The strength and beauty of the radical’s position is that he already
to a large extent lives in that sort of world which he desires. Many
people there are who would like to live in a world arranged in some
sort of harmony with socialistic ideals, but who, believing they
are impossible, dismiss the whole movement as an idle if delightful
dream. They thus throw away all the opportunity to have a share
in the extending of those ideals. They do not see that the gradual
infiltration of those ideals into our world as it is does brighten and
sweeten it enormously. They do not know the power and advantage of
even their “little faith” which their inclinations might give them.
But the faith of the radical has already transformed the world in
which he lives. He sees the “muddle” around him, but what he actually
feels and lives are the germs of the future. His mind selects out the
living, growing ideas and activities of the socially fruitful that
exist here and now, and it is with these that his soul keeps company;
it is to their growth and cultivation that he is responsive. This is
no illusion that he knows, no living in a pleasing but futile world of
fancy. For this living the socialistic life as far as he is able, he
believes has its efficient part in creating that communal life of the
future. He feels himself, not as an idle spectator of evolution, but as
an actual co-worker in the process. He does not wait timidly to jump
until all the others are ready to jump; he jumps now, and anticipates
that life which all desire, but which most, through inertia, prejudice,
insufficient knowledge, and feeble sympathy, distrust or despair of.
He knows that the world runs largely on a principle of imitation,
and he launches boldly his personality into society, confident of its
effect in polarizing the ideas and attitudes of the wistful. Towards
himself he finds gravitating the sort of people that he would find
in a regenerated social order. To him come instinctively out of his
reading and his listening the ideas and events that give promise of
the actual realization of his ideals. In unlooked-for spots he finds
the seeds of regeneration already here. In the midst of the sternest
practicalities he finds blossoming those activities and personalities
which the unbelieving have told him were impossible in a human world.
And he finds, moreover, that it is these activities and personalities
that furnish all the real joy, the real creation, the real life of the
present. The prophets and the teachers he finds are with him. In his
camp he finds all those writers and leaders who sway men’s minds to-day
and make their life, all unconscious as they are of the revolutionary
character of the message, more rich and dynamic. To live this life of
his vision practically here in the present is thus the exceeding great
reward of radical youth. And this life, so potent and glowing amongst
the crude malignity of modern life, fortifies and stimulates him, and
gives him the surety, which is sturdier than any dream or hope, of
the coming time when this life will permeate and pervade all society
instead of only a part.
XIII
THE COLLEGE: AN INNER VIEW
The undergraduate of to-day, if he reads the magazines, discovers
that a great many people are worrying seriously about his condition.
College presidents and official investigators are discussing his
scholarship, his extra-curricular activities, and his moral stamina.
Not content with the surface of the matter, they are going deeper and
are investigating the college itself, its curriculum, the scholarship
of the instructors, and its adequacy in realizing its high ideal as
a preparation for life. The undergraduate finds that these observers
are pretty generally inclined to exonerate him for many of his
shortcomings, and to lay the blame on the college itself; the system is
indicted, and not the helpless product.
For this he is grateful, and he realizes that this dissatisfaction
among educators, this uneasy searching of the academic heart, promises
well for the education of his children, and for himself if he remains
in college long enough to get the benefit of the reforms. Meanwhile,
as he attends recitations and meetings of undergraduate societies,
talks with his fellow students and the professors, and reads the
college papers, he may, even if he can get no hint of the mysterious
inner circles where the destinies of the students are shaped and great
questions of policy decided, be able himself to see some of the things
that complicate college scholarship to-day, from an inner point of
view which is impossible to the observer looking down from above. He
may find in the character of the student body itself, and the way in
which it reacts to what the college offers it, an explanation of some
of the complications of scholarship that so disturb our critics; and in
a certain new quality in the spirit of the college, something that is
beginning to crystallize his own ideals, and to make him count himself
fortunate that he is receiving his education in this age and no other.
