Chapter II: Part 2

The pressing inquiry, then, for all undergraduate training is, Are we giving to our boys the kind of education which will fill their future life with meaning? A man must live with himself. He must be a good companion for himself. A college graduate, whatever his specialty, should be able to spend an evening apart from the crowd. The theater, the automobile, the lobster-palace, were never intended to be the chief end of collegiate education. A college course should give the undergraduate tastes, temperament, and habits of reading. A graduate who studies to be a specialist in any line needs also the education which will give him depth, background, and the historical significance of civilization and life in general.

A lady at a dinner-party was making desperate attempts to interest in her conversation a certain business man who had been introduced to her as a graduate of a prominent university. She talked to him of books, education, theater, races, pictures, society, and out-of-door life. All of her efforts were futile. Finally he said, “Try me on leather; that’s my line.” This college graduate lost something important in his incompetency for general and intelligent conversation. His loss was more tragic, however, as a representative of the so-called college-educated classes, exponents of specialistic training, who have become materially successful, but who are without those personal resources necessary for their own enjoyment and profit, and who find themselves utterly inadequate for guidance or incentive to their fellowmen.

ELECTIVE STUDIES

The system of elective studies which now widely characterizes the training in our higher educational institutions has made it increasingly difficult for the college man to secure a clear idea of a college course and the comprehensive training which is his due. In many institutions the whole curriculum is in a state of unstable equilibrium. The endeavor to follow the demands of the times and the desire to secure patrons and students, have often brought to both the faculty and the undergraduate an uncertainty as to the true meaning of the college. Even in freshman and sophomore years the arrangement of studies is often left to the choice of the immature student. In one of our oldest universities there is at present only one prescribed course of study. For the rest, the students are allowed to choose at their own sweet will, and their choice, while dictated by a variety of motives, is influenced in no small degree by the preponderance of emphasis, both in buildings and faculty, upon technical education. Students are left to flounder about in their selection of courses, guided neither by curriculum nor life purpose. Recently I asked twenty-six students why they chose their studies. Sixteen of them gave monetary or practical reasons; six answered that the studies chosen furnished the line of least resistance as far as preparation was concerned; and only four had in mind comprehensive culture and preparation for life.

I sympathize with the educator who said recently:

Is it not time that we stop asking indulgence for learning
and proclaim its sovereignty? Is it not time that we remind
the college men of this country that they have no right to
any distinctive place in any community unless they can show
it by intellectual achievement? that if a university is a
place for distinction at all, it must be distinguished by
conquest of mind?

While these tendencies threaten, instead of criticizing too severely our universities and our undergraduates, we should strive first to find the reason for these modern scientific and practical lines of work; and second, to suggest, if possible, definite ways by which a truer harmony in educational studies may be brought about.

EDUCATION TO MEET POPULAR DEMANDS

The rapid extension of natural-physical science in the last fifty years has had much to do with the change of accent in American education. This change of emphasis has effected a distinct transformation in the curriculum, in the college teacher and in the student ideal.

Should one care to get one’s fingers dusty with ancient documents, one might turn to an old leaflet in the files of the library at Columbia, dated November 2, 1853. It is the report of the trustees of Columbia College upon the establishment of a university system. Among other things this report outlines, in accordance with the ideas of the trustees, “the mission of the college.”

This mission is, “to direct and superintend the mental and moral culture. The design of a college is to make perfect the human intellect in all its parts and functions; by means of a thorough training of all the intellectual faculties, to obtain their full development; and by the proper guidance of the moral functions, to direct them to a proper exertion. To form the mind, in short, is the high design of education as sought in a College Course.” The report hereupon proceeds to note that unfortunately this sentiment, “manifest and just” though it be, “does not meet with universal sympathy or acquiescence.” On the contrary, the demand for what is termed progressive knowledge ... and for fuller instruction in what are called the useful and practical sciences, is at variance with this fundamental idea. The public generally, unaccustomed to look upon the mind except in connection with the body, and to regard it as a machine for promoting the pleasures, the conveniences, or the comforts of the latter, will not be satisfied with a system of education in which they are unable to perceive the direct connection between the knowledge imparted and the bodily advantages to be gained. The committee therefore “think that while they would retain the system having in view the most perfect intellectual training, they might devise parallel courses, having this design at the foundation, but still adapted to meet the popular demand.”

We have here one of the early indications of “parallel courses” in one of our institutions of higher learning as a concession to popular demands. But this concession at Columbia was made before the immense extension and development of modern natural, physical, and industrial science. Education or culture in the early fifties was something easy to define. It included logic, literature, oratory, conic sections, and religion. Since that date, however, the American undergraduate has discovered modern research work at the German university. Cecil Rhodes has opened Oxford for American students with his “golden key.” The American student has been called upon to match with his technical ability the enormous and rapid development of a new material civilization, and educational institutions take color from the social and political media in which they exist. In fact, it cannot be easily estimated how real or how comprehensive a factor the college graduate has been in guiding and shaping this practical and progressive awakening.

