Thank You, Sir—May I Have Another?

My undergraduate career is winding down, and as I look back I find a depressing lack of hijinks (or so my official story goes). This is perhaps for the best, because a) at my age such things would be unseemly; b) the rational, open-minded, well-intentioned nuns I encountered in 13 years of Catholic school could reappear at any moment. Fortunately, not everyone in Columbia’s past has been so dutiful/cowardly.

In the beginning, discipline under Samuel Johnson, the first president of King’s College, was apparently quite lax by contemporary standards, whatever that means. After 25-year-old Oxford alum Myles Cooper succeeded him in 1762, students were being stripped of their academic gown in front of the entire college and forced to kneel and beg forgiveness for stealing eight sheets of paper and a penknife. So some context, provided by David C. Humphrey’s From King’s College to Columbia, might be helpful.

Apart from obvious differences like the absence of minorities in any significant number and women completely, the most significant point of contrast between King’s College and Columbia College today is the disparity in students’ ages. With no standardized entrance requirements or any real admission screening, students entered as freshmen from 12 to 19 (mean: 14 and a half), if they could pay the tuition.

There were also “private pupils,” who lived off-campus and were not listed on the official rolls, but who still studied at the school, paying fees directly to the professors. In short, as Humphrey points out, there was more diversity than we might expect in what seems like a fairly homogeneous student body.

Sadly, the classes were not as enthralling and relevant as they are today, with a curriculum that consisted of two years of intensive Latin and Greek grammar, classical literature, logic, metaphysics, ethics, as well as math and science (both later dropped by Cooper). Somehow many of the wealthy teenage boys of King’s College found other ways to amuse themselves.

Popular study alternatives included drinking, playing cards, skipping mandatory prayer sessions, running off to the country, fishing, stealing tea cups, spitting in the cook’s face, “creating ‘Noise and Confusion,’” and challenging the president to a duel in the middle of class.

But the pièce de resistance was a rather vicious cartoon attacking a widely unpopular professor. Declaring that he is “tired of Euclid,” Professor “Patrick Pagan” pays a visit to “Miss Myng” (consult the OED or any British person). They get drunk on spruce beer and subsequently Miss Myng conceives, which she attributes to the spruce beer. The final scene features Patrick Pagan holding a sack with a pound sign—“Doctor, this is for you if you will make her abortive”—and concludes with Miss Myng in bed, moaning that the “pale face man has ruined me.”

Still, these sorts of things could happen anywhere—the King’s College metropolitan advantage did not really exist until the mid-1760s, when the neighborhood began to grow progressively seedier. The school was located at the corner of Murray and Church streets—more importantly, to enter it one had to pass “thro’ one of the streets where the most noted prostitutes live,” according to one well-informed visitor, who also estimated that roughly 500 “ladies of pleasure” operated in the surrounding area.

So it was perfectly reasonable for Myles Cooper to try to seal off the school with an eight-foot-high fence (“with Nails at the top”)—and station a man at the gate with a list of rules about when and when not to let students pass. Students were also forced to wear their academic gowns at all times to distinguish them from the townies and, in theory, shame them into obedience (often unsuccessfully).

All of these measures were imported from Oxford, as was the “Black Book,” a record of student infractions. Upon being appointed president, Cooper had promised to strengthen discipline—but all the crimes given above came from the Black Book.

Cooper was fighting an uphill battle, since in the late 18th century a bachelor’s degree was not exactly necessary to succeed in life—it was certainly not a prerequisite for a career or further professional training. Over 20 years, 101 of 209 students dropped out—roughly a quarter left to fight in the Revolutionary War, which shut down the school for eight years. After the war, Samuel Johnson’s son, William Samuel Johnson, became president and relaxed the strictures.

This is all more or less irrelevant today. But perhaps the King’s College records can teach us something: gather ye rosebuds while ye may, because eventually you’re going to have to sell out and become the thing you despise, in a nice Hegelian synthesis—the mastermind behind the cartoon later joined the faculty of King’s College and taught alongside the real Patrick Pagan.

Robert Ast is a student in the school of General Studies studying English and Comparative Literature. Columbia Babylon runs alternate Thursdays.