THE HIGHER EDUCATION.
America has more colleges, so called, than all the other civilized
nations combined.
These institutions of learning are not results of accident, or
accretions of church reverences and purposes, like the great
universities of older lands. Most of them were founded and have been
maintained by the people at large, and these, until recent times, were
very poor. They are testimonials to the level-head and tenacity of
purpose of the American people. Says President Gilman, of Johns Hopkins
University:
“That tenacity of purpose with which a few settlers in the wilderness
held on to the idea of a liberal education, in spite of their scanty
crops and scantier libraries, their wide separation from the old-world
seats of learning, and their lack of professional teachers, is one of
the noblest of many noble traits possessed by our forefathers, who were
never so weary or so poor that they could not keep alive the altar-fires
in the temples of religion and of learning. Their primitive foundations
did not depend on royal bounty or on feudal liens; they were supported
by free-will offerings from men and women in moderate circumstances, by
the minister’s savings and the widow’s portion. It is only within the
present generation that large donations have reached their coffers. The
good and the bad we inherit in our collegiate systems were alike
developed in the straitened school of necessity.
“The founders of the original colleges were not only high-minded and
self-sacrificing, but they were devoted to an ideal. They believed in
the doctrine that intellectual power is worth more than intellectual
acquisitions; that an education of all the mental faculties is better
for the happiness of individual scholars and for the advancement of the
community than a narrow training for a special pursuit. Accordingly,
their educational system did not begin with professional seminaries, for
the special training of any one class, but with schools of general
culture, colleges of the liberal arts, as good as could be made with
their resources and in that age. Instead of an academic staff made up of
those who professed to teach some special branch of knowledge, these
colleges had a master and fellows (or tutors), men who were fit to teach
others those rudiments of higher learning in which they had themselves
been taught. Moreover, as years rolled on, instead of concentrating
personal and pecuniary support upon a few of the oldest and most
promising foundations, far-sighted men built up in every portion of the
land colleges corresponding in their principal features with the
original foundations, and depending for maintenance on the beneficence
of individuals.
“The history of the colonial foundations abounds in examples of the
wisdom and self-sacrifice with which they were conducted under
circumstances which called for devotion to a lofty ideal. No one can
study the biography of their graduates without discovering that they
were the men who moulded the institutions of this country. It is easy to
point out deficiencies in these academic organizations, as it is to
criticise the defects of the emigrants’ cabins and the foresters’ paths;
it is easy to lament that a deeper impression was not made upon the
scholarship of the world; easy to mention influential men who never
passed a day within college walls; easy to provoke a smile, a sneer, or
a censure by the record of some narrow-minded custom or proceeding. But,
nevertheless, the fact cannot be shaken that the old American colleges
have been admirable places for the training of men. Let the roll of
graduates of any leading institution be scrutinized, or even the record
of a single class selected at random, and it will be seen that the
number of life failures is very small, and the number of useful,
intelligent, high-minded and upright careers very large. It may,
therefore, be said that the traditional college, though commonly
hampered by ancient conditions and by the lack of funds with which to
attain its own ideal, has remained the firm and valiant supporter of
liberal culture, and that any revolutionary or rabid changes in its
organization or methods should be carefully watched. Nevertheless, as we
proceed, it will be evident that changes are inevitable and that most
desirable improvements are in progress. The child is becoming a man.”
But we need more concentration of effort, money and good men, both as
instructors and students, in colleges where the highest education may be
obtained. The great number of our colleges is a source of weakness--not
of strength. A great number of these institutions are mere academies,
and seem to have been founded principally to keep students within the
denominational fences of their parents; the college is charged with what
should be the special work of parent and pastor. Says President Gilman:
“Every important Christian denomination has come to have its distinctive
college, and many an argument has been framed to prove that sectarian
colleges are better than those which seek to promote the union of
several religious bodies. It has not been thought sufficient that a
college should be pervaded by an enlightened Christianity, nor even that
it should be the stronghold of a simple evangelical life and doctrine,
nor that it should be orthodox as to the fundamental teachings of the
Church; but sectarian influences must everywhere predominate, among the
trustees or in the faculty, or in both the governing bodies. Hence we
see all over the land feeble, ill-endowed and poorly manned
institutions, caring a little for sound learning, but a great deal more
for the defence of denominational tenets.”