In the constitution of college society, and in the intellectual and
spiritual ideals of the teachers, he may find the explanation of why
the college is as it is, and the inspiration of what the college ought
to be and is coming to be.
The first thing that is likely to impress the undergraduate is the
observation that college society is much less democratic than it used
to be. It is to be expected, of course, that it will be simply an
epitome of the society round about it. But the point is, that whereas
the college of the past was probably more democratic than the society
about it, the present-day college is very much less democratic.
Democracy does not require uniformity, but it does require a certain
homogeneity, and the college to-day is less homogeneous than that of
our fathers. For the growing preponderance of the cities has meant
that an ever-increasing proportion of city-bred men go to college, in
contrast to the past, when the men were drawn chiefly from the small
towns and country districts. Since social distinctions are very much
more sharply marked in the city than in the country, this trend has
been a potent influence in undemocratizing the college. In ordinary
city life these distinctions are not yet, at least, insistent enough to
cause any particular class feeling, but in the ideal world of college
life they become aggravated, and sufficiently acute to cause much
misunderstanding and ill-feeling. With increasing fashionableness,
the small college, until recently the stronghold of democracy, is
beginning to succumb, and to acquire all those delicately devised,
subtle forms of snobbery which have hitherto characterized the life
of the large college. If this tendency continues, the large college
will have a decided advantage as a preparation for life, for as a rule
it is situated in a large city, where the environment more nearly
approximates the environment of after life than does the artificial and
sheltered life of the small college.
The presence of aliens in large numbers in the big colleges, and
increasingly in the smaller colleges, is an additional factor in
complicating the social situation. It ought not to be ignored, for
it has important results in making the college considerably less
democratic even than would otherwise be the case. It puts the American
representatives on the defensive, so that they draw still more closely
together for self-defense, and pull more tightly their lines of vested
interest and social and political privilege. The prejudice of race
can always be successfully appealed to in undergraduate matters,
even to the extent of beguiling many men with naturally democratic
consciences into doing things which they would murmur at if called
on to do as individuals, and not as the protectors of the social
prestige of the college. The fraternities are of course the centre of
this vast political system which fills the athletic managerships,
selects members of the societies, officers of classes and clubs,
editors and assistants of publications, and performs generally all
that indispensable public service of excluding the aliens, the
unpresentable, and the generally unemployable from activity.
I am aware that most of the colleges pride themselves on the fact
that the poor man has an equal chance with the rich to-day to win
extra-curricular honors, and mingle in college society on a perfect
plane of social equality with the best. It is true, of course, that
in college as in real life the exceptional man will always rise
to the top. But this does not alter the fact that there exists at
too many American colleges a wholesale disfranchisement from any
participation in the extra-curricular activities, that is not based on
any recognizable principle of talent or ability. It is all probably
inherent in the nature of things, and to cavil at it sets one down as
childish and unpractical. At present it certainly seems inevitable
and unalterable. The organized efforts of the President recently to
democratize the social situation at Princeton met with such dull,
persistent hostility on the part of the alumni that they had to be
abandoned.
This social situation in the college is not very often mentioned
in the usual discussions of college problems, but I have dwelt on
it here at length because I believe that it has a direct bearing on
scholarship. For it creates an eternal and irreconcilable conflict
between scholarship and extra-curricular activities. Scholarship is
fundamentally democratic. Before the bar of marks and grades, penniless
adventurer and rich man’s son stand equal. In college society,
therefore, with its sharply marked social distinctions, scholarship
fails to provide a satisfactory field for honor and reputation. This
implies no dislike to scholarship as such on the part of the ruling
class in college society, but means simply that scholarship forces an
unwelcome democratic standard on a naturally undemocratic society. This
class turns therefore to the extra-curricular activities as a superior
field for distinction, a field where honor will be done a man, not
only for his ability, but for the undefinable social prestige which he
brings along with him to college from the outside world. There is thus
a division of functions,--the socially fit take the fraternities, the
managerships, the publications, the societies; the unpresentable take
the honors and rewards of scholarship. Each class probably gets just
what it needs for after life. The division would thus be palpably fair
were it not for the fact that an invidious distinction gets attached to
the extra-curricular activities, which turns the energy of many of the
most capable and talented men, men with real personality and powers of
leadership, men without a taint of snobbery, into a mad scramble for
these outside places, with consequent, but quite unintentional, bad
effects on their scholarship.