The American undergraduate is more than ever before contemporaneous with all that is real and important in modern existence. He is filled with enthusiasm for civic and social and religious investigation and improvement. With self-reliant courage he works his way through college, tutoring, waiting on table, and performing other real services. He debates with zeal economics, immigration, and labor questions. Indeed, the modern American university is taking increasingly firmer hold upon the life of the nation. The college graduate of fifty years ago was more or less a thing apart. If he was strong in his literary studies, he was also weak in his attachment to life itself, where education really has its working arena. In comparison with him, the student to-day spends a greater proportion of his time in the study of political science. One feels the limitation of the modern undergraduate especially in the sweep of his literary knowledge, and in his acquaintance with abstract thought, art, and poetry. But when we see student and professor working together on our American farms, bringing about a new and higher type of rural life; when we find our mechanical engineers not only in the mountains and on the Western prairies, but in the heart of India or inland China or South Africa, building there their bridges and railroad tunnels according to the ideas seen in the vision of their new practical educational training, we are bound to ask whether the modern undergraduate is not truly interested in the deep aim of all true scholarship, namely, the spiritual and concrete construction of life by means of ideas made real. Ambassador Bryce’s opinion of the American universities carries weight, and of them he has said:

If I may venture to state the impression which the
American universities have made upon me, I will say that
while of all the institutions of the country they are
those of which the American speaks most modestly, and
indeed deprecatingly, they are those which seem to be at
this moment making the swiftest progress, and to have
the brightest promise for the future. They are supplying
exactly those things which European cities have hitherto
found lacking to America; and they are contributing to her
political as well as to her contemplative life elements of
inestimable worth.

But since undergraduate training must deal not simply with the theory of education, but also with the imperative demands and conditions of a new time, there must be discovered practical ways by which our undergraduates may save their literary ideals at the same time that they enlarge their practical and progressive knowledge; means by which they may discover literary, historical, linguistic, and philosophical values without losing their mathematics and their physical and material sciences.

To the end, therefore, of making cultural studies as strong, attractive, and profitable to our undergraduates as practical and scientific training, our institutions should train men of large caliber to teach English and belles-lettres. They should discover great teachers and inspiring personalities.

PERSONALITY OF GREAT TEACHERS

President Gilman of Johns Hopkins University took as his motto, “Men before buildings.” The subject of securing great teachers for students is perhaps the most vital topic which can be considered, since from the point of view of undergraduates a professor, whether teaching civil engineering or Greek, is invariably influential because of what he is personally.

In a large university which I recently visited I was told that there were three thousand students and five hundred instructors and professors, an average of a professor to every six students. Upon asking several of the undergraduates how many professors they knew personally, I was somewhat astounded to find that less than a dozen of these six hundred teachers came into personal contact with the students outside of the classes. One graduate told me that he had not been in the home of more than three professors during his college course.

There are undoubtedly reasons for this lack of association between the professors and the undergraduates. In a large university, the demand upon the teacher for more work than he should rightfully undertake, the ever-increasing interest of the student in college affairs, with many other influences, are constantly presented as difficulties in the way of the teacher’s close relationship with the student. But the important point in this association between student and professor is that in many cases the professor has nothing vital and individual to give the undergraduate when he meets him. In too many cases he is a dry and weary man, living his life in books rather than in men. A. C. Benson has described a Cambridge don in terms that at times we fear fit some college professors of our own land. He sits “like a moulting condor in a corner, or wanders seeking a receptacle for his information.” The American college teacher has too often been chosen simply because of his scholarship. Our institutions of learning have been obsessed with the mere value of the degree of doctor of philosophy. As a consequence, many a young professor is scholarly and expert in his knowledge of his subject, but utterly without ability to impart it with interest. He lacks driving force as well as guiding and regulating force. He seems at times without the capacity for real feeling. He is not alive to the issues of the time in which he lives. He starts his subject a century behind the point of view in which his scholars are interested. Too often, alas! he misses the chief opportunity of a college teacher in not becoming friendly with his undergraduates; for there is no comradeship like the comradeship of letters, the comradeship of knowledge, the comradeship of those whose lives are united in the higher aims of serious education.

Letters have never lacked their fascination when they have been embodied in the thought and personalities of great teachers. Albert Harkness, with his face aglow with literary enthusiasm, reading “Prometheus Bound,” in his lecture-room in the old University Hall at Providence, is one of the unfading memories of my undergraduate days. When Tennyson said, “I am sending my son not to Marlborough, but to Bradley, the great teacher,” it was not a _subject_ he had in mind, but a _personality_. In one institution which I visit, virtually the entire undergraduate body elects botany. A student said to me one day, “We do not care especially for botany, but we would elect anything to be under Dr. ----.” Not long ago, attending a college dinner at the University of Minnesota, I heard a professor at my side lamenting the tendency to irreverence on the part of American college men. While we were speaking, ex-President Northrop came into the room, and the entire crowd of students were on their feet in an instant, cheering their beloved president. One of the undergraduates closed his remarks by saying that the deepest impression of his college days had occurred in the chapel when their honored president prayed; and he quoted the following verse:

When Prexy prays
Our heads all bow,
A sense of peace
Smooths every brow,
Our hearts, deep stirred,
No whisper raise
At chapel time
When Prexy prays.

