第115章 Chapter 13 Survivals of the Non-Invidious Interest

In the school life of today， learned ritual is in a general way best at home in schools whose chief end is the cultivation of the "humanities". This correlation is shown， perhaps more neatly than anywhere else， in the life-history of the American colleges and universities of recent growth. There may be many exceptions from the rule， especially among those schools which have been founded by the typically reputable and ritualistic churches， and which， therefore， started on the conservative and classical plane or reached the classical position by a short-cut； but the general rule as regards the colleges founded in the newer American communities during the present century has been that so long as the constituency from which the colleges have drawn their pupils has been dominated by habits of industry and thrift， so long the reminiscences of the medicine-man have found but a scant and precarious acceptance in the scheme of college life. But so soon as wealth begins appreciably to accumulate in the community， and so soon as a given school begins to lean on a leisure-class constituency， there comes also a perceptibly increased insistence on scholastic ritual and on conformity to the ancient forms as regards vestments and social and scholastic solemnities. So， for instance， there has been an approximate coincidence between the growth of wealth among the constituency which supports any given college of the Middle West and the date of acceptance -- first into tolerance and then into imperative vogue -- of evening dress for men and of the d閏ollet？for women， as the scholarly vestments proper to occasions of learned solemnity or to the seasons of social amenity within the college circle. Apart from the mechanical difficulty of so large a task， it would scarcely be a difficult matter to trace this correlation. The like is true of the vogue of the cap and gown.

Cap and gown have been adopted as learned insignia by many colleges of this section within the last few years； and it is safe to say that this could scarcely have occurred at a much earlier date， or until there had grown up a leisure-class sentiment of sufficient volume in the community to support a strong movement of reversion towards an archaic view as to the legitimate end of education. This particular item of learned ritual， it may be noted， would not only commend itself to the leisure-class sense of the fitness of things， as appealing to the archaic propensity for spectacular effect and the predilection for antique symbolism； but it at the same time fits into the leisure-class scheme of life as involving a notable element of conspicuous waste. The precise date at which the reversion to cap and gown took place， as well as the fact that it affected so large a number of schools at about the same time， seems to have been due in some measure to a wave of atavistic sense of conformity and reputability that passed over the community at that period.