The First Hundred Years

The first class met in a borrowed room of the Madison Female Academy: 17 young men, and a mathematics professor recruited all the way from Princeton.

The students had arrived by stagecoach, farm wagon and shanks' mare. Board, reported the chancellor, "need not exceed 80-c- per week." They ate mostly bread and milk, an occasional fish from Lake Mendota, and, as a "rare treat," roast potatoes. A room in North Hall, the dormitory "on the hill," cost $5 a term; furniture "new from the store," another $8. Students had to draw and fetch their own water from the university well, chop down campus trees for firewood, and raid nearby farms for straw for their mattresses. Daily chapel was compulsory; so were six hours of daily attendance at lectures and recitations. There were few electives; Latin, Greek and mathematics were the solid meat & potatoes of the classical course, and upperclassmen were also fed on rhetoric and mental and moral philosophy.

Students found time to start a literary society, publish a magazine, and indulge in diversions that met with faculty approval: boating, fishing, wicket and quoits. It was considered "morally wrong" for students to spend much time over a chessboard, and some young wastrels had been known to patronize saloons, gaming houses and even the theater.

Such were the beginnings of the University of Wisconsin, 100 years ago. Last week Wisconsin's Historian Merle Curti concluded that today's students would have found little, to their liking "in the plain living, the simple amusements, the rigid and rigorous disciplines" that their school started with. But many a 19th Century student remembered his campus days as the time of his life. Naturalist John Muir, leaving Madison in 1863, had paused on a high hill to look back "with streaming eyes" at the Wisconsin campus "where I had spent so many hungry and happy and hopeful days."

One day last week, in a Quonset-hut reading room on the lower campus of the University of Wisconsin, every seat was taken. It was exam week. Girls in neat sweaters & skirts (the wartime sloppy-joe style was out), men in open shirts and dungarees were giving the books a last hard look.

Up on Bascom Hill, students emerging from a late class skidded and skated on the icy path, at first accidentally, then for fun. In Slichter Hall, the modern new men's dorm, a bunch of ex-G.I.s played an endless card game called Schafskopf. In the Rathskellar (see cut) of the $2,650,000 Memorial Union, one of the few places on any U.S. campus where 3.2 beer is sold, the jukebox blared Slow Boat to China. A waiter deftly scooped the head off three beers with one flick; a lone engineer, studying in a corner, made a quick calculation on his slide rule; and a tired-looking veteran's wife smacked her squalling youngster smartly on his bottom. Alumnus John Muir wouldn't have recognized the old place.

In Wisconsin's centennial year there are 18,623 students enrolled at Madison, from Edna Aaness to Norris Zvniecki, from 47 states and 57 countries. About one-fourth of them are girls.* The centennial's bumper crop had outgrown dormitories, boarding houses, and the fraternities and sororities on Langdon Street, spilling over into Army barracks, an ordnance works and three trailer camps. It now costs about $1,000 a year to go to college in Madison, for board, room and tuition, with not much left over for beer, dates and phonograph records.

More than half the students are being helped through school by the G.I. Bill of Rights, but the 745 ex-G.I. freshmen this fall were a new sort, who had never heard a gun fired in anger and had served mostly as occupation troops.

Uncertainties. Over in Sterling Hall, silver-haired little Professor Selig Perlman, 60, a top economist, is sorry to see the veterans on their way out. Says Perlman: "I liked the returned G.I.s very much; you could talk to them. They were rather fed up with particularism and intellectual isolation; they wanted to see the whole picture . . ."

Adds Classicist Walter R. Agard: "Their determination to get something out of Wisconsin has been positively painful . . . A much more solid, substantial crowd than after the first war. They went after their problems hard, and not too optimistically . . . Uncertainty is the nearest thing to a common banner. They'd like to be assured, and can't be. That's part of the disillusionment."

History Professor William Hesseltine files a minority report: "I was considerably happier over the generation of the '30s. These veterans have been harder workers--but except in technique, they're not as good. They don't have the quick, keen intellect or the inquiring disposition . . . The slogan of the '30s was 'Oh, yeah?' --a general, basic skepticism. This generation wants to believe something. It is looking for a quick and easy answer."

