Pleiades
On Discipline in Universities
SHOULD there be any such thing ? Apparently the angels (videlicet, a lady writing in the .News Chronicle about " what
is wrong with Cambridge'") are ready to rush in where fools
would fear to tread, and to answer with a prompt " No." It is easy, in these days of Jugendbewegungen (when Sir James, Barrie sings hymns to youth, which youth—not having his sense of humour—gravely takes au pied de la lettre), to bid a theoretical good-bye to discipline, Sparta, Rome and all such antiquities. Sparta had her kywyr) —but it is not for us ; Rome had her censor morum—but he is not for us
Winchester had a founder who said " Manners makyth man " —but what is William of Wykeham or his motto to us ? And yet one who has gone through these things in the passive and the active mood—who was drilled at school and college ; who has walked the streets proctorially, and tried to keep a college contented—can give no easy or ready answer to the problem, just because he has been plunged so deeply
into its difficulties. He can only feel sure of one thing—
that there is some wisdom in Aristotle ; and that when Aristotle said that there was a stage of " habituation," during which youth had to be drilled in habits by a social discipline, he said a " mouthful." And did not the great Goethe quote with some approval the saying of another Greek writer :—
6 µii (lapels dveporros ob raideverat-
" the man who has never been flayed is not getting an education " ?
One may think, in the abstract, of a University set in an old grey city or a green country town—the city of Oxford or the town of Cambridge—whose students are left free to go their own ways in the light of self-discipline. The thought is a dream, a chimaera bombinans in vacuo. In actual life the " authorities " of the city or town—the police, the magis- trates, the council—will look to some " authority " in the University, and expect that authority to be responsible, in some way, for the behaviour of laughing, ragging, irresponsible youth. Again and again the writer of these lines, being placed in some position of authority, has met that expectation, and has been compelled by a mastering sense of social obligation to do justice to its demands. After all, the young men cannot be left to skip like goats about the streets, or in theatres, or in cinemas, or in inns. Quite apart from the responsibility that age owes to youth (and we elders are responsible for helping our juniors to pause and reflect, even in the hey-day of youth, and among all the dancing bubble of the blood, about the canons of decent behaviour)—quite apart from that, there is a responsibility that a University, and the authorities of a University, owe to the civic community in which it and they are set. It is doubtful whether Universities do enough to meet the implications of this latter responsibility fairly and squarely. True, the Proctors go about the streets at night in our old Universities ; they are very solicitous about the " mint and cummin " of academic discipline : they fine the hapless youth who has forgotten, after curfew, to add a cap to his gown and wear full academic costume—or again, having done all that, has kept his pipe in his mouth. And no doubt there is some point in preserving a decency in externals, though the methods may well seem to an ordinary onlooker—and still more to a colonial student unused to such things—minute and meticulous. But there are graver things than these that are not done. Take the matter of motor-cars, for example. There are, it is true, some regulations about the matter. A freshman may not have a car ; a man of any year can only drive his car at a certain time and during certain hours. But should undergraduates, with their wild dashing ways of driving and their passion for speed, have cars at all—particularly in old places like Oxford and Cam- bridge, with their narrow winding streets, their corners, their crossings, their burden of domestic and civic traffic ? There is a good case for an answer in the negative, even if you are only thinking (and after all, that is the first con- sideration) of the rights of the civic community and the amenities it may fairly claim to enjoy. The case is strengthened when you think of other things—the death rate from accidents due to high-powered cars driven by undergraduates at high speed ; the distraction from studies which the car, with its range of roaming and its opportunities for new amusements, may involve ; the rise in the standard and cost of living which it brings ; the increased social differentiation which arises when one owns a car of one quality, another one of another, and a third no car at all. There are great American Universities where a car, like Toad-in-the-hole, non est inVentus. There seems to be no reason—if youput the matter merely on the ground of civic decencY—whY a car should be found in the possession of any undergraduate in an English University.
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Universities have not only a civic obligation. They have also a national duty. It is a national duty of Universities to admit that number of undergraduates (no less, but also no more, and especially no more) which will enable them to make their best contribution to the nation by making the best of therriselves. An over-crowded University is doing poor service to the nation. As it fills itself up, it pulls itself down. It admits students of perhaps dubious quality ; but, apart from that, it does itself harm by the mere fact of over-crowding- harm both in the intellectual and in the moral sphere. It harms itself intellectually, because it mechanizes its instruc- tion. When classes swell nearly to a hundred, and lectures to over a thousand (and this happens in one, at any rate, of the British Universities), there is something wrong. The moral harm may be no 'less serious. Crowds are vehicles of excitement ; and a crowded University is an excited University. The young are excitable enough per se : when the young are crowded together, at the University stage of life, the excite- ment may become a danger. Is it absurd to think of the risk of their running clean off the rails in a kind of wild, contagious herd-gaiety ? Do we not sometimes read of happenings which make that risk seem very real ? There is a degree of quiet and an amount of free space which are needed if " in their patience men shall possess their souls." An older man cannot but long—and long passionately—for the quieter University of his youth, with its quieter spaces and its elbow-room. He cannot but feel that there is a self-discipline that Universities should lay on themselves in this matter of size. It is true enough that, thousands knock at their doors for admission. But it is not clear that Universities do good to themselves or the nation if they open their doors too often, or too wide, to all this knocking.
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Our old English Universities are both Universities of Colleges. Something has been said of the University and its problems ; but what of the College ? A College is in its nature a family ; and like all families it has its discipline—a regular way of life which, for the sake of the servants as well as the members, has to follow regular hours.. The discipline of a family is made by father and mother ; and there seems to be no reason why the discipline of the College should not be made by master and tutor. The wise master and tutor, remembering that the members of their family are " of a larger growth," will do well to consult the leaders among the undergraduates about the rules of the family life ; and in the writer's experience such consultation is as natural and regular as it should be in any family. " Self-discipline " in a College would be like self-discipline in a family : it would be no discip- line at all--quod est impossibile. There is not too much discip- line in Colleges : perhaps there is too little. A little more discipline might mean a little less expense in the cost of the undergraduate's life. No parent, and but few undergraduates, would complain of that. After all, when we are given a definite pattern, we are generally all of us willing to cut our cloth according to it. Those who ought to give the pattern in Colleges are sometimes too shy of their own ability, and too dubious about the good sense of their own undergraduate's.
. ORION*, ,
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