The result of all this is, of course, a general lowering of scholarship
in the college. The ruling class is content with passing marks, and
has no ambition to excel in scholarship, for it does not feel that the
attainment of scholars’ honors confers the distinctions upon it that
it desires. In addition, this listlessness for scholarship serves to
retard the work of the scholarly portion of the classes; it makes the
instructor work harder, and clogs up generally the work of the course.
This listlessness may be partly due to another factor in the situation.
An ever larger proportion of college students to-day comes from the
business class, where fifty years ago it came from the professional
class. This means a difference between the intellectual background of
the home that the man leaves and of the college to which he comes,
very much greater than when college training was still pretty much
the exclusive property of the professional man or the solid merchant,
and almost an hereditary matter. For, nowadays, probably a majority
of undergraduates are sent to college by fathers who have not had a
college education themselves, but who, reverencing, as all Americans
do, Education if not Learning, are ambitious that their sons shall
have its benefits. These parents can well afford to set their sons up
handsomely so that they shall lose nothing of the well-rounded training
that makes up college life; and although it is doubtful whether their
idea of the result is much more than a vague feeling that college
will give their boys tone, and polish them off much in the way that
the young ladies’ boarding-school polishes off the girls, they are
a serious factor to be reckoned with in any discussion of college
problems.
Most of these young men come thus from homes of conventional religion,
cheap literature, and lack of intellectual atmosphere, bring few
intellectual acquisitions with them, and, since they are most of them
going into business, and will therefore make little practical use of
these acquisitions in after life, contrive to carry a minimum away
with them. In the college courses and talks with their instructors they
come into an intellectual atmosphere that is so utterly different from
what they have been accustomed to that, instead of an intellectual
sympathy between instructor and student, there ensues an intellectual
struggle that is demoralizing to both. The instructor has sometimes to
carry on a veritable guerilla warfare of new ideas against the pupils
in his courses, with a disintegrating effect that is often far from
happy. If he does not disintegrate, he too often stiffens the youth,
if of the usually tough traditional cast of mind, into an impregnable
resolution that defies all new ideas forever after. This divergence
of ideals and attitudes toward life is one of the most interesting
complications of scholarship, for it is dramatic and flashes out in the
class-room, in aspects at times almost startling.
There is still another thing that complicates scholarship, at least in
the larger colleges that have professional schools. Two or three years
of regular college work are now required to enter the schools of law,
medicine, divinity, and education. An undergraduate who looks forward
to entering these professional schools, too often sees this period of
college work as a necessary but troublesome evil which must be gone
through with as speedily as possible. In his headlong rush he is apt
to slight his work, or take a badly synthesized course of studies, or,
in an effort to get all he can while he is in the college, to gorge
himself with a mass of material that cannot possibly be digested.
Now, the college work is of course only prescribed in order that the
professional man may have a broad background of general culture before
he begins to specialize. Any hurrying through defeats this purpose, and
renders this preliminary work worse than useless. A college course must
have a chance to digest if it is to be at all profitable to a man; and
digestion takes time. Between the listlessness of the business youths
who have no particular interest in scholarship, and the impetuosity of
the prospective professional man who wants to get at his tools, the
ordinary scholar who wants to learn to think, to get a robust sort of
culture in an orderly and leisurely way, and feel his mental muscles
growing month by month, gets the worst of it, or at least has little
attention paid to him. The instructor is so busy, drumming on the
laggards or restraining the reckless, that the scholar has to work out
much of his own salvation alone.
