“There was a sense of something skewed about the place,” Pulitzer winner Henry Allen ’63 writes about Hamilton in his 2017 book,
Where We Lived: Essays on Places
. Allen describes Hamilton as institutionally perpetuating “perhaps a feeling that we were being asked to live up to something that never existed.” While Allen and his contemporaries were told to live up to “an ordained ethos [of] . . . when Hamilton believed itself to be a tiny Oxford,” today’s Hamilton students care to know little about our institution’s own past, instead deeming it problematic and subsequently scrubbing the period, in its entirety, from the collective Continental memory. This purposeful institutional forgetfulness damages Hamilton — particularly the College’s capacity to produce intellectually-ambitious graduates.
Allen paints a picture of Hamilton that today’s students would find unrecognizable. Despite a few similarities (“amusements of freshman year included vomiting”), Allen’s late 1950s and early 1960s classmates revelled in all that contemporary Hamilton rebukes. “In our time, a persistent anti-Semitism limited the Jews in certain fraternities,” he writes, adding that “any black student was always in danger of being elected class president,” presumably as a joke. While some institutions and their local leaders may express yearning for a complete rejoinder to this period in Hamilton’s past, Allen’s memoir indicates that, largely speaking, Hamilton is now better than it once was, and that Hamilton will be better in twenty years than it is now. For example, while in Allen’s time, Hamilton’s adolescent boys mockingly bestowed the class presidency upon an unwitting black classmate they presumably disliked and refused to interact with, in our time, this position of power, among others, is now a genuine prize to be fought for and is often won, not at all in jest, by people of color. Although certain facets of Allen’s commentary remains prescient today (“There was little to do for social life except to walk down the hill and drink at the Village Tavern”), Hamilton is a fundamentally changed place, as Hamilton’s evolution from Allen’s time to ours is congruent with America’s bend towards progress.
With this bend, Hamilton is faced with a difficult task: determining which facets of the past to embrace and which to repudiate. Particularly in reference to academic rigor, there is no doubt that the College, in its search for future improvement, should look to this “problematic” period. And yet, the reality is that much of Hamilton’s supposed previous “greatness” — like that of America’s — is deeply intertwined with years of institutionalized discrimination.
“Our class continued the Hamilton custom of admitting only ten percent Jews and at most two or three African-Americans,” writes Preston Zucker ’60 in a reflection on Hamilton’s website. This, the College’s period of supposed greatness, often positively described by alumni who whitewash the ills of Hamilton’s already quite literally-white past, is one that perpetuated inequality and abuse, raising the question: what can we learn from our Continental foreathers?
While in Allen’s time, “The past ruled [Hamilton] as if by divine right,” our contemporary iteration of this divinity places primacy on modernism, imploring students and faculty to disregard much of the College’s institutional past, deeming its mere existence problematic. While Hamilton’s previous iteration is not one I nor many current students would wish to be somehow teleported into, there is a need for prudence — a need to carefully mine the soil of the past for seeds to plant in hopes of nurturing the present into future blossoming.
In its search for the means of future improvement, the College would be well-served by looking in its own past, reintroducing a program of increased academic rigor. “One night,” Allen writes, “I heard the chaplain, a fierce and glaring Scot, explain it this way: ‘Hamilton is everyone’s second choice.’” And yet, despite recognizing Hamilton’s second-choice status, Allen and his classmates “were helped by the fact that the first-rate part of Hamilton revealed itself instantly and totally to incoming Freshman — a curriculum that was an intellectual boot camp designed to show us we are as yet unable to write, read, think, or be worthy in any of the civilization we are were supposed to inherit.” At our current juncture, in which students immersed in Hamilton’s “I’m not a kid, but I’m also not an adult” liminal community often repudiate the past writ large, the need for a collective intellectual reexamination and willingness to address our own shortcomings — in addition those of the College — is increasingly prescient. And yet, rather than shoot the proverbial plane out of the sky to spite the “problematic” pilot (or even the incidentally-problematic third-row passenger, as is more often the case), sacrificing the innocent passengers, rendering their potential contributions null, Hamilton’s students, faculty, and administrators should apply increased nuance, delineating the clearly good from the clearly bad.
In his freshman year, Allen writes, “We were challenged. We responded. [. . . ]Something was at stake beyond today’s self-esteem and identity entitlements[ . . . ]Except for a few flunk-outs, the system produced confidence and competence and we were — and are — better for it.” In the midst of reforming Hamilton into a campus in which those across all identity groups feel as safe as humanly possible, there is room to reintroduce this type of academic tradition, in which the stakes are higher and unpreparedness and laziness are not tolerated, but rooted out and expunged early in one’s first year, potentially at the cost of one’s teenage feelings. If rendering Hamilton a “safe space” comes at the cost of inhibiting students’ ability to academically struggle as a means to craft themselves individuals worthy of civilizational inheritance, then what exactly are we doing here on the Hill?
“To Charles,” Allen inscribed in my copy of his book, “Please, please restore the English Department.” Rather than crack the requisite Village Tavern joke, as he does throughout his chapter discussing Hamilton, Allen’s handwritten note expresses an interest in semi-conservatively retaining the positive institutions of the past, rather than allowing the powers-that-be to fully replace them in the name of some some abstract definition of “progress.” For Hamilton’s future, administrators and students should follow Allen’s lead, picking out the contemporarily-meaningful and useful needle from amidst a deeply-problematic historical haystack. The potential goods of the past may not be exclusively academic, but the potential for increased rigor — an institutional improvement — is obvious.
“People on the American left have reason to be happy these days,” Noah Rothman writes in
Commentary
. “Boilerplate liberalism has become the soundtrack to daily American life. But they’re not happy; far from it.” Similarly, despite our campus’ own liberalism that certainly is leftward of “boilerplate”, there are liberal students and faculty who will be quick to deem Allen’s “civilization” — along with my admiration of rendering ourselves worthy of its guardianship — problematic, citing not only America’s history and continuation of prejudice against countless minority groups, but also the College’s own flaws. There are Continentals who readily apply this classification — which often fatalistically delegitimizes entire projects, schools of thought, or institutions based on slight incidents of bias — to Hamilton, as if the College itself, due to its past and continued struggles, is somehow not worthy of saving. Hamilton’s past is neither perfect nor wholly-corrupted; like many of us, the reality is somewhere in between.
In the coming years, Continentals in the student body, administration, and faculty will continue to face the monumental task of determining what baggage from our past we intend to bring along on our trip towards progress. I certainly hope we account for our institution’s commendable historical passengers before shooting the Hamiltonian plane out of the sky.
