The student is also too prone to distinguish between academic morals
and human morals. As a student, he may crib in examination without
compunction. As a student, he too often feels it is right to deceive
his teacher. Students who are gentlemen and who would as soon cut
their own throats as steal your purse, will yet steal your office sign
or the pole of your barber. In such college outlawry he loses no sense
of self-respect, and in no degree the respect of his fellow students.
Let us confess at once that in what may be called academic immorals
there is usually no sense of malice. This condition does create a
distinct difference between academic and human ethics. Let the
distinction be given full credit. Yet, be it at once and firmly said,
a lie is a lie, and thieving is thieving. The blameworthiness may
differ in different cases, but there is always blameworthiness.
Be it also said the public does not usually recognize the distinction
which the student himself seeks to make. The public becomes justly
impatient with, and more or less indignant over, the horseplay, or
immoralities which students work outside, and sometimes inside,
college walls. The student is to remember that before he was a student
he was a man, that after he has ceased to be a student he is to be a
man, and while he is a student he is also to be a man, and also
before, after, and always he is to be a gentleman. Such irregular
conditions belong, of course, to youth as well as to the student. The
irreverence which characterizes all American life is prone to become
insolence, when, in the student, it is raised to the second or third
power. The able man and true--student or not a student--of course
presently adjusts himself to orderly conditions. The academic
experience proves to be a discipline, though sometimes not a happy
one, and the discipline helps towards the achievement of a large and
rich character.
X
Another misconception made by the student is also common. It is a
misconception attaching to any weakness of his character. The student
is inclined to believe that there may be weaknesses which are not
structural. He may think that there may be some weakness in one part
of his whole being which shall not affect his whole being. He may
believe that he can skimp his intellectual labor without making his
moral nature thin, or that he can break the laws of his moral nature
without breaking his intellectual integrity. He may think that he can
play fast and loose with his will without weakening his conscience or
without impairing the truthfulness of his intellectual processes. He
may imagine that he is composed of several distinct potencies and that
he can lessen the force of any one of them without depreciating the
value of the others. Lamentable mistake, and one often irretrievable.
For man is a unit. Weakness in one part becomes weakness in every
part. In the case of the body, the illness of one organ damages all
organs. If the intellect be dull, or narrow in its vision, or false in
its logic, the heart refuses to be quickened and the conscience is
disturbed. If the heart be frigid, the intellect, in turn, declines to
do its task with alertness or vigor. If conscience be outraged, the
intellect loses force and the heart becomes clothed with shame. Man is
one. Strength in one part is strength in, and for, every part, and
weakness in one part results in weakness in, and for, every part.
For avoiding these three misconceptions, the simple will of the
college man is of primary worth. If he will to distinguish knowledge
from efficiency, and knowledge from cultivation, if he will to know
that the distinction between academic morals and human morals is not so
deep as some believe, and if he will to believe in the unity of
character, the student has the primary help for securing a sound idea
and a right practice.