THE PROFESSOR IN THE LECTURE-ROOM

The classroom presentation of the college professor is also highly important. Many a subject is spoiled for a student because of the pedantic, priggish, or solemn manner of the teacher. Many a teacher is devoted to his subject and painstaking, but his lack of knowledge as to the use of incident, epigram, and enticing speech in presenting his subject, prevents his popularity and power as a teacher. Woodrow Wilson says that he had been teaching for twenty years before he discovered that the students forgot his facts, but remembered his stories. We realize that tables of population, weights, and measures, temperatures, birth-rates, and dimensions, are at times necessary, but these should be used in the classroom with moderation.

Too often a teacher takes for granted that he has an uninteresting subject, and therefore gives up the task of making it attractive. A professor of mathematics, endeavoring to evade the obligation for good teaching, gave to a professor of chemistry, whose lecture-room was always crowded with interested students, the following reason for the unpopularity of his subject: “The trouble with mathematics is that nothing ever happens. If, when an equation is solved, it would blow up or give off a bad odor, I should get as many students as you.” The real reason, however, was deeper than the nature of his subject. It lay in the nature of the man. He did not have the power to bring his subject into vital contact with reality and with the life of his students.

The lecture plan also handicaps many a teacher in this important task of getting near the student and drawing him out. The seminar of our larger universities and graduate schools help much in individualizing the students. Students may be talked to death. They themselves often want to talk. An undergraduate in the South, after hearing a professor who was without terminal facilities, told me the old story of Josh Billings, who defined a bore as a man who talked so much about himself that you couldn’t talk about yourself.

In many institutions the students also are forced to take too many lectures. Their minds become jaded. Thinking is the last thing they have power to do in the lecture-room. There is little desire or opportunity for intellectual reaction; as one professor of a Western university humorously remarked:

They do not listen, however attentive or orderly they may
be. The bell rings, and a troop of tired-looking boys,
followed perhaps by a larger number of meek-eyed girls,
file into the classroom, sit down, remove the expressions
from their faces, open their note-books on the broad
chair-arms, and receive. It is about as inspiring an
audience as a room full of phonographs holding up their
brass trumpets.

TWO WAYS OF TEACHING HISTORY

The most discouraging moments of my college days occurred during the lecture hours of history, not because I did not have a natural bent for history, but because the professor made the topic, for me, uninteresting. My mind became a blank almost as soon as I entered the classroom. Lecture days in history covered me with a darkness beyond that which I had ever imagined could emanate from the world of fallen spirits. My powers went into eclipse. There seemed to be a kind of automatic cut-off between my brains and my note-book. My only source of comfort consisted in the fact that my miseries had companionship. In some examinations, I remember, only a small remnant of the class succeeded in satisfying the demands of our scholarly teacher.

I can only remember flashes and hints of a long, solemn, student face, shrouded with whiskers, bending with piercing eye over books which seemed only slightly less dry than a remainder biscuit, droning, in “hark-from-the-tombs-a-doleful-sound” incantation, words, which to our vagrant attention were just words, belonging to remote centuries, while about me my companions shivered audibly, waiting to be called up. The professor was called a great student of history. He might have been. We gladly admitted this: it was the chief compliment we could pay him. As a teacher and inspirer of boys, however, he was a good example of the way to make history impregnable.

I hold in memory, also, another professor who taught history. He was seldom called a professor. The students called him “Benny.” There was a kind of lingering affection in our voices as we spoke his name. His lecture-room was always crowded. No student ever went to sleep, no student became so frightened that he lost his wits, no student ever took himself too seriously. There was an element of humor and humanness which was constantly kindled by this great, manly teacher and which fired at frequent intervals every student heart. His illustrations were not confined to Horatius on the bridge, Garibaldi promising his soldiers disaster and death, or Luther at Worms. He attached history to modern themes. His historical situations were described not in the terms of tedious systems, but in the personalities of great men. We somehow felt that he himself was greater than anything he said; that he himself was a great man. He found interest in the _life_ of college as well as in the work of college. He talked about the last foot-ball game and the reason why the college was defeated and the lessons that men should draw from their failure. The value of his remarks was enhanced by the fact that most of the men had seen him on the running-track in the gymnasium, or on the front row of the grand stand, cheering patriotically with both voice and arms. I remember how he used to add driving power to our awakening resolves and ambitions. We were quite likely to forget that we were learning history. To-day at alumni dinners the mere mention of the name “Benny” brings an enthusiasm which the most eloquent speech of any other man seems incapable of invoking. Here was a man who also taught history; but the man was more than his book, he was more than his subject: he was the light and the blood of it, and the glory of that theme still brightens the path of every one of those hundreds of students who caught a new and radiant vision of the march of events in the light of a great man’s eyes. It was of such teachers that Emerson must have been thinking when he said, “There is no history, only biography,” and again, “An institution is but the lengthened shadow of a man.”

