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Title: Why go to College?
Author: Cooper, Clayton Sedgwick
Language: English
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WHY GO TO COLLEGE
[Illustration: The Chapel at West Point as seen from an Entrance to
the Area of the Cadet Barracks]
WHY GO TO COLLEGE
BY
CLAYTON SEDGWICK COOPER
Author of “College Men and the Bible”
_ILLUSTRATED_
[Illustration: (Publisher colophon.)]
NEW YORK
THE CENTURY CO.
1912
Copyright, 1912, by
THE CENTURY CO.
_Published, October, 1912_
WITH GRATEFUL REMEMBRANCE
THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED TO MY
COLLEGE TEACHER AND FRIEND
E. BENJAMIN ANDREWS
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS 3
II EDUCATION À LA CARTE 51
III THE COLLEGE CAMPUS 93
IV REASONS FOR GOING TO COLLEGE 135
V THE COLLEGE MAN AND THE WORLD 173
INDEX 203
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
The Chapel at West Point as seen from an Entrance to
the Area of the Cadet Barracks _Frontispiece_
PAGE
Old South Middle, Yale University 8
A Protest against Prosiness 21
University Hall, University of Michigan 37
The Serpentine Dance after a Foot-ball Game 45
Johnston Gate from the Yard, Harvard University 55
The Library, Columbia University 66
A Popular Professor of Chemistry and his Crowded Lecture-Room 80
Student Waiters in the Dining-Hall of an American College 97
Amateur College Theatricals 112
The Main Hall, University of Wisconsin 122
Blair Arch, Princeton University 143
Editors of the Harvard _Lampoon_ making up the “Dummy”
of a Number 154
The Library and the Thomas Jefferson Statue, University of
Virginia 164
Harper Memorial Building and the Law Building, University of
Chicago 178
The Arch between the Dormitory Quadrangle and the Triangle,
University of Pennsylvania 192
PREFACE
The characteristics of a college course demanded by our American
undergraduates is determined by two things; first, by the character
of the man who is to be educated, and second, by the kind of world
in which the man is to live and work. Without these two factors
vividly and practically in mind, all plans for courses of study,
recreation, teaching, or methods of social and religious betterment
are theoretical and uncertain.
After ten years of travel among American college men, studying
educational tendencies in not less than seven hundred diverse
institutions in various parts of the United States and Canada, it
is my deep conviction that the chief need of our North American
Educational system is to focus attention upon the individual
student rather than upon his environment, either in the curriculum
or in the college buildings.
A few great teachers in every worthy North American institution
who know and love the boys, have always been and doubtless will
continue to be the secret of the power of our schools and
colleges. There are indications that our present educational system
involving vast endowments will be increasingly directed to the end
of engaging as teachers the greatest men of the time, men of great
heart as well as of great brain who will live with students, truly
caring for them as well as teaching them. We shall thus come nearer
to solving the problem of preparing young men for leadership and
useful citizenship.
That this is the sensible and general demand of graduates is easily
discovered by asking any college alumnus to state the strongest
and most abiding impression left by his college training. Of
one hundred graduates whom I asked the concrete question, “What
do you consider to be the most valuable thing in your college
course?”--eighty-six said, substantially: “Personal contact with a
great teacher.”
CLAYTON SEDGWICK COOPER.
March 12th, 1912.
GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS
Colleges, in like manner, have their indispensable
office,--to teach elements. But they can only highly
serve us when they aim not to drill, but to create; when
they gather from far every ray of various genius to their
hospitable halls, and by the concentrated fires, set the
hearts of their youth on flame. Thought and knowledge are
natures in which apparatus and pretension avail nothing.
Gowns and pecuniary foundations, though of towns of gold,
can never countervail the least sentence or syllable of
wit. Forget this, and our American colleges will recede in
their public importance, whilst they grow richer every year.
EMERSON.
I
GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS
The American college was recently defined by one of our public men
as a “place where an extra clever boy may go and still amount to
something.”
This is indeed faint praise both for our institutions of higher
learning and for our undergraduates; but judging from certain
presentations of student life, we may infer that it represents a
sentiment more or less common and wide-spread. Our institutions
are criticized for their tendency toward practical and progressive
education; for the views of their professors; for their success
in securing gifts of wealth, which some people think ought to
go in other directions; and for the lack of seriousness or the
dissipation of the students themselves. Even with many persons who
have not developed any definite or extreme opinions concerning
American undergraduate life, the college is often viewed in the
light in which Matthew Arnold said certain people regarded Oxford:
Beautiful city! so venerable, so lovely, so unravaged by
the fierce intellectual life of our century, so serene!
There are our young barbarians, all at play!
Indeed, to people of the outside world, the American undergraduate
presents an enigma. He appears to be not exactly a boy, certainly
not a man, an interesting species, a kind of “Exhibit X,” permitted
because he is customary; as Carlyle might say, a creature “run by
galvanism and possessed by the devil.”
The mystifying part of this lies in the fact that the college man
seems determined to keep up this illusion of his partial or total
depravity. He reveals no unchastened eagerness to be thought good.
Indeed, he usually “plays up” his desperate wickedness. He revels
in his unmitigated lawlessness, he basks in the glory of fooling
folks. As Owen Johnson describes Dink Stover, he seems to possess
a “diabolical imagination.” He chuckles exuberantly as he reads in
the papers of his picturesque public appearances: of the janitor’s
cow hoisted into the chapel belfry; of the statue of the sedate
founder of the college painted red on the campus; of the good
townspeople selecting their gates from a pile of property erected
on the college green; or as in graphic cartoons he sees himself
returning from foot-ball victories, accompanied by a few hundred
other young hooligans, marching wildly through the streets and cars
to the martial strain,
There’ll be a hot time in the old town to-night!
In other words, the American student is partly responsible for the
attitude of town toward gown. He endeavors in every possible way to
conceal his real identity. He positively refuses to be accurately
photographed or to reveal real seriousness about anything. He is
the last person to be held up and examined as to his interior moral
decorations. He would appear to take no thought for the morrow,
but to be drifting along upon a glorious tide of indolence or
exuberant play. He would make you believe that to him life is just
a great frolic, a long, huge joke, an unconditioned holiday. The
wild young heart of him enjoys the shock, the offense, the startled
pang, which his restless escapades engender in the stunned and
unsympathetic multitude.
This perversity of the American undergraduate is as fascinating to
the student of his real character as it is baffling to a chance
beholder, for the American collegian is not the most obvious thing
in the world. He is not discovered by a superficial glance, and
surely not by the sweeping accusations of uninformed theoretical
critics who have never lived on a college campus, but have gained
their information in second-hand fashion from _question-naires_ or
from newspaper-accounts of the youthful escapades of students.
We must find out what the undergraduate really means by his
whimsicalities and picturesque attitudinizing. We must find out
what he is thinking about, what he reads, what he admires. He seems
to live in two distinct worlds, and his inner life is securely shut
off from his outer life. If we would learn the college student,
we must catch him off guard, away from the “fellows,” with his
intimate friend, in the chapter-house, or in his own quiet room,
where he has no reputation for devilment to live up to. For college
life is not epitomized in a story of athletic records or curriculum
catalogues. The actual student is not read up in a Baedeker.
His spirit is caught by hints and flashes; it is felt as an
inspiration, a commingled and mystic intimacy of work and play, not
fixed, but passing quickly through hours unsaddened by the cares
and burdens of the world--
No fears to beat away--no strife to heal,
The past unsighed for, and the future sure.
It is with such sympathetic imagination that the most profitable
approach can be made to the American undergraduate. To see him
as he really is, one needs to follow him into his laboratory or
lecture-room, where he engages with genuine enthusiasm in those
labors through which he expresses his temperament, his inmost
ideals, his life’s choice. Indeed, to one who knows that to
sympathize is to learn, the soul windows of this inarticulate,
immature, and intangible personality will sometimes be flung wide.
On some long, vague walk at night beneath the stars, when the
great deeps of his life’s loyalties are suddenly broken up, one
will discover the motive of the undergraduate, and below specious
attempts at concealment, the self-absorbed, graceful, winsome
spirit. Here one is held by the subtle charm of youth lost in
a sense of its own significance, moving about in a mysterious
paradise all his own, “full of dumb emotion, undefined longing, and
with a deep sense of the romantic possibilities of life.”
[Illustration: Old South Middle, Yale University]
In this portrait one sees the real drift of American undergraduate
life--the life that engaged last year in North American
institutions of higher learning 349,566 young men, among whom were
many of America’s choicest sons. Thousands of American and Canadian
fathers and mothers, some for reasons of culture, others for social
prestige, still others for revenue only, are ambitious to keep
these students in the college world. Many of these parents, whose
hard-working lives have always spelled duty, choose each year to
beat their way against rigid economy, penury, and bitter loss, that
their sons may possess what they themselves never had, a college
education. And when we have found, below all his boyish pranks,
dissimulations, and masqueradings, the true undergraduate, we may
also discern some of the pervasive influences which are to-day
shaping life upon this Western Continent; for the undergraduate is
a true glass to give back to the nation its own image.
HIS PASSION FOR REALITY
Early in this search for the predominant traits of the college
man one is sure to find a passion for reality. “We stand for him
because he is the real thing,” is the answer which I received from
a student at the University of Wisconsin when I asked the reason
for the amazing popularity of a certain undergraduate.
The American college man worships at the shrine of reality.
He likes elemental things. Titles, conventions, ceremonies,
creeds--all these for him are forms of things merely. To him
The rank is but the guinea’s stamp,
The man’s the gowd for a’ that.
The strain of the real, like the red stripe in the official
English cordage, runs through the student’s entire existence. His
sense of “squareness” is highly developed. To be sure, in the
classroom he often tries to conceal the weakness of his defenses
with extraordinary genius by “bluffing,” but this attitude is
as much for the sake of art as for dishonesty. The hypocrite is
an unutterable abomination in his eyes. He would almost prefer
outright criminality to pious affectation. Sham heroics and mock
sublimity are specially odious to him. The undergraduate is still
sufficiently unsophisticated to believe that things should be what
they seem to be: at least his entire inclination and desire is to
see men and things as they are.
This passion for reality is revealed in the student’s love of
brevity and directness. He abhors vagueness and long-windedness.
His speeches do not begin with description of natural scenery; he
plunges at once into his subject.
A story is told at New Haven concerning a preacher who, shortly
before he was to address the students in the chapel, asked the
president of the university whether the time for his address would
be limited. The president replied, “Oh, no; speak as long as you
like, but there is a tradition here at Yale chapel that no souls
are saved after twenty minutes.”
The preacher who holds his sermon in an hour’s grip rarely holds
students. The college man is a keen discerner between rhetoric
and ideas. No decisions are more prompt or more generally correct
than his. He knows immediately what he likes. You catch him or
you lose him quickly; he never dangles on the hook. The American
student is peculiarly inclined to follow living lines. He is
not afraid of life. While usually he is free from affectation,
he is nevertheless impelled by the urgent enthusiasm of youth,
and demands immediate fulfilment of his dreams. His life is not
“pitched to some far-off note,” but is based upon the everlasting
now. He inhabits a miniature world, in which he helps to form a
public opinion, which, though circumscribed, is impartial and sane.
No justice is more equal than that meted out by undergraduates
at those institutions where a student committee has charge of
discipline and honor-systems. A child of reality and modernity,
he is economical of his praise, trenchant and often remorseless
in his criticisms and censures, for as yet he has not learned to
be insincere and socially diplomatic. This penchant for reality
emerges in the platform of a successful college athlete in a New
England institution who, when he was elected to leadership in one
of the college organizations, called together his men and gave them
two stern rules:
First, stop apologizing! Second, do a lot of work, and don’t talk
much about it!
HIS NATURALNESS
The undergraduate’s worship of reality is also shown in his
admiration of naturalness. The modern student has relegated into
the background the stilted elocutionary and oratorical contests
of forty years ago because those exercises were unnatural. The
chair of elocution in an American college of to-day is a declining
institution. Last year in one of our universities of one thousand
students the course in oratory was regularly attended by three.
The instructor in rhetorical exercises in a college to-day usually
sympathizes with the remarks of one Professor Washington Value,
the French teacher of dancing at New Haven when that polite
accomplishment was a part of college education. At one time when
he was unusually ill-treated by his exuberant pupils, he exclaimed
in a frenzy of Gallic fervor: “Gentlemen, if ze Lord vere to come
down from heaven, and say, ‘Mr. Washington Value, vill you be
dancing mast’ at Yale Collège, or vill you be étairnally dam’?’ I
would say to Him--‘’Sieur, eef eet ees all ze sem to you, I vill be
étairnally dam’.’” The weekly lecture in oratory usually furnishes
an excellent chance for relaxation and horseplay. A college man
said to me recently: “I wouldn’t cut that hour for anything. It is
as good as a circus.”
The student prefers the language of naturalness. He is keen for
scientific and athletic exercises, in part at least because they
are actual and direct approaches to reality. His college slang,
while often superabundant and absurd, is for the sake of brevity,
directness, and vivid expression. The perfect Elizabethan phrases
of the accomplished rhetorician are listened to with enduring
respect, but the stumbling and broken sentences of the college
athlete in a student mass-meeting set a college audience wild with
enthusiasm and applause.
Henry Drummond was perhaps the most truly popular speaker to
students of the last generation. A chief reason for this popularity
consisted in his perfect naturalness, his absolute freedom from
pose and affectation. I listened to one of his first addresses in
this country, when he spoke to Harvard students in Appleton Chapel
in 1893. His general subject was “Evolution.” The hall was packed
with Harvard undergraduates. Collegians had come also from other
New England institutions to see and to hear the man who had won
the loving homage of the students of two continents. As he rose to
speak, the audience sat in almost breathless stillness. Men were
wondering what important scientific word would first fall from the
lips of this renowned Glasgow professor. He stood for a moment with
one hand in his pocket, then leaned upon the desk, and, with that
fine, contagious smile which so often lighted his face, he looked
about at the windows, and drawled out in his quaint Scotch, “Isn’t
it rather _hot_ here?” The collegians broke into an applause that
lasted for minutes, then stopped, began again, and fairly shook
the chapel. It was applause for the natural man. By the telegraphy
of humanness he had established his kinship with them. Thereafter
he was like one of them; and probably no man has ever received more
complete loyalty from American undergraduates.
HIS SENSE OF HUMOR
Furthermore, the college man’s love of reality is kept in balance
by his humorous tendencies. His keen humor is part of him. It
rises from him spontaneously on all occasions in a kind of
genial effervescence. He seems to have an inherent antagonism
to dolefulness and long-facedness. His life is always breaking
into a laugh. He is looking for the breeziness, the delight, the
wild joy of living. Every phenomenon moves him to a smiling mood.
Recently I rode in a trolley-car with some collegians, and could
not but notice how every object in the country-side, every vehicle,
every group of men and women, would draw from them some humorous
sally, while the other passengers looked on in good-natured,
sophisticated amusement or contempt. The whole student mood is as
light and warm and invigorating as summer sunshine. He lives in a
period when
’tis bliss to be alive.
Rarely does one find revengefulness or sullen hatred in the
American undergraduate. When a man with these traits is discovered
in college, it is usually a sign that he does not belong with
collegians. His place is elsewhere, and he is usually shown the
way thither by both professors and students. Heinrich Heine said
he forgave his enemies, but not until they were dead. The student
forgives and usually forgets the next day. The sense of humor is
a real influence toward this attitude of mind, for the student
blots out his resentment by making either himself or his antagonist
appear ridiculous.
He has acquired the fine art of laughing both at himself and
with himself. A story is told of a cadet at a military school
who committed some more or less trivial offense which reacted
upon a number of his classmates to the extent that, because of
it, several cadets were forced to perform disciplinary sentinel
duty. It was decided that the young offender should be forthwith
taken out on the campus, and ordered to kiss all the trees,
posts, telegraph-poles, and, in fact, every free object on the
parade-ground. The humorous spectacle presented was sufficient
compensation to sweep quite out of the hearts of his classmates any
possible ill feeling.
The faculty song, the refrain of which is
Where, oh, where is Professor ----?
Way down in the world below,
and is indulged in by many undergraduate students, usually
covers all the sins and foibles of the instructors. One or two
rounds of this song, with the distinguished faculty members as
audience, is often found sufficient to clear the atmosphere of any
unpleasantness existing between professors and students.
Not long ago, in an institution in the Middle West, this common
tendency to wit and humor came out when a very precise professor
lectured vigorously against athletics, showing their deleterious
effect upon academic exercises. The following day the college
paper gave on the front page, as though quoted from the professor’s
remarks, “Don’t let your studies interfere with your education.”
The student’s humor is original and pointed. Not long ago I saw a
very dignified youth solemnly measuring the walks around Boston
Common with a codfish, keeping accurate account of the number of
codfish lengths embraced in this ancient and honorable inclosure.
His labors were made interesting by a gallery of collegians, who
followed him with explosions of laughter and appropriate remarks.
Not long ago in a large university, during an exceedingly long
and prosy sermon of the wearisome type which seems always to be
coming to an end with the next paragraph, the students exhibited
their impatience by leaning their heads over on their left hands.
Just as it seemed sure that the near-sighted preacher was about to
conclude, he took a long breath and said, “Let us now turn to the
_other side_ of the character of Saint Paul,” whereupon, suiting
the action to the word, every student in the chapel shifted his
position so as to rest his head wearily upon the other hand.
[Illustration: A Protest against Prosiness]
RELIGION AND THE COLLEGE MAN
I have often been asked by people who only see the student in such
playful and humorous moods, “Is the American college man really
religious?” The answer must be decidedly in the affirmative. The
college boy--with the manner of young men somewhat ashamed of
their emotions--does not want to talk much about his religion,
but this does not prove that he does not possess the feeling or
the foundation of religion. In fact, at present there is a deep
current of seriousness and religious feeling running through the
college life of America. The honored and influential students in
undergraduate circles are taking a stand for the things most worth
while in academic life.
The undergraduate’s religious life is not usually of the
traditional order; in fact it is more often unconventional,
unceremonious, and expressed in terms and acts germane to student
environment. College men do not, for example, crowd into the
church prayer-meetings in the local college town. As some one
has expressed it, “You cannot swing religion into college men,
prayer-meeting-end-to.” When the student applies to people such
words as “holy,” “saintly,” or “pious,” he is not intending to
be complimentary. Furthermore, he does not frequent meetings “in
derogation of strong drink.” His songs, also, are not usually
devotional hymns, and his conversation would seldom suggest that he
was a promoter of benevolent enterprises.
