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All in the mix Race class and school choice Bridget Byrne
RACE, CLASS, AND CHOICE IN LATINO/A HIGHER EDUCATION
Pathways in the College-for-All Era
SARAH M. OVINK
Race, Class, and Choice in Latino/a Higher Education
Sarah M. Ovink
Race, Class, and Choice in Latino/a Higher Education
Pathways in the College-for-All Era
Sarah M. Ovink
Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University
Blacksburg, Virginia, USA
Portions of Chapters 1, 3, 4 and 5 are adapted from the forthcoming article, “‘In Today’s Society, It’s a Necessity’: Latino/a Postsecondary Plans in the College-for-All Era.” Social Currents, (2016). doi: 10.1177/2329496516663220.
Chapter 6 is adapted from “‘They Always Call Me an Investment’: Gendered Familism and Latino/a College Pathways.” Gender & Society 28, no. 2 (April 1, 2014): 265–88. doi:10.1177/0891243213508308.
Figure 7.1 is adapted with permission from the State Higher Education Executive Officers (SHEEO). These data were sourced from SHEEO’s State Higher Education Finance Fiscal Year 2013 Final Report, which can be found at www.sheeo.org.
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made.
This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature The registered company is Nature America Inc. New York
A CKNOWLEDGMENTS
The research that forms the basis of this book has benefited from a large circle of friends and supporters. Undertaking a project of this scope—eight years and counting—is impossible to do alone, so there are many to thank.
First, my deepest gratitude is to my respondents. These 50 young people gave me their time and energy in exchange for three movie tickets and a listening ear. Later, when the movie tickets ran out and all I could offer was the listening ear, most of those I could get a hold of still kept on talking. For eight years I have kept the stories of their dreams and aspirations at the forefront of my thoughts. I hope that this book does justice to the depth and breadth of all that they shared with me.
This project has been supported by a number of funders over the years. I gratefully acknowledge support from the UC Davis Consortium for Women and Research, the UC Davis Institute of Governmental Affairs, the UC Davis Department of Sociology, and two UC Davis and Humanities Graduate Research Awards. In 2008, I was awarded a National Science Foundation Dissertation Improvement Grant, which funded data collection for the first three waves of interviews, from 2008 to 2009, as well as transcription services for the 134 interviews collected during that time period. This research was also supported by a grant from the American Educational Research Association, which receives funds for its “AERA Grants Program” from the National Science Foundation under Grant DRL-0941014. Finally, the collection of 2012 fourth-wave interviews was supported by a Niles Research Grant from the College of Liberal Arts and Human Sciences at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University
(Virginia Tech). Opinions reflect those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the granting agencies.
Authors often observe that writing a book is a lonely endeavor, and indeed, I spent many hours alone at my desk, wrestling with data and concepts. However, I am lucky to have a supportive community of friends, colleagues, and family members who helped make this process both more joyful and less solitary. Thanks go first and foremost to my graduate advisor, Dina Okamoto, who was enthusiastic about this project from the very beginning. Without her positivity and support, it would never have gotten off the ground. The rest of my committee also contributed excellent advice and trenchant comments: Vicki Smith, Eric Grodsky, and Claude Fischer. My community at UC Davis sustained me through the hard work of data collection and analysis over the first three waves of data collection. These were the folks who read early drafts, talked things through on long car rides, helped with coding, offered advice and commiseration, made me take shopping breaks, shared ridiculously expensive conference hotel rooms, took me out for drinks, or just generally cheered me on: Melanie Jones Gast, Jane Le Skaife, Radha Kamir Richmond, Demetra Kalogrides, Kim Ebert, David Orzechowicz, Brian Veazey, Julie Siebens, Jesse Rude, Lina Mendez Benavidez, Cassie Hartzog, and Daniel Herda.
My Bay Area community sustained me through the ups and downs of early parenthood and graduate school. I will be forever grateful for the friendship of Kerry Abukhalaf, Amy Bradley, Amiee James, Amy Haines, Kay Worthington, Anna Roberts, Kerry Doherty, Corinna Guerrero, Kim Selders, and Andrea Cultrera. To my parents, Jennifer and Roger Ovink, and my sister, Katie Ovink: I cannot put in words how much your support has meant to me. From rental fix-ups to trailer comparison shopping; from dishwasher installation to inflatable bed provision; from affordable childcare to late-night frozen yogurt runs—you three really outdid yourselves. I am particularly privileged to have a sister like Katie in my life—without the six months of nearly free nannying that she provided while I recruited and completed the first wave of interviews, this project could not have been possible. Special thanks also to Karen and Tom Sindelar, my parentsin-law. I cannot forget one particular visit, when I was in the throes of analysis and sleep deprivation, and Karen held our sleeping baby for three straight hours while I frantically composed what would later become the bulk of the chapter now entitled “ ‘Getting It Over With’: Choosing a Four-Year College.” Karen, I still owe you for that one. Consuelo, te extraño mucho. Gracias para todo. Besos y abrazos a toda la familia.
In 2011 my family took an incredible leap, moving from Alameda, California, to Blacksburg, Virginia, where I accepted the position of assistant professor of sociology at Virginia Tech. I could not have asked for a better transition, or a warmer, more congenial place to begin my career. Many thanks to all of my colleagues and especially to department chair John Ryan, who has been generous with both advice and support. That support has included teaching leaves and a pre-tenure sabbatical semester, without which I would not have had the time or intellectual space to write this book. My colleagues and friends Petra Rivera-Rideau, Rachelle Brunn-Bevel, and Minjeong Kim have helped keep me accountable virtually, as co-organizers of our online writing group. They supported me through the final stages of completing this manuscript as we completed daily “check-ins” and made sure to show up for our writing. In-person colleagues David Brunsma, Claire Robbins, Danna Agmon, Christine Labuski, Nick Copeland, Petra Rivera-Rideau, and Katie Carmichael kept me company at “write-ins” held at fine coffee establishments all over Blacksburg. This manuscript also benefited from thoughtful chapter readthroughs and comments by Carson Byrd, Jenn Bondy, Melanie Jones Gast, David Brunsma, Barbara Ellen Smith, Rachelle Brunn-Bevel, and the anonymous peer reviews—I cannot thank you enough. Moira Killoran and the rest of the team at Academic Coaching & Writing pushed me to not just meet my goals, but to enjoy every step of the journey. Sarah Nathan, former education editor with Palgrave Macmillan, deserves credit for pushing me to develop a book proposal from a kernel of an idea we discussed back in 2013. I thank her for her persistence, and for the support I received from Mara Berkoff and the rest of the staff at Palgrave. I am grateful for excellent research assistance from Virginia Tech sociology graduate student Yun Ling Li, who created the figures that accompany Chapter 3 entitled “Limited Options: Choosing a Two-Year Transfer Pathway” and the conclusion. Last but not least, I received stellar advice on book writing and publishing from Annie Martin, Elizabeth Branch Dyson, Matthew Hughey, David Embrick, and David Cline. Beyond those who are named here, there are yet more who have helped, cheered, and shoved me along, in ways both big and small. It would take another book’s worth of pages to thank them all, so I trust that they know who they are and what they did, and that they know how grateful I am.
