Word: sociality
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Dates: during 1920-1929
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...would they be failures? In a previous article the writer stated that there are certain groups in Harvard College, among which is the one with the social complex. This group will support college dances either through a spirit of tradition or a desire to let the "girl back home" get a view of Harvard College glory. The Freshman Jubilees and the Junior Proms are indeed sorry specimens of Harvard glory...
...most important of these social obstacles arises from the initial necessity of an arbitrary allotment of students to form the various groups or "houses." It is the purpose of the Harvard authorities, probably a wise one, to make each "house" a cross-section in personnel of the college as a whole. Their selection of the men who are to live together will, therefore, cut across the grooves in which undergraduate social life naturally flows. This poses the question whether as a result there can be any real cohesion within the new groupings, without which, it is plain, they will fail...
What goal will such a grouping of students serve to approach? Any intelligently directed educational institution will, I believe, confess as its fundamental aim the encouragement of intellectual activity and the increase of intellectual power among its students. Its social structure should be planned or altered with this underlying intellectual purpose in mind. The House plan, as it is at present conceived, obviously will tend to throw students into contact with all types of their associates. It may even succeed in giving them a certain social breadth which they would not obtain under any other system; though here one well...
...still remains to be answered. It will patently no more foster an atmosphere of common intellectual effort than the present system, since the intent is to prevent any large concentration of men working on the same subjects. We must then assume that diversity of intellectual appreciation, like breadth of social experience, is the object of the House plan. In other words it is expected that an art student, a mathematician, a football player, and a CRIMSON editor will gather informally in the new Houses and each impart his special knowledge toward the common edification. The smallest experience of student gatherings...
...will be said that such a scheme would lead to specialization and narrowness. To a certain extent this objection is valid, though a wide variety of types, both social and intellectual, are certainly represented among the students who are following any broad field of knowledge. But it is difficult to see how active intellectual curiosity can be aroused among undergraduates, naturally tending toward diffusion of effort, without some specification, and consequently narrowing, of interest. Alan R. Sweezy...