President Eliot, of Harvard, thus indicates the results of this spirit,
added to another which is still less pardonable:
“In the absence of an established church, or of a dominant sect in the
United States, denominational zeal has inevitably tended to scatter even
those scanty resources which in two centuries have become available for
the higher education; and this lamentable dissipation has been increased
by the local pride of States, cities and neighborhoods, and the desire
of many persons, who had money to apply to public uses, to found new
institutions rather than to contribute to those already established--a
desire not unnatural in a new country, where love of the old and
venerable in institutions has but just sprung up. In short, the
different social, political and religious conditions of this country
have, thus far, quite prevented the development of commanding
universities like those of the mother-country.”
As the greater colleges increase in financial and intellectual
strength, the weaker ones must either drop out of existence, or be
satisfied to impart merely the high-school course of instruction, and
prepare their more aspiring pupils to enter colleges worthy of the name.
Ex-President White, of Cornell University, foreshadows their future as
follows:
“Our country has already not far short of four hundred colleges and
universities more or less worthy of those names, besides a vast number
of high-schools and academies quite as worthy to be called colleges or
universities as many which bear those titles. But the system embracing
all these has by no means reached its final form. Probably in its more
complete development the stronger institutions, to the number of twenty
or thirty, will, within a generation or two, become universities in the
true sense of the word, restricting themselves to university work;
beginning, perhaps, at the studies now usually undertaken in the junior
year of our colleges, and carrying them on through the senior year, with
two or three years of special or professional study afterward. The best
of the others will probably accept their mission as colleges in the true
sense of the word, beginning the course two years earlier than at
present, and continuing it to what is now the junior year. Thus they
will do a work intermediate between the general school system of the
country and the universities, a work which can be properly called
collegiate, a work the need of which is now sorely felt, and which is
most useful and honorable. Such an organization will give us as good a
system as the world has ever seen, probably the best system.”
There is no lack of money for institutions of learning which show
special aptitude in any direction. A belief in thorough education is
common to almost all progressive men, whether they themselves are
college graduates or “self-made” men. President White, after naming many
men who have given largely to different colleges, says:
“Such a tide of generosity bursting forth from the hearts and minds of
strong and shrewd men who differ so widely from each other in residence
and ideas, yet flowing in one direction, means something. What is it? At
the source of it lies, doubtless, a perception of duty to the country
and a feeling of pride in the country’s glory. United with this is,
naturally, more or less of an honorable personal ambition; but this is
not all; strong common sense has done much to create the current and
still more to shape its course. For, as to the origin of this stream,
the wealthy American knows perfectly that the laws of his country favor
the dispersion of inherited wealth rather than its retention; that in
two or three generations at most his descendants, no matter how large
their inheritance, must come to the level determined by their character
and ability; that their character and ability are most likely to be
injured, and therefore the level to which they subside lowered, by an
inheritance so large as to engender self-indulgence; that while, in
Great Britain, the laws and customs of primogeniture and entail enable
men of vast wealth to tie up their property, and so to found families,
this, in America, is impossible; and that though the tendency toward the
equalization of fortunes may sometimes be retarded, it cannot be
prevented.
“So, too, as to the direction of the stream; this same common sense has
given its main channel. These great donors have recognized the fact that
the necessity for universal primary education will always be seen, and
can be adequately provided for, only by the people as a whole; but that
the necessity for that advanced education which can alone vivify and
energize the whole school system, drawing a rich life up through it,
sending a richer life down through it, will rarely be provided for, save
by the few men wise enough to understand a great national system of
education, and strong enough efficiently to aid it.