Finally, I cannot close without acknowledging the profound support of my husband and partner in all things, Eric Sindelar. Eric has been there for me since before the beginning, when a career as a sociologist seemed
like a fantastical pipe dream for this former seventh-grade teacher. Eric helped make it happen, shoring up my confidence when I needed it, providing a helpful sounding board, tactfully questioning my incomprehensible jargon, and, of course, providing emotional support throughout all our years together. Eric is also my partner in raising our two wonderful children, Kiely and Atticus. Kiely, who was a newborn when I began collecting these data, and who will be nine when this book is published, is always quick with a hug and the kind query, “How is your book going, Mommy?” Atticus, who was a newborn during my last term of graduate school, and who is now five, can be counted on for snuggles and welcome distractions—literally pulling me away from my computer—whenever they are most needed. These three comprise my most ambitious and sustaining lifelong project, and it is to them that this book is dedicated.
L IST OF F IGURES
Fig. 3.1 Respondent aspirations and enrollment over time
Fig. 3.2 California community college transfer velocity 2007–2013: Median and five sample colleges
Fig. 3.3 California community college transfer velocity 2007–2013: Gender differences and median across five sample colleges
55
59
59
Fig. 3.4 California community college transfer velocity 2007–2013: Median differences by financial aid received across all colleges 61
Fig. 3.5 California community college transfer velocity 2007–2013: Median differences by race/ethnicity across all colleges 61
Fig. 7.1 Public US Full-Time Enrollment (FTE) and Educational Appropriations per FTE: Fiscal 1988–2013
208
L IST OF T ABLES
Table 1.1 Sample demographics across five waves 2
Table 3.1 Wave 3 enrollment by institutional category 54
Table 6.1 Interview sample college enrollment numbers and percentages by gender at wave 3 162
CHAPTER 1
Introduction: Pathways in the Collegefor-All Era
This is a study of 50 Latino/a college aspirants who were high school seniors in San Francisco East Bay Area in the fall of 2007. They attended three different high schools: a total of 20 graduated from Valley City or Plain High, located in upper-middle-class Valley City; and 30 from Inland High in working-class Inland City, just a few miles away.1 They aspired to attend a variety of postsecondary institutions, including public two-year colleges, for-profit institutions, and public and private four-year colleges (see Table 1.1).
At first glance, it might appear unusual that all 50 of the mostly secondgeneration Latino/a youth who agreed to take part in the study aspired to attend college. But, as I will demonstrate, their attitudes and outlook are increasingly common to all high school students in the United States, regardless of family income, class status, gender, and race/ethnicity. In fact, in 2013, the Pew Hispanic Research Center reported that, for the first time, 69% of Hispanic high school students expected to attend college, surpassing whites (at 67%). How can such optimism coexist with some other, more familiar realities: the lagging US economy, stalled comprehensive immigration reform, rising college tuitions, and waning financial support in the form of need-based grants and loans from both universities and the federal government?
I planned to focus my research on individual decision-making; that is, how and why Latino/a students decide whether to attend college, and
S.M. Ovink, Race, Class, and Choice in Latino/a Higher Education, DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-51886-6_1
Table 1.1 Sample demographics across five waves
Wave 1 (2007–2008)
Wave 2 (2008)
Wave 3 (2008–2009) Wave 4 (2012)
5 (2015)
aTwo students, Blanca and Caden, are left out of the Wave 3 Initial College count. Though Blanca did take classes at Valley City College while a high school student, it is unclear whether she also enrolled there following high school. Caden did not enroll in any postsecondary classes until Wave 4.
how their pathways to college or the world of work varied. This line of inquiry led me to examine two interrelated questions: how do Latino/a students formulate and manage their educational and occupational aspirations? More specifically, how do college aspirants make sense of the varying, and sometimes conflicting, pressures of individual ambition and family and network influences to make decisions about college and career? Second, how and why do East Bay Latino/a college aspirants progressively revise their educational and occupational expectations? As I followed these 50 students over a two-year period, and, later, caught up with subsets of the original 50 in 2012 and 2015, it became clear that, though a pervasive “college-for-all” culture2 contributed heavily toward the ubiquity of their college plans, another set of factors made “college-for-all” an unfunded mandate for many of these low-income Latino/a students. What I came to realize is that the basic premise of my initial line of inquiry no longer made sense. That is, while previous research has focused on whether students go to college,3 my respondents assumed that everyone goes to college—the more relevant questions are where (community college or 4-year), when (right away or while working full-time), and how it will be paid for (parents, loans, or self-paid).
While on balance these changes represent positive development, we cannot ignore the still very relevant challenges facing Latino/a, lowincome and other underrepresented minority groups with college aspirations. In an era of increased economic insecurity, decreased funding for college counseling, and receding support for subsidized or low-cost college tuition, many of my respondents entered a kind of limbo of part-time employment and part-time college attendance that promised to stretch out over many more than the expected four years of commitment to college enrollment. “Going” to college, for these students, could be measured on a sliding scale. At one end of the scale were students attending one or two classes per semester at community colleges; at the other, the few respondents who managed to fulfill the “classic” college ambition of moving away from home, living in a dorm, and attending classes fulltime. College enrollees at the bottom of the scale could not be said to be foregoing college, but many of them expressed dissatisfaction with their stop-and-start progress, which did not seem to be delivering the path to mobility they expected that “going” to college would illuminate.
STALLED AMBITIONS
Dorota might seem at first to be an unusually determined young woman, but in many ways she was typical of the mostly working-class Latino/a students I interviewed. She had decent but not outstanding grades, with a self-reported GPA of 2.9 at high school graduation. She aspired to become a pilot, possibly to join the military, and later, to become a political writer. While attending California State University – East Bay (CSU East Bay), she had an 80-hour per week job at a cellular phone provider, while keeping up with a variety of friends and a steady boyfriend. When I asked, bemused at her list of commitments, if she ever slept, she responded crisply, “Of course I sleep. I come home and I nap. I do sleep.”
Always poised and punctual at the Starbucks where we met for each of her three interviews, Dorota made her points emphatically, often tapping on the table for effect—in sum, she projected an air of efficiency, certainty, and businesslike self-possession. For nearly 30 minutes following our first interview, she peppered me with questions about the University of California – Davis, where I was then a graduate student, and affirmed that she would definitely accept my offer of college counseling (offered to all students as a benefit of participating in the study). And yet, in the end, she decided to attend CSU East Bay, a lower-ranked California public four-year
college located close to her home. She did not take up my offer of college counseling. Moreover, according to Dorota, her SAT scores, which were high enough to exempt her from taking CSU’s placement exams, were not forwarded to CSU East Bay as expected. As a consequence, she missed the fall placement exams, and the university required her to enroll in remedial classes in math and English. CSU’s remedial courses do not count for credits toward graduation. She was disdainful of peers in her remedial English class, many of whom skipped classes and did not seem to put forth much effort when they did attend. These classes bored her, and she herself stopped putting forth much effort, telling me, “I’m in a classroom with dumb people and for some reason I can’t push myself to do the work. I don’t know why. I just, I get so lazy, [telling myself] ‘Oh well, it’s so easy, I’ll do it later.’” I asked if she had met with a college counselor, and she reported that in her required General Education class for first-years, the instructor had helped her sign up for a major in film, an interest she had not previously emphasized. At the end of her third interview, when I asked Dorota how she felt about her progress, she told me, “I feel like I messed up … I need to start doing my work. My English class is really annoying me and it’s remedial and I can’t believe that I didn’t turn in my essays … It’s just, oh my God. I can’t push myself to do my work. I just can’t do it.” In effect, Dorota’s progress seemed stalled out, arrested by inertia and lacking institutional guidance that might have jump-started her former ambitions.
