The night of November 12,
1840 was much like the preceding five November 12ths at the University of
Virginia: there was a riot. University of Virginia students liked to riot,
prized their “uprisings.” This riot was actually an annual celebration of an
1836 riot that the students regarded as a victory over university professors.
At
Virginia, students and professors lived directly next to each other, around the
central Lawn. Thomas Jefferson had designed buildings, landscape, and
curriculum to represent the apex of rationalism and enlightenment. The Lawn was
not fully enclosed but open at one end, facing out to the horizon—an
architectural manifestation of the creed of the unfettered reach of reason. Yet
Virginia’s students refused to get with Mr. Jefferson’s enlightened program.
Rather than proving young Southern gentlemen to be genteel aspirants to the
mantle of learning, they exemplified the worst aspects of tyrannical young
slave masters, accustomed to their whims being gratified and apt to be violent
when they were not. “They drank, gambled, rioted and vandalized property”—and
that while Jefferson was alive.
The November 12, 1840 riot was too much for John A. G. Davis, professor of law at Virginia since 1830, and he stalked outside to put an end to the nonsense. He saw at least two students wearing masks and firing guns. When he approached one of them, reaching out to unmask him, the student shot him in the belly. Davis died two days later. The student was tracked down by stunned and chastened classmates; later, he jumped bail and committed suicide.
II
The
university—in any recognizable form—is an invention of the Middle Ages, and therefore so is the university riot. Medieval riots were often more
akin to insurrections and uprisings, usually by students, sometimes even by the
“masters” of a university’s colleges, and directed, depending upon the group,
at either the ruling power of the university or the town in which the
university was located. The university in Bologna was founded by the collections
of students who grouped themselves vaguely by origin, called “nations” in
Bologna and other medieval universities. These student unions were created to
secure favorable legal and financial treatment from the government of the city
and to hire teachers to educate them. By creating this joint corporation,
students suddenly gained power. In the medieval university, threatening a riot
established a bargaining position.
Since
most student-run organizations are at best chaotic works in progress, numerous
groups of students tired of the Bologna experience and left for another city to
found their own university. Teachers grown tired of obeying the diktat of students also abandoned Bologna and founded
universities run by what they considered a more sophisticated management:
themselves.
Even
these teacher-led universities were marked by student uprisings and
occasionally by a faculty revolt. In 1209, a dispute between the masters
running the University of Oxford and the town government over the punishment of
students provoked the masters to pick up and leave town—some for Reading just
down the River Thames, others for Paris, and others eventually to East Anglia
to found the University of Cambridge. In 1229, a Fat Tuesday dispute between
students and citizens of Paris led to an Ash Wednesday riot so spectacular that
the university was subsequently shut for two years.
Violence was common in the medieval university. Rules at Oxford laid down that students should not have swords or longbows, indicating that, of course, many did. The different “nations” of each university were often literally at each other’s throats. Town-and-gown violence was common, but murder of fellow students seems to have been even more common.
III
Violence,
uprisings, and riots, then and now, are a manifestation of the shadow campus
that has always existed, below and behind the professional campus visible to
the professorial and professional eye. To that contented, benign gaze, the
modern campus consists of classrooms, offices, seminar rooms, libraries, and
perhaps a college center. To professors, the existence of dormitories, clubs,
video consoles, clubs, drugs, and fraternities is known, of course, and
accepted, in much the same way that we might accept the existence of Pluto. It
exists, but it is not so very important to what is really going on in the warm
and bright part of the solar system.
When
a professor notes that many of his students seem tired, he often does not
realize that it is because it is pledge week. Another professor, helping an
advisee keep a time diary, is stunned to discover how much time is spent
playing immersive online video games and binge-watching Netflix. As historian
and educator Mark Carnes observes in Minds on Fire (2014),
the shadow campus is focused upon play and competition. Play is not something
undergraduates often find in the classroom, unless they are the few and unusual
destined to become professional academics. Yet competition and challenge have
often been there in abundance. Given however that only about 50 percent of
undergraduates in the most recent National Survey of Student Engagement
self-report that they have been challenged by classwork, it is only inevitable
that undergraduates spend ever more time in play and competition in the shadow
campus than in the professional, visible campus.
