JEWS IN AMERICA FROM 1800 UNTIL WORLD WAR II---Episode 13

MANY STUDENTS WENT TO THE BIG THREE TO PARTY AND TO SOCIALIZE WITH "THEIR KIND" 

    Despite their growing prominence, however, Harvard, Yale, and Princeton faced serious problems. Yale had become the archetype of the elite private college through the immense popularity of Frank Merriwell and later of Dink Stover [ the hero of Owen Johnson's 1912 novel, Stover at Yale ], but deteriorating academic standards were a subject of intense internal discussion. So, too, was the alleged decline in standards of deportment --- a significant issue for an institution that prided itself on turning out "gentlemen." According to the George W. Pierson, "Disorders, infractions, and petty irritations had been getting rather frequent and unnecessary." By 1902, "an unending stream of individuals had to be disciplined for cheating, or for drunken disorder, or for throwing bottles out the windows,  or even for going sailing with low women." 
   In1903, a committee headed by Professor Irving Fisher issued a devastating report about the academic atmosphere at Yale. Scholarly performance, the report concluded, had been dropping regularly since1896--1897, with the decline most marked among the highest-ranking students. The value system underpinning campus culture, which elevated social, athletic, and fraternal activities over scholarship, was at  the root of the problem: "An impression is very strong and very prevalent that the athlete is working for Yale, the student for himself.  To be a high-stand man is now a disadvantage rather than otherwise . . . In fact, hard study has become UNFASHIONABLE at Yale." 

   "In general," the report went on, "the man who attends strictly to study [ the 'grind'] is regarded as peculiar or even contemptible. It is believed that a man should 'know mwn' at Yale ; that 'study is a mistake'." To support its sobering conclusions, the report offered an intriguing fact : whereas 26 of 34 of Yale's valedictorians had been tapped by one of Yale's prestigious senior societies between 1861 and 1894, only 3 of 9 had been tapped since.
   So anti-intellectual was the undergraduate culture at Yale that classes vied with one another for the honor of being the least studious. In 1904, the yearbook boasted of having "more gentlemen and fewer scholars than any other class in the memory of man." But the class of 1905, judged by the Fisher Committee to have been the worst in recent Yale history, bested its predecessor, offering the following ditty : 

     Never since the Heavenly Host with all the Titans fought 
        Saw they a class whose scholarship 
    Approached so close to naught. 

Meanwhile, the Yale senior societies continued to select their members on the basis of athletic talent, prominence in extracurricular affairs, and social background. And so great a public honor was election to a society that the question of who was [and who was not] "tapped" on Tap Day was the subject of regular coverage in the New York Times.

If intellect was not highly valued at turn-of-the-century Yale, it was perhaps even less esteemed at Princeton. Headed since 1888 by Francis Landley Patton, a Presbyterian theologian noted for his administrative laxity and his failure to enforce disciplinary and academic standards, Princeton had a reputation as the least academically serious member of the Big Three. Patton himself hardly helped matters when he reportedly said at a faculty meeting : "Gentlemen, whether we like it or not, we shall have to recognize that Princetonis a rich man's college and that rich men do not frequently come to college to study." Patton also made a remark that was to haunt Old Nassau's reputation for years to come : Princeton was "the finest country club in America." 

   So weak was Princeton's academic atmosphere that a faculty committee was formed in 1901 to investigate "the scholastic condition of the college." Patton vigorously opposed its recommendation to raise academic standards, and by March 1902 a group  of trustees began to look into the matter. It became clear that Patton's end was near when, at a dinner at the Waldorf in New York, men from Harvard, Columbia, and Hopkins told several trustees in blunt terms that "Princeton was becoming the laughing stock of the academic world, that the President was neglecting his duty, the professors neglecting theirs, the students theirs, that Princeton was going to pieces." In a matter of weeks, Patton had been forced to resign, and Woodrow Wilson, an eminent political scientist who had been on the faculty since 1890, was named president. Wilson spent much of the next eight years trying to raise his school's academic standards. 
   Though Harvard was by far the most academically distinguished of the Big Three, it too suffered from a student culture largely hostile to academic exertion. As at Yale and Princeton, a faculty committee was formed at Harvard to identify the sources of low academic standards and to devise policies for elevating them. The committee, which was chaired by Le Baron Russell Briggs and included Harvard's future president A. Lawrence Lowell, concluded that the amount of time that students spent studying was "discreditably small." Its analysis of replies of letters ofinquiry from 245 instructors and 1,757 students revealed a surprising fact : the instructors believed that students spent twice as much time on their studies as they actually did. Even the better students were devoting only about 25 hours a week to academic work, including the 12 hours spent at lectures; the less committed students spent considerably less time on academic tasks.