“It is, then, plain, good sense which has led mainly to the development
of a munificence such as no other land has seen; therefore it is that
the long list of men who have thus distinguished themselves and their
country is steadily growing longer.”
But in opposition to the spirit which founded and has supported our many
institutions of learning there has arisen a pestilent theory, born of
the sudden increase of wealth and love of luxury, that no education is
worth anything which does not enable a man to make more money and make
it easier than his neighbor who has had no liberal schooling. Because
technical schools--of which the more we have the better off we will
be--teach men to use their wits about many practical things, there seems
to be prevalent a stupid notion that material things are all there are
of life, and that sentiments, principles and aspirations are not worth
cultivating. Such stuff might do if we were a nation of shopkeepers, but
we are not that kind of people. For each man who is thinking and caring
only for money and what it will bring him are half a dozen earnest,
clear-headed people who know that all human needs are not satisfied when
the stomach is full and the senses satiated.
In a recent and admirable address to a college society Bishop Potter
fairly stated and answered the current sneer at the higher education, as
follows:
“We are met by a spirit which it is time, I think, that we recognize, as
there is a need that it should be challenged. We Americans are, of all
peoples under the sun, supremely a practical people. No mechanism is
invented, no book is written, no theory is propounded, but that
straightway there is heard a voice demanding: ‘Well, this is all very
interesting, very novel, very eloquent; but what, after all, is the good
of it? To what contrivance, to what enterprise can you hitch this
discovery, this vision of yours, and make it work? How will it push,
pull, pump, lift, drive, bore, so that, employed thus, it may be a
veritable producer? Yes, we want learning for our young men, our young
women; but how can it be converted by the shortest road and in the most
effectual way into a marketable product?’ ‘The man of the North,’ says
De Tocqueville, writing of our North, ‘has not only experience, but
knowledge. He, however, does not care for science as a pleasure, and
only embraces it with avidity when it leads to useful applications.’ And
the worst of such an indictment is the fact that it is still so often
true.
“The conditions of this generation demand that we should be reminded
that, beyond bodies to be clothed, and tastes to be cultivated, and
wealth to be accumulated, there is in each one of us an intellect to be
developed and, by means of it, truth to be discerned, which, beside all
other undertakings to which the mind of man can bend itself, should
forever be foremost and supreme. The gratification of our physical
wants, and next to that the gratification of our personal vanity or
ambition, may seem to many people at once the chief end of existence and
the secret of the truest happiness. But there have been men who have
neither sought nor cared for these things, who have found in learning
for its own sake at once their sweetest rewards and their highest
dignity.
“The vocation of the scholar of our time becomes most plain. He is to
take his stand and to make his protest. With a dignity and a resolution
born of the greatness of his calling and his opportunity, he is to spurn
that low estimate of his work and its result which measures them by what
they have earned in money or can produce in dividends. Here, in his
counting-room or his warehouse, sits the plutocrat who has amassed his
millions, and who can forecast the fluctuations of the market with the
unerring accuracy of an aneroid barometer. To such a one comes the
professor from some modest seat of learning among the hills, minded to
see his old classmate of other days, to grasp his hand again, and to
learn, if it may be, how he fares. And the rich man looks down with a
bland condescension upon the school-fellow who chose the company of his
books rather than the companionship of the market-place, and as he
notes, perhaps, his lean and Cassius-like outline, his seedy if not
shabby garb, and his shy and rustic manner, smooths his own portly and
well-clad person with complacency, and thanks his stars that he early
took to trade. Poor fool! He does not perceive that his friend the
professor has most accurately taken his measure, and that the clear and
kindly eyes that look at him through those steel-bowed spectacles have
seen with something of sadness, and something more of compassion, how
the finer aspirations of earlier days have all been smothered and
quenched! In an age which is impatient of any voice that will not cry,
‘Great is the god of railroads and syndicates, and greater yet are the
apostles of ‘puts’ and ‘calls,’ of ‘corners’ and pools!’ we want a race
of men who by their very existence shall be a standing protest against
the reign of a coarse materialism and a deluge of greed and
self-seeking.