It is of such men that other college graduates think to-day, even as Matthew Arnold thought of Jowett at Balliol:

For rigorous masters seized my youth,
And purged its faith, and trimmed its fire,
Shew’d me the high, white star of truth,
There bade me gaze, and there aspire.

WANTED: THE GREAT TEACHER

But how are we to train such teachers for our undergraduates? This is no child’s task. It is the matchless opportunity of the college; it is the crying need of our times. A large proportion of undergraduates in college lecture-rooms are virtually untouched in either their feelings or their intellects by the ministry of the church. Whatever the ministry may have been in our father’s times, it is not to-day significant or effective in imparting its message to students. The fact is periodically demonstrated by test questions of teachers to their students concerning the Bible, English literature, and church history. I have recently visited a dozen of the leading preparatory schools whose headmasters and teachers quite invariably unite in lamenting the inadequacy of the Sunday-schools and of religious training in the home. Indeed, many students go up to our best preparatory schools in almost a heathenish condition as regards religion and Christian knowledge. It is the day and time of the teacher’s ministry in both secondary schools and in colleges. No pulpit in our day is more far-reaching and decisive than the desk of the college teacher. The college professor who does not forget that he is first a man, then a professor, and who can get past the friendship of books and knowledge to a genuine friendship with students, can be the highest force in our present day civilization. But the teacher says: “I am only a teacher of literature, or of chemistry, or of engineering, or of bridge-building. I am not an evangelist or a moral reformer, or a promoter of polite accomplishments or of social service.” Much of this is true also of the great teachers of history. Yet somehow these men found in their specialty the door through which they entered into the very hearts and lives of their school-boys.

A short time ago at the University of Iowa I had the opportunity of meeting at luncheon thirty members of the faculty. The subject for discussion was: “What can the professor do really to assist students at the University of Iowa in discovering the values worth while in college life?” Approximately one-half of the teachers for various reasons prayed to be excused from the discussion. I was specially interested in the answers of the other men--among whom were the men, according to student testimony, who had a real hold upon the university life. One man was of the department of chemistry. He was prominent in student activities. When he was introduced, a student said, “There is no man more truly liked in the university than Professor ----.” As he talked, we felt that, while he might be a good teacher of chemistry, his department was chiefly important in giving him a point of departure from which he could go forth to interest himself in the life of young men. After the conference he said to me: “If professors want influence with students, let them appear at debates, at athletic games, and at student mass-meetings; let them show real interest in undergraduate activities of all sorts, even at personal sacrifice.”

Another professor was a teacher of English. He was not interested in athletics or in the religious life of the students so much as in revealing to students in the classroom as well as outside the classroom the charm of literary things. That was his message--his individual message to his college. His life-work was more than presenting the evolution of the English novel: it was a mission to students to secure on their part habits of reading and a taste for genuine literature which in after years would be to many the most priceless reward of their college days. It is not necessary that two college teachers should present the same truth in the same way, but when college professors and instructors, presidents, deans, and tutors, realize that teaching to-day as in former days is a calling, not simply a means of livelihood, and that every man who holds any such position must somehow discover how to reach personally at least a small circle of students, then our colleges will not longer be defined as “knowledge shops,” but as the homes of those inspirations and friendships, those ideals and incitements, which make life more than meat and the body than raiment.

While the drift of our modern life in the outside world may be toward technical and scientific education, the drift in college is still toward the great teacher--the man of thought-provoking power and of spiritual capacity; sincere and genuine both in scholarship and manhood, of whom one can speak, as Carlyle spoke of Schiller, “a high ministering servant at Truth’s altar, and bore him worthily of the office he held.”

III

THE COLLEGE CAMPUS

Rudyard Kipling speaks of four street corners of four great cities where a man may stand and see pass everybody of note in the world. There are likewise vantage-points in our American colleges from which one may discover not only the influential undergraduate types, but also the real life of their environment. One of these places is the college campus.

Undergraduate life falls into two broad divisions: college work, pertaining to the study and the classroom; and college relaxation, centering upon the campus. The latter includes social life, amusements, athletics, and the other voluntary exercises in which students meet for fellowship and competition. The close tie between college work and college play is often shown. A change in student sentiment has instant effect on student work, while no rules of the faculty can nullify those deeply rooted principles of student life which make all college men akin.

A WEST POINT INCIDENT

This relation of student feeling to college authority was shown not long ago at West Point. The cadet corps was under arrest for having given the “silence” to an officer in the mess-hall during supper, for reasons deemed by the cadets to be vital to corps honor and dignity. The first silence occurred at supper. The whole corps of cadets, 450 men, were marched back to barracks supperless, and were placed under arrest in their rooms. Again at breakfast the cadets repeated the silence, for which they were returned to barracks, but not until they had been made to “double time” up and down the road for about twenty minutes. That morning the cadets had virtually no breakfast. At the next formation for midday dinner an incident occurred which struck a chord even deeper than discipline and authority, and broke the insubordination of the students. In the autumn one of the cadets had brought from home a graphophone, and among the comic-song cylinders was one which pictured a non-domestic husband about to slip quietly away from home for an evening at the club, when his wife confronted him with the command,

Put on your slippers; you’re in for the night.

