Think things were better in the olden days? Think again.

I've been reading The Autobiography of William Lyon Phelps (1939), and while it does have some sigh-worthy features (such as having colleges like Yale and Harvard call him up and, in effect, start a bidding war to have him come and teach there . . . when he was an instructor), it also has a few tidbits that should give one pause.* Here are some excerpts from 1891-2 and a few years later. A lot has changed--but then again, a lot hasn't:

"In the early Spring, obsessed by the work I was doing on my Doctor's thesis and by the fear that I should not finish it in time, I became afflicted with insomnia" (258). A faculty member tells him that he has already done enough to be worthy of a degree and that he can polish it up later, thus helping Phelps to avoid "a complete and prolonged breakdown."

In those days, Harvard had a composition requirement for freshman, sophomores, and some juniors in which a daily theme was required, which Phelps regarded as an unnecessary compulsory exercise: "The only men on the Harvard English Faculty who were excused from reading themes were Professor Child and Professor Kittredge. . . One day I met [Professor Child]in the Yard, and he asked me what I was doing; I replied, 'Reading themes.' He looked at me affectionately and said, 'Don't spoil your youth'" (274).

"During the entire academic year at Harvard, I read more than eight hundred themes every week; I read all day and a good part of the night. Once I was sick for two days, and a substitute read for me, because even one day's lapse made it impossible to keep up" (274).

"There is no doubt that in those days (1880-1900) popularity with the students was a serious handicap . . . [because] extreme popularity made the ruling powers feel that the candidate must have stooped to conquer. Professor Sumner used to say it was often easier for a man from another college to receive an appointment than for a man on the ground; 'the latter's faults we know, and all we know of the distant man is that he has faults, but as we do not know what they are, we forget their certain existence'" (287).

A few years later, at Yale, Phelps decides to teach "the first course in any university in the world confined wholly to contemporary fiction. I called the course Modern Novels." This "amazing addition to the curriculum" (298) inspired all kinds of ridicule in the newspapers, usually under the headline "THEY STUDY NOVELS."

"I well remember also [Professor Lounsbury's] saying to me over and over again, and always with emphasis, that it was ridiculous to judge the value of a college professor by what his students thought of him. They were not qualified to judge. It was only what other professors thought of him that should count; for they were his peers" (324).


*(You see how contagious Phelps's style is?)

College, Hollywood-style (pre-1950s)

As I was driving to work the other day, I started thinking about how professors' jobs and campus life generally were depicted in old Hollywood movies. Of course, there are more recent depictions: what about Ross from Friends, who held down a tenured position at NYU while having oodles of time to hang out at the coffee shop and got articles published without ever spending five minutes in writing them? The old ones, though, seemed to have a set of rules.

1. College professors are poor, if by poor you mean having a beautiful old Victorian mansion and a maid. See The Male Animal for an example of this. Of course, in 1940s and 1950s movies, characters often yearn to get rid of that spacious Victorian heap with its 10' ceilings and move into a 3-bedroom split-level in the suburbs. In these movies, expect to hear a lot of talk about poor faculty salaries, even as the maid serves tea, and expect to think to yourself, "I wish I were poor like that."
   
2. Football and other sports are the raison d'etre for a college. See Father Was a Fullback, etc. Sometimes pesky professors try to interfere with the big game by insisting that students do a little thing like pass an exam even in the face of the administration's and the trustees' insistence that beating State is much more important. Even the staid Mr. Belvedere gets into the act in Mr. Belvedere Goes to College, setting a high-jump record after he teaches sorority girls to behave like ladies. Night into Morning is the most realistic picture of all these. In that movie, Ray Milland is an English professor who actually spends some time grading blue books in between bouts of handling his personal life. He agonizes about giving an oral exam to a failing student who's needed for the big game but finally does so.
   
3. There is a place for women on campus. Indeed there is, and a woman on campus is there mainly to provide a disturbing element: distracting the quarterback of the football team (Campus Confessions), or, if she's older, to be a Wise Dean or an Easily Shocked Spinster Librarian (and yes, I know this is a stereotype, but these movies trade on stereotypes).
   
4. Faculty-student romances are common, and a good thing, too. It's a sorry heroine who can't get her professor to marry her, and a lot of professors are single heartthrobs (Van Johnson in Mother is a Freshman, Fredric March in The Wild Party) just to make this possible.


5. Administrators generally quiver like Jello at any hint of displeasure from the trustees. The Male Animal isn't as funny a movie as it thinks it is, especially in its mandatory drunk scenes, but there is a surprisingly effective plot thread: Henry Fonda insists on his right to read selections from the letters of Bartolomeo Vanzetti (of Sacco and Vanzetti) to his class even if he'll be fired as a communist sympathizer for doing so. Joan Crawford likewise stands up against censorship in Goodbye, My Fancy (pictured above), lambasting her former lover and weak-willed college president Robert Young with a few pithy quotations from Walt Whitman.

Have I missed any college cliches? Are there any new variations?
[Edited to add: Kiita has a good post on this with a lot more (and a lot more recent) films at chasing the red balloon: The thing to determine conclusively is whether you are in a comedy or a tragedy..]