Not
all parts of the shadow campus are as benign as a Netflix binge. The shadow
campus is most visible—becomes the official campus—when millions of Americans
watch the most visible representation of higher education: football and
basketball. This shadow campus becomes both visible and destructive when the
university wins, or loses, a championship, or a coach is fired, and suddenly
thousands of students appear from nowhere to burn cars and weep and curse. As
tourists pick their way gingerly between pools of vomit on a Sunday morning, as
one can do on High Street in Columbus, Ohio, or The Corner, near the University
of Virginia, they can smell the shadow campus, if not see it. In an age of
alumni payments to students, coaches securing prostitutes for players,
administrators resigning or going on trial, few can doubt the power of the
shadow campus or the depth of its darkest places.
As
Carnes shows, the shadow campus has always existed and, throughout its
existence, has assumed numerous guises in response to the stimulus of college
authorities. When Jefferson founded his university, the student organization
into which students could escape from the panoptic gaze of their professors was
the “Literary Society.” The College of New Jersey had two on the eve of the
Revolution, the Cliosophic and the Whig. These
societies served both as what their sobriquet indicated (some soon had larger
libraries than the colleges where they were located) and also as drinking
groups. When colleges began to lean upon or suppress literary societies, the
American fraternity emerged. Some places—among them the University of
Virginia—soon had both. Nineteenth-century Princeton added its own variation,
its quintessentially Princetonian eating clubs, which
soon became an evermore visible shadow campus that
existed apart from the professional and public campus.
Nearly every attempt, as Carnes demonstrates, to destroy the shadow campus has failed. When Woodrow Wilson tried to eliminate Princeton’s eating clubs, undergraduates and alumni so frustrated his plans he found it easier to be elected Governor of New Jersey. Attempts to end intercollegiate football have, since shortly after the sport began, encountered the unstoppable triumvirate of enthusiastic undergraduates, nostalgic alumni, and unsentimental gamblers. In the modern age, any member of the administrative nomenklatura who actually wants to do something about drinking on campus has to face not only the deeply engrained culture of the shadow campus, but also the combined marketing firepower of the American alcohol industry (in the 1980s Anheuser-Busch launched a forty-seven-city marketing campaign by distributing beer pong to fraternities and college bars) and the possibility of a spectacular riot (such as when Washington State banned on-campus drinking in 1998, resulting in a riot involving about five hundred students; a block party gone badly wrong at Kent State in 2012 had a thousand more protesters than the more famous protest at Kent State in 1970). A Dean of Students launching a sobriety initiative is bringing a knife to a gunfight. In the story of American higher education, it is the exceptions—such as the University of Chicago ending its football program in 1939—that prove the rule.
IV
Yet
the shadow campus has proven, over the centuries, to be an unintentional
incubator of reform. Alumni and professorial discontent has, not only in the Middle Ages, led to the creation of competing institutions;
Jefferson’s university was his alternative to his own alma mater, William and
Mary. Yet his utopian visions of a rational learning community proved to be
fanciful dreams. When a chastened student body at the University of Virginia
finally came to its senses, following the murder of Professor Davis, they and
the university’s overseers sought the consolations of evangelical religion.
This resulted in the 1845 hiring of William Holmes McGuffey, the strict
Calvinist author of the eponymous McGuffey Readers, as professor of moral
philosophy. Mr. Jefferson would not have been amused, but McGuffey seems to
have been a man of considerable presence, the kind of teacher who simply by
that presence (and that of just a few others) alter the course of an
institution. The future Confederate guerrilla Col. John Singleton Mosby had
been one of UVa’s failures, expelled for shooting a
town tough-guy in the neck in 1853 (violence did not exactly disappear at UVa after 1840). But when he was on the run from Federal
authorities after the end of the Civil War, having refused to surrender, the
atheist Mosby took the chance to ride into Charlottesville to visit with the
Reverend McGuffey. That is a fair indication of professorial charisma.
One
or two professors like McGuffey can change an institution, but they are rare.
The normal procedure has been, as in the Middle Ages or in Jefferson’s
Virginia, to found a new institution. The Revolutionary era in the South saw
the creation of numerous colleges, or if not colleges, than the academies that
were colleges in embryo, like Liberty Hall in Lexington, Virginia (now
Washington and Lee) and Hampden-Sydney Academy, soon to replace the last word
with “College.” Jefferson undoubtedly scorned their religious passions, but
they proved to be as creative and certainly more
reproducible than his own intellectual child.