“But to have such a race of men we must have among us those whose vision
has been purged and unsealed to see the dignity of the scholar’s
calling. One may not forget that among those who will soon go forth from
college halls to begin their work in life there must needs be many to
whom the nature of that work, and in some sense the aims of it, are
foreordained by the conditions under which they are compelled to do it.
One may not forget, in other words, that, with many of us, the stern
question of earning our bread is that which most urgently challenges
us, and which we cannot hope to evade. But there is no one of us who may
not wisely remember that, in the domain of the intellect as in the
domain of the spiritual and moral nature, ‘the life is more than meat
and the body than raiment,’ and that the hope of our time, or of any
time, is not in men who are concerned in what they can get, but in what
they can see. Frederick Maurice has well reminded us how inadequate is
that phrase which describes the function of the scholar to be the
acquisition of knowledge. Here is a man whose days and nights are spent
in laborious plodding, and whose brain, before he is done with life,
becomes a store-house from which you can draw out a fact as you would
take down a book from the shelves of a library. We must not speak of
such a scholar disrespectfully; and in a generation which is impatient
of plodding industry, and content, as never before, with smart and
superficial learning, we may well honor those whose rare acquisitions
are the fruit of painful and untiring labor. But, surely, his is a
nobler understanding of his calling as a scholar who has come to see
that, in whatsoever department of inquiry, it is not so much a question
of how much learning he is possessed of, as, rather, how truly anything
that he has learned has possessed him. There are men whose acquirements
in mere bulk and extent are, it may be, neither large nor profound. But
when they have taken their powers of inquiry and investigation and gone
with them to the shut doors of the kingdom of knowledge, they have
tarried there in stillness and on their knees, waiting and watching for
the light. And to these has come, in all ages, that which is the best
reward of the scholar--not a fact to be hung up on a peg and duly
numbered and catalogued, but the vision of a truth to be the inspiration
of all their lives.”
Among the departments of higher education at which the self-styled
“practical” man turns up his nose are the mental, moral and political
sciences. They are sneered at as a mass of mere theories; good enough,
perhaps, to help intellectual natures otherwise unoccupied to pass away
the time, but of no practical good in the world. Yet President Gilman,
whose mind runs largely upon applied science, says of these studies:
“They have twofold value--their service to the individual and their
service to the state. It is by the study of the history of opinion, by
the scrutiny of mental phenomena, and by the discussion of ethical
principles, that religious and moral character is to be developed. The
hours of reflection are redeemed from barrenness and made fruitful, like
sand-plains irrigated by mountain-streams, when they are pervaded by
the perennial currents which flow from the lofty heights of philosophy
and religion. Above all other educational subjects in importance stands
philosophy, the exercise of reason upon those manifold and perplexing
problems of existence which are as old as humanity and as new as the
nineteenth century. For its place in a liberal education no substitute
need apply. What is true of the moral sciences in reference to
individual character may be said of the historical and political
sciences in relation to the state. That nation is in danger of losing
its liberties, and of entering upon a period of corruption and decay,
which does not keep its eye steadily fixed on the experience of other
nations, and does not apply to its own institutions and laws the lessons
of the past. The evils we complain of, the burdens we carry, the dangers
we fear, are to be met by the accumulated experience of other
generations and of other climes.”
