Adjustment operates, in the jargon of the day, on two levels: the intellectual and the personal. Intellectual adjustment begins as required courses for freshmen (and sometimes sophomores) who have commonly just escaped from a good many required courses in the secondary school. And these required courses are the products of the kindest thoughts and a considerable administrative skill. Their instructors are hand-picked and, being selected, brood conscientiously over Great Books, The Development of Western Man, Humanism, and other well-meant exercises supposed to replace the old, pernicious survey course in English literature or the history of Europe. Commonly, however, inspection shows that the new required courses are simply the old courses blown up out of all manageable size. I may call them processing courses; and like all processing, they are directed at the average, the medium, the median, or the mean, whatever one's statistical philosophy devises. The difficulty is that in these enormous surveys instruction, like the radius vector of the planets, sweeps over equal areas in equal times. Meanwhile those who are not average are bored.
But the precious ointment in our sight is not intellectual adjustment but personal adjustment, and this is a sacred cause—so sacred that we have invented a weird and unique hierarchy of secular priests to see that the student forever "adjusts." There is on the face of the civilized globe no other group like it. We have deans, tutors, counselors, vocational guides, counselors on marriage, alumni advisers, medical men, and psychiatrists. We have orientation week, campus week, the reading period, religious retreats, and summer camps. I am not prepared to argue down the validity of any one of these inventions taken singly; all I am prepared to say is that, taken as a whole, they befog the idea that higher education is an intellectual exercise. Higher education becomes adjustment. And what these well-meant therapeutic devices do is to postpone decision-making. The symbol of this refusal to face the fact that in life as in war there are final occasions is the make-up examination.
Under the old, free elective system, when a youth went off to college, he went off to a mysterious place where he had to learn the rules by himself or suffer the consequences of not knowing them. This situation, however naïve in terms of "adjustment," had one big advantage: he was at last Away From Home. Going to college was like Bar Mitzvah in Hebrew tradition: once past it, you not only entered upon man's estate, but, moreover, there was no return. You had cut the leading strings; and the fiction of the nineties that pictures the Yale undergraduate with his bulldog and his pipe was true to the facts. Today we do not cut the leading strings, we merely lengthen them. It is not true that an American lad cannot make a significant mistake as a young collegian, but it is true to say that an entire battery of adjusters is happily at work to see that his mistakes shall never, never harm him. Mistakes should not be harmless. Experience, said Oscar Wilde, is the name we give to our mistakes. Take away the mistakes, and what good is the experience?
(Howard Mumford Jones, "Undergraduates on Apron Strings," in Atlantic Essays, ed. Samuel N. Bogorad and Cary B. Graham [Boston: D. C. Heath and Company, 1958], 12-9, at 16-7 [essay first published in 1955])
Keith Burgess-Jackson, J.D., Ph.D. 