THE GROWING PRESENCE OF LATINO/AS IN HIGHER EDUCATION
Unfortunately, as I hinted before, Dorota’s story is quite typical of the students I interviewed. Gaps between black and white students in achievement and attainment continue to receive a great deal of attention in both media coverage and academic research. The postsecondary pathways of Latinos/as have received comparatively less notice, despite the group’s status as the largest minority group in the United States, with among the lowest levels of educational achievement and attainment. Latino/a high school dropout rates are worse than those of blacks or whites (15% versus 12% and 8.2%, respectively), meaning a larger percentage of Latino/a students are left out of the college pipeline altogether. Nationwide, the number of Latino/a students enrolling in college is at an all-time high, but these buoyant reports can mask the reality that as of October 2011,
just 56% of Latino/a college students were enrolled in four-year institutions (versus 72% of white college students), meaning that the balance of Latino/a enrollees were attending two-year community colleges and other postsecondary institutions that do not grant a BA degree.4
Latino/a youth represent a growing share of K–12 students in US public schools, as well as a rapidly increasing proportion of college enrollees. In 2012, the National Center for Educational Statistics (NCES) reported that Latino/a youth made up nearly one-quarter (24%) of all public school enrollees, up from about one-fifth (18%) in 2002. NCES projects that their enrollment share will increase to nearly 30% in 2024.5 On the whole, Latino/a youth are part of the largest and fastest-growing minority group in US society; thus, our destiny as a nation is increasingly bound up in their successful transition to adulthood. Given the strong societal emphasis placed on higher education as the best pathway to stable jobs and fulfilling careers, it is imperative that we assess the processes and mechanisms that influence Latino/a college pathways in order to eliminate remaining gaps.
One factor that dampens Latino/a college pathways in a context of growing costs is the higher levels of poverty and significantly lower levels of parental educational attainment as compared with other groups.6 Higher rates of poverty also partially explain another pipeline bottleneck: because school funding structures in the United States largely depend on property taxes and Latinos/as are more likely to live in low-income neighborhoods, Latino/a college aspirants have a greater propensity to attend underresourced and low-performing schools.7 Schools and school personnel can be highly influential in the development of college aspirations and expectations. Positive school experiences can help set students on a path to success.8 Negative schooling experiences, such as lack of respect and student engagement,9 poor organizational practices,10 and discriminatory treatment of minority groups,11 may “turn off” vulnerable Latino/a students and depress their college aspirations and expectations. Another factor that may negatively affect Latino/a college pathways is the phenomenon known as “undermatching.” Students undermatch when they enroll in an institution they are “overqualified” for, typically as measured by grades and test scores. Recent research by Awilda Rodriguez suggests that even when Latino/a students apply to selective institutions, they are less likely to actually enroll when accepted than are similar white students.12 Rodriguez’s work suggests that having enough college information and resources to apply to college is not enough to overcome enrollment gaps
between Latino/a students and their typically more-advantaged, white peers. Latino/a students may still lack needed resources to make enrollment a reality, including being able to “actually envision themselves” attending a selective college.13
Among students of Latino/a descent, recent immigration flows and the subsequent racialization process that Latinos/as undergo are consequential for students’ college pathways. Racialized structures construct Latino/a youth as a category with some fluidity, but as racially, linguistically, and culturally distinct from black, white, and Asian Americans. As Latino/a youth make their way in the world, they must also contend with what it is to be Latino/a in the US context, which is to say, they must confront the often negative constructions and expectations of majority whites of themselves as members of a “problem” group. Tomás Jiménez14 argues that ongoing replenishment of the Latino/a immigrant population affects both intergroup and intragroup relations. Media and political controversy over continual flows of immigration from Mexico and Central America helps maintain the salience of race and ethnicity in the lives of Latino/a students, which obstructs their ability to follow the assimilation patterns of earlier generations of European immigrants. Resentment from “native” whites due to assumptions of undocumented status among Latinos/as further fuels intergroup conflict. Immigrant replenishment also raises intragroup questions of ethnic authenticity, taste, and styles that affect Latino/a students’ ethnic identification, reference group, and educational choices. In sum, Latino/a students’ educational decisions are likely influenced by both intergroup hostility from “native” whites and intragroup challenges to maintain or discard ethnic ties.
On the other hand, as many immigrants came to the United States because of the opportunity to provide high-quality education for their children, immigrant families may be particularly interested in supporting children’s college plans. Latino/a college aspirants report being bolstered by immigrant parents who are exceptionally motivated to provide their children with educational opportunity, yet who themselves provide a negative example of the earnings and lifestyle afforded by low levels of educational attainment—an example that is not as readily provided for white, middle-class college-goers. Whereas college-going is often thought of as an individualistic decision, among Latino/a populations the will and desires of family may hold greater sway. Familism, or a pattern of behavior or belief in which family and group concerns take precedence over the individual, may be especially influential for college decision-making
among Latinos/as and other groups with a recent history of immigration. A family-centric outlook may push Latinos/as to attempt college, but such family fealty may also limit their college choices to those physically close to the family network.15
In the California context, a lack of information and financial resources leads many Latino/a students—who, as previous research has shown, are disproportionately likely to have grown up in low-income homes and to attend underresourced schools—to prefer community colleges that often fail to provide an adequate pathway to college attainment. The California college system is made up of three tiers. Top-tier University of California campuses (UCs), of which there are nine, are doctoral-level research universities, some of which rank among the best in the nation. Mid-tier California State Universities (CSUs) are comprehensive, teaching-focused, BA-granting institutions with some master’s but very few doctoral programs. Both the UC and CSU systems have dramatically increased tuition in recent years in an era of waning monetary support for public higher education in California. When I began my study in 2007, the annual tuition at UC Berkeley was $8383, and the annual tuition at CSU East Bay cost $2772.16 By the fourth follow-up, in 2012, the year most respondents expected to be completing their BA degrees, costs had risen to $14,985.50 and $5472, respectively.17 As of this writing, university officials expect current rates to remain the same through 2016–2017, making six years in a row without tuition increases, after which costs are expected to rise once again.18 California’s community colleges (CCs) encompass a wide network of institutions that grant AA degrees, as well as provide a growing transfer pathway for BA hopefuls. CCs are widely known as cheap—just $20 per credit at the time I was interviewing East Bay Area Latinos/as. With UCs and even CSUs out of reach financially for many of my respondents, CCs looked like an attractive alternative to “get some credits out of the way” cheaply and, they hoped, quickly.