Yet the undergraduate is truly religious. Some of the things which
seem at first sight quite out of the realm of the religious are
indications of this tendency quite as much as compulsory attendance
upon chapel exercises. Dr. Henry van Dyke has said that the college
man’s songs and yells are his prayers. He is not the first one who
has felt this in listening to Princeton seniors on the steps of
Nassau Hall singing that thrilling hymn of loyalty, “Old Nassau.”
I have stood for an entire evening with crowds of students about
a piano as they sang with a depth of feeling more readily felt
than described. As a rule there was little conversing except a
suggestion of a popular song, a plantation melody, or some stirring
hymn. One feels at such times, however, that the thoughts of
the men are not as idle as their actions imply. As one student
expressed it in a college fraternity recently, “When we sing like
that, I always keep up a lot of thinking.”
Moreover, if we consider the college community from a strictly
conventional or religious point of view, the present-day
undergraduates do not suffer either in comparison with college men
of other days, or with other sections of modern life. The reports
of the last year give sixty out of every one hundred undergraduates
as members of churches. One in every seven men in the American
colleges last season was in voluntary attendance upon the Bible
classes in connection with the College Young Men’s Christian
Association.
The religious tendencies of the American undergraduates are also
reflected in their participation in the modern missionary crusades
both at home and abroad. Twenty-five years ago the entire gifts of
North American institutions for the support of missions in foreign
lands was less than $10,000. Last year the students and alumni of
Yale University alone gave $15,000 for the support of the Yale
Mission in China, while $131,000 represented the gifts of North
American colleges to the mission cause in other countries. The
missionary interests of students on this continent are furthermore
revealed in the fact that 11,838 men were studying modern missions
in weekly student mission study classes during the college season
of 1909-10. At Washington and Lee University there were more
college men studying missions in 1910 than were doing so in the
whole United States and Canada sixteen years ago.
During the last ten years 4338 college graduates have gone to
foreign lands from North America to give their lives in unselfish
service to people less fortunate than themselves. Six hundred of
these sailed in 1910 to fill positions in foreign mission ports
in the Levant, India, China, Japan, Korea, Africa, Australia, and
South America.
THE BACCHIC ELEMENT
Furthermore, the standards of morals and conduct among the American
undergraduates are perceptibly higher than they were fifty years
ago. There is a very real tendency in the line of doing away
with such celebrations as have been connected with drinking and
immoralities. To be sure, one will always find students who are
often worse for their bacchic associations, and one must always
keep in mind that the college is on earth and not in heaven; but
a comparison of student customs to-day with those of fifty years
ago gives cause for encouragement. Even in the early part of the
nineteenth century we find conditions that did not reflect high
honor upon the sobriety of students; for example, in the year 1814
we find Washington Irving and James K. Paulding depicting the usual
sights about college inns in the poem entitled “The Lay of the
Scottish Fiddle.” The following is an extract:
Around the table’s verge was spread
Full many a wine-bewildered head
Of student learn’d, from Nassau Hall,
Who, broken from scholastic thrall,
Had set him down to drink outright
Through all the livelong merry night,
And sing as loud as he could bawl;
Such is the custom of Nassau Hall.
No Latin now or heathen Greek
The senior’s double tongue can speak.
Juniors from famed Pierian fount
Had drank so deep they scarce could count
The candles on the reeling table.
While emulous freshmen, hardly able
To drink, their stomachs were so full,
Hiccuped, and took another pull,
Right glad to see their merry host,
Who never wine or wassail crost;
They willed him join the merry throng
And grace their revels with a song.
There has probably never been a time in our colleges when such
scenes were less popular than they are to-day. Indeed, it is
doubtful whether the American college man was ever more seriously
interested in the moral, social, and religious uplift of his times.
One of his cardinal ambitions is really to serve his generation
worthily both in private and in public. In fact, we are inclined to
believe that serviceableness is to-day the watchword of American
college religion. This religion is not turned so much toward the
individual as in former days. It is more socialized ethics. The
undergraduate is keenly sensitive to the calls of modern society.
Any one who is skeptical on this point may well examine the
biographies in social, political, and religious contemporaneous
history. In a recent editorial in one of our weeklies it was
humorously stated that “Whenever you see an enthusiastic person
running nowadays to commit arson in the temple of privilege,
trace it back, and ten to one you will come against a college.”
President Taft and a majority of the members of his Cabinet are
college-trained men. The reform movements, social, political,
economic, and religious, not only in the West, but also in the
Levant, India, and the Far East, are being led very largely by
college graduates, who are not merely reactionaries in these
national enterprises, but are in a very true sense “trumpets that
sing to battle” in a time of constructive transformation and
progress.
THE PLAY LIFE OF THE AMERICAN UNDERGRADUATE
Undoubtedly one of the reasons which helps to account for the
lack of knowledge on the part of outsiders concerning the revival
in college seriousness is found in the fact that the play life
of American undergraduates has become a prominent factor in our
educational institutions. Indeed, there is a general impression
among certain college teachers and among outside spectators of
college life that students have lost their heads in their devotion
to intercollegiate athletics. And it is not strange that such
opinions should exist.
A dignified father visits his son at college. He is introduced
to “the fellows in the house,” and at once is appalled by the
awestruck way with which his boy narrates, in such technical
terms as still further stagger the fond parent, the miraculous
methods and devices practised by a crack short-distance runner
or a base-ball star or the famous tackle of the year. When in an
impressive silence the father is allowed the unspeakable honor of
being introduced to the captain of the foot-ball team, the autocrat
of the undergraduate world, the real object of college education
becomes increasingly a tangle in the father’s mind. As a plain
business man with droll humor expressed his feelings recently,
after escaping from a dozen or more collegians who had been
talking athletics to him, “I felt like a merchant marine without
ammunition, being fired into by a pirate ship until I should
surrender.”
Whatever the undergraduate may be, it is certain that to-day he
is no “absent-minded, spectacled, slatternly, owlish don.” His
interest in the present-day world, and especially the athletic
world, is acute and general. Whether he lives on the “Gold Coast”
at Harvard or in a college boarding-house in Montana, in his
athletic loyalties he belongs to the same fraternity. To the
average undergraduates, athletics seem often to have the sanctity
of an institution. Artemus Ward said concerning the Civil War that
he would willingly sacrifice all his wife’s relatives for the sake
of the cause. Some such feeling seems to dominate the American
collegian.
CONCERNING ATHLETICS
Because of such athletic tendencies, the college student has been
the recipient of the disapprobation of a certain type of onlookers
in general, and of many college faculties in particular.
President Lowell of Harvard, in advocating competitive scholarship,
in a Phi Beta Kappa address at Columbia University, said, “By free
use of competition, athletics has beaten scholarship out of sight
in the estimation of the community at large, and in the regard of
the student bodies.” Woodrow Wilson pays his respects to student
athleticism by sententiously remarking, “So far as colleges go, the
side-shows have swallowed up the circus, and we in the main tent do
not know what is going on.”
Professor Edwin E. Slosson, who spent somewhat over a year
traveling among fourteen of the large universities, utters a
jeremiad on college athletics. He found “that athletic contests
do not promote friendly feeling and mutual respect between the
colleges, but quite the contrary; that they attract an undesirable
set of students; that they lower the standard of honor and honesty;
that they corrupt faculties and officials; that they cultivate
the mob mind; that they divert the attention of the students
from their proper work; and pervert the ends of education.” And
all these cumulative calamities arrive, according to Professor
Slosson, because of the grand stand, because people are _watching_
foot-ball games and competitive athletics. The professor would have
no objection to a few athletes playing foot-ball on the desert
of Idaho or in the fastnesses of the Maine woods, provided no one
was looking. “If there is nobody watching, they will not hurt
themselves much and others not at all,” he concedes.
Meanwhile, regardless of their doom,
The little victims play.
In fact, such argument appeals to the average collegian with about
the same degree of weight as the remark of the Irishman who was
chased by a mad bull. The Irishman ran until out of breath, with
the bull directly behind him; then a sudden thought struck him, and
he said to himself: “What a fool I am! I am running the same way
this bull is running. I would be all right if I were only running
the other way.”
It will doubtless be conceded by fair-minded persons generally
that in many institutions of North America athletics are being
over-emphasized, even as in some institutions practical and
scientific education is emphasized at the expense of liberal
training. It is difficult, however, to generalize concerning either
of these subjects. Opinion and judgment vary almost as widely as
does the point of view from which persons note college conditions.
A keen professor of one of the universities where athletics too
largely usurped the time and attention of students, justifiably
summed up the situation by saying:
The man who is trying to acquire intellectual experience
is regarded as abnormal (a “greasy grind” is the elegant
phrase, symptomatic at once of student vulgarity,
ignorance, and stupidity), and intellectual eminence falls
under suspicion as “bad form.” The student body is too much
obsessed of the “campus-celebrity” type,--a decent-enough
fellow, as a rule, but, equally as a rule, a veritable
Goth. That any group claiming the title _students_ should
thus minimize intellectual superiority indicates an
extraordinary condition of topsyturvydom.
During the last twelve months, however, I have talked with several
hundred persons, including college presidents, professors, alumni,
and fathers and mothers in twenty-five States and provinces of
North America in relation to this question. While occasionally a
college professor as well as parent or a friend of a particular
student has waxed eloquent in dispraise of athletics, by far the
larger majority of these representative witnesses have said that in
their particular region athletic exercises among students were not
over-emphasized.
[Illustration: University Hall, University of Michigan]
Yet it is evident that college athletics in America to-day are
too generally limited to a few students who _perform_ for the
benefit of the rest. It is also apparent that certain riotous
and bacchanalian exercises which attend base-ball and foot-ball
victories have been very discouraging features to those who are
interested in student morality. In another chapter I shall treat
at some length of these and other influences which are directly
inimical to the making of such leadership as the nation has a right
to demand of our educated men. In this connection, however, I wish
to throw some light upon the student side of the athletic problem,
a point of view too often overlooked by writers upon this subject.
In the first place, it needs to be appreciated that student
athletics in some form or other have absorbed a considerable amount
of attention of collegians in American institutions for over half
a century. Fifty years ago, even, we find foot-ball a fast and
furious conflict between classes. If we can judge by ancient
records, these conflicts were often quite as bloody in those days
as at present. An old graduate said recently that, compared with
the titanic struggles of his day, modern foot-ball is only a
wretched sort of parlor pastime. In those days the faculty took
a hand in the battle, and a historical account of a New England
college depicts in immortal verse the story of the way in which a
divinity professor charged physically into the bloody savagery of
the foot-ball struggle of the class of ’58.
Poor ’58 had scarce got well
From that sad punching in the bel--
Of old Prof. Olmstead’s umberell.
It will be impossible to fully represent the values of athletics
as a deterrent to the dissolute wanderings and immoralities common
in former times. Neither can one dwell upon the real apotheosis of
good health and robust strength that regular physical training has
brought to the youth of the country through the advent of college
gymnasiums and indoor and outdoor athletic exercises. Much also
might be said in favor of athletics, especially foot-ball, because
of the fact that such exercises emphasize discipline, which,
outside of West Point and Annapolis, is lamentably lacking in this
country both in the school and in the family. While there is much
need to engage a larger number of students in general athletic
exercises, it is nevertheless true that even though a few boys play
at foot-ball or base-ball, all of the students who look on imbibe
the idea that it is only the man who trains hard who succeeds.
There is, too, a feeling among those who know intimately the
real values of college play life, when wholesale denunciations
are made of undergraduate athletics, that it is possible for
one outside of college walls or even for one of the faculty to
produce all the facts with accuracy, and yet to fail in catching
the life of the undergraduate at play. Inextricably associated
with college athletics is a composite and intangible thing known
as “college spirit.” It is something which defies analysis and
exposition, which, when taken apart and classified, is not; yet
it makes distinctive the life and atmosphere of every great seat
of learning, and is closely linked not only with classrooms,
but also with such events as occur on the great athletic grand
stands, upon fields of physical contest in the sight of the college
colors, where episodes and aims are mighty, and about which
historical loyalties cling much as the old soldier’s memories are
entwined with the flag he has cheered and followed. While we are
quoting from Phi Beta Kappa orators, let us quote from another, a
contemporary of Longfellow, Horace Bushnell, whom Henry M. Alden
has called, next to Emerson, the most original American thinker
of his day. In his oration before the Phi Beta Kappa Society of
Harvard sixty years ago, Dr. Bushnell said that all work was for
an end, while play was an end in itself; that play was the highest
exercise and chief end of man.
It is this exercise of play which somehow gets down into the very
blood of the American undergraduate and becomes a permanently
valuable influence in the making of the man and the citizen. It
is difficult exactly to define the spirit of this play life, but
one who has really entered into American college athletic events
will understand it--the spirit of college tradition in songs and
cheers sweeping across the vast, brilliant throng of vivacious
and spell-bound youth; the vision of that fluttering scene of
color and gaiety in the June or October sunshine; the temporary
freedom of a thousand exuberant undergraduates; pretty girls vying
with their escorts in loyalty to the colors they wear; the old
“grad,” forgetting himself in the spirit of the game, springing
from his seat and throwing his hat in the air in the ebullition
of returning youth; the mercurial crowd as it demands fair play;
the sudden inarticulate silences; the spontaneous outbursts; the
disapprobation at mean or abject tricks,--or that unforgettable
sensation that comes as one sees the vast zigzagging lines of
hundreds of students, with hands holding one another’s shoulders
in the wild serpentine dance, finally throwing their caps over the
goal in a great sweep of victory. One joins unconsciously with
these happy spirits in this grotesque hilarity as they march about
the stadium with their original and laughable pranks, in a blissful
forgetfulness, for the moment at least, that there is any such
thing in existence as cuneiform inscriptions and the mysteries of
spherical trigonometry. Is there any son of an American college
who has really entered into such life as this who does not look
back lingeringly to his undergraduate days, grateful not only
for the instruction and the teachers he knew, but also for those
childish outbursts of pride and idealism when the deepest, poignant
loyalties caught up his spirit in unforgettable scenes:
Ah! happy days! Once more who would not be a boy?
A friend of mine had a son who had been planning for a long time
to go to Yale. Shortly before he was to enter college he went with
his father to see a foot-ball game between Yale and Princeton.
On this particular occasion Yale vanquished the orange and black
in a decisive victory. After the game the Yale men were marching
off with their mighty shouts of triumph. The Princeton students
collected in the middle of the foot-ball-field, and before singing
“Old Nassau,” they cheered with even greater vigor than they
had cheered at any time during the game, and this time not for
Princeton, but for Yale. The sons of Eli came back from their
celebration and stopped to listen and to applaud. As the mighty
tiger yell was going up from hundreds of Princetonian throats, and
as the Princeton men followed their cheers by singing the Yale
“Boolah,” the young man who stood by his father, looked on in
silence, indeed, with inexpressible admiration. Suddenly he turned
to his father and said: “Father, I have changed my mind. I want to
go to Princeton.”
[Illustration: The Serpentine Dance after a Foot-ball Game]
Such events are associated (in the minds of undergraduates) not
only with the physical, but with the spiritual, with the ideal. The
struggle on the athletic-field has meaning not simply to a few men
who take part, but to every student on the side-lines, while the
pulsating hundreds who sing and cheer their team to victory think
only of the real effort of their college to produce successful
achievement.
Standing beneath a tree near Soldiers’ Field at Cambridge, with
undergraduates by the hundred eager in their athletic sports on one
side, and the ancient roofs of Harvard on the other, there is a
simple marble shaft which bears the names of the men whom the field
commemorates, while below these names are written Emerson’s words,
chosen for this purpose by Lowell:
Though love repine and reason chafe,
There came a voice without reply--
’Tis man’s perdition to be safe,
When for the truth he ought to die.
Not only upon the shields of our American universities do we find
“veritas”; in spirit at least it is also clearly written across
the face of the entire college life of our times. Gentlemanliness,
open-mindedness, originality, honor, patriotism, truth--these are
increasingly found in both the serious pursuits and the play life
of our American undergraduates. The department in which these
ideals are sought is not so important as the certainty that the
student is forming such ideals of thoroughness and perfection.
This search for truth and reality may bring to our undergraduates
unrest or doubt or arduous toil. They may search for their answer
in the lecture-room, on the parade-ground, in the hurlyburly of
college comradeships, in the competitive life of college contests,
or even in the hard, self-effacing labors of the student who
works his way through college. While, indeed, it may seem to many
that the highest wisdom and the finest culture still linger, one
must believe that the main tendencies in the life of American
undergraduates are toward the discovery of and devotion to the
highest truth--the truth of nature and the truth of God.
II
EDUCATION À LA CARTE
“If I were to return to college, I should take nothing that was
practical,” remarked a recent college graduate. This attitude
reveals by contrast a somewhat wide-spread tendency of opinion
toward practical and progressive studies.
At a public gathering not long since, the president of a great
State institution in the Middle West said that he believed within
another decade every course in the institution of which he was the
head would be intended simply to fit men to earn a livelihood. A
cultivated disciple of quiet and delightful studies who overheard
this remark was heard to say almost in a groan, “If I thought that
was true of American education generally, I should want to die.”
An even more significant note of warning against merely
bread-and-butter studies comes from Amherst College, where the
class of 1885 recently presented to the governing board the radical
plan of abolishing entirely the degree of bachelor of science,
with the purpose of building up a strictly classical course for a
limited number of students admitted to college only by competitive
examinations. The plan provides for the raising of a fund to meet
any deficiency caused by the temporary loss of students and also
for the increase of teachers’ salaries. The general idea in the
mind of the Amherst committee is expressed as follows:
The proposition for which Amherst stands is that
preparation for some particular part of life does not make
better citizens than “preparation for the whole of it”;
that because a man can “function in society” as a craftsman
in some trade or technical work, he is not thereby made
a better leader; that we have already too much of that
statesmanship marked by ability “to further some dominant
social interest,” and too little of that which is “aware
of a world moralized by principle, steadied and cleared of
many an evil thing by true and catholic reflection and just
feeling, a world not of interest, but of ideas.” Amherst
upholds the proposition that for statesmen, leaders of
public thought, for literature, indeed for all work which
demands culture and breadth of view, nothing can take
the place of the classical education; that the duty of
institutions of higher education is not wholly performed
when the youth of the country are passed from the high
schools to the universities to be “vocationalized,” but
that there is a most important work to be performed by an
institution which stands outside this straight line to
pecuniary reward; that there is room for at least one great
classical college, and we believe for many such.