This song was very popular with the cadets. They were drawn up in front of the barracks, every man indignant, obstinate, and determined to repeat the silence, and to continue it even at the risk of starvation and confinement. At this critical moment the graphophone, which had been set to begin its work five minutes after its humorous owner had left his room, began to sing in a high-pitched voice through the open window directly above the lines of cadets,

Put on your slippers; you’re in for the night.

The effect was irresistible. It was like the changing of a current in an electric battery. The eyes of the cadets, despite the fact that they were at attention, sought the eyes of their fellows; their faces relaxed, then broke into a smile. By the time they reached the mess-hall the whole corps was laughing, and their sense of humor had swept away the sense of anger and pride. This was the beginning of the restoration of the traditional West Point discipline. The campus had spoken to the classroom.

“GROWN-UP” COLLEGIANS

It is through an understanding of this spirit of the campus that the work of American undergraduates can be adjusted to modern demands. The work of the classroom and examination-hall makes for democracy, while the social life of the college makes for conservatism and aristocracy. Campus life is increasingly difficult to understand because of its growing complexity. The material needs of our time have created a class of undergraduates bent on becoming specialists, and these men have increasingly less time for either college work or college life; for them the undergraduate course is something to be hurried through as a short cut to professional efficiency. Even athletics and college affairs have only a slender hold upon these utilitarian specialists. They have a “grown-up” look on their faces as, eager for scientific research, they rush to and fro between their rooms and their laboratories.

Undergraduate life is now likewise influenced by the influx of students who are not the sons of college men, but who come from homes the chief ideals of which have been derived from counting-rooms and laboratories, from brokers’ and railroad offices. These students, scions of a property-getting class, in conjunction with the social and the scientific students in college, help to change the classical traditions. They emphasize the campus side of college life more than that of the lecture-room. Their eyes are upon the stadium rather than upon the library; the delights of scholarship influence them less than ambition for leadership and the importance of “making good” in student affairs. They are in college for “popular” reasons, and too often fail to learn how to think. But they are eager, versatile, adaptable, with a ready capacity for social adjustment and modern expression.

COSMOPOLITAN LIFE AT COLLEGE

Furthermore, the student world has been subdivided until it is a wholly different thing from what it was fifty or even twenty years ago. While in the seventies the college student knew every man in his class, in the large institution to-day an undergraduate will meet in the college yard scores of classmates who are perfect strangers, and to whom he has no more idea of speaking than to persons whom he has never seen before. The student who has been brought up always to dine in a dinner-coat will have for his table-companions men who have never owned a dress-coat and who see no immediate prospect of needing one.

The influx of foreign students has added to the cosmopolitan life of American institutions. So far as they are Orientals, the English departments are specially modified both in the character of the attendance and the instruction by their presence. The professor’s task of adjusting instruction to a mixed assembly of American, Indian, Mohammedan, Porto Rican, Chinese, and Japanese students may be inferred from the answer of a young East Indian student who was asked to describe in English his daily routine:

At the break of day I rises from my own bed, then I employ
myself till 8 o’clock, after which I employ myself to
bathe, then take for my body some sweetmeat, and just at 9½
I came to school to attend my class duty, then, at 2½ P. M.
I return from school and engage myself to do my further
duties then I engage for a quarter to take my tiffin, then
I study till 5 P. M., after which I began to play anything
which comes in my head. After 8½ half pass to eight we are
began to sleep, before sleeping I told a constable just 11
o’ he came and rose us from half pass elevan we began to
read still morning.

The familiar din of dishes at the commons of Columbia, as well as at the University of California, serves to raise the pitch of a polyglot table-talk that often represents a dozen nationalities. Last year in American colleges there were hundreds of undergraduates of alien speech, customs, ideals, temperaments, and religion. Among these were a specially important delegation of three hundred Chinese young men who were beneficiaries of the Boxer indemnity fund. These students from foreign nations still further subdivide undergraduate life through their race clubs, societies for learning English, special religious conferences, and new studies.

COLLEGE TRADITIONS

College tradition adds its distinctive and forceful factor to the campus life of the undergraduate, particularly in the older seats of learning. A good tradition makes it easy to accomplish things worth while without the spasmodic campaigns that characterize many younger institutions. Students are often more zealous to uphold the ancient customs of their college than anything else connected with it. The annual conflicts between freshmen and sophomores have become a part of the institution. Certain traditional habits, often humorous, sometimes doubtful, in character, have grown up in nearly every North American college. An old account of life at Cambridge tells of the manner in which both occupant and furniture of a freshman’s room were menaced by a missile as big as a cantaloupe that was thrown into it. It was described as a _transmittendam_ (it went with the room), and was handed down in some such forcible manner from one generation of freshmen to another. The desire to link the past with the present at Harvard is also shown in the custom of registering the name of each occupant on the doors of certain old frame buildings long used as lodging-houses by students. The old college pump has been a traditional means of grace to many freshmen, and the customary restriction to upper classmen of caps, canes, and pipes has added pugilistic zest to undergraduate life.

