Tradition In College Life

Mark B. Ryan, Jonathan Edwards College, Yale University

Sometime in the in 1960s, the fellows of my residential college at Yale instituted a new prize for a graduating senior, one that recognised a category of accomplishment that had not been so honoured in the past. With no better title to pin on it, they called it, simply, the “New Prize.” But they couldn’t let such a title, with its naked reference to innovation, stand unadorned, with no homage to a worthy heritage. The prize description, still recited at graduation dinners, alluded to the founding of New College, Oxford, nearly 1600 years before—and expresses the hope that, 1600 years hence, this honour still will be known as the “New Prize.”

In their instinct to drape a new collegiate enterprise in the habiliments of tradition, the fellows were sustaining a modus operandi that had marked the Yale colleges from their inception. Contriving these new institutions in the late 1920s, the planners repaired to the British colleges, where academic traditions, maturing for centuries, had ripened to perfection. They returned with ideas, and nascent designs, for an array of accoutrements—college heraldry and dishware and colours and commemorative cups and scarves and more. For names, they looked not towards wealthy donors or recent luminaries, but towards outstanding leaders and thinkers from the university’s earliest days. The buildings that they constructed brought collegiate Georgian and gothic styles to high levels of elaboration, complete with gargoyles and finials and woodcarving, all finished by an army of craftsmen imported from Europe. They even intentionally patched leaded glass and artificially eroded steps, to lend the appearance of human use over centuries.  All was in service of creating, full blown, an ambience of tradition.

From our more cost-conscious or post-modernist perspective, many of these measures may appear excessive or artificial, as doubtless they were. But the educational instincts of those planners, I would argue, were sound. All those icons of tradition cultivate a sense of belonging. They help give solidity to the community, making one’s ties to it feel a shade more momentous, more lasting, more substantial and committed. Together with the rituals of communal life, the common celebrations great and small that mark the rhythms of the week or the year, they intensify the bonds that students feel with the institution and with one another. And those bonds serve an educational purpose.

Students, surely, have an instinctive knowledge of nexus between tradition and belonging, and they are constantly in the business of creating, spontaneously, rituals and “traditions” for the community. While the Yale planners may have gone to great expense to provide an aura of perpetuity, the basic human process of adhering to tradition is evident in any college community, and need not be costly. Any observer of college life knows that a moniker, a shibboleth, a chant, a practice, a ceremony, an observance, a mascot—a repeated convention of any sort, no matter how casually or tentatively adopted—can soon, in the short span of student memory, appear hoary and sacrosanct, as if it had been a defining element of community history for time immemorial. That capacity to generate “traditions” speaks to a deep need to intensify the ties of collegiate identity, and to strengthen the bonds among the college’s cohorts.

Insofar as rituals and traditions speak to those needs, and help to inspire a more cohesive and integrated community, they contribute to all the educational benefits that residential colleges offer; they help to foster learning. Participating in those traditions, students (and fellows) find shared experiences, and points of contact, that might further their relationships, potentially awakening interests and expanding horizons. And they may incorporate more of the community’s values and expectations; they are integrated further into collegiate life.

Studies of student performance have identified just such integration as a prominent factor in student retention.  The more socially integrated students feel themselves to be in a healthy collegiate life, the more they absorb its educational ethos: the more fully dedicated are they likely to be to its shared expectations of academic accomplishment and strivings for the common good. In the network of a college’s interrelationships, both among students and between students and administrators, a struggling student, too, is assured of a safety net: troubles and faltering will not pass unnoticed. The connection that both fellows and students have to institutional life increases the likelihood of meaningful mentoring. Above all, the intensified bonds among students stirs latent interests and talents, as they infect one another with their intellectual and creative enthusiasms. The educational value of that social intimacy among students—fostered by traditions—is as true today as it was when John Henry Newman articulated it over a century and a half ago: “the conversation of all is a series of lectures to each,” he wrote, “and they gain for themselves new ideas and view, fresh matter of thought, and distinct principles for judging and acting, day by day.”

Mark B. Ryan, Jonathan Edwards College, Yale University

July 2014