[Illustration: Johnston Gate from the Yard, Harvard University]
These opinions are impressive. No one can visit widely our American
colleges without feeling the appropriateness of such warnings and
demands. A story is told of the president of a college praying in
chapel for the prosperity of his school and all new and “inferior”
institutions. The prayer would seem to have been answered in the
last decade, which marks the marvelous growth of modern technical
institutions in America. This growth has been specially pronounced
in the great State universities and in the institutions fitted to
train men in practical education.
GROWTH OF PRACTICAL EDUCATION
Dr. William R. Harper is quoted as saying shortly before his death
that “no matter how liberally the private institution might be
endowed, the heritage of the future, at least in the West, is to
be the State university.” An ex-president of a State university
has given the following indication of ten years of advance in
attendance of students at fifteen State universities in comparison
with attendance at fifteen representative Eastern colleges and
universities:
1896-97 1906-07
State universities 16,414 34,770
Increase 112%
Eastern institutions 18,331 28,631
Increase 56%
Almost any one of our great universities at present has many times
the wealth, equipment, and students of all of our colleges fifty
years ago. Our American agricultural and mechanical colleges,
the greater number of which have arisen within ten years, now
enroll more than 25,000 students. In 1850 there were only eight
non-professional graduate students in the United States. In 1876,
when Johns Hopkins opened, there were 400 such students. There are
now at least 10,000 students of this class, and every year finds an
additional number of our larger institutions including graduate
courses preparing for practical vocations, with many of them adding
facilities for graduate study during the summer.
The following more concrete comparison by Professor E. E. Slosson
reveals the manner in which the new State institutions are rapidly
meeting the demands of modern times for technical and professional
education; for the chief progress in these institutions has
been not in the old-fashioned culture studies, but in special
departments, including well-nigh everything from engineering and
dairying to music and ceramics:
Total Annual Total Average
Annual Appropriation Instructing Expenditure
Income. for Salaries Staff in for Instruction
of Instructing University. per Student.
INSTITUTIONS. Staff.
Columbia University
$1,675,000 $1,145,000 559 $280
Harvard University
1,827,789 841,970 573 209
University of Chicago
1,304,000 699,000 291 137
University of Michigan
1,078,000 536,000 285 125
Yale University
1,088,921 524,577 365 158
Cornell University
1,082,513 510,931 507 140
University of Illinois
1,200,000 491,675 414 136
University of Wisconsin
998,634 489,810 297 157
University of Pennsylvania
589,226 433,311 375 117
University of California
844,000 408,000 350 136
Stanford University
850,000 365,000 136 230
Princeton University
442,232 308,650 163 235
University of Minnesota
515,000 263,000 303 66
Johns Hopkins University
311,870 211,013 172 324
WHAT IS THE CHIEF END OF AN AMERICAN COLLEGE?
This sudden and enormous advance in the pursuit of technical
studies, which have made the State universities formidable
rivals to our older, privately endowed institutions, has aroused
uncertainty as to the real object of collegiate training. Modern
commercialism, which has said that you must touch liberal studies,
if at all, in a utilitarian way, has swept in a mighty current
through our American universities. The undergraduate is feeling
increasingly the pressure of the outside modern world--the world
not of values, but of dollars. The sense of strain, of rush, and of
anxiety which generally pervades our business, our public and our
professional life, has pervaded the atmosphere in which men should
be taught first of all to think and to grow.
The present tendency of students is to feel that any form of
education that does not associate itself directly with some form
of practical and significant action is artificial, unreal, and
undesirable. Last winter I visited an institution on the Pacific
coast where literary studies were considered, among certain
classes of students, as not only unpractical, but almost unmanly.
As a result of such drift in educational sentiment, the American
undergraduate is in danger of getting prepared for an emergency
rather than for life. He is losing,
In action’s dizzying eddy whirled,
The something that infects the world.
The student leads his life noisily and hurriedly. He scarcely takes
time to see it all plainly without dust and confusion. There is
all about him a blurred sense of motion and duties. His culture
lies upon him in lumps. He does not allow it time to impress him.
College is a bewildering episode rather than a place of clear
vision.
THE NEED OF LEADERS RATHER THAN MONEY-MAKERS
It is far easier to turn out of our colleges mechanical experts
than it is to create men who are thoughtful, men who know
themselves and the world. The value of the modern man to society
does not depend upon his ability to do always the same thing
that everybody else is doing. College men should be fitted to
_make_ public sentiment as well as to follow it. The educated
leader should be in advance of his period. Independence born
of thoughtfulness and self-control should mark his thought and
decision. The world looks to him for assistance in vigorously
resisting those deteriorating influences which would commercialize
intellect, coarsen ideas, and dilute true culture. His hours of
insight and vision in the world of art, ideas, letters, and moral
discipline should assist him to will aright when high vision is
blurred by the duties of the common day. His clearer conception
of highest truth should lead him to hope when other men despair.
Our colleges should train men who will be “trumpets that sing to
battle” against all complacency, indifference, and social wrong.
When a student, however, puts his profession of medicine or
engineering before that of responsible leadership in social,
political, moral, and industrial life, he ceases to be a real
factor in the modern world. We already have a thousand men who can
make money to one man who can think and make other men think. We
have a thousand followers to one genuine leader who incorporates
in his own mind and heart a high point of view and the ability
to present it in an attractive way. It is one thing for an
undergraduate to go out from his institution expert in electrical
science; it is quite another thing for him to so truly discover
the spirit of life itself, as to be able to harmonize his expert
ability with the broader and deeper life of the age in which he
lives.
The present undergraduate often fails lamentably at this very
point. He frequently reminds one of the remark of an old gentleman
to an old lady whom I saw at a backwoods railway-station in Oregon
watching a small white dog chasing with great zeal an express-train
which had surged past the station. The old lady, turning to her
companion, said eagerly, “Do you think he will catch it?” The old
man answered, “I am wondering what he will do with the blamed thing
if he _does_ catch it.” The college undergraduate likewise is often
uncertain about what he is to do with his profession beyond making
a living with it. Our colleges, with their technical training,
should give the conviction that a physician in a community is more
than a medical practitioner. His success as a physician brings with
it an obligation of interest and leadership in all of the social,
civic, and philanthropic movements of the town or city in which he
works. He should discover in college that he is to be more than
a doctor; that he is to be also a man and a citizen. In the last
analysis, for real success it is not a question whether a man is a
great engineer or a great electrician or a great surgeon; it is the
question of individual character.
The pressing inquiry, then, for all undergraduate training is,
Are we giving to our boys the kind of education which will fill
their future life with meaning? A man must live with himself. He
must be a good companion for himself. A college graduate, whatever
his specialty, should be able to spend an evening apart from the
crowd. The theater, the automobile, the lobster-palace, were
never intended to be the chief end of collegiate education. A
college course should give the undergraduate tastes, temperament,
and habits of reading. A graduate who studies to be a specialist
in any line needs also the education which will give him depth,
background, and the historical significance of civilization and
life in general.
A lady at a dinner-party was making desperate attempts to interest
in her conversation a certain business man who had been introduced
to her as a graduate of a prominent university. She talked to
him of books, education, theater, races, pictures, society, and
out-of-door life. All of her efforts were futile. Finally he
said, “Try me on leather; that’s my line.” This college graduate
lost something important in his incompetency for general and
intelligent conversation. His loss was more tragic, however,
as a representative of the so-called college-educated classes,
exponents of specialistic training, who have become materially
successful, but who are without those personal resources necessary
for their own enjoyment and profit, and who find themselves utterly
inadequate for guidance or incentive to their fellowmen.
ELECTIVE STUDIES
The system of elective studies which now widely characterizes
the training in our higher educational institutions has made it
increasingly difficult for the college man to secure a clear idea
of a college course and the comprehensive training which is his
due. In many institutions the whole curriculum is in a state of
unstable equilibrium. The endeavor to follow the demands of the
times and the desire to secure patrons and students, have often
brought to both the faculty and the undergraduate an uncertainty as
to the true meaning of the college. Even in freshman and sophomore
years the arrangement of studies is often left to the choice of
the immature student. In one of our oldest universities there is
at present only one prescribed course of study. For the rest, the
students are allowed to choose at their own sweet will, and their
choice, while dictated by a variety of motives, is influenced
in no small degree by the preponderance of emphasis, both in
buildings and faculty, upon technical education. Students are left
to flounder about in their selection of courses, guided neither by
curriculum nor life purpose. Recently I asked twenty-six students
why they chose their studies. Sixteen of them gave monetary or
practical reasons; six answered that the studies chosen furnished
the line of least resistance as far as preparation was concerned;
and only four had in mind comprehensive culture and preparation for
life.
I sympathize with the educator who said recently:
Is it not time that we stop asking indulgence for learning
and proclaim its sovereignty? Is it not time that we remind
the college men of this country that they have no right to
any distinctive place in any community unless they can show
it by intellectual achievement? that if a university is a
place for distinction at all, it must be distinguished by
conquest of mind?
While these tendencies threaten, instead of criticizing too
severely our universities and our undergraduates, we should strive
first to find the reason for these modern scientific and practical
lines of work; and second, to suggest, if possible, definite ways
by which a truer harmony in educational studies may be brought
about.
EDUCATION TO MEET POPULAR DEMANDS
The rapid extension of natural-physical science in the last fifty
years has had much to do with the change of accent in American
education. This change of emphasis has effected a distinct
transformation in the curriculum, in the college teacher and in the
student ideal.
Should one care to get one’s fingers dusty with ancient documents,
one might turn to an old leaflet in the files of the library at
Columbia, dated November 2, 1853. It is the report of the trustees
of Columbia College upon the establishment of a university system.
Among other things this report outlines, in accordance with the
ideas of the trustees, “the mission of the college.”
[Illustration: The Library, Columbia University]
This mission is, “to direct and superintend the mental and moral
culture. The design of a college is to make perfect the human
intellect in all its parts and functions; by means of a thorough
training of all the intellectual faculties, to obtain their full
development; and by the proper guidance of the moral functions,
to direct them to a proper exertion. To form the mind, in short,
is the high design of education as sought in a College Course.”
The report hereupon proceeds to note that unfortunately this
sentiment, “manifest and just” though it be, “does not meet with
universal sympathy or acquiescence.” On the contrary, the demand
for what is termed progressive knowledge ... and for fuller
instruction in what are called the useful and practical sciences,
is at variance with this fundamental idea. The public generally,
unaccustomed to look upon the mind except in connection with the
body, and to regard it as a machine for promoting the pleasures,
the conveniences, or the comforts of the latter, will not be
satisfied with a system of education in which they are unable to
perceive the direct connection between the knowledge imparted and
the bodily advantages to be gained. The committee therefore “think
that while they would retain the system having in view the most
perfect intellectual training, they might devise parallel courses,
having this design at the foundation, but still adapted to meet the
popular demand.”
We have here one of the early indications of “parallel courses”
in one of our institutions of higher learning as a concession to
popular demands. But this concession at Columbia was made before
the immense extension and development of modern natural, physical,
and industrial science. Education or culture in the early fifties
was something easy to define. It included logic, literature,
oratory, conic sections, and religion. Since that date, however,
the American undergraduate has discovered modern research work at
the German university. Cecil Rhodes has opened Oxford for American
students with his “golden key.” The American student has been
called upon to match with his technical ability the enormous and
rapid development of a new material civilization, and educational
institutions take color from the social and political media in
which they exist. In fact, it cannot be easily estimated how real
or how comprehensive a factor the college graduate has been in
guiding and shaping this practical and progressive awakening.
The American undergraduate is more than ever before contemporaneous
with all that is real and important in modern existence. He
is filled with enthusiasm for civic and social and religious
investigation and improvement. With self-reliant courage he works
his way through college, tutoring, waiting on table, and performing
other real services. He debates with zeal economics, immigration,
and labor questions. Indeed, the modern American university is
taking increasingly firmer hold upon the life of the nation. The
college graduate of fifty years ago was more or less a thing
apart. If he was strong in his literary studies, he was also weak
in his attachment to life itself, where education really has its
working arena. In comparison with him, the student to-day spends a
greater proportion of his time in the study of political science.
One feels the limitation of the modern undergraduate especially in
the sweep of his literary knowledge, and in his acquaintance with
abstract thought, art, and poetry. But when we see student and
professor working together on our American farms, bringing about
a new and higher type of rural life; when we find our mechanical
engineers not only in the mountains and on the Western prairies,
but in the heart of India or inland China or South Africa, building
there their bridges and railroad tunnels according to the ideas
seen in the vision of their new practical educational training,
we are bound to ask whether the modern undergraduate is not truly
interested in the deep aim of all true scholarship, namely, the
spiritual and concrete construction of life by means of ideas made
real. Ambassador Bryce’s opinion of the American universities
carries weight, and of them he has said:
If I may venture to state the impression which the
American universities have made upon me, I will say that
while of all the institutions of the country they are
those of which the American speaks most modestly, and
indeed deprecatingly, they are those which seem to be at
this moment making the swiftest progress, and to have
the brightest promise for the future. They are supplying
exactly those things which European cities have hitherto
found lacking to America; and they are contributing to her
political as well as to her contemplative life elements of
inestimable worth.
But since undergraduate training must deal not simply with the
theory of education, but also with the imperative demands and
conditions of a new time, there must be discovered practical ways
by which our undergraduates may save their literary ideals at
the same time that they enlarge their practical and progressive
knowledge; means by which they may discover literary, historical,
linguistic, and philosophical values without losing their
mathematics and their physical and material sciences.
To the end, therefore, of making cultural studies as strong,
attractive, and profitable to our undergraduates as practical and
scientific training, our institutions should train men of large
caliber to teach English and belles-lettres. They should discover
great teachers and inspiring personalities.
PERSONALITY OF GREAT TEACHERS
President Gilman of Johns Hopkins University took as his motto,
“Men before buildings.” The subject of securing great teachers for
students is perhaps the most vital topic which can be considered,
since from the point of view of undergraduates a professor, whether
teaching civil engineering or Greek, is invariably influential
because of what he is personally.
In a large university which I recently visited I was told that
there were three thousand students and five hundred instructors
and professors, an average of a professor to every six students.
Upon asking several of the undergraduates how many professors they
knew personally, I was somewhat astounded to find that less than a
dozen of these six hundred teachers came into personal contact with
the students outside of the classes. One graduate told me that he
had not been in the home of more than three professors during his
college course.
There are undoubtedly reasons for this lack of association between
the professors and the undergraduates. In a large university, the
demand upon the teacher for more work than he should rightfully
undertake, the ever-increasing interest of the student in college
affairs, with many other influences, are constantly presented as
difficulties in the way of the teacher’s close relationship with
the student. But the important point in this association between
student and professor is that in many cases the professor has
nothing vital and individual to give the undergraduate when he
meets him. In too many cases he is a dry and weary man, living
his life in books rather than in men. A. C. Benson has described
a Cambridge don in terms that at times we fear fit some college
professors of our own land. He sits “like a moulting condor in
a corner, or wanders seeking a receptacle for his information.”
The American college teacher has too often been chosen simply
because of his scholarship. Our institutions of learning have been
obsessed with the mere value of the degree of doctor of philosophy.
As a consequence, many a young professor is scholarly and expert
in his knowledge of his subject, but utterly without ability to
impart it with interest. He lacks driving force as well as guiding
and regulating force. He seems at times without the capacity for
real feeling. He is not alive to the issues of the time in which
he lives. He starts his subject a century behind the point of
view in which his scholars are interested. Too often, alas! he
misses the chief opportunity of a college teacher in not becoming
friendly with his undergraduates; for there is no comradeship like
the comradeship of letters, the comradeship of knowledge, the
comradeship of those whose lives are united in the higher aims of
serious education.
Letters have never lacked their fascination when they have been
embodied in the thought and personalities of great teachers. Albert
Harkness, with his face aglow with literary enthusiasm, reading
“Prometheus Bound,” in his lecture-room in the old University Hall
at Providence, is one of the unfading memories of my undergraduate
days. When Tennyson said, “I am sending my son not to Marlborough,
but to Bradley, the great teacher,” it was not a _subject_ he had
in mind, but a _personality_. In one institution which I visit,
virtually the entire undergraduate body elects botany. A student
said to me one day, “We do not care especially for botany, but
we would elect anything to be under Dr. ----.” Not long ago,
attending a college dinner at the University of Minnesota, I heard
a professor at my side lamenting the tendency to irreverence on the
part of American college men. While we were speaking, ex-President
Northrop came into the room, and the entire crowd of students were
on their feet in an instant, cheering their beloved president. One
of the undergraduates closed his remarks by saying that the deepest
impression of his college days had occurred in the chapel when
their honored president prayed; and he quoted the following verse:
When Prexy prays
Our heads all bow,
A sense of peace
Smooths every brow,
Our hearts, deep stirred,
No whisper raise
At chapel time
When Prexy prays.
THE PROFESSOR IN THE LECTURE-ROOM
The classroom presentation of the college professor is also highly
important. Many a subject is spoiled for a student because of
the pedantic, priggish, or solemn manner of the teacher. Many a
teacher is devoted to his subject and painstaking, but his lack of
knowledge as to the use of incident, epigram, and enticing speech
in presenting his subject, prevents his popularity and power as a
teacher. Woodrow Wilson says that he had been teaching for twenty
years before he discovered that the students forgot his facts,
but remembered his stories. We realize that tables of population,
weights, and measures, temperatures, birth-rates, and dimensions,
are at times necessary, but these should be used in the classroom
with moderation.
Too often a teacher takes for granted that he has an uninteresting
subject, and therefore gives up the task of making it attractive.
