The terrible fact is that the undergraduate in his effort to attain social unity has sacrificed the liberty of thought. It would be indelicate for a Harvard man, however generous, to condemn other colleges. Let Mr. Johnson speak for Yale: “It is ruled by the tyranny of the average, the democracy of a bourgeois commonplaceness.” And an undergraduate wrote in _The Yale Literary Magazine_ that “we are accounted for as one conglomeration of body first, head next, and last and least, soul. As one we go to chapel, as one our parental authorities would like to see us pastured at Commons, and as one we are educated.” For Princeton _The Nassau Lit_ writes this significant editorial: “It is not long before the freshman learns that a certain kind of thinking, too, is quite necessary here, and from that time on, until graduation, the same strong influence is at work, until the habit of _conforming_ has become a strongly ingrained second nature…. Four years of this … results in a certain fixity of ideas…. We are brought up under the sway of what seems to us a rather bourgeois conventionality.”
Apart from the fact that the term “bourgeois,” contradictory to the aristo-democratic ideal in essence, occurs in two of these statements, I do not think that they call for extended comment. These things, at least, no man has been able to say of Harvard; even to this day there remains a fierce, jealous, almost joyous tradition of intellectual freedom—in spite of all!
I say “in spite of all,” because I am now leaving the old Harvard and am about to record the deep conversion of recent years which says a prosperous and Philistine No to everything the old Harvard has said, and which is surrendering its spirit to the very forces against which the old Harvard made its arm strong and its heart of triple brass. I do not mean that Harvard will cease to be great; I do mean that it may cease to be Harvard. It is hard to deal with a phenomenon of this sort solely by means of actualities. I am describing the disintegration of a social background, the subsidence of one tone and the emergence, not yet complete, of another. But, yielding to the present insistence upon “facts,” I shall name a number of significant developments which indicate the nature of what I have called the changing temper at Harvard.