Yet this distinguished teacher would not, like some men of equal note
but less breadth of character, have the college student restrict himself
to these departments of study. He shows himself abreast of the times
when he says:
“A liberal education requires an acquaintance with scientific methods,
with the modes of inquiry, of observation, of comparison, of eliminating
error and of ascertaining truth, which are observed by modern
investigators. Such an acquaintance may be better secured by prolonged
and thorough attention to one great department of science, like
chemistry, physics, biology, or geology, than by acquiring a smattering
of twenty branches. If every college student would daily for one or two
years devote a third of his study time to either of the great subjects
we have named, or to others which might be named, he would exercise his
faculties in a discipline very different from that afforded by his
linguistic and mathematical work. He would not only find his observing
powers sharpened; he would find his judgment improved by its exercise on
the certainties of natural law. He would never afterward be prejudiced
against the true workers in science, nor afraid of the progress of
modern learning. Whatever might be his future vocation, ecclesiastical,
educational, or editorial, he would speak of science with no covert
sneer and with no suppressed apprehension. The more religious his
nature, the more reverent would he become. In public affairs which call
for a knowledge of science, he would know how to discriminate between
the quack and the authority, and he would be quick to perceive in how
many departments of government the liberal use of scientific methods is
now imperatively demanded.”
If no other purpose could be attained by raising the standard and
broadening the scope of such of our colleges as aspire to the rank of
universities, and of sending to them all of our young men who sincerely
desire a liberal education, there would be the enormous gain, to each
student, of association with men of his own kind. Such association
elsewhere is almost impossible in this land of scattered population and
magnificent distances. Many ill-balanced “cranks” might have been spared
us could active, restless, inquiring minds have been placed amid
congenial surroundings instead of chafing against barren environments
and consuming their minds over trivialities. Edward Everett Hale is
credited with the saying: “The main good of a college is not in the
things which it teaches; the good of a college is to be had from the
‘fellows’ who are there and your association with them.” President
Dwight, of Yale, while dissenting from the sweeping first clause of Mr.
Hale’s assertion, admits:
“But ‘the fellows’ did me much good in the way of my education. I had a
most excellent and worthy set of friends, especially in the last year of
my college life. My associations with them drew me out of myself, and
gave me, in the best meaning of the term, the sense and the impulse of
good-fellowship. As bearing upon my preparation for my life’s work, this
association did much to give me that common sense, and sympathy, and
warm-heartedness, and love of young men, and comprehension of their
nature and their feelings, the value of which is so great to a college
teacher. The college friendships, in their best development, came to me
at the most fortunate period--in the later years of the course. They
came at a time when they could operate most healthfully and happily upon
all that I had gained from my studies and my teachers, and rounded out
for me, if I may so express it, the education which belonged to the
university.”
One requisite to the greater success of our higher colleges is a better
class of students. When fees for matriculation and tuition formed an
important part of the income from which a school had to maintain itself,
an applicant’s defects of preparation or personal character were winked
at; but this no longer is necessary at Yale, Harvard or any of the half
dozen younger universities which have been richly endowed. No one should
be received as a student who does not “mean business” and who is not
quickly responsive to the influences about him. Says Prof. Shaler, of
Harvard:
“It is very clear that the essential aim of our higher educational
establishments is to take youths who have received a considerable
training in preparatory schools, who have attained the age of about
eighteen years, and have begun to acquire the motives of men, and fit
them for the higher walks of active life. To the youth must be given a
share of learning which may serve to enlarge to the utmost his natural
powers. He must be informed and disciplined in the art and habit of
acquiring information. He must also be disciplined in the ways of men,
in the maintenance of his moral status by the exercise of his will, in
self-confidence and in the faithful performance of duty for duty’s sake.
Every influence which tends to aid him in putting away the irresponsible
nature of the child should be brought to bear; every condition which
will lead him to send forth his expectations and ambitions from his
place in the school to his place among men should surround him.
“Once bring a young man clearly to feel that his career in life is
fairly begun when he resorts to college or the professional school; let
him but conceive that his place in life is to be determined by his
conduct in preparation for it, and we bring to bear a set of motives
which are morally as high as the ordinary motives of discipline are low
in the moral scale. Just so far as the work of a student abounds in
suggestions of his work in the world, so far as his teachers by their
conduct, as well as by their words, serve to arouse his manly, dutiful
sense, the education effects its true end. Every youth who is fitted to
be a student in our higher colleges or universities will quickly respond
to the stimulus he feels in passing from the disciplinary conditions of
childhood to those which are fit for men. If he be in spirit capable of
scholarly manliness, we may be sure that his imagination has forerun the
conditions he has met in his lower schooling. He has longed for
something like the independence and responsibility of manhood; for an
advance to the place of trust to which he is bidden.”