A professor of mathematics, endeavoring to evade the obligation
for good teaching, gave to a professor of chemistry, whose
lecture-room was always crowded with interested students, the
following reason for the unpopularity of his subject: “The trouble
with mathematics is that nothing ever happens. If, when an equation
is solved, it would blow up or give off a bad odor, I should get as
many students as you.” The real reason, however, was deeper than
the nature of his subject. It lay in the nature of the man. He did
not have the power to bring his subject into vital contact with
reality and with the life of his students.
The lecture plan also handicaps many a teacher in this important
task of getting near the student and drawing him out. The seminar
of our larger universities and graduate schools help much in
individualizing the students. Students may be talked to death. They
themselves often want to talk. An undergraduate in the South, after
hearing a professor who was without terminal facilities, told me
the old story of Josh Billings, who defined a bore as a man who
talked so much about himself that you couldn’t talk about yourself.
In many institutions the students also are forced to take too many
lectures. Their minds become jaded. Thinking is the last thing
they have power to do in the lecture-room. There is little desire
or opportunity for intellectual reaction; as one professor of a
Western university humorously remarked:
They do not listen, however attentive or orderly they may
be. The bell rings, and a troop of tired-looking boys,
followed perhaps by a larger number of meek-eyed girls,
file into the classroom, sit down, remove the expressions
from their faces, open their note-books on the broad
chair-arms, and receive. It is about as inspiring an
audience as a room full of phonographs holding up their
brass trumpets.
TWO WAYS OF TEACHING HISTORY
The most discouraging moments of my college days occurred during
the lecture hours of history, not because I did not have a natural
bent for history, but because the professor made the topic, for me,
uninteresting. My mind became a blank almost as soon as I entered
the classroom. Lecture days in history covered me with a darkness
beyond that which I had ever imagined could emanate from the world
of fallen spirits. My powers went into eclipse. There seemed to be
a kind of automatic cut-off between my brains and my note-book.
My only source of comfort consisted in the fact that my miseries
had companionship. In some examinations, I remember, only a small
remnant of the class succeeded in satisfying the demands of our
scholarly teacher.
I can only remember flashes and hints of a long, solemn, student
face, shrouded with whiskers, bending with piercing eye over books
which seemed only slightly less dry than a remainder biscuit,
droning, in “hark-from-the-tombs-a-doleful-sound” incantation,
words, which to our vagrant attention were just words, belonging to
remote centuries, while about me my companions shivered audibly,
waiting to be called up. The professor was called a great student
of history. He might have been. We gladly admitted this: it was
the chief compliment we could pay him. As a teacher and inspirer
of boys, however, he was a good example of the way to make history
impregnable.
[Illustration: A Popular Professor of Chemistry and his Crowded
Lecture-Room]
I hold in memory, also, another professor who taught history.
He was seldom called a professor. The students called him “Benny.”
There was a kind of lingering affection in our voices as we spoke
his name. His lecture-room was always crowded. No student ever
went to sleep, no student became so frightened that he lost his
wits, no student ever took himself too seriously. There was an
element of humor and humanness which was constantly kindled by this
great, manly teacher and which fired at frequent intervals every
student heart. His illustrations were not confined to Horatius on
the bridge, Garibaldi promising his soldiers disaster and death,
or Luther at Worms. He attached history to modern themes. His
historical situations were described not in the terms of tedious
systems, but in the personalities of great men. We somehow felt
that he himself was greater than anything he said; that he himself
was a great man. He found interest in the _life_ of college as
well as in the work of college. He talked about the last foot-ball
game and the reason why the college was defeated and the lessons
that men should draw from their failure. The value of his remarks
was enhanced by the fact that most of the men had seen him on the
running-track in the gymnasium, or on the front row of the grand
stand, cheering patriotically with both voice and arms. I remember
how he used to add driving power to our awakening resolves and
ambitions. We were quite likely to forget that we were learning
history. To-day at alumni dinners the mere mention of the name
“Benny” brings an enthusiasm which the most eloquent speech of any
other man seems incapable of invoking. Here was a man who also
taught history; but the man was more than his book, he was more
than his subject: he was the light and the blood of it, and the
glory of that theme still brightens the path of every one of those
hundreds of students who caught a new and radiant vision of the
march of events in the light of a great man’s eyes. It was of such
teachers that Emerson must have been thinking when he said, “There
is no history, only biography,” and again, “An institution is but
the lengthened shadow of a man.”
It is of such men that other college graduates think to-day, even
as Matthew Arnold thought of Jowett at Balliol:
For rigorous masters seized my youth,
And purged its faith, and trimmed its fire,
Shew’d me the high, white star of truth,
There bade me gaze, and there aspire.
WANTED: THE GREAT TEACHER
But how are we to train such teachers for our undergraduates?
This is no child’s task. It is the matchless opportunity of the
college; it is the crying need of our times. A large proportion of
undergraduates in college lecture-rooms are virtually untouched
in either their feelings or their intellects by the ministry of
the church. Whatever the ministry may have been in our father’s
times, it is not to-day significant or effective in imparting its
message to students. The fact is periodically demonstrated by test
questions of teachers to their students concerning the Bible,
English literature, and church history. I have recently visited
a dozen of the leading preparatory schools whose headmasters
and teachers quite invariably unite in lamenting the inadequacy
of the Sunday-schools and of religious training in the home.
Indeed, many students go up to our best preparatory schools in
almost a heathenish condition as regards religion and Christian
knowledge. It is the day and time of the teacher’s ministry in both
secondary schools and in colleges. No pulpit in our day is more
far-reaching and decisive than the desk of the college teacher.
The college professor who does not forget that he is first a man,
then a professor, and who can get past the friendship of books and
knowledge to a genuine friendship with students, can be the highest
force in our present day civilization. But the teacher says: “I am
only a teacher of literature, or of chemistry, or of engineering,
or of bridge-building. I am not an evangelist or a moral reformer,
or a promoter of polite accomplishments or of social service.” Much
of this is true also of the great teachers of history. Yet somehow
these men found in their specialty the door through which they
entered into the very hearts and lives of their school-boys.
A short time ago at the University of Iowa I had the opportunity
of meeting at luncheon thirty members of the faculty. The subject
for discussion was: “What can the professor do really to assist
students at the University of Iowa in discovering the values worth
while in college life?” Approximately one-half of the teachers
for various reasons prayed to be excused from the discussion. I
was specially interested in the answers of the other men--among
whom were the men, according to student testimony, who had a real
hold upon the university life. One man was of the department of
chemistry. He was prominent in student activities. When he was
introduced, a student said, “There is no man more truly liked in
the university than Professor ----.” As he talked, we felt that,
while he might be a good teacher of chemistry, his department was
chiefly important in giving him a point of departure from which he
could go forth to interest himself in the life of young men. After
the conference he said to me: “If professors want influence with
students, let them appear at debates, at athletic games, and at
student mass-meetings; let them show real interest in undergraduate
activities of all sorts, even at personal sacrifice.”
Another professor was a teacher of English. He was not interested
in athletics or in the religious life of the students so much as
in revealing to students in the classroom as well as outside the
classroom the charm of literary things. That was his message--his
individual message to his college. His life-work was more than
presenting the evolution of the English novel: it was a mission
to students to secure on their part habits of reading and a taste
for genuine literature which in after years would be to many the
most priceless reward of their college days. It is not necessary
that two college teachers should present the same truth in the
same way, but when college professors and instructors, presidents,
deans, and tutors, realize that teaching to-day as in former days
is a calling, not simply a means of livelihood, and that every
man who holds any such position must somehow discover how to
reach personally at least a small circle of students, then our
colleges will not longer be defined as “knowledge shops,” but as
the homes of those inspirations and friendships, those ideals and
incitements, which make life more than meat and the body than
raiment.
While the drift of our modern life in the outside world may be
toward technical and scientific education, the drift in college is
still toward the great teacher--the man of thought-provoking power
and of spiritual capacity; sincere and genuine both in scholarship
and manhood, of whom one can speak, as Carlyle spoke of Schiller,
“a high ministering servant at Truth’s altar, and bore him worthily
of the office he held.”
III
THE COLLEGE CAMPUS
Rudyard Kipling speaks of four street corners of four great cities
where a man may stand and see pass everybody of note in the world.
There are likewise vantage-points in our American colleges from
which one may discover not only the influential undergraduate
types, but also the real life of their environment. One of these
places is the college campus.
Undergraduate life falls into two broad divisions: college work,
pertaining to the study and the classroom; and college relaxation,
centering upon the campus. The latter includes social life,
amusements, athletics, and the other voluntary exercises in which
students meet for fellowship and competition. The close tie between
college work and college play is often shown. A change in student
sentiment has instant effect on student work, while no rules of
the faculty can nullify those deeply rooted principles of student
life which make all college men akin.
A WEST POINT INCIDENT
This relation of student feeling to college authority was shown not
long ago at West Point. The cadet corps was under arrest for having
given the “silence” to an officer in the mess-hall during supper,
for reasons deemed by the cadets to be vital to corps honor and
dignity. The first silence occurred at supper. The whole corps of
cadets, 450 men, were marched back to barracks supperless, and were
placed under arrest in their rooms. Again at breakfast the cadets
repeated the silence, for which they were returned to barracks, but
not until they had been made to “double time” up and down the road
for about twenty minutes. That morning the cadets had virtually
no breakfast. At the next formation for midday dinner an incident
occurred which struck a chord even deeper than discipline and
authority, and broke the insubordination of the students. In the
autumn one of the cadets had brought from home a graphophone,
and among the comic-song cylinders was one which pictured a
non-domestic husband about to slip quietly away from home for an
evening at the club, when his wife confronted him with the command,
Put on your slippers; you’re in for the night.
This song was very popular with the cadets. They were drawn up
in front of the barracks, every man indignant, obstinate, and
determined to repeat the silence, and to continue it even at the
risk of starvation and confinement. At this critical moment the
graphophone, which had been set to begin its work five minutes
after its humorous owner had left his room, began to sing in a
high-pitched voice through the open window directly above the lines
of cadets,
Put on your slippers; you’re in for the night.
[Illustration: Student Waiters in the Dining-Hall of an American
College]
The effect was irresistible. It was like the changing of a current
in an electric battery. The eyes of the cadets, despite the fact
that they were at attention, sought the eyes of their fellows;
their faces relaxed, then broke into a smile. By the time they
reached the mess-hall the whole corps was laughing, and their
sense of humor had swept away the sense of anger and pride. This
was the beginning of the restoration of the traditional West Point
discipline. The campus had spoken to the classroom.
“GROWN-UP” COLLEGIANS
It is through an understanding of this spirit of the campus that
the work of American undergraduates can be adjusted to modern
demands. The work of the classroom and examination-hall makes
for democracy, while the social life of the college makes for
conservatism and aristocracy. Campus life is increasingly difficult
to understand because of its growing complexity. The material needs
of our time have created a class of undergraduates bent on becoming
specialists, and these men have increasingly less time for either
college work or college life; for them the undergraduate course
is something to be hurried through as a short cut to professional
efficiency. Even athletics and college affairs have only a slender
hold upon these utilitarian specialists. They have a “grown-up”
look on their faces as, eager for scientific research, they rush to
and fro between their rooms and their laboratories.
Undergraduate life is now likewise influenced by the influx
of students who are not the sons of college men, but who come
from homes the chief ideals of which have been derived from
counting-rooms and laboratories, from brokers’ and railroad
offices. These students, scions of a property-getting class, in
conjunction with the social and the scientific students in college,
help to change the classical traditions. They emphasize the campus
side of college life more than that of the lecture-room. Their eyes
are upon the stadium rather than upon the library; the delights
of scholarship influence them less than ambition for leadership
and the importance of “making good” in student affairs. They are
in college for “popular” reasons, and too often fail to learn how
to think. But they are eager, versatile, adaptable, with a ready
capacity for social adjustment and modern expression.
COSMOPOLITAN LIFE AT COLLEGE
Furthermore, the student world has been subdivided until it is a
wholly different thing from what it was fifty or even twenty years
ago. While in the seventies the college student knew every man in
his class, in the large institution to-day an undergraduate will
meet in the college yard scores of classmates who are perfect
strangers, and to whom he has no more idea of speaking than to
persons whom he has never seen before. The student who has been
brought up always to dine in a dinner-coat will have for his
table-companions men who have never owned a dress-coat and who see
no immediate prospect of needing one.
The influx of foreign students has added to the cosmopolitan life
of American institutions. So far as they are Orientals, the English
departments are specially modified both in the character of the
attendance and the instruction by their presence. The professor’s
task of adjusting instruction to a mixed assembly of American,
Indian, Mohammedan, Porto Rican, Chinese, and Japanese students may
be inferred from the answer of a young East Indian student who was
asked to describe in English his daily routine:
At the break of day I rises from my own bed, then I employ
myself till 8 o’clock, after which I employ myself to
bathe, then take for my body some sweetmeat, and just at 9½
I came to school to attend my class duty, then, at 2½ P. M.
I return from school and engage myself to do my further
duties then I engage for a quarter to take my tiffin, then
I study till 5 P. M., after which I began to play anything
which comes in my head. After 8½ half pass to eight we are
began to sleep, before sleeping I told a constable just 11
o’ he came and rose us from half pass elevan we began to
read still morning.
The familiar din of dishes at the commons of Columbia, as
well as at the University of California, serves to raise the
pitch of a polyglot table-talk that often represents a dozen
nationalities. Last year in American colleges there were hundreds
of undergraduates of alien speech, customs, ideals, temperaments,
and religion. Among these were a specially important delegation
of three hundred Chinese young men who were beneficiaries of the
Boxer indemnity fund. These students from foreign nations still
further subdivide undergraduate life through their race clubs,
societies for learning English, special religious conferences, and
new studies.
COLLEGE TRADITIONS
College tradition adds its distinctive and forceful factor to the
campus life of the undergraduate, particularly in the older seats
of learning. A good tradition makes it easy to accomplish things
worth while without the spasmodic campaigns that characterize many
younger institutions. Students are often more zealous to uphold
the ancient customs of their college than anything else connected
with it. The annual conflicts between freshmen and sophomores have
become a part of the institution. Certain traditional habits, often
humorous, sometimes doubtful, in character, have grown up in nearly
every North American college. An old account of life at Cambridge
tells of the manner in which both occupant and furniture of a
freshman’s room were menaced by a missile as big as a cantaloupe
that was thrown into it. It was described as a _transmittendam_
(it went with the room), and was handed down in some such forcible
manner from one generation of freshmen to another. The desire
to link the past with the present at Harvard is also shown in
the custom of registering the name of each occupant on the doors
of certain old frame buildings long used as lodging-houses by
students. The old college pump has been a traditional means of
grace to many freshmen, and the customary restriction to upper
classmen of caps, canes, and pipes has added pugilistic zest to
undergraduate life.
College tradition is not an unmixed blessing when it results in
provincialism and the loss of that breadth of mind and appreciative
sympathy which should characterize educated men. When any
undergraduate body becomes blindly a law unto itself, refusing to
learn from other institutions; when faculty and students take the
position that because certain ideas have never prevailed at their
college, therefore they never should and never shall prevail, they
show their unfitness for leadership in an age of vast and varied
opportunity.
The students of the Middle West and the Far West are more sensible
of their freedom from the past than are our Eastern undergraduates.
They realize that they are at least a hundred years behind Eastern
colleges in the dignity of their traditions, and they therefore
seek to crystallize college spirit about college customs; but their
customs do not interfere with progress, as sometimes happens in the
East, and a question is decided on its merits quite regardless of
precedent or policies. If a proposition seems sensible and right,
it is adopted, despite its novelty or its conflict with tradition.
Keeping close to modern needs, those colleges have gone ahead and
accomplished things while more conservative institutions have been
leisurely thinking about them. It is this audacity of spirit, this
dash and action, which endear to the undergraduates of the West all
men of achievement. When among them one thinks of the old verse:
Oh, prudence is a right good thing
And those are useful friends,
Who never make beginnings
Until they see the ends,
But now and then give me a man
And I will make him king,
Just to take the consequences,
Just to _do_ the thing.
THE GAIETY OF UNDERGRADUATES
Traditions are closely connected with college gaiety, and gaiety
forms a real part of the comprehensive life of the American
student. “Cheerfulness,” says Arnold Bennett, “is a most precious
attainment.” The undergraduate cultivates it as an art, puts worry
behind him, and faces the world with a laugh.
About his gaiety there is a kind of humorous bravado. He likes
to defy the lightning. An old graduate of Princeton relates how,
in 1857, when the paper called _The Rake_, because of its daring
criticisms, had brought its editors under the ban of suspension by
the faculty, the editors injected fun into the dismal situation by
printing the statement, “We have authority for supposing that even
the faculty do not coöperate as heartily with our undertaking as
they could and should.”
At the University of Michigan a professor, lecturing on
electricity, wished to show that the fur of a cat is raised by an
electrical current. He asked one day, “Will some student bring a
cat to-morrow, in order that we may show this experiment?” The next
day every one of the forty students entered the lecture-room with a
cat under his arm!
Mechanical laws seem never to baffle the collegian in search of
gaiety. Indeed, when one studies some of the mysterious happenings
on and about the college campus, one ceases to wonder at the
mechanical triumphs of the Egyptians. At one college which I
visited, the stilly night was disturbed by half a hundred students
who, with riotous yells, ran a two-horse wagon back and forth
on an upper story of a college dormitory, to which place they
had succeeded in hoisting it. This occurred at midnight, for the
delectation of three hundred students and members of the faculty
who were sleeping below. Next day the college paper declared that
the president of the institution had been seen at his bedside
supplicating against earthquakes and thunderbolts.
I once visited a small college where the chapel exercises were
abruptly ended because six or eight barn-yard fowl had been placed
inside the pipe-organ. As several hundred students marched into the
chapel, the old German professor, who was deaf, began to play the
organ. The commingled sounds that issued from that instrument when
the levers began to work were described as extraordinary.
Much of the enduring loyalty of college men clings about the
memories of such events. A college president once said to me that
some of the most important gifts to his institution came from
men who remembered college fun and “idlesse” long after time had
blotted out the serious impressions of the classroom. As one
apostle of the easy-going side of student days has said:
“There is some chill and arid knowledge to be found upon the
summits of formal and laborious science; but it is all around about
you, and for the trouble of looking that you will acquire the warm
and palpitating facts of life.”
Still, there is the duty of drawing a distinct line between college
fun and fundamental decency and good order. When this line is
crossed, all the authority of the faculty and, if necessary, the
laws of the land should be brought to bear upon the offenders.
There should be no dallying with undergraduate law-breakers, no
special exemptions for students. Reprehensible and even criminal
acts have been committed by college men in the last few years which
called for severer punishment than seemingly they received. It is
no kindness to the undergraduate to overlook acts of dishonesty,
ruthless destruction of property, or dissipated license. Respect
for property and conventions should be impressed upon a boy
before he reaches college age. It is because lawlessness has been
tolerated by parents in the home, as well as by over-lenient
masters at boarding-school, that we read continually of offenses
against common sense and respectability, committed by persons of
supposed cultivation. Few things are more needed in American life
to-day than strengthening the respect for discipline and lawful
authority.
COLLEGE MEN’S HONOR
Such abuses of liberty, as well as nearly all other college
delinquencies, can be largely prevented by a consistent appeal to
the undergraduate’s sense of honor. Recently I asked the president
of a North Carolina college what he regarded as the chief
characteristic of American students. He replied promptly, “College
honor.” At Princeton, at the University of Virginia, at Amherst,
and at many other institutions, the honor system in examinations
arranged and managed by students, represents the deliberate
intention of the undergraduates to do the square thing. These laws,
which the students voluntarily impose upon themselves, are enforced
more vigorously than the rules of the faculty.
A few years ago I visited a university at a time when the
entire undergraduate body was deeply stirred over a matter that
involved college honor. A senior of high standing socially and
intellectually, the son of a prominent family, high in popular
favor, was overheard to use disrespectful language to his landlady.
The senior was summoned before the student committee having charge
of undergraduate affairs, confronted with the charges, allowed
to make answer, and, being found guilty, was asked to leave the
institution. His family and friends, incensed by this demand, which
seemed to them both harsh and unjust, appealed to the faculty for
redress. The chairman of the faculty replied that the matter
was entirely in the hands of the students. Application was then
made to the student committee to present the young man’s side of
the question to the whole college. The student council readily
acceded to this request, saying that they were perfectly willing to
consider the charges more at length, as their only desire was to be
absolutely just. When he went up for a new trial the young man’s
family engaged a lawyer. The student body also engaged counsel. The
trial was held in one of the largest halls in the university town,
and virtually the whole student body sat through the evening and
far into the morning listening to the presentations of both sides.
A judge who told me of the incident said that during those hours,
looking into those student faces, he did not remember seeing any
man change his expression, but that every one sat in the attitude
of seeking only the truth. The jury, which was chosen from the
faculty and from impartial men in the town, found that the young
man had actually used the words attributed to him, and therefore
pronounced him guilty of the charge.
A few months ago an incident occurred at a Southern college that
impressed me deeply. At one of a series of meetings which I was
holding, a student rose and said that he wished to make confession
to the student body. He had recently won the sophomore-junior
debate, but wished to confess that he had gained it unfairly. He
had overheard his opponent rehearsing his debate in an adjoining
room, and although he stopped his ears and refused to listen, his
room-mate took down the points. Afterward, the debater said, the
temptation was so subtle that he took the notes, arranged his own
debate accordingly, and won. “But,” he said with deep feeling, “I
stole it, and I have come to plead the forgiveness of the student
body.”
Very early the next morning a young man called at the house where
I was being entertained, to tell me that he was the room-mate who
had taken the notes mentioned in the confession. He, too, wished an
opportunity to speak to the students. At the public meeting that
evening, before three hundred college men, he rose and told of his
all-night fight for character on the college campus. He described
the humiliation which he saw confronting him if he should tell of
his part in the dishonorable proceeding, and said:
“I was helped by a power beyond myself to make a clean breast of
it. I am here to tell the students that I, rather than the man who
spoke last night, should take the blame for stealing that debate.”
I do not remember ever having witnessed such deep feeling, or heard
such applause in any assembly, as greeted that sturdy confession.
It was a triumph of college honor and integrity, rooted in manhood,
conscience, and religion.
[Illustration: Amateur College Theatricals]
SOCIETY LIFE AMONG UNDERGRADUATES
But the supreme opportunity for the inculcation and employment of
honesty is not reserved for examinations and public presentations;
it also belongs to the complex social life of the colleges, which
has become important. The club-book of an Eastern university,
for example, records the existence at that institution of ninety
different social organizations, the object of most of them being
to bring men together sociably. Such intermingling is vital for
college friendship. It is true, as former Dean Henry P. Wright of
Yale has said, that, to a student, a friend is a “fellow whom you
know all about, and still like,” and for that reason the social
organizations which bring men together in an intimacy closer than
is found anywhere else are indispensable aids in the formation of
lasting friendships.
The social groupings of college life are also important because
they give an opportunity for concrete and tangible success through
student leadership. College society, in fact, has brought into
being a restricted, but very real, world, with special laws and a
kind of public opinion founded on student initiative and sentiment.
Responsibility and leadership in college affairs have given many
an undergraduate the initial stir to the qualities which make him
successful in after life. These fraternal bodies, democratic,
discriminatingly alert for the best men, and usually emphasizing
worth rather than birth, are vital not only in the discovery
of individuality, but also in their unique contribution to the
corporate strength and unity of college life.
COLLEGE FRATERNITY LIFE
The Greek-letter society is found at the heart of these
undergraduate social activities. Indeed, fraternities have become
in many institutions as much the center of the college itself as
of college society. So far as social and moral influences go, the
character of the fraternity which a young man joins is quite as
important as the college or university he selects. The fraternity
students represent the “system” in college: they choose athletic
managers, they exert the “pull” which controls editorship upon the
college papers, they determine largely the presidents of classes,
and in some cases the elections to senior societies.
The membership of the thirty-five national Greek-letter
fraternities (not to mention a hundred or more local fraternities
or the fifty fraternities of the professional schools) now
comprises 200,000 undergraduates and graduates. These figures do
not include the twenty intercollegiate sororities that claim 250
chapters and 25,000 members. Three hundred and seventy colleges and
universities at present contain chapters of national Greek-letter
fraternities, and millions are invested in the buildings of these
societies. An almanac for 1911 ascribes 1013 fraternity-houses
to American colleges. Half a million dollars is invested in
chapter-houses at the University of Michigan alone. The property of
the eleven fraternities at Amherst had twenty times greater money
value than Yale’s available funds in 1830; and the property of the
fraternities at Columbia, valued at a million dollars, are as great
as the total productive funds of all the colleges at the beginning
of the last century.
The college fraternity or the college club becomes responsible
for a large and representative part of the undergraduate life
in America. It is usually responsible for the histrionics in
university life, and there is perhaps no literary tendency more
pronounced in our colleges to-day than that toward the making of
the drama. Several important plays of recent years may be traced
to graduates who were members of such clubs as “The Hasty Pudding”
of Harvard and “The Mask and Wig” of Pennsylvania. At a time when
confessedly there is a crying demand for good, strong plays at the
theater, it is agreeable to hear that the classes of professors of
dramatic literature are crowded.
Furthermore, the fraternity is no longer simply a debating society;
it is also a student-home. There is an increasing tendency,
especially on the part of state institutions, to make it possible
for college fraternities to erect their buildings on the campus.
Every fraternity-house is the product of much thought, liberal
support, and often sacrifice, on the part of influential alumni.
College authorities are seriously considering the many problems
connected with these organizations, for thousands of undergraduates
find their homes in them for four very impressionable years. The
general attitude of the faculties is wisely not one of repression
or of drastic regulation by rules, but, as President Faunce of
Brown has expressed it, of “sympathetic understanding, constant
consultation, and the endeavor to enlist fraternities in the best
movements in college life.”
There is, moreover, a plain tendency on the part of members of
college fraternities to face the dangers as well as to enjoy
the advantages connected with such societies. They realize
that these organizations can be effectively influenced only by
a leavening process within the fraternity itself, for external
pressure and rules have never yet succeeded in forming or changing
student sentiment. The fraternity can establish manliness and
decency, or sportiness and laziness, as its ideals, and these
ideals are clearly reflected in the membership. The inclination
of these bodies to assume definite responsibility for the moral
welfare of their members is indicated by the action of some
of the old national fraternities, which have chosen efficient
field-secretaries to travel among the chapters in order to study
conditions and to assist in the direction, control, and general
betterment of fraternity activities. The type of men selected for
membership is being more carefully scrutinized. In a considerable
and growing number of institutions, students are not chosen for
membership until the end of the freshman year; there is thus
needful opportunity on both sides for more intelligent choice.
More and more the coöperation of fraternity alumni is being
sought by the authorities. These graduates, who are often largely
responsible for the fine houses of the fraternities, are justly
called upon by the college to assist in maintaining proper
regulations within them. Moreover, assurance is given that the
fraternity itself wishes to coöperate with the faculty in securing
a higher grade of scholarship, which fraternity life too frequently
menaces, and in demanding the reform of conditions leading to
delinquency of all kinds. There is no police force really effective
for a college community but a student police force, and this
operates not by external pressure, but by internal persuasion.
A real danger of the modern college fraternity lies in its
distraction from the real work of the college--study and the
intellectual life--through habits of indifference, laziness,
or immorality. The chapter-house tends to suggest that college
work is optional, not imperative. “Thou shalt not loaf!” as an
eleventh commandment, written across the doorposts of a fraternity
club-house in the Middle West, is no inappropriate injunction. The
undue and distressing waste of time in inconsequent and foolish
play, the inevitable interruptions, the dissipations of social
events, the inane profligacy, the autocracy of athletics, the
feeble conversations that “skim like a swallow over the surface
of reality”--all these are too often the doubtful compensations
received by the college man as fraternity privileges.
“The modern world is an exacting one,” says ex-President Woodrow
Wilson, “and the things that it exacts are mostly intellectual.”
One often wonders, in visiting the fraternities of America, how
large a place this intellectual work holds in college life. Was
that Eastern college professor justified in saying that some
fraternity men are not unlike the old farmer down East who was
usually to be found in a comfortable arm-chair in the post-office,
and when asked what he did, replied, “I just set and think, and
set and think, and sometimes I just _set_.” The fraternity-house
that becomes a place to “set” rather than a place to work is hardly
a credit to a college campus. As President Northrop said to some
society men at the University of Minnesota, “If your fraternity
is not a place for intellectual and moral incitements, it is a
failure, and it must go the way of all failures.”
Among other gifts, the American college fraternity may justly
be expected to bestow upon its members devoted friendship, the
ability to live successfully with other men, and such habits of
application, industry and sobriety as develop ideas and character.
THE UNDERGRADUATE’S PHILOSOPHY OF LIFE
But this hint at the somewhat free-and-easy life of the fraternity
chapter-house should not leave the impression that the American
undergraduate is, as a rule, a thoughtless creature or that he
fails to formulate a philosophy of life. Gilbert K. Chesterton
remarks, “There are some people, and I am one of them, who think
that the most practical and important thing about a man is still
his view of the universe.” Certain beholders of collegiate
conditions have evidently become acquainted with only those
students who have thoughtlessly taken their serious views,
in second-hand fashion, from their ancestors or from current
opinion. These spectators have perhaps justly concluded that the
undergraduate has no view of life--no view, at least, which is
complimentary to him.
[Illustration: The Main Hall, University of Wisconsin]
Such an impression is not general among those who are familiar
with the inner working of the undergraduate mind and have watched
the result of his philosophy in practical works. Many of the
vital movements of the time have originated among these seemingly
thoughtless college men. It was in a small room at Princeton, in
the year 1876, that Cleveland H. Dodge, W. Earl Dodge, and Luther
D. Wishard, after earnest conversation regarding the moral and
religious life of the institution, decided to send delegates to
the next year’s Convention of the International Committee of Young
Men’s Christian Associations, held in Louisville, Kentucky. This
delegation presented to the International Committee plans for the
Student Young Men’s Christian Association at Princeton. Other
groups of undergraduates took similar action both in America and
in other countries, until at present the World’s Student Christian
Federation includes 148,300 students and professors in its
membership. These federated movements represent twenty-one nations.
In connection with these societies during the last college season
66,000 students met regularly for Bible study.
These associations at the colleges have given rise to many other
organizations which have stimulated the educated life of the
world. The Student Volunteer Movement for Foreign Missions, which
originated in connection with a student conference at Mount
Hermon, Massachusetts, in the year 1886, has been responsible for
enlisting thousands of collegians who have been sent by churches
and Christian organizations to serve in foreign lands. This student
missionary organization is also accomplishing an educational work
in familiarizing undergraduates with the social, political, and
religious conditions of foreign nations. The college Christian
associations now have 163 graduates among their employed officers
in the institutions of higher learning in North America.
Undergraduate philosophy of life is an evolution. It consists of
three stages: the first is characterized by a sense of calamity or
fear as the student leaves behind the observances and conventional
creeds of childhood, held with unquestioning and often unthinking
assent. He begins to think for himself. He enters an atmosphere of
thoughtfulness and scientific discovery, an environment in which
facts come before opinions. His first alarm is because he thinks he
is losing his religion. He says, like the prophet Micah, when the
hostile Danites took away his images, “Ye have taken away my gods
... what have I more?”
In the second period of his thinking he changes his early
ceremonial god for breadth of mind. He revels in his impartial view
of men and the universe. By turns he calls himself a pantheist,
a pragmatist, or an agnostic. His religious position is at times
summed up in the description of a young college curate by a bishop
who said the young man arose in his pulpit with a self-confidence
begotten of fancied wisdom, saying to his expectant hearers:
“Dearly beloved, you must repent--as it were; and be converted--in
a measure; or be damned--to a certain extent!”
The third stage of the undergraduate’s philosophy is usually in
line with constructive action. He begins to be interested in doing
something, and practice for him, as for men generally, helps to
solve the riddle of the universe. The best test of college theology
or college philosophy is its serviceableness, its power to attach
the student to something which needs to be done, and which he
can do. Many an undergraduate whose college course has seemed an
intellectually unsettling period has found himself upon solid
ground as soon as he has begun seriously to engage in the world’s
work.
Indeed a strikingly aggressive social propaganda is now in
operation in the North American colleges. The college student,
like the modern American, is a practical being and is interested
in securing practical results. His first question regarding any
movement usually is, “What is it doing that is really worth while?”
Recently a graduate of an Eastern university was secured to give
his entire time to the study and promotion of social service in the
colleges of the United States and Canada.
An example of such service is demonstrated by the social work that
the University of Pennsylvania is doing in connection with its
settlement house in Philadelphia, which is owned and conducted
by the Christian Association of the university. The settlement,
erected in the river-front district, immediately opposite the
university, at Lombard and Twenty-sixth streets, consists of
a group of buildings built at a cost of $60,000; a children’s
playground adjoining the house; an athletic field across the river;
and, forty miles from Philadelphia, a beautifully situated farm of
sixty-four acres, used for a camp for boys and girls, for mothers
and children, in the summer months. Every year one hundred students
and members of the faculty take part in the active service and
support of the settlement. Among the activities are the following:
Boys’ and girls’ and adults’ clubs; industrial classes; athletics;
dispensary; modified milk station; visiting physician; resident
nurse; public lectures; entertainments; religious meetings;
social investigation; political work; and the usual activities of
a playground, athletic field, and summer camp. Former residents
and volunteer workers of the settlement are scattered throughout
the world engaging in social and religious work. Four are medical
missionaries in China, one is a missionary in Persia, another
in Honolulu, another in South America, while three are holding
prominent positions in social work in this country.
PHILOSOPHY OF SERVICEABLENESS
Such works, with numerous other tendencies which might be
mentioned in the line of unpaid and voluntary service for college
publications, musical organizations, debating organizations,
and athletics, lead one to define the American undergraduate’s
philosophy of life as one of service. Unlike the German or Indian,
his seriousness is not associated with metaphysical or theological
discussion or expression. He asks not so much _What?_ as _What
for?_ His aims belong to “a kingdom of ends.” Student theory
operates in a real world--a world where contact is not so marked
with creeds and laws as with virile movements and living men. The
undergraduate is enamoured of a gospel of action. To him “deeds
are mightier things than words” are. His spirit slumbers under
sermons and lectures upon dogma and description, but rises with
an heroic call to give money, time, and life for vital college
or world enterprises. Difficulties stir him as they always stir
true men. He admires the power that is “caught in the cylinder and
does not escape in the whistle.” More and more plainly in all his
undergraduate and graduate work the American student is revealing
his love and ability for that serviceableness to the state, to
the church, and to industrial life which, though often unpaid and
unappreciated, brings to the servant a satisfying reward in the
doing.
A few years ago a Harvard athlete played in a hard and exciting
foot-ball game against Yale. Toward the end of the game, when it
was nearly dark, this man was fairly hurled through the Yale line
in a play that shortly afterward resulted in giving the game to the
Cambridge men. It seemed a strange irony of circumstance that just
before time was called the heroic player was disqualified. When the
game was over and the crimson men were marching wildly about the
field, yelling for Harvard and carrying the foot-ball players on
their shoulders, the man whose playing was largely contributory to
this triumph was down in the training-quarters, almost alone, but
with the satisfaction that, although forgotten by the crowd, he had
“played the game.” Certain alumni, who had seen this man’s plucky
but unpraised fight for his Alma Mater, sent to him these words of
Kipling:
And only the Master shall praise us, and only the Master shall
blame;
And no one shall work for money, and no one shall work for fame,
But _each for the joy of the working_....
We must admit that the undergraduate’s philosophy of life may be
obscure at times, even to himself; that it is as subtle and evasive
as the moods of youth; and that its expression is as cosmopolitan
as nationality, and as varied as human nature. For some students,
too, we must conclude that trivialities and immoralities bury far
out of sight the true meaning of college training and life-work;
but in other students, and these are the majority, underneath his
curriculum and his customs, his light-heartedness, his loves,
and his seeming listlessness, one may discern the real American
undergraduate, energetic, earnest, expectant, and strenuously eager
for those great campaigns of his day and generation in which the
priceless guerdon is the “joy of the working.”
IV
REASONS FOR GOING TO COLLEGE
Recently I attended the commencement exercises at one of our large
universities. As undergraduates and friends of the graduating
class were gathered in a large church awaiting the arrival of the
procession, in a seat directly in front of me sat a middle-aged
woman and a man whose appearance and nervous expectation drew
general attention. The man’s clothes were homely and of country
cut. His face was deeply lined, and wore the tan of many summers.
I noted his hard, calloused hand resting on the back of the seat
as he half rose to look at the door through which the seniors were
to enter. The woman by his side was a quiet, sympathetic person to
whom a phrase from Barrie would be applicable: she had a “mother’s
face.”
While many eyes were turned toward the old couple, the commencement
procession entered the church. The two seemed scarcely to notice
the dignitaries who led the procession, but their eyes were
straining to catch the first glimpse of the seniors. At least half
of the audience were now interested in this father and mother. The
latter suddenly placed both hands upon the man’s arm. Her face
beamed, and an answering light appeared in the face of a strong
young man who marched near the head of the seniors. That day some
persons in the audience heard only listlessly the commencement
speeches. Instead, they were picturing the couple back on an upland
farm of New England, dedicating their lives to the task of giving
their boy the advantages which they had never received, and which
they must have felt would separate him forever from their humble
life and surroundings. It had been no easy path up which this pair
had struggled to the attainment of that ambition. This was the day
of their reward. All the gray days behind were lost in the radiance
of pride and love. The father was full of joy because he had had
the privilege of working for the boy, while to the mother it was
enough that she had borne him.
Such scenes are still frequent in commencement time, and they
are significant. Does it really pay to send boys to college in
America? Is the game worth the candle? Is the contemptuous notice
placed by Horace Greeley in his newspaper office still applicable:
“No college graduates or other horned cattle need apply”? We can
probably take for granted, as we consider the vast expenditure of
money and time and men in the cause of American education, that the
people of the country are believing increasingly in the value of
college training; but to many persons there arises the question, To
what college shall we send our young hopeful? There is even a more
basic question, Why go to college at all?
Rather than theorize on this subject, I asked one hundred recent
graduates of North American colleges to tell me what decided
their choice of an institution, the chief values derived from
their college course, and the effect of college training upon
their life-work. The following is a summary of the testimony thus
obtained:
GRADUATE TESTIMONY CONCERNING COLLEGE
I. What were the reasons that led you to choose
your college?
Financial reasons 40
Influence of friends or relatives 18
Type of the alumni 32
Standing of the institution 10
II. What do you consider the most important values
received from your college course?
Broader views of life 21
Friendships formed 18
Training or ability to think 7
General education as foundation for life-work 11
Influence of professors 36
Technical training 7
III. In the light of your experience, what would
you suggest to a boy relative to the kind of
preparatory school to choose?
High school or public school 45
Academy or private school 33
A school emphasizing athletics 22
IV. Did your college training decide your life-work?
Decision before going to college 32
Decision during college 38
Decision after graduation 2
Not yet fully decided 28
The values of a college course are strikingly presented by the
following answers: A Johns Hopkins man attributes to his university
“a desire for, search after, and acceptance of the truth regardless
of the consequences.” A recent alumnus of Boston University
says: “I learned to have a far broader view of what teaching (my
profession) really is. When I entered college I regarded it as a
process of instilling a knowledge of facts in a young person’s
mind; when I was graduated I knew that this was a very small part,
merely a means to the great end--the development of personality.”
A graduate of the University of Georgia says that his college
course meant to him “a self-unfoldment, a diversity of interests
in life, a growth of ideals, of purposes, and of judgment; strong
convictions and friendships.” A student from the School of Mines in
Colorado considers the chief value of his college training was the
giving him “a vision of a life-work instead of a job”; a graduate
of the University of Louisiana writes that the chief value to him
was “a realization that I was worth as much as the average man”;
while an alumnus of Vanderbilt University said that his course gave
him “the feeling of equality and of opportunity to do things and
be something along with other men. It has meant, perhaps, a greater
chance to do my best.”
CHOOSING A COLLEGE
The choice of a college, according to this testimony, is
largely dependent upon one of three things,--the location of
the institution (involving expense), the influence of friends
or relatives, and the advantages the institution may offer for
special training. The selection of the college, however, is not
so important as formerly. Every prosperous institution now gives
sufficient opportunity for the acquirement of knowledge and
training. Apart from the prestige which the name of a large and
well-known university or college gives to its graduates in after
life, the difference between the values imparted by scores of
American institutions is not considerable. There are at least a
hundred institutions in America sufficiently well equipped to give
a boy the foundation of mental training that a college education is
intended to supply. Their libraries are filled with books; their
laboratories contain expensive and elaborate modern appliances;
their gymnasiums are preëminent in equipment; their instructors
are drawn from the best scholars in the country and also from
the finishing schools of Europe; the spirit of athletics and
undergraduate leadership are, as a rule, strongly emphasized, while
the fraternity and social systems afford rare opportunities for
friendship. Temptations and college evils vary comparatively little
in different institutions.
[Illustration: Blair Arch, Princeton University]
The advantages of contact and the acquirement of experience
through the laboratory of a big city institution are frequently
more than counterbalanced by the close fellowship and the lack
of distractions in a small country college. It is true that the
investigators of the Carnegie Foundation found a large variation in
the amount of money expended by different institutions to educate
a student. It is my belief, after visiting more than five hundred
institutions in North America, that the quality of instruction in
any one of these institutions of the first grade does not vary
sufficiently to render the choice of a college on the ground of
educational advantages a matter of great moment. The values which
the small college loses from inferior equipment are usually offset
by the more direct access of the student to the personality of the
teacher, and often by closer friendships with fellow-students.
Indeed, educational results are not always commensurate with
material advantages. As President Garfield said, a man like Mark
Hopkins on one end of a bench and a student on the other end is
still the main essential of a college. Many years ago Henry Clay
visited Princeton, and was asked by President McLean (Johnnie,
as he was familiarly and popularly called) to sit down in the
president’s study. The furniture was not elaborate in those days,
nor did it consist of the most solid material. Mr. Clay sat down,
and the rickety old chair which was proffered him sank beneath his
weight. The statesman, rising from the floor, said solemnly, “Dr.
McLean, I hope that the other chairs of this institution are on a
more permanent foundation.” Indeed, the foundation of learning in
those days was laid upon the personality of great teachers who,
like Dr. McLean, had personal contact with the students, making up
in individual interest what was lacking in material equipment.
It is important that the student should choose instructors quite
as carefully as institutions. What a man selects when he gets to
college--his studies, his teachers, and his friends--will prove far
more vital to him than the institution he happens to choose.
IDEALS JOINED TO ACTION
Whether in college or out in the world, the important thing is
that college gives an opportunity not only for the acquirement of
knowledge, but also for the matching of that knowledge against
real problems. Something definitely good is derived from new
adjustments. Education can never be completed at home. The college
boy returns to his old home with new reverence, with a new
conception of its meaning. He has secured a vision that enriches
and liberates by getting in touch with universal interests. He has
gotten out of himself into the life of others.
College brings together ideas and action. It is the practice-ground
for honor and square-dealing. A championship base-ball game was
played recently between Wesleyan and Williams at Williamstown.
This game was the last one of a series, and it was to decide which
college should hold the championship for the coming year. The
tension was naturally great. At the end of the seventh inning the
score stood 1 to 0 in favor of Wesleyan. The last Williams man at
the bat knocked a slow “grounder” to the short-stop. In throwing
it to first base, he drove it so high that the first baseman, in
attempting to get it, stepped about an inch off the base. The
umpire called the man out, but the Wesleyan first baseman, going up
to the umpire, said, “That man was not out.” Williams finally won
that day, but Wesleyan had the satisfaction of knowing that their
man had “played the game.”
TRAINING OF THE INDIVIDUAL
One of the chief functions of the American college is to discover
the man in the student, and to train him for citizenship and
public service. President Hadley of Yale points out the fact that
of the twenty-six presidents of the United States, seventeen
were college men, and of these seventeen, fourteen were graduates
of the old-fashioned classical colleges. Grant was a West Point
man, Monroe and McKinley left college before the end of their
junior year, one to go to the army, and one to teach school. This
contribution of individual leadership to a nation seems to be
proper and fitting, as Dr. Hadley says:
If a college man has used the opportunities offered by
the faculty, he has acquired a wide knowledge of history
and a broad view of public affairs. If he has utilized
the opportunities offered by his fellow-students, he has
acquired the democratic spirit, has gotten a grip upon
public opinion, and has had considerable experience in
dealing with a large variety of men. All these things give
him an advantage in the race, and statistics show that he
makes good use of this advantage.
This power of the American college to develop individual initiative
and leadership has been decidedly enhanced in recent years. The
college in the United States has gradually developed from a
quasi-family institution for growing school-boys to a small world
of wide, voluntary opportunity for young men. There is a decided
difference between American undergraduate life to-day and that of a
century ago, or even of fifty years ago. Then boys were graduated
at eighteen or nineteen years of age, and they were under the
watchful eye of presidents, professors, and tutors, who were _in
loco parentis_. The earlier period was a period of flogging and
fagging and “freshmen servitude rules.” Indeed, the age was one
of black-and-blue memories derived from those educational lictors
who with their rods made deeper impressions than all the Roman
Cæsars. Freshmen were forbidden to wear hats in the president’s or
professors’ dooryards or within ten yards of a president, eight
rods of a professor, or five of a tutor. These young men were
forbidden to run in the college yard or up or down stairs or to
call to any one through a college window. Seniors had the power to
regulate the dress and the play of underclass members. In those
early days fines and penalties for misdemeanors ran from half
a penny up to three shillings, while sophomores had their ears
boxed before the assembled college by the president or a member
of the faculty. The conclusion of the college prayer indicated
the enforced humility of students in those days: “May we perform
faithfully our duties to our superiors, our equals, and our
inferiors.”
American college life had its rise in New England institutions
presided over by rigorous Puritans whose hands were as hard as
their heads, who believed in total depravity and original sin, and
who held the young sternly to account for any remissness. In those
early days student community life differed little from student home
life; both failed dismally to develop initiative or individual
responsibility. They were characterized by strict authority on the
part of the parent and teacher, and ingenious attempts to outwit
this authority on the part of the young. It was this conception
of the college which led the Massachusetts legislature to give
the Harvard faculty authority to inflict corporal punishment
upon Harvard students. At that time it was easy for a student to
determine his life-work, for the great majority of boys either
entered the ministry, or studied law or medicine. The whole college
living was simple and homogeneous.
GOVERNMENT BY UNDERGRADUATES
Existence in the modern American college is quite another thing.
In the college itself there has arisen an interminable round
of activities which make demands on the talents and abilities
of students. Managerial, civic, social, religious, athletic,
and financial leadership is exemplified in almost all colleges.
Undergraduate leadership is the most impressive thing in college
life. One reason for the sway of athletics over students exists in
the fact that through these exercises the student body recognizes
real leadership. Loyalty to it is repeatedly seen. At a small
college the students may elect their best pitcher as the president
of the senior class; their best jumper for the secretary; and,
regardless of the subtlety of the humor, may choose their best
runner for the treasurer of the class. The president of another
college has estimated that in his institution the regular college
activities outside of the curriculum reached a grand total of
twenty-seven, and included everything from the glee-club leader
to the chairman of an old-clothes committee. The dean of another
institution who felt this overwhelming change in student affairs is
quoted as recommending “a lightening of non-academic demands upon
the students.”
A college man is surrounded, therefore, with ample opportunity for
individual development. His habits and his executive abilities
are considered quite as important as his “marks” when the final
honors are awarded. In short, the real government of our large
North American institutions is to-day in the hands of the students,
however much the faculty may think that they wield the scepter.
Honor systems, athletics, college journalism, fraternity life,
self-support, curriculum, seminars, unrestrained electives, student
researches, and laboratory methods--all these are signs of the new
day of student individualism. The parental form of government is
less popular; the self-government idea is now the slogan in student
life. The dogmatic college president whom I met recently in a
Western State who insisted that in _his_ college there shall be no
fraternities or no athletics is marching among the belated leaders
of modern education. Meanwhile embryonic statesmen and railroad
managers are discovering themselves and their life-work in the
society and politics of undergraduate days. In the ninety per cent.
of his time which it is estimated the American undergraduate spends
outside of his recitations, there is increasingly the tendency to
make the college a practice-ground for the development of personal
enterprise, individuality, and efficiency.
LEARNING TO THINK
At least twelve college presidents have said to me during the last
year that in their judgment the chief advantage of a college course
is learning to think. It has been stated by Dr. Hamilton Wright
Mabie that to Americans no conquests are possible save those which
are won by superiority of ideas. Professor George H. Palmer tells
an anecdote of a Harvard graduate who came back to Cambridge and
called upon him to express his gratitude for certain help which had
come to him in Professor Palmer’s classroom, and which had directly
influenced his life. The professor, naturally elated, hastened to
inquire what particular remark had so influenced the young man’s
career. The graduate replied: “You told us one day that John Locke
insisted on _clear ideas_. These two words have been transforming
elements in my life and work.”
The colleges liberate every year a tremendous vital force, which
is a prodigious energy. It may drive men aimlessly into all kinds
of trifling, display, and doubtfully acquired possessions, or it
may be harnessed to clear ideas and sturdy convictions on the
great subjects of nationalism, industrialism, and enlightenment
through schools and art and literature and religion. Education
in the fullest meaning of the term is the source and secret of
American success. Some of our colleges are older than the nation.
Harvard was founded in 1636, William and Mary in 1693, Yale in
1701, Princeton in 1746, all before our distinctively national
life began. The colleges are the training centers of the nation’s
life, and to the trained men of any nation belong increasingly
the opportunities and the prizes of public life. Bismarck was
sagaciously prophetic when he said that one-third of the students
of Germany died because of overwork, one-third were incapacitated
for leadership through dissipation, and the other third ruled
Germany. The future welfare of the peoples of the earth is in the
hands of the men who are being trained by the schools for service
and public leadership. The power of leadership is developed in
part at least by the expression of ideas in writing and speaking.
President Eliot is quoted as saying that the superior effectiveness
of some men lies not in their larger stock of ideas, but in their
greater power of expression. Many a student has learned to give
expression to his ideas and convictions, and many an editor has
found his vocation, by writing for the college journals.
[Illustration: Editors of the Harvard _Lampoon_, making up the
“Dummy” of a Number]
COLLEGE JOURNALISM
But the condition of college journalism at present does not confer
high honor on the American undergraduate or on American colleges.
When we look beyond the college daily, we find literary periodicals
nearly at a standstill as to funds and ideas. In the Middle West
especially, the editors of literary journals spend a good part
of their time in drumming up delinquent subscribers. The principal
activity manifested by many a college literary magazine is to start
and to stop. They resemble the ephemeral Edinburgh university
magazine, described by Robert Louis Stevenson: “It ran four months
in undisturbed obscurity and died without a gasp.” To the modern
era of literary productiveness the college man, at least while
in college, seems to be a comparatively small contributor. The
best men are needed to make college journalism popular, for deep
within most students’ hearts is a love for real literature; as
one student said recently, “Many a man is found reading classic
literature on the sly.” It may seem to an outsider that the
student usually prefers his heroes to be visible and practical,
jumping and fighting about on the athletic field, much as certain
persons prefer to hear a big orchestra, the players in which can
be seen sawing and blowing and perspiring, rather than to listen
to mysterious, sweet, but unseen music. Some day strong college
leaders will rise up to champion college journalism and college
reading as to-day they fight for athletics. Then college sentiment
will make popular the pen and the book.
When book-life is as popular as play-life, college conversation
will have new point; the fraternity man will be able to spend an
hour away from the “fellows” and the rag-time piano, and the docile
professor, starting out reluctantly to visit his students, will
not need to pray “Make me a child again just for to-night!” as he
immolates himself for a long, dreary evening trying to smile and
talk wisely of college politics and base-ball averages.
A NEW REALISM IN LITERATURE
How is the undergraduate to be interested in writing? How
can college journalism be made to take a real hold on the
undergraduate’s life? One might answer, present literature and
writing in an interesting manner, bring out the humanity in it;
for, above all, the undergraduate is intensely human. New college
ideals and interests have been born, and have grown up in a new
age of literary aspiration and method. The times demand literature
instinct with human interest, vital with reality. We may quarrel
with the type; we may call it vulgar and yellow and thin and
realistic, but the fact remains that it is the literary temper
of the day; and there are those whose opinions are worthy of
consideration who believe that this new realism in literature is by
no means to be treated lightly, even in comparison with the poetic
and stately form of Elizabethan letters.
BOOKS AND THE UNDERGRADUATE
The opportunity offered for cultivating acquaintance with good
books is not the least reason for spending four years in a college
atmosphere. In the year 1700, when William and Mary were on the
throne of England, James Pierpont selected eleven trustees, nine
of whom were graduates of Harvard, who, it is recorded, met at
Branford, Connecticut. Each of the eleven brought a number of
books, and, laying them on the table, said, “I give these books
for the foundation of a college in this colony.” This was the
early foundation of Yale. The influence of such foundations upon
the ideals of American students has been considerable. Many
a man has discovered in college what Thackeray meant when he
wrote to his mother in 1852, “I used, you know, to hanker after
Parliament, police magistracies, and so forth; but no occupation
I can devise is so profitable as that which I have at my hand in
that old inkstand.” Robert Louis Stevenson--and who can forget him
in thinking of books?--said twenty years after his school-days, “I
have really enjoyed this book as I--almost as I used to enjoy books
when I was going twenty to twenty-three; and these are the years
for reading. Books,” he continued, “were the proper remedy: books
of vivid human import, forcing upon the minds of young men the
issues, pleasures, business, importance, and immediacy of that life
in which they stand; books of smiling, or heroic temper, to excite
or to console; books of a large design, shadowing the complexity of
that game of consequences to which we all sit down, the hanger-back
not least.”
HOW TO INTEREST STUDENTS IN GOOD READING
Some critics tell us that the undergraduate of to-day reads
only his required books, and talks nothing but athletics. One
gets the impression that the average college man feels about his
prescribed work in literature much as D. G. Rossetti felt about
his father’s heavy volumes. “No good for reading.” The fault is
not wholly with the undergraduate. There is need for a change of
method in interesting students in books. Too early specialization
has frustrated the student’s literary tendencies. College men are
forced into “original research” before they know the meaning of
the word bibliography. They rarely read enough of any one great
author to enter into real friendship with him. Classroom study
is often microscopic. Literature is made easy for the student by
the innumerable sets of books giving dashes of the world’s best
literature, and chosen from an utterly different point of view than
the student would take were he to make his own choice, thus often
prejudicing him against an author whom he might otherwise have
loved.
Grammatical and syntactical details too often obstruct the path to
the heart of classical education. A student in one of our colleges
had read the first six books of Vergil’s Æneid in a preparatory
school, and when his father asked him what it was about, answered,
“I hadn’t thought about that.” The real charm and interest of this
classic had entirely escaped him. It had been buried beneath a
mountain of philology. When we fail to make the student realize
that the best literature of the world is interesting, why should
we wonder that the student’s literary realm is invaded by the
pseudo-psychological novel, the humanly human though indelicate
memoirs which tend frequently to keep the mind in the low and
morbid levels?
Emphasis is needed on a few great books, not upon everything.
The student is often discouraged by long lists of books, and it
frequently happens that he reads without assimilating. A college
friend of mine became an example of devotion to Bacon’s injunction
about reading until one becomes a “full man.” He was literally
full to the brim and running over with reading. He rarely laid
down his books long enough to prepare for his course lectures; he
certainly never stopped long enough to think about what he had
read. His chief delight was in recounting the titles of the books
he had consumed in a given period. He was something like Kipling’s
traveler in India, who spent his time gazing intently at the names
of the railway stations in his Baedeker. When the train rushed
through the station he would draw a line through the name, saying
in a satisfied manner, “I’ve done that.”
The undergraduate’s reading may be made pleasurable instead
of being a painful duty. Books ought to open new rooms in his
house of thought, start new trains of ideas and action, help him
to find his own line, give just views of the nation’s history
and destinies, impart a mental tone, and give a real taste for
literature, inspired by intellectual curiosity. College reading
should also awaken the soul of the student and attach his faith to
the loyalties of life. A foot-ball coach said to me recently that
his team was defeated in the last half of the game because of a
lack of physical reserve. His men were equal, if not superior, to
the other team in their technic, they followed the signals, but
they had not trained long enough to secure the physical stamina
which is always an element of success in the last half of the game.
Good reading is good training. Good books give mental and spiritual
reserve. They fill the reservoirs of the mind and heart with the
kind of knowledge that arouses, sustains, and steadies a man in
a crisis. The best books assure power in the right direction. A
student whose mind is filled with the best will have neither time
nor inclination for the literature that appeals only to a liking
for the commonplace and the sensational. It will be unfortunate if
Tennyson’s indictment against an English university become true of
our American teachers:
Because you do profess to teach, and teach us nothing.
Feeding not the heart.
[Illustration: The Library and the Thomas Jefferson Statue,
University of Virginia]
To find not simply the laws of chemical and electrical action, but
also the laws of the mind and the spirit, the nature of life and
death, and the character of “that power not ourselves that makes
for righteousness”--all this should determine the lines of reading
for students outside of their specialty. Such reading is not for
acquisition, for attainment, or for facts alone; it is for
inspiration and ideals, and a realizing sense of that passionate
joy derived from all things real and beautiful.
THE PIONEER SPIRIT
College training brings with it responsibility and reward. The
responsibility is that of leadership--the kind of leadership which
comes to the man of advanced knowledge and unusual advantages, who
sees the needs of his time and does not flinch from the hardest
kind of sacrifice in view of those needs. The reward is not always
apparent to the world, but it is more than sufficient for the
worker. Indeed, the American undergraduate is becoming more and
more aware that his pay is not his reward. He is learning that
the world is not keen to pay the cost of new ideas or to reward
professional leadership with material values. Furthermore, his
half-paid service does not tell the whole story of his sacrifice.
His work is often lost in the successes of some other man who
follows him. But the college-trained man who has weighed well
these needs, and has deliberately chosen, is not to be pitied.
Indeed, it is doubtful whether any one is more to be envied. He is
under the impulsion of an inner sense of mission. The college has
given him faith in himself and his mission. Many a graduate, going
out from American halls of learning, feels somewhat as Carlyle
felt when he said: “I have a book in me; it must come out,” or as
Disraeli intimated in his answer when he was hissed down in the
House of Commons, “You will not hear me now, but there will come a
time when you will hear me.”
The undergraduate, spending laborious days upon the invention which
shall make industrial progress possible in lands his eyes will
never see, is carried along by an impulse not easily expressed.
He realizes the feeling that Robert Louis Stevenson expressed
when he said about his writing that he felt like thanking God
that he had a chance to earn his bread upon such joyful terms. He
has deliberately turned his back upon certain temporalities in
order to face the sunrise of some new ideal for social betterment
or national progress. He has heard the gods calling him to some
far-reaching profession that is more than a position. There is
stirring in him always the sense of message. He has caught the
clear, captivating voice of a unique life-work. It urges him on to
the occupation of his new land of dreams. Is this leader worried
because some one misunderstands him? Does he envy the man who,
following another ideal, sweeps by in an automobile which perhaps
his own particular genius has made possible? The pioneer of letters
who has known the sweetness and light of literary satisfaction, the
fine frenzy of that creative, imaginative activity in which ideas
are caught and crystallized in words, does not despair when his
earthly rewards seem to linger.
The college, then, is a means only to the larger life of spirit and
service. It exists to point out the goal the attainment of which
lies inherent in the student. The college is like the tug-boat that
pulls the ship from the harbor to the clear water of the free, open
sea. The curriculum, the play-life, the laboratory, the patriotism
of the college spirit, the buildings, and the men, are only torches
gleaming through the morning shadows of the student’s coming day.
V
THE COLLEGE MAN AND THE WORLD
“How crooked can a modern business man be and still be straight?”
This question was propounded at a college dinner in New York by a
young lawyer who, in behalf of the recent graduates of an Eastern
university, had been asked to give utterance to some of the first
impressions of a young alumnus upon his entrance into the life of
the world. The question was not asked in a trifling manner, but
it represented the query which inevitably arises in the mind of
the graduate of ideals and high desires who to-day leaves his alma
mater to plunge into the confused business and professional life of
our times.
The question awakens the inquiry as to whether the colleges of
America are to-day sending into the world trained leaders or
subservient followers; whether graduates enter their special
careers with a real message and mission, or whether, however
optimistically they may begin their work, their high purposes are
buried or not beneath the rush of practical and material affairs.
More than half a million students are to-day studying in our
secondary schools and institutions of higher learning, with a
money expense to the nation involving many millions dollars. Tens
of thousands of teachers and trained educators are devoting years
of hard and faithful service in preparing these American youths
for life. Are these students, after graduation, assuming real
leadership? Are they contributing vision, judgment, and guidance in
great national enterprises sufficiently definite and valuable to
compensate the country for the sacrifices in time, money, and life
that are made for the support and continuance of our educational
institutions?
There seems to be a difference of opinion concerning this subject
even in these times of vast educational enterprises. A business man
of high repute wrote to me recently as follows:
I do not consider that our colleges are meeting the
requirements of modern business life. From your own
observation you must know that the most conspicuously
successful people in business were conspicuously poor
at the start, both financially and educationally. Grover
Cleveland, who was not a college graduate, once said that
the perpetuity of our institutions and the public welfare
depended upon the simple _business-like_ arrangement of the
affairs of the Government.
This is the frequently expressed opinion of men of business and
affairs, who present the successful careers of self-made men as
an argument against collegiate education. This argument, however,
fails to take into account that the same dogged persistence
which has brought success to many of our present-day leaders in
industrial and national life would have lost nothing in efficiency
by college training.
Ask these masters of the business world who have risen by their
individual force what they most regret in life. In nine cases
out of ten the answer will be, “The lack of an opportunity for
education.” And they will usually add: “But my sons shall have an
education. _They_ shall not be handicapped as I have been.” For the
practical proof of the genuineness of this feeling, one has simply
to read over the names in the catalogues of the great universities
and colleges of America, where the names of the sons of virtually
all the great business and professional men will be found.
While, therefore, we must take it for granted that Americans
generally believe in a collegiate education, we may still question
whether the colleges are really equipping for leadership the
young men whom they are sending into our modern life. What, after
all, do the colleges give? Out of one hundred graduates whom I
asked what they had gained in college, twenty-one said, “Broader
views of life,” or perspective. Long ago John Ruskin said that
the greatest thing any human being can do in the world is to see
something, and then go and tell what he has seen in a plain way.
To make the undergraduate see something beyond the commonplace is
still the purpose of education. This enlarged vision is often the
salvation of the individual student. It furnishes the impulse of a
new affection. It attaches him to some great, uncongenial task. It
gives him a mission great enough and hard enough to keep his feet
beneath him. It saves him by steadying him.
THE ART OF RELAXATION
But no graduate is equipped for either mental or moral leadership
until he has learned the art of relaxation. Both his health and his
efficiency wait upon his ability to rest, to relax, to be composed
in the midst of life’s affairs. A real cause of American physical
breakdown has been attributed by a famous physician “to those
absurd feelings of hurry and having no time, to that breathlessness
and tension, that anxiety of feature and that solicitude of
results, that lack of inner harmony and ease, in short, by which
with us the work is apt to be accompanied, and from which a
European who would do the same work would, nine times out of ten,
be free. It is your relaxed and easy worker, who is in no hurry,
and quite thoughtless most of the while of consequence, who is your
most efficient worker. Tension and anxiety, present and future all
mixed up together in one mind at once, are the surest drags upon
steady progress and hindrances to our success.”
We find that one of the supreme purposes of education in ancient
Greece was to prepare men to be capable of profiting by their
hours of freedom from labor. In his writing upon education, Herbert
Spencer gives special attention to the training that fits citizens
for leisure hours.
[Illustration: Harper Memorial Building and the Law Building,
University of Chicago]
The American college graduate is quite certain to receive early
the impression that efficiency is synonymous with hustling; that
modern life, in America at least, as G. Lowes Dickinson has said,
finds its chief end in “acceleration.” His danger is frequently
in his inability to concentrate, to compose himself for real
thoughtful leadership. Many a graduate takes years to get over that
explosive energy of the sophomore, which spends itself without
result. He takes display of energy for real force. His veins are
filled with the hot blood of youth. He has not learned to wait. He
is inclined to put more energy and nervous force into things than
they demand. Like all youth, he is inclined to scatter his energy
in all directions. He is therefore in danger sooner or later of
breaking down physically or mentally, or both, and in spending the
time which should be utilized in serviceableness in repairing the
breakages of an uneconomic human machine. The average American
graduate rarely needs Emerson’s advice for a lazy boy, which was,
“Set a dog on him, send him West, do something to him.”
College training must give a man permanent idealism. Too often the
graduate is inclined to fall into the line of march. He begins to
worry and to lose his attractive gaiety and buoyancy. His habits
of thought and study are soon buried beneath the myriad details of
business life or nervous pleasures. He becomes anxious about things
that never happen. His anxiety about future happenings or results
takes his mind from present efficiency. He becomes tense and tired
and irritable. The attitude of composure and self-assurance which
for a time he possessed in college is changed to a fearsome,
troubled state, the end of which is the sanatorium or something
even more baneful. I have sometimes thought that for a month at
least I should like to see the office signs, “Do it now,” “This is
my busy day,” “Step quickly,” replaced by the old scriptural motto,
“In quietness and confidence shall be your strength.”
How shall our colleges assist American youth to secure the art of
relaxation and to obtain the ability to relieve the tension of the
workaday world by beneficial and delightful relief from business
strain? Such gifts will often be the chief assets of a college
man’s training. Business men, and professional men, too, frequently
reach middle life with no interest outside their specialties.
When business is over, life is a blank. There are no eager voices
of pleasant pursuits calling them away from the common round and
routine tasks. It is too late to form habits. The rich rewards
that education may give in leisure hours are lost, swallowed up by
a thousand things that are merely on the way to the prizes that
count. This is a terrific loss, and for this loss our colleges are
in part at least at fault.
In certain institutions, however, we discover teachers who realize
that a real part of their vocation consists in giving to at least a
few students habits of real and permanent relaxation.
In a New England college recently I found a professor spending
two afternoons a week in cross-country walks with students to
whom he was teaching at an impressionable age habits that could
be continued after college days. These walks occurred on Sunday
and Thursday afternoons. With rigid persistence he had followed
the plan of walking with his students for six or eight months, a
sufficient time in which to form habits. He explained his object
by saying that during his own college career he had engaged in
certain forms of athletics which he was unable to pursue after
graduation. While his college physical training had benefited him
physically, he nevertheless found himself quite without habits of
bodily relaxation. He was deprived of apparatus and the opportunity
for many out-of-door games, but had found an immense value in
walking. In passing on to these college boys this inclination for
out-of-door relaxation, he was perhaps contributing his chief
influence as a teacher.
Why should not habits of this kind be definitely organized and
carried out by the physical departments of our colleges? The
opportunity to study trees, plants, and animals, and to become
watchful for a hundred varying phases of nature, would furnish no
small opportunity for projecting the influence of college into
later life.
These tendencies toward relaxation take different forms according
to individual tastes. One graduate of my acquaintance finds outlet
for his nervous energy in a fish-hatchery. To be sure, he bores
his friends by talking fish at every conceivable opportunity,
and people frequently get the impression that his mind has a
piscatorial rather than financial trend, as he loses no opportunity
to dilate upon his latest adventure in trout; and yet his physician
was doubtless right in saying that this man, the head of one of the
largest financial institutions in America, owes his life as well as
his success to this special form of relaxation.
A graduate of one of our large Western technical schools who is at
the head of a big steel foundry has a private book-bindery, where
with two or three of his friends the life of the world is lost
evening after evening in the quiet and delightful air of books and
book-making. The best treatises upon book-binding line the walls.
Old and rare editions of the most famous masters are carefully
sheltered in cases of glass. One end of the room is filled with
his printing and binding-machines. He showed me a beautifully bound
volume which he himself had printed and bound. As he lovingly
fingered the soft leather, reading to me his favorite passages from
this masterpiece, I discerned in him a different man from the one
I had often seen sitting in his grimy office discussing contracts
for steel rails for China and bridge girders for South America. A
deeper, finer man had been discovered in the hours of recreation.
When asked how he happened to become interested in a matter so
antipodal to his life-work, I found that the tendency started in
college days, when he had been accustomed to browse among the
books in the old college library under the faithful and regular
guidance of a professor who once every week took his students to
the library with the express purpose of inculcating a love for old
and beautifully bound books.
The college, moreover, should start the graduate interest in
philanthropic and serious enterprises which in themselves furnish
suitable as well as pleasing relaxation to hundreds of American
university men. Letters received from scores of recent graduates,
many of whom are taking a large share in moral, social, and
philanthropic endeavors, state that the beginnings of their
interest dated with their experience in the Christian associations,
settlement houses, boys’ clubs, and charitable organizations of
college days. One man of large philanthropic interest received
his first view of a field of opportunity and privilege by hearing
a lecturer on a social betterment tell of finding a homeless boy
hovering over the grating of a newspaper building on a winter
night. The story touched a chord deep in the hearer, who saw this
vision of a world until then unknown to him--a world of suffering
and hunger and cold; and when in later life it was made possible,
he devoted his influence and his fortune to the erection of a home
for friendless boys.
What is the college accomplishing toward the solution of that
vital subject, the question of the immigrant? The possibilities of
dealing with such far-reaching international problems is indicated
by the influence of a college debate upon the subject, “What shall
we do with the immigrant?” Through his reading and investigation of
the subject, a certain student who engaged in this debate received
his first impetus toward what has proved to be one of the main
contributions of his life to the nation by the establishment of
Italian colonies that are probably as effective as any plans which
are being suggested or utilized for the betterment of our foreign
population.
MENTAL RESOURCEFULNESS
According to President John G. Hibben of Princeton, graduates
on the average earn only six dollars per week at the start. He
justifies this low earning power by saying, “It is our endeavor to
create a high potential of mental possibility rather than actual
attainment.”
We are inclined to consider efficiency only as expressed along
social, economic, industrial, or mechanical lines. It is not
strange in a period when financial standing bulks large in the
minds of a comparatively new people that the recognition of the
learned classes should be less noticeable than formerly. Yet
reactive tendencies from strictly utilitarian education are
evident. Individual and ideal aims of education are beginning
to emerge above the commercial and mechanical aims. Already
the salaries of college presidents and college teachers are
increased, offering additional incentive for men of brains and
scholarly achievement. Masters of industry who have been slaving
for industrial and social progress are now becoming eager to push
their accomplishments onward to mental and spiritual satisfactions.
How otherwise can we explain such establishments as the Carnegie
Foundation, the millions of Mr. Morgan for art, the vast sums
contributed to religion and education in this and other lands? The
ethical and social ideals of to-day are attaching thousands of our
best youth to far-reaching endeavor. There is a new quest for that
philosophy of life which, as Novalis stated it, could indeed bake
no bread, but would give us God, freedom, and immortality. These
are the signs of a new age of mental productivity--an age in which
scholarship and learning will have a value for themselves; when
people will appreciate that it is not merely the book one studies,
but how he studies it that counts; that if we can produce a man of
scholarly, thoughtful ability, we are sending into the world a
person who will be proficient along any line in which he may engage.
In a Harvard address a few years ago, it was remarked by Mr. Owen
Wister that America possessed only three men of unquestioned
preëminence to whom students could turn for academic tuition in
their respective lines. I believe it was Edmund Gosse who said that
America had not produced a single poet deserving to rank with the
unquestioned masters of English poetry. While these statements may
be questioned, one realizes the general truth behind them when we
contrast the marvelous and expensive architectural equipment of
American universities with the paucity of great men and teachers.
The trend of the times, however, is slowly but certainly toward a
new individualism. Attention is being focused more and more upon
the values of life rather than upon the volume of life. The college
graduate may not be able to deliver an oration in Hebrew in the
morning and in Latin in the afternoon, but he is able to think
through and around his problem, and this is mental resourcefulness,
truly a chief aim of collegiate education and one of the first
necessities for success. Emerson’s prophecy may be realized in our
day:
Perhaps the time has already come, when the sluggard
intellect of this continent will look from under its iron
lids and fill the postponed expectation of the world with
something better than the exertion of mechanical skill.
Our day of dependence, our long apprenticeship to the
learning of other lands, draws to a close. The millions
that around us are rushing into life cannot always be fed
on the sere remains of frozen harvests. Who can doubt that
poetry will revive and lead in a new age, as the star in
the constellation Harp, which now flames in our zenith,
astronomers announce shall one day be the pole star for a
thousand years.
The challenge is to our undergraduates. And it will be accepted.
The colleges will teach men to think, to be mentally alert and
resourceful, and then the man will count in the leadership of
modern life, in the sense intended by Dr. Simeon who, upon seeing
a trained graduate approach, exclaimed, “There comes three hundred
men.”
In order to accomplish this, however, the college must make it a
point to teach principles rather than dogmatic methods. Too often
our systems of learning are too bookish. The boy is inclined to
get the impression that there is only one way to do a thing, and
that is the way he has learned from his professor or his text-book.
A business man told me that he was recently obliged to dismiss
one of his college graduates because the young man could not see
or think of but one way to work out a mechanical proposition. His
training had circumscribed him, cramped, limited, and enslaved him
instead of freeing him. He was unable to move about easily in his
sphere of chosen activity. He had gained a prejudice rather than a
principle. He still lived in a classroom, though out in the world.
His progress was water-logged in academic conservatism.
LIFE-WORK PROPAGANDA
It is, moreover, time for constructive action on the part of both
college and alumni in the matter of directing students to their
proper calling. While it is impossible for our colleges to make
great men out of indifferent raw material, it is possible to
assist undergraduates to discover their inherent bent or capacity.
Until the student has made such a discovery, the elective system
which is now general in our American institutions is something of
a farce. The lazy student, undecided in his vocation, uses it as
a barricade through which he wriggles and twists to his degree,
or at best is tempted in a dozen various directions, selecting
disconnected subjects, in no one of which he finds his chief
aptitude. The elective system to such a student is an art-gallery
without a key, a catalogue without the pictures. He does not know
what he wishes to see.
[Illustration: The Arch between the Dormitory Quadrangle and the
Triangle, University of Pennsylvania]
This undergraduate ability or inclination is not easily
grasped either by himself or by others. It requires study and
discriminating sympathy, to extricate a main desire from many
incidental likings. Frequently the desire itself must be virtually
created. It is a common remark among American undergraduates, “I
wish I _knew_ what I was fitted for.” The college is under deep
obligation to serve the nation not merely by presenting a great
number of excellent subjects, which, if properly selected, will
land the young man in positions of leadership and usefulness; but
it may and must go beyond this negative education, and assist
the student actually to form his life purpose.
American institutions of learning are at present neglecting an
opportunity _par excellence_ for presenting different phases of
life-work to undergraduates, especially emphasizing the relation
of this life-work to the great branches of leadership and modern
enterprise. There are hundreds of students being graduated from
our institutions to-day who have not decided what they are to
do in after life. Even if we assume that these men are prepared
in an all-round way for life, it must be realized that they are
severely handicapped by the necessity of trying different lines of
work for years after graduation before fixing upon their permanent
vocation. They not only miss the tremendous advantage of enthusiasm
and impulse of the young, but they are also in danger of drifting
rather than of moving forward with positive and aggressive activity.
A NEW COLLEGE OFFICER NEEDED
I see no possibility of bringing undergraduates to a decision of
their proper life-work without the assistance of a new office
in our educational institutions. A man is needed who can treat
with students with real human interest, as well as with teaching
intelligence. He should not be the college pastor, who is looked
upon as a professional religionist, and therefore shunned by
many students who need him most, but one definitely and actively
responsible for the development of leadership. He should be a
close student of college affairs, sympathetic with students,
human, high-minded, natural, and keenly alive to humor and social
interests. In some institutions this man might hold the leadership
in philanthropic, religious, and social-service interests. It might
be his privilege to arrange lectures by leading men of the country
who were filled with zeal for their callings. The man who could
make possible the endowment of such a chair in a great university
would be doing a great work for his country.
LEARNING AND INVESTIGATION
But while the American undergraduate may consistently look to the
college to furnish him with ideals and with the methods of making
these ideals effective, the world looks to the college for definite
and advanced information. The college, with its accumulated stores
of intellect, its apparatus, and its unusual means for observation,
owes the world a debt that none but it can pay. And this is the
gift which the college has given, and is still giving, to the world
so quietly, so unobtrusively, that the world scarcely dreams of the
source of its gain. Let one think of the myriad signs of modern
progress by which society is being constantly carried forward.
Behind the scenes you will find some quiet, hidden worker in a
laboratory or library, an unpractical man perhaps, but one through
whom a new realm of possibilities in science or industry or letters
have been revealed.
What is the world’s interest in these men--men who are so generally
underpaid that much of their best work is made impossible by the
necessary outside labors to support their families, who, beyond
their own personal satisfaction, have as little recognition as
perhaps any workers of modern society? When the world demands
expert knowledge in industry, science, literature, and art, the
college may well reply, “When are you going to show your gratitude
for the self-sacrifice and far-reaching labors of thousands of
devoted men whose work is both a challenge and an example to the
world to-day?”
And this example of the man who learns to devote himself to one
thing is not lost upon the undergraduate, to whom example is ever
stronger than precept. Indeed, it is this tendency to learn how to
do one thing well that is bringing the colleges into the attention
of the modern world. The secret of genius is to be able to seize
upon some concrete, near-at-hand piece of work, to see it with
unobstructed and steady vision, and then, out of the rich treasure
of knowing how to do one thing thoroughly, to draw by insight and
expression the general principle.
For, after all, the contribution of the college to the world is
often one which cannot be fully analyzed. It is not discovered
in a thorough knowledge of a curriculum or in the statistics of
athletics any more than a foreign country is discovered in a
guide-book or in a hasty recital of its industries. There is no
master word to express what a college career may mean or should
mean to American youth who in years of high impression experience
with a multitude of their fellows.
Days that flew swiftly like the band
That in the Grecian games had strife,
And passed from eager hand to hand
The onward-dancing torch of life.
After we have said much concerning the life and the work of the
American undergraduate, there is still a valuable thing which the
college should impart to him, and through which he should become
enabled to present with greater charm and with greater force the
message which is in his soul. This valuable thing, at once both
idealism and incentive, is the undergraduate’s _individual_ message
to the world. It may be composed of knowledge, the ability to
think, the faculty of relaxation, and the power to do faithfully
and successfully some given task. These things, however, are all
dependent upon the _spirit_ of the actor, upon his vision, his
determination, his ambitious and unflagging attempts. The true
modern university contributes to the world a great-minded and a
great-hearted man, to whom college life has been a soul’s birth
as well as a mind’s awakening. It gives to its youth that peculiar
but indispensable thing which burned in the heart of the young
art-student who stood before the masterpiece and said, “I, too, am
a painter.”
END
INDEX
A
Action the Gospel of the Undergraduate, 130
Agricultural Colleges, Attendance at, 56
Alden, Henry M., 40
Alien Influences in College Life, 101
American Undergraduate Life, 8
Amherst College honor system, 109
Amherst College, value of fraternity property, 117
Amherst College, plan proposed to abolish the B. S. degree, 52
Analysis of attitude of the Undergraduate, 6
Anecdotes, humorous, 19-20
Anecdotes of the working of college honor systems, 110-111
Appleton Chapel, 16
Arnold, Matthew, quoted, 4, 84
Athletics fifty years ago, 38
Athletics in colleges, 31
Athletics over-emphasized in American colleges, 33
Attendance of students at state and representative universities, 56
B
Bacchic element among undergraduates, 26
Barrie, James, 135
Base-ball game, an exhibition of honor, 146
Bennett, Arnold, 105
Benson, A. C., 74
Bible classes, attendance, 25
Bible study, great organizations for, 125
Bible teaching, inadequacy of, 85
Billings, Josh, quoted, 78
Bismarck, quoted, 154
Book-binding as a relaxation, 184
Book-life in college, 158
Books and the undergraduate, 159
Books, influence of, 164
Boston University, 139
Branford, Conn., 159
Bryce, James, quoted, 72
Bushnell, Horace, 40
C
Cambridge, old life at, 102
Campus and schoolroom, 98
Carnegie Foundation, 143, 188
Carlyle, Thomas, 4, 89, 169
Chesterton, Gilbert K., 122
Chief end of an American college, 58-62
Choosing a college, 140
Church history, inadequately taught, 85
Church membership, 25
Classroom presentation of the professor, 77
Clay, Henry, 144
College, a means to the larger life, 169
College and the immigrant question, 186
College clubs responsible for large part of undergraduate life, 117
College, constructive action of, 191
College develops individual initiative, 147
College fraternities, dangers of, 120
College graduates in the missionary field, 26
College graduates of fifty years ago versus those of to-day, 71
College journalism, 154
College men and the world, 173
College men as leaders of reform movements, 29
College men should be makers of public sentiment, 60
College slang, 15
College spirit, 39
College teachers, what they lack, 75
College traditions, 102
College work and college relaxation, 93
College Y. M. C. A., 25
Colleges and the requirement of modern business life, 174
Colleges, dates of founding, 153
Colorado School of Mines, 139
Columbia University, 31
Columbia University, financial statistics, 57
Columbia University, report of plan to establish the university
system, 66
Columbia University, value of fraternity property, 117
Commercialism in American universities, 58
Cornell University, financial statistics, 57
Cosmopolitan life at college, 100
Courses of study, tendency towards the practical, 51
Criticisms of American colleges, 3
D
Dangers of modern college fraternities, 120
Degrees, radical plan proposed at Amherst college, 52
Dickinson, L. Lowes, 178
Discipline emphasized by athletics, 39
Disraeli, quoted, 168
Dodge, Cleveland H., 125
Dodge, W. Earl, 125
Drummond, Henry, quoted, 16
Dyke, Henry van, 24
E
East Indian student’s description of his daily routine, 101
Eastern universities, attendance at, 56
Editors of _The Rake_ suspended, 105
Education the secret of American success, 153
Education to meet popular demands, 65
Elective studies, 63
Eliot, President of Yale, 154
Emerson, Ralph W., 40, 46, 181, 190
English literature, inadequately taught, 85
Enrollment in agricultural and mechanical colleges, 56;
in Johns Hopkins University, 56
F
Faculties’ attitude towards fraternities, 118
Faunce, President of Brown University, 118
Fish-hatching as a relaxation, 184
Financial statistics of various colleges, 57
Foot-ball in colleges, 37
Foot-ball, instance at a Harvard-Yale game, 131
Foreign students in American colleges, 100
Forms of relaxation, 183
Fraternities, membership, 116
Fraternity alumni, coöperation of, sought, 119
Fraternity houses, 117
Fraternity houses, problems connected with, 118
Fraternity life in college, 116
G
Garfield, James H., 144
German universities, research work in, 70
Gilman, Daniel Coit, President Johns Hopkins, 73
Gosse, Edmund, 189
Government by Undergraduates, 150
Graduate testimony concerning college, 138
Grant, Gen. U. S., 147
Greek-letter societies, 116
Growth of practical education, 55
H
Hadley, Arthur Twining, President of Yale, 146
Harkness, Albert, 75
Harper, Dr. William R., 55
Harvard University, date founded, 153
Harvard faculty authorized to inflict corporal punishment, 149
Harvard University, financial statistics, 57
“Hasty Pudding, The,” of Harvard, 117
Heine, Heinrich, 18
Hibben, John G., 187
History, two ways of teaching, 79
Honor and square dealing, 145
Honor of the college men, 108-112
Honor systems, 13, 109
Hopkins, Mark, 144
Humor of the collegian, 105-107
Humor, sense of in undergraduate, 17
Humorous anecdotes, 19-20
I
Ideals joined to action, 145
Immigrant question, the, 186
Individual character, the need of, 62
Individual training, 146
Influence of professors with students, 87
Influences on student life, 99
Irving, Washington, 27
J
Johns Hopkins University, 139
Johns Hopkins University, financial statistics, 57
Johnson, Owen, 4
K
Kipling, Rudyard, 93, 131, 163
L
Lawlessness in college, 108
Learning and investigation, 196
Learning to think, 152
Lectures, making interesting, 78
Literature, new realism in, 159
Locke, John, 153
Longfellow, Henry W., 40
Lowell, Abbott Lawrence, President of Harvard, 31
Lowell, James Russell, 46
Loyalty to leadership, 150
M
McLean, President of Princeton, 144
McKinley, William, 147
Mabie, Dr. Hamilton Wright, 152
“Mask and Wig, The,” of University of Pennsylvania, 117
Mechanical colleges, enrollment in, 56
Membership of Greek letter societies, 116
Mental resourcefulness, 187
Micah, quoted, 127
Mission contributions, 25
Mission of the university system, 66
Missions, origin of the student volunteer movement, 126
Missionaries, college graduates as, 26
Monroe, James, 147
Mount Hermon, Mass., conference resulting in organization of The
Student Volunteer Movement for Foreign Missions, 126
N
Naturalness of the undergraduate, 14-17
Need of leaders in the world, 59
New college officer needed, 195
Northrup, Cyrus, ex-president of University of Minnesota, 76, 121
O
Oxford University, opened to American students by Cecil Rhodes, 70
P
Palmer, Professor George H., 152
Parallel courses, first conceded, 69
Parental sacrifices, 8
Paulding, James K., 27
Personality of great teachers, 73
Philadelphia, U. of P. settlement house, 128
Pierpont, James, 159
Pioneer spirit, 167
Practical courses of study the tendency, 51
Practical education, growth of, 55
Pranks of college undergraduates, 106
Predominant traits of college man, 11
Presidents who were college men, 147
Princeton University, date founded, 153
Princeton University, financial statistics, 57
Princeton honor system, 109
Princeton inception of World’s Student Christian Federation, 125
Princeton-Yale foot-ball anecdote, 45
Professor in the lecture room, 77
Provincialism as a result of college traditions, 103
Puritan influence on American college life, 149
R
Reasons for going to college, 135-169
Reform movements, led by college men, 29
Relaxation, the art of, 177
Religion and the college man, 23-26
Research work in German universities, 70
Responsibilities of college fraternities, 119
Rhetoric versus ideas, 13
Rhodes, Cecil, 70
Rossetti, D. G., 161
Rules of a New England athletic leader, 14
Ruskin, John, 176
S
Settlement house of the University of Pennsylvania, 128
“Silence” insubordination at West Point, 94
Slang in college, 15
Slosson, Professor Elwin E., 32, 57
Social organizations in colleges, 112
Social service, promotion of, 128
Society life among undergraduates, 112
Soldiers’ Field, Cambridge, memorial shaft, 45
Specialistic training, 63
Spencer, Herbert, 178
Spirit of college play life, 41
Stanford University, financial statistics, 57
State institutions, growth of, 57
State universities, attendance at, 56
Stevenson, Robert Louis, 157, 160, 168
Student individualism, 151
Student, the “for popular” reasons class, 99
Student Volunteer Movement of Foreign Missions, origin of, 126
Students, and their relationship to teachers, 74
Students’ passion for reality, 12
Studies, choice of, 64
Studies, elective, 63
Systems of learning too bookish, 190
T
Tablet-talk in Columbia commons, 101
Taft, William H., 29
Teachers, for undergraduates, how to train, 85
Teachers, need of, 73
Teachers’ relationship to students, 74
Teaching a calling, not a means of livelihood, 88
Technical institutions, growth of, 55
Tennyson, quoted, 76, 164
Thackeray, W. M., quoted, 160
Town versus gown, 5
Training of the Individual, 146
U
Undergraduate life of a century ago, 148
Undergraduate life, two divisions of, 93
Undergraduate, perversity of, 4-11
Undergraduate philosophy, three stages of, 126
Undergraduate--his naturalness, 14-17
Undergraduate, his passion for reality, 11-14
Undergraduate, his sense of humor, 17-20
Undergraduate life, influences on, 99
Undergraduates and the temperance question, 27
Undergraduates as readers, 161
Undergraduates, book-life of, 158
Undergraduates, gaiety of, 105
Undergraduate’s philosophy of life, 122
Undergraduate’s philosophy of serviceableness, 130
Undergraduates, play life of, 29
Uninteresting lectures, 78
University of California, Chinese students at, 101
University of California, financial statistics, 57
University of Chicago, financial statistics, 57
University of Georgia, 139
University of Illinois, financial statistics, 57
University of Iowa, faculty discussion, 86
University of Louisiana, 139
University of Michigan, chapter houses, 117
University of Michigan, financial statistics, 57
University of Minnesota, anecdote of ex-President Northrup, 76
University of Minnesota, financial statistics, 57
University of Pennsylvania, settlement house in Philadelphia, 128
University of Pennsylvania, financial statistics, 57
University of Virginia honor system, 109
University of Wisconsin, financial statistics, 57
University system, its mission, 66
V
Value, Prof. Washington, anecdote of, 15
Vanderbilt University, 139
Vocational versus classical education, 55
W
Walking as a relaxation, 183
Ward, Artemus, 31
Washington and Lee University Mission students, 26
Wesleyan University, 146
West Point, an incident at, 94
William and Mary College, date founded, 153
Williams College, 146
Wilson, Woodrow, 32, 77, 121
Wishard, Luther D., 125
Wister, Owen, 189
Wright, Dean Henry P., 115
World’s Student Christian Federation, organization of, 125
Y
Yale anecdote, 12
Yale Mission in China, 26
Yale University, date founded, 153
Yale, early foundation of, 159
Yale University, financial statistics, 57
=TRANSCRIBER’S NOTE=
Italic text is denoted by _underscores_.
Bold text is denoted by =equal signs=.
Obvious typographical errors and punctuation errors have been
corrected after careful comparison with other occurrences within
the text and consultation of external sources.
Except for those changes noted below, all misspellings in the text,
and inconsistent or archaic usage, have been retained.
Many words with hyphens, or without them, have been silently
adjusted to be more consistent. For example, instances of ‘Football’
have been changed to ‘Foot-ball’.
Pg xi: ‘Aften ten years’ replaced by ‘After ten years’.
Pg 33: ‘unforgetable sensation’ replaced by ‘unforgettable
sensation’.
Pg 42: ‘unforgetable scenes’ replaced by ‘unforgettable scenes’.
Pg 175: ‘both finacially and’ replaced by ‘both financially and’.
Pg 208: ‘college graudates as’ replaced by ‘college graduates as’.
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