Whether or not all this is good for the scholar in cultivating his
self-reliance, the general level of scholarship certainly suffers.
Neither the college administration nor the faculties have been
entirely guiltless, in the past, of yielding before the rising tide
of extra-curricular activities. Athletics, through the protection,
supervision, and even financial assistance, of the college, have become
a thoroughly unwholesome excrescence on college life. They have become
the nucleus for a perverted college sentiment. College spirit has come
to mean enthusiasm for the winning of a game, and a college that has
no football team is supposed to have necessarily no college spirit.
Pride and loyalty to Alma Mater, the prestige of one’s college, one’s
own collegiate self-respect, get bound up and dependent upon a winning
season at athletics. It seems amazing sometimes to the undergraduate
how the college has surrendered to the student point of view.
Instructors too often, in meeting students informally, assume that they
must talk about what is supposed to interest the student rather than
their own intellectual interests. They do not deceive the student,
and they do miss a real opportunity to impress their personality upon
him and to awaken him to a recognition of a broader world of vital
interests than athletic scores and records.
If the college would take away its patronage of athletics, which puts
a direct premium on semi-professionalism, would circumscribe the
club-house features of the fraternities, and force some more democratic
method of selection on the undergraduate societies, would it have the
effect of raising the general level of scholarship? It surely seems
that such a movement on the part of the college administration would
result in keeping athletics proportioned directly to the interest that
the student body took in it, to the extent of their participation
in it, and the voluntary support that they gave to it, instead of
to the amount of money that an army of graduate managers and alumni
associations can raise for it and to the exertions of paid professional
coaches and volunteer rah-rah boys. This would permit college sentiment
to flow back into its natural channels, so that the undergraduate might
begin to feel some pride in the cultural prestige of his college, and
acquire a new respect for the scholarly achievements of its big men.
This would mean an awakened interest in scholarship. The limitation of
extra-curricular activities would mean that that field would become
less adequate as a place for acquiring distinction; opportunity would
be diminished, and it would become more and more difficult to maintain
social eminence as the _sine qua non_ of campus distinction. Who knows
but what these activities might be finally abandoned entirely to the
unpresentable class, and the ruling class seize upon the field of
scholarship as a surer way of acquiring distinction, since the old gods
had fled?
If the college is not yet ready to adopt so drastic an attitude, it has
at least already begun to preach democracy. It is willing to preach
inspirationally what it cannot yet do actively. In the last few years
there has been creeping into the colleges in the person of the younger
teachers a new spirit of positive conviction, a new enthusiasm, that
makes a college education to-day a real inspiration to the man who
can catch the message. And at the risk of being considered a traitor
to his class, the sincere undergraduate of to-day must realize the
changed attitude, and ally himself with his radical teachers in spirit
and activity. He then gets an altered view of college life. He begins
to see the college course as an attempt, as yet not fully organized
but becoming surer of its purpose as time goes on, to convert the
heterogeneous mass of American youth--scions of a property-getting
class with an antiquated tradition and ideals that are out of harmony
with the ideals of the leaders of thought to-day; slightly dispirited
aliens, whose racial ideals have been torn and confused by the
disintegrating influences of American life; men of hereditary culture;
penniless adventurers hewing upward to a profession--to a democratic,
realistic, scientific attitude toward life that will harmonize and
explain the world as a man looks at it, enable him to interpret human
nature in terms of history and the potentialities of the future, and
furnish as solid and sure an intellectual and spiritual support as the
old religious background of our fathers that has been fading these many
years.
This is the work of the college of to-day, as it was the work of
the college of fifty years ago to justify the works of God to man.
The college thus becomes for the first time in American history a
reorganizing force. It has become thoroughly secularized these last
twenty years, and now finds arrayed against it, in spirit at least if
not in open antagonism, the churches and the conservative moulders of
opinion. The college has a great opportunity before it to become, not
only the teacher, but the inspirational centre of the thought and
ideals of the time.
