ABSTRACT
The history of American college life resembles the swinging of a pendulum in a wide arc. First there was the era of the church-dominated college with its unity of curriculum and extracurriculum, with its cohesive, self-contained life. Next came the changes characteristic of the years from 1865 to 1918, when there arose what one observer has called the “bifurcated college.” 1 In their own “students’ university,” undergraduates improvised a strenuous “college life” which was independent of, and frequently worked at cross-purposes to, the central intellectual concerns of American higher learning. The sideshows were now in a fair way of swallowing up the main tent. 2
