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This chapter examines the institutional dynamics—that is, the organizational arrangements, cultural ideas, and practices in place at Eastern Elite University and Western Flagship University—to see how they affect student conservatism at both campuses. More specifically, it explores what conservative students say they find when they arrive on the Western Public and Eastern Elite campuses—and the degree to which students comment on their university's politics. The chapter first considers each university's reputation in the higher education sector and how a school's standing in the larger field of universities might influence students' perceptions of their experiences as conservatives in college. It then discusses extracurricular aspects of college life, focusing on the social and residential scene at each school, as well as academics. In particular, it analyzes how several aspects of scholastic life work on the two campuses and how they affect students' experiences as conservatives.

This chapter examines the college life and college sport participation of Jewish Americans in the U.S. prior to World War II. Jewish college students who participated in intercollegiate athletics played a special role in this college experience by serving a spectrum of contradictory interest. The accomplishments of these athletes gave hope to the Jewish people that it was possible for them achieve real success without abandoning or denying ethnic attachments.

Unlike music, drama never had an official position in the Oxford curriculum, as it was not considered to have a sufficiently philosophical dimension. But if it lacked a faculty it did not lack students. From the 1540s on, drama played an extensive, authorized, role both in college life and in the public life of Oxford. This role was sometimes recreational, sometimes ceremonial, and sometimes quasi-curricular. We know of two instances in which arts students were required to write a play in order to supplicate for their BA. Less trifling was the expenditure by the dean and chapter of Christ Church from 1554 onwards for the annual production of two comedies and two tragedies, one of each pair in Latin and the other in Greek, payments regularly recorded in the treasurer's accounts for the next sixty years. Similar allowances of college funds in support of plays, by order of the governing body, are recorded at Magdalen College in 1580 and St John's College in 1582.

This chapter considers the importance of Anglophilia to college life in the nineteenth century and to the academic mystique that it sustains. Why has intellectual and university culture historically assumed pretensions toward Britain? Where do the English accents come from? Figures such as George Ticknor, Edward T. Channing, James Russell Lowell, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow shaped a philosophy of intellectualism in America that patterns not only the content and pedagogic practices of higher education but also the daily routines and social pleasures of academic life.

This chapter provides an intersectional perspective on gendered racial-ethnic identities (a gender identity that is racialized and a racial-ethnic identity that is gendered), with a focus on experiences of intellectual invalidation. Black women were the most likely to report these alienating campus experiences, and many responded with identity-protection coping strategies that led them to disconnect from campus life or limit their engagement to activities that affirmed their gendered racial-ethnic identity. This chapter illustrates the benefits and costs of certain Black interviewees' conscious decisions to disconnect from general college life. One approach was blanket rejection, while another involved severely narrowing the range of spaces and people that incorporated into the college experience. A third and more extreme form of disconnecting highlights the role that counterspaces play in making the disconnection from college life sustainable.

This chapter details H. L. A. Hart's experiences as an Oxford scholar. Herbert Hart arrived at New College to take up his scholarship to read for the Literae Humaniores degree — a mixture of Greek, Latin, ancient history, and philosophy — in October 1926. Herbert was in many ways well-equipped for his entry into the social and educational hierarchy of Oxford. Though reserved in manner, he was vigorous in discussion. His extraordinary erudition and his familiarity with some of the most beautiful architectural sights of Europe gave him a conversational range and, at least on the surface, a social confidence unusual in someone of his age and background. Both the aesthetic and the intellectual environments which awaited him at New College were to shape his life in vivid and decisive ways.

This chapter examines the use of the Internet by young people to maintain social ties after they move from high school to college. It finds that when young adults move away from home to go to college, technology-mediated communication retards the natural decline in social relationships which young adults often experience as a result of the move. However, this effect varies by type of technology. Even though speaking by phone with a partner is a much stronger predictor of a close personal relationship than Internet-based communication, the latter is most likely to help young people maintain relationships. However, the chapter argues that this effect of communication on psychological closeness does not reflect intrinsic properties of the communication media but instead the marketing and regulatory decisions in the United States which lower the cost of Internet communications.

Atiya Fyzee’s travelogue provides a glimpse not only of grand public gatherings and prestigious social engagements, but also of the so-called everyday: a world that is routine and even mundane. A form of informal ethnography, Atiya’s travelogue contains accounts of food and cooking in Britain during the Edwardian period, along with gardening, the weather, religion, leisure, and travel. Atiya also wrote about the day-to-day realities of friendships, college life, and what it meant in practical terms to study at a women’s teacher training college of the period. She was particularly impressed by the English servants when compared to those back in her native India.

How does university life add depth and quality and also opportunity to professional research? This is the key question discussed in this chapter. In answering it, the pre-eminent work of Aaron Klug and his cross-fertilizing interactions with his colleagues in the Cambridge College Peterhouse are analysed. Klug, who won the Chemistry Nobel Prize outright, made many revolutionary discoveries in structural molecular biology, especially the determination of the structure of viruses. He also devised new techniques in electron microscopy that are now of great importance in present-day research in molecular biology. Klug’s indebtedness to colleagues of Peterhouse, including Kendrew and Perutz, and his early mentor at the Cavendish Laboratory Lawrence Bragg, as well as a brief account of the current research pursued by members of Peterhouse and the famous confrontation in 1952 between Erwin Chargaff and Crick and Watson are also described.