Our higher colleges should not become retreats for that large, lazy,
irresponsible class of young men and women who mistake fondness for
reading for a desire to study. There is no more deceptive creature alive
than the juvenile book-worm. He is like the English king who became
noted as “the most learned fool in Christendom.” Neither should
feebleness of body be regarded as an indication of vigorous intellect;
this mistake has filled colleges as disastrously as pulpits. The
seriousness of ill-health is not an intellectual purpose; it is a mental
disease, and should be treated by the gymnasium instructor--not the
college professor. President White, in outlining the university of the
future, said:
“A long observation of young men and young women has taught me that
there is infinitely greater danger to their health, moral, intellectual
and physical, from lounging, loafing, dawdling and droning over books,
than from the most vigorous efforts they can be induced to make; and I
believe that most thoughtful teachers will agree with me on this point.
In order to meet any danger of the sort suggested, it will be observed
that I have insisted on a proper examination as to physical condition at
the same time with the regular examinations for scholarships and
fellowships, and also upon frequent reports from the successful
candidates as to health as well as progress. The expectation of such
examinations and reports would do much to guard and improve the health
of ambitious young scholars in every part of the country.”
Our higher colleges contain some admirable instructors, but the average
quality is not yet what it should be. President Gilman says:
“For the ordinary instruction of under-graduate students men of broad,
generous, varied culture are needed; men who know the value of letters
and of nature in a plan of study; men who understand their own views
because they are watching the necessities and the transactions of to-day
with the light of historical experience; men who believe that character,
intellectual and moral, is more important than knowledge, and who are
determined that all the influences of college life shall be wholesome.
Such teachers as these have hitherto constituted the faculties of
American colleges; their names may not have been made renowned by any
new discoveries or by the publication of any great treatises, but they
have impressed themselves on generations of pupils who have in their
turn helped to form the best institutions which maintain the nation. It
will be a great misfortune to American education, if, in choosing
specialists for collegiate professorships (as must be done in future),
the authorities fail to make sure that these specialists are men of
general cultivation, of sound morals and of hearty sympathy with the
youth they are to teach.”
But what are college trustees to do? Most of the great gifts to colleges
are for special purposes--the erection of buildings, the purchase of
instruments, the founding of a library, the purchase of a telescope, but
seldom for the purpose of securing a valuable addition to the faculty by
an endowment which would yield a sum that would justify a man of high
attainments in abandoning a lucrative profession and devoting himself to
education. Says President Gilman:
“Is it not time for all who are interested in college foundations to
call for large donations for the increase of ‘the wages fund?’ Ought not
the college authorities to keep in the background their desire for
better buildings, and insist that adequate means must first be provided
for the maintenance of instruction? It will be suicidal if a prosperous
country like this suffers its institutions of learning to be manned by
men of second-rate abilities because they are cheaper, and because the
men of first-rate powers are turned away from the work of higher
education to the professions of law and medicine, to the ministry and
to business pursuits, as giving more hope, more comfort and more
freedom, with equally good opportunities of usefulness and with
prospects of higher honor. It will be a shame if the hoary head in a
college, instead of being a crown of glory, is a sign of poverty and
neglect. A college professorship should be liberally paid, and with an
augmenting salary, so that, in this respect, it may be at least as
attractive as other careers which are open to intellectual men. If the
very best men are not secured for the work of instruction, and if they
are not made so easy in their pecuniary circumstances as to be free from
care on that account, farewell to intellectual advancement, farewell to
literary progress, farewell to scientific discovery, farewell to sound
statesmanship, farewell to enlightened Christianity; the reign of
bigotry and dulness is at hand.”