College tradition is not an unmixed blessing when it results in provincialism and the loss of that breadth of mind and appreciative sympathy which should characterize educated men. When any undergraduate body becomes blindly a law unto itself, refusing to learn from other institutions; when faculty and students take the position that because certain ideas have never prevailed at their college, therefore they never should and never shall prevail, they show their unfitness for leadership in an age of vast and varied opportunity.

The students of the Middle West and the Far West are more sensible of their freedom from the past than are our Eastern undergraduates. They realize that they are at least a hundred years behind Eastern colleges in the dignity of their traditions, and they therefore seek to crystallize college spirit about college customs; but their customs do not interfere with progress, as sometimes happens in the East, and a question is decided on its merits quite regardless of precedent or policies. If a proposition seems sensible and right, it is adopted, despite its novelty or its conflict with tradition. Keeping close to modern needs, those colleges have gone ahead and accomplished things while more conservative institutions have been leisurely thinking about them. It is this audacity of spirit, this dash and action, which endear to the undergraduates of the West all men of achievement. When among them one thinks of the old verse:

Oh, prudence is a right good thing
And those are useful friends,
Who never make beginnings
Until they see the ends,
But now and then give me a man
And I will make him king,
Just to take the consequences,
Just to _do_ the thing.

THE GAIETY OF UNDERGRADUATES

Traditions are closely connected with college gaiety, and gaiety forms a real part of the comprehensive life of the American student. “Cheerfulness,” says Arnold Bennett, “is a most precious attainment.” The undergraduate cultivates it as an art, puts worry behind him, and faces the world with a laugh.

About his gaiety there is a kind of humorous bravado. He likes to defy the lightning. An old graduate of Princeton relates how, in 1857, when the paper called _The Rake_, because of its daring criticisms, had brought its editors under the ban of suspension by the faculty, the editors injected fun into the dismal situation by printing the statement, “We have authority for supposing that even the faculty do not coöperate as heartily with our undertaking as they could and should.”

At the University of Michigan a professor, lecturing on electricity, wished to show that the fur of a cat is raised by an electrical current. He asked one day, “Will some student bring a cat to-morrow, in order that we may show this experiment?” The next day every one of the forty students entered the lecture-room with a cat under his arm!

Mechanical laws seem never to baffle the collegian in search of gaiety. Indeed, when one studies some of the mysterious happenings on and about the college campus, one ceases to wonder at the mechanical triumphs of the Egyptians. At one college which I visited, the stilly night was disturbed by half a hundred students who, with riotous yells, ran a two-horse wagon back and forth on an upper story of a college dormitory, to which place they had succeeded in hoisting it. This occurred at midnight, for the delectation of three hundred students and members of the faculty who were sleeping below. Next day the college paper declared that the president of the institution had been seen at his bedside supplicating against earthquakes and thunderbolts.

I once visited a small college where the chapel exercises were abruptly ended because six or eight barn-yard fowl had been placed inside the pipe-organ. As several hundred students marched into the chapel, the old German professor, who was deaf, began to play the organ. The commingled sounds that issued from that instrument when the levers began to work were described as extraordinary.

Much of the enduring loyalty of college men clings about the memories of such events. A college president once said to me that some of the most important gifts to his institution came from men who remembered college fun and “idlesse” long after time had blotted out the serious impressions of the classroom. As one apostle of the easy-going side of student days has said:

“There is some chill and arid knowledge to be found upon the summits of formal and laborious science; but it is all around about you, and for the trouble of looking that you will acquire the warm and palpitating facts of life.”

Still, there is the duty of drawing a distinct line between college fun and fundamental decency and good order. When this line is crossed, all the authority of the faculty and, if necessary, the laws of the land should be brought to bear upon the offenders. There should be no dallying with undergraduate law-breakers, no special exemptions for students. Reprehensible and even criminal acts have been committed by college men in the last few years which called for severer punishment than seemingly they received. It is no kindness to the undergraduate to overlook acts of dishonesty, ruthless destruction of property, or dissipated license. Respect for property and conventions should be impressed upon a boy before he reaches college age. It is because lawlessness has been tolerated by parents in the home, as well as by over-lenient masters at boarding-school, that we read continually of offenses against common sense and respectability, committed by persons of supposed cultivation. Few things are more needed in American life to-day than strengthening the respect for discipline and lawful authority.