Discontent
with the riotous state of higher education in the first half of the nineteenth
century led to a further burst of institution building. Given the troubles at
Jefferson’s university and other southern schools, it is surely no accident
that the 1830s and 40s saw the creation of both the Virginia Military Institute
and the South Carolina Military Academy. Like helpless parents before and
since, southerners in the 1830s seem to have thought that military discipline
might make men of their little demons.
Nor
were these problems and solutions limited to the South. Numerous New England
colleges were established to deal with what their founders saw as the rot in
established colleges. As Kenneth Nivison has shown
(2000, 283), Williams, Bowdoin, Middlebury, Waterville, and Amherst were
founded as answers to the problems and needs of the developing liberal society
of the United States. Their founders’ solution was to offer a classical liberal
education, which they saw as important not first for its intellectual content,
but for its ability to transform students’ characters.
This
transformation led to further rebellions, as students rejected what they were
taught and rebelled against the molds intended to form them. Yet other students
accepted and adapted, in the process creating a model of what it meant to be a
scholar and a gentleman—and should one not like the emphasis on gentlemen, one
could always found a co-educational Oberlin, or Olivet, or Knox, or Wheaton.
Whatever aspect they adopted—a transformed University of Virginia (complete with a new chapel); New England liberal arts colleges; Presbyterian academies; or coeducational colleges in the Midwest—all of these reform movements took the shadow campus seriously. Arguably, so did some of those research institutions founded in the late nineteenth century, if only by eliminating undergraduate education altogether.
V
Arguably,
today—even after generations of reform movements, and the hiring of numerous
staff and administrators to deal with its problems—the shadow campus remains as
visible and as destructive as ever. Sexual assault has seemingly become an ever
more serious problem. Binge drinking continues, and it is complemented by ever
more creatively-designed drugs. Some fraternities survive on campuses even when
they are known to endanger the lives of their members, usually propped up by
national networks and proud, slightly addled alumni. And intercollegiate sports
continue to dominate many NCAA member-school campuses. In fact, most of the
large college riots since 2000 have erupted over victories or losses by sports
teams or occasionally for no particular reason at all (viz., the blackout riot
at the University of Washington in 2010), rather than over racism, wars, or any
concern of conscience, as Boomer historians of the 1960s have noted with some
regret. At times, it seems that even professors might begin to take notice of
what is going on outside the classroom.
What
then—as Vladimir Lenin would have said were he a provost—is to be done?
Mark
Carnes suggests adapting new pedagogies that draw upon play. The creation of
new pedagogies that actually recognize the existence of the shadow campus is a
start, a very important one, but it is not sufficient. What is now needed is
what has always been done since the very beginning of the university: start a
new campus. Problems of one type of university model have always led to the
creation of new models, and nowhere has this crisis-driven creativity
flourished with greater vigor than in the United States. Only rarely have
universities been able to reform themselves completely without a great
incentive—like, say, the murder of a professor. But creating new types of
universities—building new colleges—has often proven easier than reforming an
existing institution. It is curious that despite many cyber-enthusiasms that
have so far turned out to be little more than vaporware, there have been few
well-funded or supported attempts to create new physical institutions that will
simultaneously address the pressing question of higher education’s costs and
the problems of the shadow campus. We have all the institutional and cultural
problems that have always created new models of higher education, and yet as
far as the eye can see across the landscape there are no great entrepreneurial
alternatives. If there was ever a moment when we needed those entrepreneurs,
and those reformers, that have been so seminal in past centuries, it is now. A
culture in great need awaits not only its McGuffeys but its Jeffersons.
Albert Louis Zambone is Visiting Assistant Professor of
History at Augustana College, Rock Island, Illinois.
Works
Cited
Bowman, Rex and Carlos Santos. Rot, Riot, and Rebellion: My Jefferson’s Struggle to Save the University that Changed America. Charlottesville, University of Virginia Press, 2013.
Carnes, Mark C. Minds on Fire: How Role-Immersion Games Transform College. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014.
Dabney, Virginius. Mr. Jefferson’s University: A History. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1981.
Nivison, Kenneth. Proving Grounds: New England
Colleges and the Emergence of Liberal America, 1790–1870. Unpublished
PhD dissertation, The Catholic University of America, 2000.