Our colleges need more scholarships and more fellowships. It ought to be
possible for any one desirous and deserving of a good education to
obtain it, whether he be son of a prince or son of a pauper. It ought
also to be possible for a brilliant and studious graduate to be
specially rewarded and encouraged by being supported by his Alma Mater
so long as he continues his studies to some purpose and for the benefit
of the college. The “fellow” of an English university may be a mere
loafer; his title and its accompanying allowance of money call for no
return; they are merely rewards for what has already been done.
President White says:
“I would allow the persons taking fellowships to use them in securing
advanced instruction at whatever institution they may select at home or
abroad. Probably the great majority would choose the best institutions
at home, but many would go abroad and seek out the most eminent
professors and investigators. Thus, eager, energetic, ambitious young
American scholars would bring back to us the best thoughts, words and
work of the foremost authorities in every department throughout the
world; skill in the best methods, knowledge of the best books,
familiarity with the best illustrative material. From the scholars thus
trained our universities, colleges and academies would receive better
teachers; our magazines and newspapers writers better fitted to discuss
living political, financial and social questions; the various
professions men better prepared to develop them in obedience to the best
modern thought, and the great pursuits which lie at the foundation of
material prosperity--agriculture, manufactures and the like--men better
able to solve the practical problems of the world. Every field of moral,
intellectual and physical activity would thus be enriched. All would be
anxious to train students fitted to compete successfully for these
fellowships, and the stronger institutions would be especially anxious
to develop post-graduate courses fitted to attract these. I can think of
no better antiseptic for the dry-rot which afflicts so many institutions
of learning. The custom of shelving clergymen unacceptable to parishes
in college professorships would probably by this means receive a killing
blow.”
Bishop Potter writes as earnestly on this subject, though from a
different point of view:
“We want place for men who, whether as fellows or lecturers, shall, in
connection with our universities, be free to pursue original
investigation and to give themselves to profound study, untrammelled by
the petty cares, the irksome round, the small anxieties, which are
sooner or later the death of aspiration, and fatal obstacles to
inspiration. It is with processes of thought as it is with processes of
nature--crystallization demands stillness, equanimity, repose. And so
the great truths which are to be the seed of forces that shall new
create our civilization must have a chance first of all to reveal
themselves. Some mount of vision there must be for the scholar; and
those whose are the material treasures out of which came those wonderful
endowments and foundations which have lent to England’s universities
some elements of their chiefest glory must see that they have this mount
of vision.”
Higher education does not require that college discipline, direction and
supervision should be abated; on the contrary, it demands more active
exercise of all these functions. Some quite good and earnest men go to
college only to read; their proper place is a large library in a city.
Others, taking advantage of “elective” studies, want to plunge into a
groove and remain there. Elective studies have their advantages, but
young men are seldom fit to select for themselves. Says President
Bartlett, of Dartmouth:
“From the fact that he has not been over the field, the youth is
incompetent to judge what is the best drill and culture for him. And
while diversity of ultimate aim may modify the latter part of the basal
education, specialism comes soon enough when the special training
begins. And those institutions seem to me wisest which reserve their
electives till the last half of the college course, then introduce them
sparingly, and not miscellaneously, but by coherent courses. A general
and predominant introduction of electives is fruitful of evils. It
perplexes the faithful student in his inexperience. It tempts and helps
the average student to turn away from the studies which by reason of his
deficiencies he most needs. It gives opportunity to the lazy student to
indulge his indolence in the selection of ‘soft’ electives.”