The financial aid system for California’s public college system is generous as compared with what is available in most other states. However, a number of factors kept many of my respondents from taking advantage of these benefits. A majority of respondents, despite coming from low-income families, reported that they were “ineligible” for both the state-based “Cal Grants” college aid program and federal financial aid. The income ceilings for Cal Grant B, which provides stipends as well as college expenses for very low-income students, might be hard to qualify for in the high-cost San Francisco Bay Area: $40,200 for a family of four
in 2008. However, the income ceilings were fairly generous for Cal Grant A: $76,400 for a family of four in 2008. I suspected, though could not always confirm, that in many cases, respondents had not filled out the forms correctly, or on time. A number of respondents stated that they “missed” the FAFSA deadline, and having filed a FAFSA—no small feat of paperwork itself—is a requirement for Cal Grants. Respondents reported that filling out financial aid forms was difficult and time-consuming, and many had trouble getting help from their parents due to limited parental English skills and lack of knowledge about financial matters. For the undocumented and non-citizen students in my sample, state-based financial aid was not yet available at the time of our interviews.19
Thus, the climate in which Latino/a college aspirants were making college decisions in 2007–2008 was, to say the least, troubled. My respondents faced a college choice set limited by a number of factors. Financial resources and family desires were comparatively well known and anticipated, but this population of college aspirants was also more susceptible to having their hopes derailed by unanticipated disasters: deportation of close family members, parents’ unstable employment or job losses, unplanned parenthood coupled with low-income status or lack of health care, and institutional indifference or neglect.
OVERVIEW OF THE ARGUMENT
I offer a detailed empirical demonstration of college choice processes among a population that, while strongly college-oriented, faces significant constraints due to both resource deficiencies and racialized status. All of my respondents identified as Latino/a, making them members of a group that is historically underrepresented among college-goers. Most—40 out of 50—were additionally categorized as low-income, and in many cases, firstgeneration college enrollees. Conventional models of the college attainment process typically fail to explain the trajectories of low-income, underrepresented minority students who are not “expected” to attempt college, yet pursue a university degree anyway. A recent study by sociologists Jennie Brand and Yu Xie suggests that students who are “least likely” to enroll in college—based on income, parental education, and other factors—actually benefit most from college attendance.20 Perhaps, for students well-schooled in the “college-for-all” ethos, the knowledge that a college degree is essential to establishing a stable, remunerative career convinces even “least-likely,” low-income and Latino/a students to enroll in postsecondary institutions.
In essence, the “college-for-all” environment has created what I term an optimistic rationalism among college-aspiring youth, such that the well-known economic incentives to attempting a college degree, coupled with, for my respondents, readily available low-cost community colleges, erase “decision-making” about whether to attend college entirely. This concept borrows from the Greek philosophical tradition of rationalism, which received “an optimistic reformulation” during the Enlightenment period of the eighteenth century.21 In the classical conception, the optimistic rationalist tended to “believe that the world is orderly and comprehensible and that there are elements in that order which have been fashioned for the good of man.”22
Respondents’ optimistic rationalism was based on reasonable assumptions about the necessity of college in attaining a middle-class, professional career. However, the rational choice to attend college was undertaken with an exuberantly optimistic anticipation of the ease with which they would be able to navigate the college pathway and claim the dual rewards of social and economic mobility. This “big picture” approach provided plenty of evidence to conclude that college was the “right” choice—that is, the rational pathway to a stable career—yet respondents glossed over the importance of structural, financial, and family supports to ensure success in the college endeavor, relying on widely shared societal messages idealizing individual drive and ambition as the main factors predicting success.
It is important to note that this individualistic outlook is widely shared up and down the economic scale. As previous research has argued, Americans are reluctant to recognize the importance of family income, wealth, and social connections to life chances.23 Wealthy youth can espouse the same sentiments about the importance of individual hard work and ambition, while relying on family, networks, and financial supports to help them get back on their feet should plans go awry. When things did not go as planned for these mostly low-income Latino/a respondents, they seldom had these kinds of supports, yet often blamed themselves for not working hard enough. Nearly all respondents reported being aware Latinos/as as a group were less likely to enroll in, or successfully complete, college; however, they were overwhelmingly optimistic about their individual chances of success. Thus, college choices based on optimistic rationalism created long and winding college pathways among many East Bay Area Latino/a college aspirants that led to feelings of disenchantment, self-doubt, and internalized disappointment. In contrast with previous literature that
describes the college pathway as similar to walking the “edge of a knife,” teetering on the edge of going or foregoing,24 East Bay Area Latinos/as’ pathways more closely resembled a never-ending obstacle course.
Universal college attendance, as we might anticipate, did not result in universal college success for these East Bay Area Latinos/as. Real differences existed between respondents and their middle- and upper-income peers in terms of their individual preparation for college, knowledge about navigating college institutions, and financial and material resources. Furthermore, significant differences exist among colleges themselves, even those that appear to offer similar amenities, majors, and degree programs. Though only a few of my respondents were aware of this fact, the available evidence shows that community colleges differ widely in their rates of successful transfers to four-year colleges, and most public two- and fouryear colleges leave it up to students to request and obtain counseling that might help them to choose high-quality classes and a purposeful course of study. Finally, variance in the make-up of the student body also affected Latino/a college enrollees’ sense of belonging and satisfaction with their college experience. Enrollees at Chabot College and California State University, East Bay reported that “everyone here is Latino/a” while the few in the sample who enrolled in top-tier University of California campuses reported the opposite, and sometimes felt marginalized or unwelcome as a result.
Myriad articles and books have considered the influences of college aspirations, or hopes, as well as expectations—what students realistically expect to achieve—on college outcomes. However, much previous work focuses on the status attainment framework, which links occupational attainment to family socioeconomic status (SES), educational attainment, and youths’ socialization process to describe the reproduction of class status across generations.25 The model, while intuitive and useful, nevertheless fails to adequately explain the trajectories of those who flout its expectations, and in particular, what drives college-attending, low-SES minorities who are not otherwise “expected” to attend college.26 In addition, most research that examines the educational pathways of Latino/a youth focuses on what Latino/a youth lack, or how they compare unfavorably to other groups27
In contrast, the aim of this book is to examine the social forces that contributed to near-universal college attendance among these 50 mostly low-income Latino/a college aspirants, all of whom graduated from fairly typical public high schools in a hybrid urban/suburban region within the
greater San Francisco Bay Area. The attempt to attain social and economic mobility can be framed as the struggle to acquire or deploy resources required to achieve mobility amid constraints. In the context of leveraging higher education to achieve mobility among low-income college aspirants, some constraints are well known and anticipated: the financial costs of college, the challenge of university coursework, the difficulty of combining paid work and study. Other constraints may not be anticipated: feelings of alienation and inadequacy, lack of institutional support and scaffolding, and skepticism or hostility from peers and family members. Resources, including financial, familial, and social/emotional, may not be up to the task of surmounting daunting constraints, or may not hold the value expected of them. Moreover, in the context of the end of the economic “bubble” of the early 2000s and the Great Recession that began in 2008, it became clear that, for many, tremendous resources were necessary simply to maintain the status quo in a high-cost region of the country where food, housing, and transportation costs easily outpaced workingclass earnings. In this environment, it is no wonder that the lure of higher education became even more attractive, given the well-known correlation between a college education and social and economic mobility. Many of my respondents cited recent articles making precisely these links, shared by well-meaning high school teachers hoping to strengthen their students’ resolve to enroll in college.
