Beer and Circus Read Online Free

rich—except for a small number of clergymen’s sons and some young men hoping to join that profession. These latter students refused to participate in the fun and games of the collegiate subculture; moreover, unlike the collegians, they did not regard the minister teachers with hostility—quite the opposite, they considered them role models, and they emulated their seriousness. The ministers responded by paying special attention to this small group of students, rewarding some, upon graduation, with academic positions, and helping others acquire church pulpits. In this way, the ministers perpetuated themselves and their vocations. Similarly, in the nineteenth century, when colleges evolved into universities, and minister teachers gave
way to professional faculty members, these men and women also chose their successors—the minority of students with academic ambitions—and this tradition continues to this day.
    From the eighteenth century on, the collegians scorned their academically inclined classmates, regarding them with suspicion and as fair game for pranks and insults. One historian of American higher education terms the serious undergraduates the outsiders : on many campuses they were, and still are, outside the mainstream of student life—the collegiate subculture.
    Unlike the collegians who mainly exist in a world of immediate gratification, the outsiders practice deferred gratification. They accept the curriculum and the discipline imposed by the faculty because they believe that, after four years, they will enter graduate or professional school and have a professional, often an academic, career. As a result, they are the undergraduates who do all the reading assignments, who turn in their papers on time, who prepare for exams and perform excellently on them, and who attend the professor’s office hours.
    In the nineteenth century, the collegians called serious students, among other derogatory names, “grubs,” “polers,” “bootlicks,” and “toadies.” In the twentieth century, the jibes persisted, only the terms changed: “grinds,” “geeks,” “dweebs,” as well as expressions referencing the more overt sexuality of the age, “brown-noses,” “ass-lickers,” and “throats.” Academic students have always tried to ignore the insults, and have continued to raise their hands in class. Outside of class, the young academics sought one anothers’ company, often living together in on- and off-campus housing units. If a university contained a sizable number of serious students, they created their own subculture within the larger undergraduate world; however, if only a few attended the school, they usually became isolated and lonely.
    As Clark and Trow indicated, the academic subculture is “present on every college campus, although dominant on some and marginal on others.” Today, at some private colleges and universities, a large percentage of undergraduates belong to it; such institutions as the University of Chicago and Brandeis University send a large percentage of their students on to graduate and professional schools. However, at many public universities, academically inclined students constitute a single digit minority, and this translates into a very low percentage of the school’s graduates going on for advanced degrees.
    Some men and women who began their university careers within the academic ethos of a private institution end up teaching at Big-time U’s with
huge collegiate subcultures and small academic ones. As a result, these faculty members have minimal understanding of, and sympathy for, the majority of their undergraduate students. In addition, even those professors who attended public universities as undergraduates, because usually they belonged to the academic subculture and disliked the collegiate one, often exhibit an animus toward the collegians in their classrooms. They