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American colleges have supported a culture of student writing and debate for nearly as long as they have existed. The literary societies of the early nineteenth century — Whig and Cliosophic at Princeton, Dialectic and Philanthropic at North Carolina — maintained their own libraries, staged weekly debates, and in several cases owned more books than the institutions that housed them. Membership was widely considered the real education; coursework was merely what one completed in the meantime.

The student journal

Out of that society culture grew the small student journal: irregular, perpetually short of money, and disproportionately influential. A handful of undergraduates with strong opinions and access to a printer could put their arguments in front of the whole college, and the model proved durable. Many twentieth-century editors, critics, and political writers did their first serious work in such journals, learning to meet deadlines and absorb hostile replies years before anyone paid them to write.

These journals also served as recruiting grounds. An essay that irritated half the faculty was a reliable way for a nineteen-year-old to get noticed by the other half, and friendships formed over late-night production work often outlasted the journals themselves, which folded and revived on a roughly generational cycle.

Argument as a discipline

Formal debate taught something the essay could not: the obligation to understand a position before attacking it. Society rules frequently assigned sides by lot, so a student might spend a week constructing the best case for a proposition he privately rejected. The exercise bred a particular kind of mind — quick, skeptical of its own certainties, hard to fluster — that examination results never measured and employers consistently prized.