Ins and Outs of Changing Campus Attitudes : ‘Grim Professionalism’ Prompts a Book on Students by History Professor at USC

When Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz was elected Tree Day Mistress at Wellesley in 1960--an honor equivalent to being crowned homecoming queen--she became an automatic insider on campus.

But within months after her ascendency she traded her preppy attire for black turtlenecks.

Horowitz, now a professor of history at USC, had bowed out of insider life to became an outsider, someone who cared more about finding herself than garnering titles.

Would Look Better

Given a choice between Tree Day Mistress and self-realization today, Horowitz fears that most of her students at USC would chose the title--it would look better on their resumes.

It’s this attitude of “grim professionalism” on campus--students’ single-minded devotion to getting good grades and good jobs--that has bothered the 45-year-old professor in recent years. To understand the changes in campus attitudes, Horowitz undertook an exhaustive historical search, thumbing back over 200 years of campus culture in the form of autobiographies, fiction, interviews and scholarly works.

Horowitz’s findings will appear in her book, “Campus Life: Undergraduate Cultures From the End of the Eighteenth Century to the Present,” to be released next month by Alfred A. Knopf.

Two Distinct Societies

Throughout history, Horowitz found, students have sorted themselves into mini-cultures. As early as the late 18th Century, there were two distinct societies on campus, the College Man and the Outsiders.

The College Man (and, beginning in the late 19th Century, College Woman), as Horowitz labels them, devalued intellectual achievement, felt themselves at war with the faculty, and believed it acceptable to cheat to get good grades. College Men revere frivolity and rowdiness and look at academics as a distasteful necessity.

This hedonistic tradition, which would later become the fraternity way of life, has its roots in long-ago student revolts against faculty tyranny. Horowitz reports that in 1800, College Men at Princeton shot pistols and rolled barrels filled with stones through the corridors of Nassau Hall to protest disciplinary actions against students.

In reaction against the College Man strain came the original Outsiders.

To the College Man, they were pious, fuddy-duddy “grinds” who lacked charm and seemed to be forever buried in a book. Where the College Men were jolly and comradely, the Outsiders were seen as grim, studious loners.

The Outsiders were the group Horowitz found liberally represented in autobiographies. She knew she was on to one whenever she read lines like: “I didn’t have time for college pranks,” “I was an immigrant and had to study hard,” or, “I cared so much about chemistry I couldn’t be bothered with college life.”

The first Outsiders were students preparing for the ministry. The next wave of Outsiders came from the ranks of the poor, immigrants, Jews and the earliest college women. They respected learning--they needed to learn to improve their lot. And they regarded professors as allies, not adversaries.

In the book, Horowitz quotes a writer, Willie Morris, who had an Outsider’s reaction to the College Man tradition he found at the University of Texas in the 1950s: “All of a sudden I got mad--probably the maddest I had ever been in my whole life--at homesickness, at blond majorettes, at gat-toothed Dallas girls, at fraternities, at twangy accents, at my own helpless condition. ‘I’m better than this sorry place,’ I said to myself.”

In the early 1900s a new strain of campus society emerged--the Rebels. Like the Outsiders, the Rebels wanted to learn, but they were not as docile as the obedient Outsiders. They constantly questioned the university’s means of imparting knowledge. And they demanded control of the school paper and school politics. During the ‘60s and early ‘70s, this group reigned on the campuses.

It was in the 1970s that the new generation of grade-grubbers evolved, according to Horowitz. She calls them the New Outsiders.

College days for the New Outsider may be marked by loneliness, stress-related ailments and even suicidal thoughts. “It’s really rough,” said Horowitz, who has a son, Ben, who is a sophomore in high school and a daughter, Sarah, in the third grade. Her husband, Daniel, teaches American history at Scripps College.

The New Outsider typically refuses to experiment for fear of losing his or her place on the highway to success. “These students enter college predetermining the track they’ll take and don’t let themselves get diverted by what matters to them,” Horowitz said.

Can’t Deviate

An example of such a student is the premed major who confided in Horowitz that she adores English literature and composes poetry between classes, but who said she can’t allow herself to deviate from her goals by studying English.

The values that come across clearly in “Campus Life” are Horowitz’s own. In her opinion, college is a place where you’re supposed to experience life. And if, in the excitement of that experience, your grades drop for a term, or if you take a temporary detour that leads nowhere--so what? That’s what this time is for.

“College did for me what I want it to do for others,” Horowitz said. “I think college students make a terrible mistake when they chose to limit themselves to a small world.”

Horowitz is unabashed about taking such an opinionated stance in a historical work. She comes out even more boldly against the College Man tradition, to the point of suggesting that fraternities should be abolished.

She argues that fraternities are “antithetical to learning” and that they tend to encourage drunkenness, violence and sexual assault.

The New Outsiders share some of the traits of the Fraternity tradition Horowitz so dislikes. They don’t really value learning. They may not be as arrogant or unruly as the College Men, and they’re less hostile to professors. But still Horowitz hopes the New Outsiders are just a passing phase.

What’s next, then?

Here and there on the campuses, a category of quiet rebels is beginning to appear, Horowitz said. Unlike the earlier rebels, they tend not to organize. They go their own ways, think their own thoughts, remain open to happenstance, and care about the intellectual life.

They may dress the same as the success-driven New Outsiders, but they answer to something beyond paychecks. They’d take personal revelation over the Tree Day Mistress crown any day.

Horowitz ends her book with an homage to these new rebels: “May their numbers and strength increase.”