Fortunately discipline is not so hard to maintain in American colleges
as in European universities. There are some “hard boys” at Harvard, and
the Yale Cubs often make night hideous at New Haven, nevertheless the
American student is generally more respectable and law-abiding than his
foreign brother. Says President Eliot, of Harvard:
“The habitual abstinence from alcohol as a daily beverage, which the
great majority of American students observe, explains in some degree the
absence in American institutions of all measures to prevent students
from passing the night away from their college rooms or lodgings. The
college halls at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton stand open all night;
while at Oxford and Cambridge locked doors and gates, and barred and
shuttered windows, enforce the student’s presence in his room after 10
P.M., but are most ineffectual to restrain him from any vice to which he
may be seriously inclined. There is more drunkenness and licentiousness
at Oxford and Cambridge than among an equal number of American students;
but this fact is due rather to national temperament, and to the
characteristics of the social class to which English students generally
belong, than to anything in university organization or discipline. Among
manly virtues, purity and temperance have a lower place in English
estimation than in American.”
So sensible are the mass of American students that when the question of
undergraduate participation in college management was raised at
Dartmouth the college societies reported adversely on the plan, and the
college paper, edited by students, manfully asserted, after a plea for
strong government, “What our colleges really need is more of West
Point.”
Between proper government and amateur police work, however, there is a
wide difference. Ex-President McCosh, of Princeton, who was a studious,
quiet man, whom no one could have suspected of sympathy with wild
hilarity, said:
“There may be colleges, but they are few, which are over-governed by
masters who look as wise as Solomon, but whose judgments are not just so
wise as his were. In some places there may be a harsh repression of
natural impulses, and an intermeddling with joyousness and playfulness.
I have known ministerial professors denounce infidelity till they made
their best students infidel. The most effective means of making young
men skeptics is for dull men to attack Darwin and Spencer, Huxley and
Tyndall, without knowing the branches which these men have been turning
to their own uses. There are grave professors who cannot draw the
distinction between the immorality of drinking and snowballing. It is
true that we have two eyes given us that we may see, but we have also
two eyelids to cover them up; and those who have oversight of young men
should know when to open and when to close these organs of observation.
I have seen a band of students dragging a horse, which had entered the
campus, without matriculating, into a _goody_-student’s room, and a
professor with the scene before him determinedly turning his head now to
the one side and now to the other that he might not possibly see it. I
have witnessed a student coming out of a recitation-room, leaping into a
wagon, whose driver had villanously disappeared, and careering along the
road, while the president turned back from his walk that his eyes might
not alight on so profane a scene.”
But between mere fun and out-and-out brutality Dr. McCosh drew the line
sharply when he said:
“It is certain that there are old college customs still lingering in our
country which people generally are now anxious to be rid of. Some of
them are offsets of the abominable practices of old English schools, and
have come down from colonial days, through successive generations. Thus
American hazing is a modification of English fagging. It seems that
there are still some who defend or palliate the crime--for such it is.
They say that it stirs up courage and promotes manliness. But I should
like to know what courage there is in a crowd, in masks at the dead of
night, attacking a single youth who is gagged and is defenceless! It is
not a fair and open fight in which both parties expose themselves to
danger. The deed, so far from being courageous, is about the lowest form
of cowardice. The preparations made and the deeds done are in all cases
mean and dastardly, and in some horrid. I have seen the apparatus. There
are masks for concealment, and gags to stop the mouth and ears; there is
a razor and there are scissors, there are ropes to bind, and in some
cases whips or boards to inflict blows; there are commonly filthy
applications ready, and in all cases unmanly insults more difficult to
be borne by a youth of spirit than any beating. The practice, so far
from being humanizing, is simply brutalizing in its influence on all
engaged in it. It does not form the brave man, but the bully. The youth
exposed to the indignity this year is prepared to revenge it on another
next year. A gentleman who knows American colleges well tells me that in
those in which hazing is common in the younger classes the very look of
the students is rowdyish. It is astonishing that the American people,
firm enough when they are roused, should have allowed this barbarity to
linger in our colleges, great and small, down to the last quarter of the
nineteenth century of the religion of purity and love.”
Our universities and more progressive colleges are slowly but surely
reshaping themselves on the lines indicated in the foregoing pages, and
the time is not far distant when no graduate can be excused for being
merely book-stuffed instead of educated.