These circumstances contributed to respondents’ optimistic rationalism, guiding them to either ignore or gloss over constraints while focusing intently on anticipated future rewards. Their optimism was at times deliberately exuberant; some respondents told me they knew about, but “didn’t want to think about” potential constraints. Other times, their optimism rested on a lack of precise information, trusting that an intent focus on the overall goal of “going” to college would pull them through the rough spots. When respondents chose college classes that did not seem to match their ultimate career objectives, and yet framed their enrollment in, for example, a jogging class, as proof that they were “moving forward” with their education, their optimism overrode their otherwise broadly shared sense of the rational practicality of college attendance. The desire to go to college was framed by my respondents as wholly unnecessary to explain to me, their interviewer. Of course I’m going to college, they would tell me, widening their eyes at my apparently terrific naïveté. Why wouldn’t I? Everyone knows that college is the answer. This “keep my head down and go” attitude led all but one member of my sample to enroll in at least one
college class during the study period, but did not serve the interests of an unfortunately large number who stopped out, dropped out, or stalled out, leading to a limbo state of neither “going” nor “foregoing.” I must hasten to add that, though their constraints too often overwhelmed their resolve, respondents’ anticipated future rewards were not extravagant. Their career objectives—nurse, police officer, accountant, teacher—were for the most part modest and some did not even require a four-year degree. That is why, in contrast to recent studies that find that youths’ aspirations are increasingly unreasonable, I aim to provide a more balanced focus that gives attention to both personal choice and systemic constraints, while pointing the way toward possibilities for change. Some of my findings may not be generalizable to the national population of Latinos/as for a variety of reasons, including regional variation in the availability of colleges at different levels of selectivity. Nevertheless, these longitudinal interviews afford an opportunity to examine the processes and mechanisms that contribute to a successful transition to college for some highly disadvantaged students, while allowing a comparison to those who fail to realize their optimistic aspirations.
This conceptualization of optimistic rationalism takes inspiration from two strains of social theory—one increasingly popular in studies of educational attainment, and one that has not often been deployed in the task of understanding differential college pathways. The first, rational choice theory, posits that respondents use rational cost-benefit analyses to make choices that will maximize their chances of success in a given arena.28
Rational choice theory is based in economic models and has been modified by sociologists,29 most notably to relax assumptions that actors possess “perfect information” with which to make their decisions. Rational choice theory has the added benefit of its intuitiveness; most people approach decisions rationally, with at least some thought as to the probable outcomes and possible constraints. Few people make life course plans on the basis of wild guesses. Moreover, rational choice theory is a good fit for a society built around a capitalist economic model, where many of our ideas about what it takes to achieve in life—hard work, determination, intelligence, good moral values—coexist with strong beliefs in the value of competition, entrepreneurship, and market-based solutions.
The second, Sewell’s30 theory of structure, revitalizes traditional conceptions of the constraining power of structure (e.g., racialized and classbased institutions) and access to resources (e.g., a college education) to include a greater emphasis on agency (free choice) and the possibilities of
change and transformation. Using Sewell’s framework, we can conceive of a college degree as a resource that an ever-increasing number of young people want to acquire. However, the “rules” that constrain college attendance pertaining to race/ethnicity and class status have not changed to accommodate rapid growth in the number of underrepresented minority college aspirants, who are, not coincidentally, also more likely to hail from low-income backgrounds. If anything, the rules are actually becoming more difficult to follow—costs are increasing, federal aid is shrinking— as growing numbers of students who were previously unlikely to consider college are beginning, like their middle- and upper-income peers, to see university attendance as ubiquitous. Still, these aspirational and demographic changes portend the possibility for structural change that would make college more affordable and more inclusive, given the increasing enrollment of low-income, underrepresented minority students. Many of my respondents themselves expressed the hope that this would come to pass, helping to explain the high incidence of community college enrollment even among poorly prepared students and undocumented sample members. Staying on a college course, no matter how slow their progress, was a means to be prepared for the hoped-for day when the obstacles would be removed and they could see an unobstructed view of the finish line of college completion.
A pervasive “college-for-all” culture largely ignores economic, racial/ ethnic, and gendered constraints on college attendance, to the detriment of first-generation and underrepresented groups. Without scaffolding for first-generation students, and without the provision of significant financial supports available to previous generations, college-for-all represents an unfunded mandate for an increasing number of college aspirants. In the not-too-distant past, high schools were heavily tracked, and educators often presumed that Latino/a, African American, and low-income students belonged in vocational education rather than college preparatory programs. Vocational education fell into disfavor, with good reason, as little more than a dumping ground for low-income women, minority group members, and “troubled” youth. Vocational education has been replaced with the present system of near-universal college prep programs, leaving students no alternative to college-for-all. Moreover, labor market data suggest that the BA is quickly becoming the new high school diploma. A 2013 report by Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce estimates that by 2020, 65% of jobs will require a college degree or postsecondary training.31
Given what we know about the changing nature of careers and the post-recession labor market, teachers and families are not wrong to encourage all students to go to college. College-for-all is marginally better than the previous two-track system in that it allows more choice for students, yet both systems fail to adequately serve Latino/a and other underrepresented students who still face disproportionate barriers to college completion in the current system. Thus, college-for-all is implicated in reproducing the growing income inequality we observe today. College has been oversold as a means of lifting individuals into the ranks of the middle class, in the absence of any significant improvements to the social contract that would keep costs low and help students navigate the increasing costs and resulting debt load. We betray first-generation Latino/a and low-income students’ optimistic rationalism—which we are complicit in encouraging—when we leave both the risks and rewards of college in the laps of individuals.
STRUCTURE OF THE BOOK
Chapter 2, “California Dreams: Higher Education in the Golden State,” introduces the location, time period, and high schools that the respondents attended. This chapter makes the case that local/regional context is an important factor for the development of an optimistically rationalist outlook on college prospects. Colleges’ proximity to students’ homes is important for low-income students’ college choices. Furthermore, the availability of nonselective proximate colleges made college attendance nearly ubiquitous among my sample. Chapter 2, also offers an overview of the study respondents and how they compared to other college aspirants in California and in the national context. Though a pool of 50 respondents cannot provide broad generalizations about the collegegoing population, this comprehensive look at how respondents stacked up against the college competition demonstrates that their experiences are increasingly common to the population of students attending underresourced schools in the college-for-all culture of public high schools in the United States.