COLLEGE MEN’S HONOR

Such abuses of liberty, as well as nearly all other college delinquencies, can be largely prevented by a consistent appeal to the undergraduate’s sense of honor. Recently I asked the president of a North Carolina college what he regarded as the chief characteristic of American students. He replied promptly, “College honor.” At Princeton, at the University of Virginia, at Amherst, and at many other institutions, the honor system in examinations arranged and managed by students, represents the deliberate intention of the undergraduates to do the square thing. These laws, which the students voluntarily impose upon themselves, are enforced more vigorously than the rules of the faculty.

A few years ago I visited a university at a time when the entire undergraduate body was deeply stirred over a matter that involved college honor. A senior of high standing socially and intellectually, the son of a prominent family, high in popular favor, was overheard to use disrespectful language to his landlady. The senior was summoned before the student committee having charge of undergraduate affairs, confronted with the charges, allowed to make answer, and, being found guilty, was asked to leave the institution. His family and friends, incensed by this demand, which seemed to them both harsh and unjust, appealed to the faculty for redress. The chairman of the faculty replied that the matter was entirely in the hands of the students. Application was then made to the student committee to present the young man’s side of the question to the whole college. The student council readily acceded to this request, saying that they were perfectly willing to consider the charges more at length, as their only desire was to be absolutely just. When he went up for a new trial the young man’s family engaged a lawyer. The student body also engaged counsel. The trial was held in one of the largest halls in the university town, and virtually the whole student body sat through the evening and far into the morning listening to the presentations of both sides. A judge who told me of the incident said that during those hours, looking into those student faces, he did not remember seeing any man change his expression, but that every one sat in the attitude of seeking only the truth. The jury, which was chosen from the faculty and from impartial men in the town, found that the young man had actually used the words attributed to him, and therefore pronounced him guilty of the charge.

A few months ago an incident occurred at a Southern college that impressed me deeply. At one of a series of meetings which I was holding, a student rose and said that he wished to make confession to the student body. He had recently won the sophomore-junior debate, but wished to confess that he had gained it unfairly. He had overheard his opponent rehearsing his debate in an adjoining room, and although he stopped his ears and refused to listen, his room-mate took down the points. Afterward, the debater said, the temptation was so subtle that he took the notes, arranged his own debate accordingly, and won. “But,” he said with deep feeling, “I stole it, and I have come to plead the forgiveness of the student body.”

Very early the next morning a young man called at the house where I was being entertained, to tell me that he was the room-mate who had taken the notes mentioned in the confession. He, too, wished an opportunity to speak to the students. At the public meeting that evening, before three hundred college men, he rose and told of his all-night fight for character on the college campus. He described the humiliation which he saw confronting him if he should tell of his part in the dishonorable proceeding, and said:

“I was helped by a power beyond myself to make a clean breast of it. I am here to tell the students that I, rather than the man who spoke last night, should take the blame for stealing that debate.”

I do not remember ever having witnessed such deep feeling, or heard such applause in any assembly, as greeted that sturdy confession. It was a triumph of college honor and integrity, rooted in manhood, conscience, and religion.

SOCIETY LIFE AMONG UNDERGRADUATES

But the supreme opportunity for the inculcation and employment of honesty is not reserved for examinations and public presentations; it also belongs to the complex social life of the colleges, which has become important. The club-book of an Eastern university, for example, records the existence at that institution of ninety different social organizations, the object of most of them being to bring men together sociably. Such intermingling is vital for college friendship. It is true, as former Dean Henry P. Wright of Yale has said, that, to a student, a friend is a “fellow whom you know all about, and still like,” and for that reason the social organizations which bring men together in an intimacy closer than is found anywhere else are indispensable aids in the formation of lasting friendships.

The social groupings of college life are also important because they give an opportunity for concrete and tangible success through student leadership. College society, in fact, has brought into being a restricted, but very real, world, with special laws and a kind of public opinion founded on student initiative and sentiment. Responsibility and leadership in college affairs have given many an undergraduate the initial stir to the qualities which make him successful in after life. These fraternal bodies, democratic, discriminatingly alert for the best men, and usually emphasizing worth rather than birth, are vital not only in the discovery of individuality, but also in their unique contribution to the corporate strength and unity of college life.

COLLEGE FRATERNITY LIFE

The Greek-letter society is found at the heart of these undergraduate social activities. Indeed, fraternities have become in many institutions as much the center of the college itself as of college society. So far as social and moral influences go, the character of the fraternity which a young man joins is quite as important as the college or university he selects. The fraternity students represent the “system” in college: they choose athletic managers, they exert the “pull” which controls editorship upon the college papers, they determine largely the presidents of classes, and in some cases the elections to senior societies.

The membership of the thirty-five national Greek-letter fraternities (not to mention a hundred or more local fraternities or the fifty fraternities of the professional schools) now comprises 200,000 undergraduates and graduates. These figures do not include the twenty intercollegiate sororities that claim 250 chapters and 25,000 members. Three hundred and seventy colleges and universities at present contain chapters of national Greek-letter fraternities, and millions are invested in the buildings of these societies. An almanac for 1911 ascribes 1013 fraternity-houses to American colleges. Half a million dollars is invested in chapter-houses at the University of Michigan alone. The property of the eleven fraternities at Amherst had twenty times greater money value than Yale’s available funds in 1830; and the property of the fraternities at Columbia, valued at a million dollars, are as great as the total productive funds of all the colleges at the beginning of the last century.

