"Memories of Oberlin College," continued ...
Recently I attended an eightieth birthday party in Vermont for my freshman year roommate, and there met someone of that age who had gone to the University of Michigan, which in his day had some 10,000 students and today has 30,000 or more. He was astonished that many of those in the room had been close friends for six decades, having met first in an Oberlin dining hall. He had not, he told me, heard from a single classmate since his graduation.
“Oberlin is Peculiar in That Which is Good” was one of several aphorisms inscribed on the dining room lampshades of the old Oberlin Inn, the comfortable nineteenth-century predecessor of the unfortunate monstrosity that now occupies the corner of Main and East College streets. The origins of the aphorism are lost, but if most definitions have changed, this one is still essentially true. Nevertheless, if those who were students before World War II were to return today (as some still do), they would be astounded at the changes in the College they knew. What is more, if the students of today could somehow be transported back to that time nearly 70 years ago that I am describing, they would not believe their eyes. Nor, I am afraid, would they stay long.
The College of that time was simple, innocent, self-consciously virtuous, God-fearing, Midwestern, and very hard working. To say students were serious about their studies would be to understate the case. The level of work demanded by the star professors of the time was extraordinarily high. Men like Frederick B. Artz and Robert Fletcher in history, L. E. Cole in psychology, J. D. Lewis in political science, Warren Taylor and Andrew Bongiorno in English, and Loren Eiseley in sociology were regarded almost with adoration and occasionally with fear. After the war, a charismatic young history professor named Harvey Goldberg arrived and astonished his classes and much of the campus with incandescent lectures on European economic history. With the Cold War and the civil rights movement heating up, political liberalism and race relations began to dominate conversation, and Goldberg became a leading speaker at “Arch 7” mass meetings held after supper on the steps of the Memorial Arch to protest the latest iniquity in Washington, DC.
Before the war the College was quite small. There were scarcely more than 1,800 students in the whole place in 1942. It was customary to say a polite “good morning” to anyone you met walking across Tappan Square, even if you were not otherwise acquainted. A century earlier, President Finney had called it “God’s college,” and there wasn’t much doubt that it was, as was said in the catalog, “an avowedly Christian college.” Many students and faculty went to First Church (“Congregational”) on the corner every Sunday. Sometime in the early weeks of that first semester of 1942, the scholarly President Wilkins offered the noontime Finney Chapel session his own poetry, something about “Oberlin in October,” which included lines recalling “Sunday morning and a white surpliced choir.” Of course, there were students of other Protestant faiths and a few Jews, but no Roman Catholics that I knew of. Even after the war, Sunday noon dinner was always preceded by the singing of the Doxology and by the Lord’s Prayer. It was still, indeed, “God’s college.”
It was the tail end of the Depression, so most of us were not wealthy. The college fees, miniscule by today’s standards, were substantial to us. Tuition was $150 per term, board $120, and room $60. The job as editor of the Review paid $15 a week and was much sought after.
Board jobs, as they were called, were important. Squads of upperclassmen in white jackets were at every meal, carrying trays of food to the tables. There were jobs in the kitchen of every dining hall for dishwashers, pot and pan scrubbers, and waiters. Each women’s dorm employed shifts of young women “on bells,” meaning that they answered the single telephone in the house and signed young women in and out in the evening. The meaning was plain: the College demanded to know where its young women were at all times. The so-called “parietel rules” called for freshman women to be in the dorm by 8:30 p.m. on five nights of the week if they were not at Carnegie Library, with lights out at 10 p.m. At times some continued studying by flashlight in their closets. Saturday nights were the exception. Young women could stay out until midnight. On Saturdays, upperclass women could go with a date to Cleveland, 90 minutes away by bus, but their destinations, and their return, were recorded at the bell desk. A limited number of extensions to 1:40 a.m. were available for out-of-town activities. None of this applied to men, who even as freshmen were allowed to come and go as they pleased. Not that there was very far to go.
It may be useful here to describe college housing of those prewar years. It was, to say the least, minimal. With the exception of Talcott and Baldwin, women’s dormitories were mainly converted houses. Men had the MB and Noah Hall, a “colonial” structure built in the thirties, but Embassy and White House on North Professor Street led a series of college-owned houses that had once been private homes with rooms for as few as a half dozen men and as many as 20 or so. Just after the war, the College purchased some old temporary army barracks and erected something dubbed “the spider” on the so-called Men’s Campus across from Noah. Women’s houses of some size all came with housemothers, usually widowed ladies of unquestioned virtue and an iron determination to see that their charges behaved according to a lengthy catalog of rules. Essentially, these rules required the absence of men above the first floor at all times, except for the annual “open house,” when every room door had to remain wide open with the occupants required to keep both feet on the floor. One can only wonder what these inflexible ladies would have thought of the famous Life magazine cover of the 1960s featuring a “coed dorm” at Oberlin—but that, fortunately for them, lay far into the future.
The women’s houses generally had dining halls serving those who lived in the house and an equal number of men from houses and dormitories that did not offer dining. It is perhaps unbelievable, but in those innocent days we actually sang in the dining halls after dinner, songs like “A Bicycle Built for Two,” “By the Light of the Silvery Moon,” “For Me and My Gal,” and “Moonlight Bay.”