Chapter 3, “Limited Options: Choosing a Two-Year Transfer Pathway,” focuses on the subsample of community college attendees. This chapter demonstrates how optimistic rationalism leads low-income students to enroll in community college, but fails to sustain all but the most tenacious BA aspirants. I provide evidence from the sample that structural
deficiencies, including a lack of high school and college counseling for two-year college attendees, as well as economic hardship, prove difficult to surmount even for the most determined students. I include in this group the three respondents who chose trade or art schools (one respondent attended a massage therapy program; another chose cosmetology school; a third attended a dance academy). Some respondents who chose a two-year transfer pathway justified the choice in terms of cost, while others viewed it as a strategic means of raising their GPA with the anticipation of transferring to a prestigious UC that had not accepted them directly after high school. Chapter 3 also notes, however, that the averaged GPAs of two-year attendees were not very different than the GPAs of those who enrolled in four-year colleges directly after high school. Building on the overview presented in Chapter 2, this chapter delves into the landscape of community colleges in the California context, their costs, and differences in transfer rates to four-year universities among the community colleges on offer.
Chapter 4, “‘Getting It Over With’: Choosing a Four-Year College,” turns the lens to those who chose to attend four-year colleges—at least at first. Financial stability, early college planning, and having a career goal are the three factors that were most influential for maintaining a trajectory toward a BA degree at a four-year institution. I assess the resources that buoyed four-year college students and the structural barriers to continuance that many still struggled with, including lack of college counseling, and the difficulty many faced in balancing classwork and employment due to the higher costs and less flexible schedules of four-year schools. Included in this chapter are the stories of three respondents who “reverse-transferred”—that is, they started attending a four-year college, and switched to two-year colleges due to a mix of finances and lack of preparedness. Four-year attendees usually felt little need to justify their choice; however, their responses often fell into two camps: those working to maintain a middle-class status (status maintenance) and those hoping to vault into it, using college as the most expedient means of doing so (status mobility).
Chapter 5, “‘I Try Not to Think About It’: College-Bound Without Citizenship,” shines a light on the experiences and college pathways of the respondents in my sample who were not US citizens, of which there were seven at the start of the study. This chapter provides background on the scope of the problem of undocumented immigrants who were brought to the USA as children, as well as the history of immigration pol-
icy and reform attempts, including the failed DREAM Act and successfully implemented DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals). Here, I examine the apparent conundrum of applying a rational choice framework to assess the pathways of non-citizen resident and undocumented students, given that they lack the legal status required to access most jobs. This chapter demonstrates that undocumented students indeed view college as a rational choice, given their continually replenished and strongly education-positive immigrant and DREAMer frames of reference, and an instrumental embracing of the “college-for-all” ideal as a means of achieving success in mainstream US culture.
Chapter 6, “Gendered Meanings in College Choice,” examines the familism concept in greater depth, and reports on the gender differences in college aspirations and enrollment observed in the sample. Even accounting for college eligibility (that is, GPAs), eligible Latina respondents more often enrolled in four-year universities than eligible Latino respondents. Specifically, I find that Latinas were more likely than similar Latinos to seek a four-year degree as a means of earning independence, while Latinos expressed a sense of automatic autonomy that was not as strongly tied to educational outcomes.
The book concludes with an examination of what my respondents’ experiences illuminate about the dual relationship between personal choice and structural constraints, and highlights the ironies of a cultural mandate that encourages limitless aspiration alongside the gradual disappearance of the scaffolding that, in previous generations, offered greater structural and institutional support for students’ college ambitions. The conclusion argues that the Great Recession exacerbated both the importance of a college degree and the financial barriers to attaining it. Increases in tuition have made four-year universities unaffordable for many, pushing four-year-eligible college aspirants to enroll in community colleges, where their progress toward a BA degree often stalls. I show that this is part of a broader trend of tuition increases rising astronomically across the nation, outpacing inflation by a wide margin, as the share of support public universities receive from state funds has steadily decreased. At the same time, the share of tenured and tenure-track faculty as a percentage of teaching staff at colleges and universities is at an all-time low (about 27%, as of this writing) and the number of administrative positions and offices has climbed steadily. I argue that a cultural turn toward treating universities as businesses has left the purported “consumer”—students and families—in an increasingly compromised position. Students and families are paying
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The Project Gutenberg eBook of Hervey Willetts
This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this ebook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook.
Title: Hervey Willetts
Author: Percy Keese Fitzhugh
Illustrator: Howard L. Hastings
Release date: November 4, 2023 [eBook #72017]
Language: English
Original publication: United States: Grosset & Dunlap, 1927
Credits: Roger Frank and Sue Clark
START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK HERVEY WILLETTS ***
HERVEY WILLETTS HIS ADVENTURES
HERVEY,
TREMBLING
IN EVERY NERVE, FACED THE APPROACHING TRAIN.
HERVEY WILLETTS
BY PERCY KEESE FITZHUGH
Author of
THE TOM SLADE BOOKS
THE ROY BLAKELEY BOOKS
THE PEE-WEE HARRIS BOOKS
THE WESTY MARTIN BOOKS
ILLUSTRATED BY HOWARD L. HASTINGS
Published with the approval of THE BOY SCOUTS OF AMERICA
GROSSET & DUNLAP PUBLISHERS
NEW YORK
Made in the United States of America
COPYRIGHT,
1927, BY
GROSSET & DUNLAP
Here he is with his hat and his ruffled up hair. Reckless, happy-go-lucky and new; And because he is crazy and won’t take a dare. They liked him—and I like him too.
He’s wild and all that and as blind as a bat, And he drives them distracted it’s true; But one look at that hat and I say for all that, I like him, that’s all, I just do.
He’s never at rest and he may be a pest, And the gods cannot say what he’ll do; He can’t take a test, yet above all the rest, I like him—and you’ll like him too.
CONTENTS
I Happy-Go-Lucky
II The Sentence
III The Last Stunt
IV The Perfect Gentleman
V Chance Acquaintance
VI The Inspired Dare
VII Gone
VIII Safety in Silence
IX Stranded
X Trapped
XI The Jaws of Death
XII Held
XIII A Noise Like a Scout
XIV At the Bar
XV Chesty, Ambassador
XVI To Pastures New
XVII Over the Top
XVIII Guilty
XIX The Comeback
XX Ominous
XXI Distant Rumblings
XXII Words and Actions
XXIII Diplomacy
XXIV In the Silent Night
XXV Life, Liberty——
XXVI Out of the Frying Pan
XXVII At Last
XXVIII The Law Again
XXIX The White Light
XXX Stunt or Service
CONTENTS
XXXI Hopeless
XXXII Ups and Downs
XXXIII Storm and Calm
XXXIV Summer Plans
XXXV Hervey’s Luck
XXXVI Reached?
HERVEY WILLETTS
CHAPTER I HAPPY-GO-LUCKY
If Hervey Willetts were lacking many qualities which a scout ought to have (and it is to be feared he was), he certainly had one quality truly scoutish; he had nerve. It was not the sort of nerve commonly recommended to scouts, but it was one kind.