If to the rising generation our elders rarely seem quite
contemporaneous in their criticisms of things, we in turn are apt to
take the ordinary for the unique. We may be simply reading into the
college our own enthusiasms, and may attribute to the college a new
attitude when it is ourselves that are different. But I am sure that
some such ideal is vaguely beginning to crystallize in the minds of the
younger professors and the older undergraduates, or those who have been
out in the world long enough to get a slightly objective point of view.
The passing of the classics has meant much more than a mere change
in the curriculum of the college; it has meant a complete shifting
of attitude. The classics as a cultural core about which the other
disciplines were built up have given place to the social sciences,
especially history, which is hailed now by some of its enthusiastic
devotees as the sum of all knowledge. The union of humanistic spirit
with scientific point of view, which has been longed for these many
years, seems on the point of being actually achieved, and it is the new
spirit that the colleges seem to be propagating.
I am sure that it is a democratic spirit. History, economics, and the
other social sciences are presented as the record of the development
of human freedom, and the science of man’s social life. We are told
to look on institutions not as rigid and eternally fixed, but as
fluid and in the course of evolution to an ever higher cultivation of
individuality and general happiness, and to cast our thinking on public
questions into this new mould. A college man is certainly not educated
to-day unless he gets this democratic attitude. That is what makes the
aristocratic organization of undergraduate life doubly unfortunate. For
one of the most valuable opportunities of college life is the chance to
get acquainted, not politely and distantly, but intimately, with all
types of men and minds from all parts of the country and all classes
of society, so that one may learn what the young men of the generation
are really thinking and hoping. Knowledge of men is an indispensable
feature of a real education: not a knowledge of their weaknesses, as
too many seem to mean by the phrase, but knowledge of their strength
and capabilities, so that one may get the broadest possible sympathy
with human life as it is actually lived to-day, and not as it is seen
through the idealistic glasses of former generations. The association
only with men of one’s own class, such as the organization of college
life to-day fosters, is simply fatal to any broad understanding of
life. The refusal to make the acquaintance while in college of as many
as possible original, self-dependent personalities, regardless of race
and social status, is morally suicidal. There are indications, however,
that the preaching of the democratic gospel is beginning to have its
influence, in the springing-up of college forums and societies which do
without the rigid coöptation that has cultivated the cutting one’s self
off from one’s fellows.
I am sure that it is a scientific spirit. The scientific attitude
toward life is no longer kept as the exclusive property of the
technical schools. It has found its way into those studies that have
been known as humanistic, but, in penetrating, it has become colored
itself, so that the student is shown the world, not as a relentless
machine, running according to mechanical laws, but as an organism,
profoundly modifiable and directive by human will and purpose. He
learns that the world in which he lives is truly a mechanism, but
a mechanism that exists for the purpose of turning out products
as man shall direct for the enrichment of his own life. He learns
to appreciate more the application to social life of machinery in
organization and coöperation; he gets some idea of the forces that
build up human nature and sway men’s actions. He acquires an impartial
way of looking at things; effort is made to get him to separate his
personal prejudices from the larger view, and get an objective vision
of men and events. The college endeavors with might and main to
cultivate in him an open-mindedness, so that at twenty-five he will not
close up to the entrance of new ideas, but will find his college course
merely introductory to life, a learning of one’s bearings in a great
world of thought and activity, and an inspiration to a constant working
for better things.
I am sure that it is a critical spirit. A critical attitude toward
life is as bad a thing for a boy as it is an indispensable thing for
an educated man. The college tries to cultivate it gradually in its
students, so that by the end of his four years a man will have come
simply not to take everything for granted, but to test and weigh and
prove ideas and institutions with which he comes in contact. Of course
the results are unfortunate when this critical attitude comes with a
sudden shock so as to be a mere disillusionment, the turning yellow
of a beautiful world; but it must come if a man is to see wisely and
understand. The college must teach him to criticize without rancor, and
see that his cynicism, if that must come too, is purging and cleansing
and not bitter.