Beating Sense into Undergrads

By Josh Gelernter

Saturday, April 02, 2016

The infant undergrads of America hit another low last Monday when Emory students woke up and discovered that pro-Trump slogans had been written in chalk on some of the university’s sidewalks. According to the Emory student newspaper, about 40 Emorites responded to the chalking by assembling outside the university president’s office and demanding that he meet with them, because they were “in pain.” The paper quotes students saying the chalk slogans were “fear”-inducing; one said she didn’t “deserve to feel afraid at [her] school.”

Why do these kids need to be handled so very gently? According to one Emory undergrad, who echoes whining heard on campuses across the country, some students “are struggling academically because they are so focused on trying to have a safe community and focus on these issues” of student comfort.

What these kids need, besides a kick in the pants, is a look at university life in the good old days, when universities were just starting to revolutionize education and lay groundwork for the Enlightenment.

When you get right down to it, two men invented modern test-and-result science: Francis Bacon and William Harvey (who discovered blood circulation). They both got their start as undergrads at Cambridge in the late 16th century.

What was Cambridge like in the late 16th century? Not pleasant. Harvey, like all students too poor to afford private lodging, slept in a tiny attic room with three other students. The attic had a window, but the window had no glass, and the room had no fireplace. According to a 16th-century writer — quoted in Thomas Wright’s superb Harvey biography, A Life in Circulation — Cambridge students were known to “run up and down half an hour, to get heat in their feet,” before turning in at night.

At 4 in the morning, students were awakened by the college bell, which gave them time to dress and prepare themselves for chapel, which began at 5. Chapel was mandatory; missing morning prayers resulted in a fine of at least twopence (at a time when one penny was enough for a meal that four students could share).

After chapel, at 6:10, classes began. Like prayer, classes were mandatory, and missing one of your hour-long lectures would get you hit with another two-penny fine. With short breaks for lunch and dinner, classes continued — in unheated and badly ventilated rooms — until 7 in the evening, when students returned to chapel for evensong. After the evening prayers, studies resumed, until 9 or 10; then the students put a little heat in their feet, climbed into their attics, and managed five or six hours’ sleep before starting again at 4.

This was all rough on Harvey, who entered Cambridge at the tender age of 15. It was probably even rougher on Bacon, who started Cambridge at 12.

At 19, when Harvey was in medical school — at the University of Padua — he had to carry a sword because muggings were so common. And Padua muggings meant losing not only your money, but all your clothes. Studying in Padua also meant dealing with locals who weren’t crazy about living among loud and boisterous students from all over Europe. Occasionally the Paduans would riot and try to set the university on fire, while chanting, “Kill, kill, kill all the students!” There were daily gang fights and hourly duels; Harvey’s Padua looked very much like Romeo’s Verona.

A few months ago, we were treated to a video of a Yale student shrieking at the master of her college, who she felt was complicit in cultural appropriation. You can hear her ordering him to “be quiet,” and tearfully shouting that it was his job to make the students feel at home, that he “should not sleep at night” and was “disgusting.” In Harvey and Bacon’s day, failing to “give place” and doff your cap to a superior would get you a school-sanctioned beating.

Why did students — in Harvey and Bacon’s day — tolerate studying in spaces that were so manifestly unsafe? Because the invention of the university meant that kids whose parents couldn’t afford to have them tutored could get a tutor-quality education and learn Greek and Latin and Hebrew and science and art and music. Universities were expensive, but poor students like Harvey were frequently able to get scholarships; if they couldn’t, they could pay their way with menial, manual labor. Students made deep sacrifices because they realized that Cambridge — and Padua and Paris and Oxford and Leiden — were giving them the opportunity to learn in a few semesters what it had taken mankind thousands of years to discover. A university education meant leaving husbandry or shopkeeping and becoming a doctor or a lawyer or a diplomat — or in Harvey and Bacon’s cases, helping ignite the Enlightenment. The harshest and most miserable universities gave us a world renaissance, invented modern science, created the free market, and turned the West against slavery.

What’s the world going to get from an Emory student frightened of a Trump slogan? A talk show on MSNBC?