There was a time when Yale was called “democratic.” This did not mean, of course, that the students had any use for the “muckers” of the town of New Haven, but merely that all the students knew one another; they were all bound for the top, and all stood together. But the secret societies came in, and now Yale is just what Princeton is, a place where the sons of millionaires draw apart and live exclusive lives. These secret societies run not merely the student life, they run the institution, through the alumni who belonged to the societies when they were undergraduates, and are now getting their sons and their friends’ sons in, and doing everything to hold up the power of “Skull and Bones.”
For this new imitation piracy the young fellows begin their training long before they see the college; there are eight or ten fashionable preparatory schools, which also have their fraternities, so that the lads are intriguing and wire-pulling and imitating one another’s imbecilities before they get out of short trousers. It is a rigid caste system, a set of artificial ideals and standards—clothes, accent, athletic prestige, money-spending, all the arcana of snobbery. The older fellows are watching, criticizing, patronizing; you “make” the proper “frat” at your “prep” school, and then go to the great university, knowing that you are watched every moment by sharply critical eyes. For a year or two you bend every thought and effort to being just exactly what the great social leaders dictate; and then comes the day of anguish, when the “tapping” is done, and you are swept on to a lifetime of triumph, or cast down into everlasting humiliation.
The standards of these fashionable societies permit you to get drunk and to acquire your due share of venereal disease, but they do not permit you to wear the wrong color tie, or to use the wrong kind of slang, or to smoke the wrong tobacco. Needless to say, they permit no smallest trace of eccentricity in ideas, and here we have a mob sentiment which supplants all academic discipline. Fifteen or twenty years ago Alexander Irvine was pastor of a church at New Haven, and thrilled some students with visions of social reform. Jack London came in 1905, and gave his famous lecture, “Revolution,” and prominent society students sat up all night to wrangle with him. But the war has swept all this away, there is no longer any trace of liberalism at Yale that I could find. Instead, there is discipline and herd sentiment. “This is the way we do it at Yale,” and woe to the youngster who tries to do it differently!