Convertibles v. Textbooks. Once it was considered hilarious when the engineers kidnaped the law president, and paraded him up & down State Street in a monkey cage stolen from Vilas Park Zoo. The returning G.I. generation had little heart and less time for such pranks; it hit the books with a sense of urgency, of "lost" years to make up. The G.I.s did well: they consistently studied harder, and averaged higher grades, than nonveterans.

Now there are signs of a letdown. In the Badger Tavern, an off-campus hangout, ex-G.I. Bob Miller remarked one night last week: "Some blame it on the talk about another war, some say we're just tired. Whatever it is, there seems to be more cutting of classes this year, more playing around, and less work." President Harold W. Stoke of Louisiana State University, who once taught at Wisconsin, returned there recently and observed: "If you take a freshman at college and give him a convertible and a textbook, you have an uneven contest."

Smooching, Etc. In the '30s, a popular Tin Pan Alley song once told the world what happens "when it's dark on Observatory Hill." It still gets dark there, but most of the sex at Madison since the war has been domesticated. One out of every five students is married (prewar: one in 21). In the G.I. generation, sex doesn't even seem to be a favorite bull-session topic.

Morris Rubin, an alumnus, sums up: "This bunch doesn't feel the compulsion to boast about its conquests the way my generation did. Iwo Jima was all the proof of their manhood anybody required." One well-informed coed says: "As far as smooching, et cetera are concerned, there is considerable smooching--but not much et cetera."

Fun for 80-c-. It is almost impossible not to have a good time at the University of Wisconsin. Without leaving the Union building, and with only 80-c- in his pocket, a student could take his pick last week of an art exhibit, a performance of Girl Crazy by the Wisconsin Players, a dance in soft-lighted Great Hall, a concert by the Marching Band, a community sing, a movie (Odd Man Out) or bowling. On Langdon Street, the Greeks were having their final white-tie-&-tails flings before Christmas vacation.

But if you ask ten Wisconsin students why they came to college, the odds are that nine of the centennial crop would reply, "To get a better job," or just "To get a job." When the G.I.s came back, the College of Engineering doubled in size. A new School of Commerce, set up in 1944, already has 1,235 students. Classes in philosophy are smaller than in 1940, though the university's enrollment has doubled in the same time.

Even the girls, who used to be the mainstay of the humanities, are going in more for home economics and the newer vocational majors (recreation, social work). Meg Rothermel, the 1948 Sweetheart of Sigma Chi, is planning to be a social worker. Dean of Women Louise Troxell finds girls much franker and surer about what they go to college for these days: "To get a job, and a husband, and very possibly both."

Prom King Politics. Plainly, Wisconsin 1948 is a transitional generation, half in and half over the G.I. era. "Politics" to many a Wisconsin student is once more coming to mean the election of Junior Prom King, instead of Harry Truman. Before the November elections, Bob LaFollette, 22-year-old grandson of "Old Bob," made speeches for MacArthur; there were about a dozen avowed campus Marxists, and even one Dixiecrat. A Daily Cardinal poll showed students about evenly split between Truman and Dewey; they were also vaguely internationalist, and convinced that Russia would have to be stopped. The Cardinal, though, seemed more exercised by such issues as racial discrimination at the University Boat House and whether or not Harry Stuhldreher should have been replaced as football coach.

Some campus worriers believe that when the G.I.s go, they will take with them the serious air that the campus has recently worn, leaving the field to the convertibles and the rah-rah life. Says Student David Weinick: "The jungle is closing in again." But against the encroaching jungle, if that was what it was, a surprising number of machetes were being wielded last week. Wisconsin was trying out on freshmen and sophomores a new culture survey program, with lectures on such "useless" subjects as the poetry of Lucretius.

Thanks to a $5,000 bequest from a onetime Wisconsin football coach, the campus may get a literary magazine again. And a faculty-student committee had got together to decide how best to beat a pathway back to the mind. Best suggestion so far: build a milk-bar meeting place for faculty and students on Bascom Hill--with no jukebox.

* An undergraduate of 1863 left an eyewitness report of the arrival of the first Wisconsin coeds: "They came like an army with banners, conquering and to conquer; they came with bewitching curls, and dimpled cheeks, and flowing robes, and all the panoply of feminine adornment; and worst of all, they came to stay."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.