And indeed Hervey had all kinds. He was always brave, he was often reckless, he was sometimes blithely heroic. But he was always wrong. His bizarre courage never paid him any interest because, somehow or other, it was always mixed up with disobedience. Thoughtful boys saw this and were sorry for him. More, they had a sneaking admiration for him.
Once, in the wee hours of the night, Hervey saved a boy from drowning. He should have had the gold medal for that; but you see he had no right to be out swimming in the middle of the night. And there you are.
All his spectacular deeds went to waste so far as scout advancement was concerned. The deed was always clouded by the escapade. And sometimes, as you shall see, there was an escapade containing none of the ingredients of heroism. Hervey’s heroic deeds were always byproducts.
He did not fit into Temple Camp at all. Why he had ever chosen it as the theatre for his stunts of glory was a puzzle. Many scouts, captivated by his effrontery, said kindly that Temple Camp did not fit into him. Assuredly there was misfit somewhere.
To give you an example of his nerve (and it is the episode on which this whole story hinges) he went back to Temple Camp the season following his summary expulsion therefrom. To appreciate the magnitude of his effrontery you must know something of the circumstance of his dismissal.
During that summer which had ended so ingloriously for him, he had pursued a course as free as life on the ocean wave. He was always in hot water. He would come strolling in late for meals, his outlandish little rimless hat at a rakish angle, swinging a stick or doing stunts with it for his own amusement as he ambled past the group assembled for camp-fire, or the after dinner stragglers lolling on the pavilion porch.
They seldom asked him where he had been. They knew he was on friendly terms with every farmer in the neighborhood, a crony at every rural wayside garage, the volunteer comrade of wandering pedlers, of gypsies, and even of tramps who made camp in secluded hollows and regaled him with dubious reminiscences. There was something about Hervey....
Yes, that was the worst of it; there was something about him. Tom Slade was under the spell, and if Tom Slade liked you, you could go a long way along the trail of disobedience. It was not that Hervey was popular, in the sense that Roy Blakeley was popular. He did not grace the camp with his presence enough to be popular.
But was it not an amazing thing that he was so much liked even though he was so seldom among the big camp family? He had no friends, yet everybody was his friend. If ever a boy was a host unto himself, as they say, Hervey Willetts was that boy. Certainly he was never lonesome.
You know him; he was slender and good looking, with a kind of dancing deviltry in his eyes. When they reprimanded him he looked at them as if he just did not understand. He was hopeless. There was an unconscious effrontery about him. The woods belonged to him. You could not scold him any more than you could scold a squirrel.
He certainly was not without feeling for he held in deep affection his little rimless hat cut full of holes and decorated with every sort of campaign and advertising button which had ever come his way. These little celluloid trinkets did not proclaim Hervey’s principles. One of them said Keep to the Right, a thing which Hervey never did. Another (I know not its origin, nor did he) said Be good and you’ll be happy.
Well, at all events, he was happy.
CHAPTER II
THE SENTENCE
Even the powers that be at Temple Camp were considerate of Hervey. They did not dismiss him as they might have done after any one of his unruly escapades. They bided their time, and as the season approached its end they became the more lenient. There was something ominous about their leniency; a kind of grimness about the way Mr. Benson greeted our hero upon his return after an all night absence. “Well, my boy, did you have a good time?” he asked with portentous cordiality.
Hervey was too guileless to read the handwriting on the wall. Another boy, conscious of his own delinquencies, would have recognized this sudden immunity from reprimand as too good to be true. But Hervey accepted it as in the natural order of things. He had never resented reprimands; he had ignored and forgotten them. He bore nobody any malice, not even the trustees. He went upon his way rejoicing. If he had any thought about the management at all, it was probably that it had at last come round to his own way of thinking. But probably he had no thought about these things at all.
Then came the end of the season with its boat races and swimming matches and distribution of awards. Against the background of these honors and festivities, Hervey seemed a lonely figure. But he was not lonely. It was his fate to arouse much sympathy which he neither deserved nor desired. There was really nothing pathetic about his being an outsider at camp. It was the camp that was the outsider, not Hervey.
Yet there was a certain pity expressed for him when little Harold Titus, the tenderfoot office boy from Administration Shack, came running down to the diving board where Hervey had condescended to grace a loitering group with his presence. These idle, bantering
groups bespoke the closing of the season; they were significant of diminishing numbers and the end of pleasurable routine.
“You’re wanted in the office, Hervey Willetts,” Harold panted. “You got to go up there right away.” Perhaps the breathless little tenderfoot felt a certain pride of triumph that he had been able to locate Hervey at all; it was a sort of scout stunt. Significant glances passed between the loiterers as Hervey departed.
He ambled in that way he had made familiar to all toward the somewhat pretentious rustic bungalow where the business of Temple Camp was conducted. He seemed never to proceed with any purpose; there was something delightfully casual about him. He was a natural born explorer. A secreted, chirping cricket could detain him, and on this occasion he paused and accommodatingly laid his trusty stick against the ground so that an aimless caterpillar might ascend it.
The small tenderfoot glanced back, aghast at Hervey’s leisurely progress toward his doom. “You better hurry up, it’s serious,” he called. And, imbued with a sense of his responsibility, he waited while our hero shot the caterpillar up into the foliage by a dextrous snap of his stick.
His ambling progress bringing him to Administration Shack, Hervey conceived the novel idea of ascending the steps on one leg. The tenderfoot messenger was appalled by the delay and by Hervey’s thus casually pulling a stunt at the very portal of the holy sanctum.
There being several steps, Hervey found his bizarre ascent difficult, but his resolution increased with repeated failures. He often made use of a couplet which had detained him many times and interfered with the camp schedule:
Start a stunt and then get stuck, Twenty days you’ll have bad luck.
He was so engrossed with this present acrobatic enterprise (to the unspeakable dismay of the little boy who had summoned him) that he did not at first perceive Councilor Wainwright standing in the doorway smiling down upon him. Indeed he was not aware of the
councilor until, triumphant, he hopped breathless into the official’s very arms. The tenderfoot was appalled.
“Well, you succeeded, Hervey?” Mr. Wainwright commented pleasantly. “Suppose we step inside. I see you never give up.”
“When I start to do a thing, I do it,” said Hervey.
“Only sometimes you start to do the wrong things,” the councilor commented sociably. “Well, Hervey,” he added, dropping into a chair and inviting the boy to do the same, “here we are at the end of the season. How many rules do you suppose you’ve broken, Hervey?”
“I don’t like a lot of those rules,” said Hervey.
“No, I know you don’t,” laughed Mr. Wainwright, “but you see this isn’t your camp. If you want to have rules of your own you ought to have a camp of your own.”
“That’s true, too,” said Hervey.
“You see, Hervey, the trouble is you don’t seem to fit. You’re not bad; I never heard of you doing anything very bad. But you don’t seem to work in harness. You’re pretty hard to handle.”
