked. The latter's instincts are far wiser than they know, for iconoclasm is never better directed than against the literalist, formalist, and sophronist. The well-fed mind, like the well-fed body, settles to a state of complacency and satisfaction, while hunger of mind, like hunger of body, is the greatest incentive of restlessness and discontent. In this direction a work of inner reorganization in our large colleges and universities, far greater and harder than the late magnificent exterior development, is the inevi- table next step. Masses of students and scores of profess- ors absorbed in the mechanics of teaching, increasing even more rapidly than numbers of studies, examination and reci- tation methods that belong to lower grades, faculties kept on the alert in striving to outwit the ever new and fertile devices of laziness and laboring to exact of preparatory SOCIAL INSTINCTS AND INSTITUTIONS 4*3 schools a degree of industry they can not stimulate in their own students; this is not the university invisible, not made with hands, but only its whited sepulture.
In place of the ideal amity, students and professors have ceased to trust and have even grown suspicious of each other. Within very recent decades and often now, student censure is meted out to those who call upon an instructor socially, or seek information about reading or studies from one who if he made a friendly call on a student would be suspected to be a spy, and the familiar terms — bootlicks, blues, cur- riers, piscatores — indicate the ostracism experienced by those who seek the good-will of instructors. Wide-spread convention sanctions reti- cence and perhaps even lies to the faculty, and every act known only to one's fellow students is almost as secure of betrayal as if done in some organization pledged to secrecy. The earlier history of American col- lege life abounds in both open and covered hostilities, sometimes with personal assaults upon Ihe members of the faculty, but more often in the form of concerted rebellion. College revolts of old were based more often upon complaints regarding commons' food, but suspicions of favoritism, any increase of the wonted stint of study or augmented rigor of examination, suffice. The latter caused the famous Harvard outbreak of 1790 which was not settled for seven years. The Harvard rebellion of 1766 interrupted work for about a month. Still more serious rebellions occurred there in 1807 and 1830. In the Southern colleges riots have been not infrequent. In 1808 about one-half the students were expelled from Princeton; in 1845 aH the students but two freshmen were expelled from another institution; a State univer- sity not many years ago expelled the entire senior class. An attempt a few decades since to pledge each college to refuse admission to students expelled from another soon failed, and in many faculties there is still a fear that the whole student-body is capable of being unified and ar- rayed in organization against their authority.
In Bologna and in Paris there were student strikes and boycotts, and more than once the entire body, under the lead of the Nations, withdrew from town and either dictated terms before they would re- turn, defying sometimes even the Pope, or withdrew to another seat. The migration of five thousand students from Prague to Leipzig and the hegira from Williams to Amherst are also in point in more recent times. Oxford asserted the right of appeal from the chancellor. Stu- dent life always insists upon privileges which of old were granted in abundance in the form of immunities from taxation, arrest save by the university beadle and in the college prison with trial by a college court. Until very recent years the German student who had offended the city's ordinances merely showed his legitimation card to a police- man and thereby escaped arrest. Free passes, exemptions from military service, reduced fees at theaters and concerts, were almost universal. To-day wherever students are threatened with the withdrawal of what 4H THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE