Why Go to College, by Clayton Sedgwick Cooper

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WHY GO TO COLLEGE

WITH GRATEFUL REMEMBRANCE
THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED TO MY
COLLEGE TEACHER AND FRIEND
E. BENJAMIN ANDREWS

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

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[xii] 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.”

GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS

WHY GO TO COLLEGE

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[4] concerning American undergraduate life, the college is often viewed in the light in which Matthew Arnold said certain people regarded Oxford:

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[5] 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,

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.[6] 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[7] 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—

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[8] 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.”

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[9-11] 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 strain of the real, like the red stripe in[12] 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[13] 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[14] 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[15] 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[16] 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[17] 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[18] amusement or contempt. The whole student mood is as light and warm and invigorating as summer sunshine. He lives in a period when

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[19] 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.

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.[20] 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.

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[24] 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.[25] 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[26] 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[27] 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:

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.[29] 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.[30] 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[32] 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[33] 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.

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[34] 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:

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[35-37] 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.

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[38] 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.

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[39] 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[40] 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[41] 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.[42] 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:

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[43-45] 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.”

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[46] words, chosen for this purpose by Lowell:

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[47] 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.

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[52] 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:

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[56] 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:

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[57] 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:

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[59] 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,

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[60] 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[61] 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[62] 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[63] 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[64] 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[65] far as preparation was concerned; and only four had in mind comprehensive culture and preparation for life.

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.[66] 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.”

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[67-69] 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[70] 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[71] 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.[72] Ambassador Bryce’s opinion of the American universities carries weight, and of them he has said:

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[74] 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[75] 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[76] 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:

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[78] 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[79] 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:

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[80] 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.

I hold in memory, also, another professor[81-83] 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[84] 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:

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[86] 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[87] 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[88] 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[89] 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 [90]office he held.”

THE COLLEGE CAMPUS

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[94] 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[95-97] 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,

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,

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[98] 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[99] 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[101] from the answer of a young East Indian student who was asked to describe in English his daily routine:

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[102] 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[103] 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[104] 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:

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[106] 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[107] 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[108] 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[109] 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[110] 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[112] 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.

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[113-115] 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[117] 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[118] 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[119] 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[120] 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[121] 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[122] 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.

Such an impression is not general among[123-125] 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,[127] 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[128] 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[129] 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[131] 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:

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.”

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[136] 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:

The values of a college course are strikingly[139] 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[140] 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[141-143] 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.

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.[144] 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[145] 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.[146] 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[147] 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:

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[148] 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[149] 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[151] 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[152] 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[153] 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[154] 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.

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[155-157] 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.[158] 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[159] 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[160] 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[161] 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[162] 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[163] 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[164] 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:

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,[165-167] 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.[168] 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[169] 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.

THE COLLEGE MAN AND THE WORLD

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[174] 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:

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[176] 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[178] 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.

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[179-181] 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[182] 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[183] 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[184] 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[185] 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,[186] 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[187] 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[188] 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[189] 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[190] one of the first necessities for success. Emerson’s prophecy may be realized in our day:

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.[191] 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,[192] 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.

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,[193-195] 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[196] 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[197] 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[198] 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[199] may mean or should mean to American youth who in years of high impression experience with a multitude of their fellows.

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[200] 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.”

INDEX

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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

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

	1896-97	1906-07
State universities	16,414	34,770
		Increase 112%
Eastern institutions	18,331	28,631
		Increase 56%

	Total	Annual	Total	Average
	Annual	Appropriation	Instructing	Expenditure
Institutions.	Income.	for Salaries	Staff in	for Instruction
		of Instructing	University.	per Student.
		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

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

WHY GO TO COLLEGE

CONTENTS

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

PREFACE

GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS

WHY GO TO COLLEGE

I

GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS

HIS PASSION FOR REALITY

HIS NATURALNESS

HIS SENSE OF HUMOR

RELIGION AND THE COLLEGE MAN

THE BACCHIC ELEMENT

THE PLAY LIFE OF THE AMERICAN UNDERGRADUATE

CONCERNING ATHLETICS

EDUCATION À LA CARTE

II

EDUCATION À LA CARTE

GROWTH OF PRACTICAL EDUCATION

WHAT IS THE CHIEF END OF AN AMERICAN COLLEGE?

THE NEED OF LEADERS RATHER THAN MONEY-MAKERS

ELECTIVE STUDIES

EDUCATION TO MEET POPULAR DEMANDS

PERSONALITY OF GREAT TEACHERS

THE PROFESSOR IN THE LECTURE-ROOM

TWO WAYS OF TEACHING HISTORY

WANTED: THE GREAT TEACHER

THE COLLEGE CAMPUS

III

THE COLLEGE CAMPUS

A WEST POINT INCIDENT

“GROWN-UP” COLLEGIANS

COSMOPOLITAN LIFE AT COLLEGE

COLLEGE TRADITIONS

THE GAIETY OF UNDERGRADUATES

COLLEGE MEN’S HONOR

SOCIETY LIFE AMONG UNDERGRADUATES

COLLEGE FRATERNITY LIFE

THE UNDERGRADUATE’S PHILOSOPHY OF LIFE

PHILOSOPHY OF SERVICEABLENESS

REASONS FOR GOING TO COLLEGE

IV

REASONS FOR GOING TO COLLEGE

CHOOSING A COLLEGE

IDEALS JOINED TO ACTION

TRAINING OF THE INDIVIDUAL

GOVERNMENT BY UNDERGRADUATES

LEARNING TO THINK

COLLEGE JOURNALISM

A NEW REALISM IN LITERATURE

BOOKS AND THE UNDERGRADUATE

HOW TO INTEREST STUDENTS IN GOOD READING

THE PIONEER SPIRIT

THE COLLEGE MAN AND THE WORLD

V

THE COLLEGE MAN AND THE WORLD

THE ART OF RELAXATION

MENTAL RESOURCEFULNESS

LIFE-WORK PROPAGANDA

A NEW COLLEGE OFFICER NEEDED

LEARNING AND INVESTIGATION

INDEX