The college fraternity or the college club becomes responsible for a large and representative part of the undergraduate life in America. It is usually responsible for the histrionics in university life, and there is perhaps no literary tendency more pronounced in our colleges to-day than that toward the making of the drama. Several important plays of recent years may be traced to graduates who were members of such clubs as “The Hasty Pudding” of Harvard and “The Mask and Wig” of Pennsylvania. At a time when confessedly there is a crying demand for good, strong plays at the theater, it is agreeable to hear that the classes of professors of dramatic literature are crowded.

Furthermore, the fraternity is no longer simply a debating society; it is also a student-home. There is an increasing tendency, especially on the part of state institutions, to make it possible for college fraternities to erect their buildings on the campus. Every fraternity-house is the product of much thought, liberal support, and often sacrifice, on the part of influential alumni. College authorities are seriously considering the many problems connected with these organizations, for thousands of undergraduates find their homes in them for four very impressionable years. The general attitude of the faculties is wisely not one of repression or of drastic regulation by rules, but, as President Faunce of Brown has expressed it, of “sympathetic understanding, constant consultation, and the endeavor to enlist fraternities in the best movements in college life.”

There is, moreover, a plain tendency on the part of members of college fraternities to face the dangers as well as to enjoy the advantages connected with such societies. They realize that these organizations can be effectively influenced only by a leavening process within the fraternity itself, for external pressure and rules have never yet succeeded in forming or changing student sentiment. The fraternity can establish manliness and decency, or sportiness and laziness, as its ideals, and these ideals are clearly reflected in the membership. The inclination of these bodies to assume definite responsibility for the moral welfare of their members is indicated by the action of some of the old national fraternities, which have chosen efficient field-secretaries to travel among the chapters in order to study conditions and to assist in the direction, control, and general betterment of fraternity activities. The type of men selected for membership is being more carefully scrutinized. In a considerable and growing number of institutions, students are not chosen for membership until the end of the freshman year; there is thus needful opportunity on both sides for more intelligent choice.

More and more the coöperation of fraternity alumni is being sought by the authorities. These graduates, who are often largely responsible for the fine houses of the fraternities, are justly called upon by the college to assist in maintaining proper regulations within them. Moreover, assurance is given that the fraternity itself wishes to coöperate with the faculty in securing a higher grade of scholarship, which fraternity life too frequently menaces, and in demanding the reform of conditions leading to delinquency of all kinds. There is no police force really effective for a college community but a student police force, and this operates not by external pressure, but by internal persuasion.

A real danger of the modern college fraternity lies in its distraction from the real work of the college--study and the intellectual life--through habits of indifference, laziness, or immorality. The chapter-house tends to suggest that college work is optional, not imperative. “Thou shalt not loaf!” as an eleventh commandment, written across the doorposts of a fraternity club-house in the Middle West, is no inappropriate injunction. The undue and distressing waste of time in inconsequent and foolish play, the inevitable interruptions, the dissipations of social events, the inane profligacy, the autocracy of athletics, the feeble conversations that “skim like a swallow over the surface of reality”--all these are too often the doubtful compensations received by the college man as fraternity privileges.

“The modern world is an exacting one,” says ex-President Woodrow Wilson, “and the things that it exacts are mostly intellectual.” One often wonders, in visiting the fraternities of America, how large a place this intellectual work holds in college life. Was that Eastern college professor justified in saying that some fraternity men are not unlike the old farmer down East who was usually to be found in a comfortable arm-chair in the post-office, and when asked what he did, replied, “I just set and think, and set and think, and sometimes I just _set_.” The fraternity-house that becomes a place to “set” rather than a place to work is hardly a credit to a college campus. As President Northrop said to some society men at the University of Minnesota, “If your fraternity is not a place for intellectual and moral incitements, it is a failure, and it must go the way of all failures.”

Among other gifts, the American college fraternity may justly be expected to bestow upon its members devoted friendship, the ability to live successfully with other men, and such habits of application, industry and sobriety as develop ideas and character.

THE UNDERGRADUATE’S PHILOSOPHY OF LIFE

But this hint at the somewhat free-and-easy life of the fraternity chapter-house should not leave the impression that the American undergraduate is, as a rule, a thoughtless creature or that he fails to formulate a philosophy of life. Gilbert K. Chesterton remarks, “There are some people, and I am one of them, who think that the most practical and important thing about a man is still his view of the universe.” Certain beholders of collegiate conditions have evidently become acquainted with only those students who have thoughtlessly taken their serious views, in second-hand fashion, from their ancestors or from current opinion. These spectators have perhaps justly concluded that the undergraduate has no view of life--no view, at least, which is complimentary to him.