“You don’t have to handle me, because I’m not around so much,” said Hervey.
“Well, now, my boy,” Mr. Wainwright pursued in a way of coming to the point, “of course, this kind of thing can’t go on. There have been a dozen occasions this season when you might have been—when you ought to have been summarily expelled. That this wasn’t done speaks well for your disposition. It’s surprising how well you are liked by those who seldom see you. I suppose it’s what you might call the triumph of personality.”
Here was a glowing truth. And because it was true, because he really did have a certain elusive charm, Hervey seemed baffled at this declaration of his own quaint attractiveness. He did not know what a hard job poor Mr. Wainwright was having trying to pronounce sentence.
“A fellow wanted to hike to Westboro with me yesterday,” said Hervey, “but I told him he’d better ask the keepers; I wouldn’t get any fellow in trouble—nix on that.”
“But you got yourself in trouble.”
“That’s different,” said Hervey.
CHAPTER III THE LAST STUNT
“Well, Hervey,” said Mr. Wainwright, “being one of the keepers, as you call us⸺ ”
“I’ve got nothing against you,” said Hervey.
“Thank you. Now, Hervey, we’ve been talking over your case for some time and it was lately decided that since the end of the season was close at hand there was no need of putting on you the stigma of dismissal. Tom Slade was responsible for that decision; he seems to like you.”
“He knows I wouldn’t take a dare from anybody,” said Hervey; “I don’t care what it is.”
“Hmph; well, he seems to like you. So you’re going home Saturday just like all the other boys. You will have finished the season. No disgrace. I don’t know whether you have any regrets or not. You have been a great trial to the management. We who have the camp in charge feel that we can’t again take the responsibility which your presence here entails. If you were with a troop and scoutmaster perhaps it would be different; perhaps you would have made a better showing under such influence. But you are a born free lance, if you know what that is, and this camp is no place for free lances, however picturesque they may be.”
“I have a lot of fun by myself,” said Hervey. “I stood on my hands on a merry-go-round horse in a carnival in Crowndale. I bet you couldn’t do that.”
Councilor Wainwright looked at him with an expression of humorous despair. “No, I don’t suppose I could,” he said.
“Isn’t that a scout stunt?” Hervey demanded.
“Why no, it isn’t, Hervey. Not when you follow a traveling carnival all the way to Crowndale and stay away for two days and identify
yourself with wandering acrobats and such. Of course, there’s no use talking about those things now. But if you’re asking me, that isn’t a scout stunt at all.”
“Gee williger!” Hervey ejaculated in comment on the unreasonableness of all councilors and camp regulations.
“That’s just it, you don’t understand,” said Mr. Wainwright. “Scouting doesn’t consist merely in doing things that are hard to do. If that were so, I suppose every lawless gangster could call himself a scout.”
“I know a gangster that’s a pretty nice fellow,” said Hervey. “He did me a good turn; that’s scouting, isn’t it?”
The camp councilor looked serious. “Well, you’d better keep away from gangsters, my boy.”
“You say a good turn isn’t scouting?”
“We won’t talk about that now, because you and I don’t see things the same way. The point is—and this is why I sent for you—you must never again at any time return to Temple Camp. You are leaving as the season closes and you are not openly disgraced. But you must tell your father ”
“It’s my stepfather,” said Hervey
Mr. Wainwright paused just a second. “Well, your stepfather then,” he said. “You must tell him that your leaving camp this season has all the effects of a dismissal. Councilor Borden wanted to write to your father—your stepfather—and tell him just how it is. But for your sake we have overruled him in that. You may tell your stepfather in your own way
⸺ ”
“Standing on my head, hey?” said Hervey.
“Standing on your head if you wish. The point is that you must tell him that you are forbidden to return to Temple Camp. And of course, you will have to tell him why. No application from you will be considered another season. Now do you understand that, Hervey?”
It was characteristic of Hervey that he never talked seriously; he seemed never impressed; it was impossible to reach him. It was not that he was deliberately flippant to his superiors. He was just utterly carefree and heedless. He talked to the camp officials exactly the same as he talked to other boys. And he did not talk overmuch to
any one “Bet you can’t do this,” was a phrase identified with him. “Do you dare me to jump off?” he would say if he happened to find himself one of a group assembled on the balcony above the porch of the “eats” shack. He could not just talk.
And now, in his disgrace (or what would have been disgrace to another boy) he only said, “Sure, what you say goes.”
“You understand then, Hervey? And you’ll explain to your— stepfather?”
“Leave it to me,” said Hervey.
Well, they left it to him. And thereby hangs a tale. This breaking the news was about the hardest job that Mr. Wainwright had ever done. If Hervey, the stunt specialist, had only known what a stunt it was, and how the other “keepers” had been disinclined to perform it, his sympathy, even affection, might have gone out to Mr. Wainwright on professional grounds. Even Tom Slade, afraid of nothing, found his presence necessary across the lake while Hervey was being “let down.”
At all events if any sympathy was in order, it was for the young councilor, not Hervey. The wandering minstrel ambled forth after the encounter and, pausing before the large bulletin board, took occasion to alter one of the announcements which invited all scouts to attend camp-fire that evening and listen to a certain prominent scout official “who has seen many camps and brings with him several interesting books which he will use in narrating how he caught weasels and collected oriental bugs in the Mongolian jungle.”
When Hervey got through with this it read, “Who has seen many vamps and brings with him several interesting crooks which he will use in narrating how he caught measels and collected oriental rugs in the Mongolian bungle.” The misspelling of measles did not trouble him.
Having thus revised the announcement he went upon his way kicking his trusty stick before him and trying to lift it with his foot so that he could catch it in his hand.
He felt that the morning had not been spent in vain.
CHAPTER IV THE PERFECT GENTLEMAN
Hervey did not wait to hear the visiting traveler and naturalist. He took the noon train from Catskill and at Albany caught a train east which took him to Farrelton, the small New England city where he lived.
He did not waste the precious hours en route. Evading an allseeing conductor, he sought the forbidden platform of the car and made acquaintance with a trainman who reluctantly permitted him to remain outside. He asked the trainman to “sneak” him into the locomotive and when told that this was impossible, he suggested overcoming the difficulty by matching pennies to determine whether the rule might not be broken. The trainman was immovable, but he relaxed enough to permit himself to hobnob with this restless young free lance on the flying platform.
“I bet you can’t walk through the car without touching the seats while the train is going around a turn,” Hervey challenged. “Bet you three cigar coupons.”
The trainman declining to essay this stunt, Hervey attempted it himself while the train was sweeping around a curve which skirted the foot of one of the beautiful Berkshire mountains. He succeeded so well that about midway of the car he went sprawling into the lap of a bespectacled young man who seemed greatly ruffled by this sudden avalanche.
Hervey rolled around into the seat beside the stranger and said, “That’s mighty hard to do, do you know it? Keep your eye out for another hill with a curve around it and I’ll do it, you see. Leave it to me.”
“You came very near not leaving anything to me,” said the young man, picking up his spectacles and gathering the grip and bundles
