WHY GO TO COLLEGE
[Illustration: The Chapel at West Point as seen from an Entrance to
the Area of the Cadet Barracks]
WHY GO TO COLLEGE
BY
CLAYTON SEDGWICK COOPER
Author of “College Men and the Bible”
_ILLUSTRATED_
[Illustration: (Publisher colophon.)]
NEW YORK
THE CENTURY CO.
1912
Copyright, 1912, by
THE CENTURY CO.
_Published, October, 1912_
WITH GRATEFUL REMEMBRANCE
THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED TO MY
COLLEGE TEACHER AND FRIEND
E. BENJAMIN ANDREWS
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS 3
II EDUCATION À LA CARTE 51
III THE COLLEGE CAMPUS 93
IV REASONS FOR GOING TO COLLEGE 135
V THE COLLEGE MAN AND THE WORLD 173
INDEX 203
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
The Chapel at West Point as seen from an Entrance to
the Area of the Cadet Barracks _Frontispiece_
PAGE
Old South Middle, Yale University 8
A Protest against Prosiness 21
University Hall, University of Michigan 37
The Serpentine Dance after a Foot-ball Game 45
Johnston Gate from the Yard, Harvard University 55
The Library, Columbia University 66
A Popular Professor of Chemistry and his Crowded Lecture-Room 80
Student Waiters in the Dining-Hall of an American College 97
Amateur College Theatricals 112
The Main Hall, University of Wisconsin 122
Blair Arch, Princeton University 143
Editors of the Harvard _Lampoon_ making up the “Dummy”
of a Number 154
The Library and the Thomas Jefferson Statue, University of
Virginia 164
Harper Memorial Building and the Law Building, University of
Chicago 178
The Arch between the Dormitory Quadrangle and the Triangle,
University of Pennsylvania 192
PREFACE
The characteristics of a college course demanded by our American
undergraduates is determined by two things; first, by the character
of the man who is to be educated, and second, by the kind of world
in which the man is to live and work. Without these two factors
vividly and practically in mind, all plans for courses of study,
recreation, teaching, or methods of social and religious betterment
are theoretical and uncertain.
After ten years of travel among American college men, studying
educational tendencies in not less than seven hundred diverse
institutions in various parts of the United States and Canada, it
is my deep conviction that the chief need of our North American
Educational system is to focus attention upon the individual
student rather than upon his environment, either in the curriculum
or in the college buildings.
A few great teachers in every worthy North American institution
who know and love the boys, have always been and doubtless will
continue to be the secret of the power of our schools and
colleges. There are indications that our present educational system
involving vast endowments will be increasingly directed to the end
of engaging as teachers the greatest men of the time, men of great
heart as well as of great brain who will live with students, truly
caring for them as well as teaching them. We shall thus come nearer
to solving the problem of preparing young men for leadership and
useful citizenship.
That this is the sensible and general demand of graduates is easily
discovered by asking any college alumnus to state the strongest
and most abiding impression left by his college training. Of
one hundred graduates whom I asked the concrete question, “What
do you consider to be the most valuable thing in your college
course?”--eighty-six said, substantially: “Personal contact with a
great teacher.”
CLAYTON SEDGWICK COOPER.
March 12th, 1912.
GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS
Colleges, in like manner, have their indispensable
office,--to teach elements. But they can only highly
serve us when they aim not to drill, but to create; when
they gather from far every ray of various genius to their
hospitable halls, and by the concentrated fires, set the
hearts of their youth on flame. Thought and knowledge are
natures in which apparatus and pretension avail nothing.
Gowns and pecuniary foundations, though of towns of gold,
can never countervail the least sentence or syllable of
wit. Forget this, and our American colleges will recede in
their public importance, whilst they grow richer every year.
EMERSON.
I
GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS
The American college was recently defined by one of our public men
as a “place where an extra clever boy may go and still amount to
something.”
This is indeed faint praise both for our institutions of higher
learning and for our undergraduates; but judging from certain
presentations of student life, we may infer that it represents a
sentiment more or less common and wide-spread. Our institutions
are criticized for their tendency toward practical and progressive
education; for the views of their professors; for their success
in securing gifts of wealth, which some people think ought to
go in other directions; and for the lack of seriousness or the
dissipation of the students themselves. Even with many persons who
have not developed any definite or extreme opinions concerning
American undergraduate life, the college is often viewed in the
light in which Matthew Arnold said certain people regarded Oxford:
Beautiful city! so venerable, so lovely, so unravaged by
the fierce intellectual life of our century, so serene!
There are our young barbarians, all at play!
Indeed, to people of the outside world, the American undergraduate
presents an enigma. He appears to be not exactly a boy, certainly
not a man, an interesting species, a kind of “Exhibit X,” permitted
because he is customary; as Carlyle might say, a creature “run by
galvanism and possessed by the devil.”
The mystifying part of this lies in the fact that the college man
seems determined to keep up this illusion of his partial or total
depravity. He reveals no unchastened eagerness to be thought good.
Indeed, he usually “plays up” his desperate wickedness. He revels
in his unmitigated lawlessness, he basks in the glory of fooling
folks. As Owen Johnson describes Dink Stover, he seems to possess
a “diabolical imagination.” He chuckles exuberantly as he reads in
the papers of his picturesque public appearances: of the janitor’s
cow hoisted into the chapel belfry; of the statue of the sedate
founder of the college painted red on the campus; of the good
townspeople selecting their gates from a pile of property erected
on the college green; or as in graphic cartoons he sees himself
returning from foot-ball victories, accompanied by a few hundred
other young hooligans, marching wildly through the streets and cars
to the martial strain,
There’ll be a hot time in the old town to-night!
In other words, the American student is partly responsible for the
attitude of town toward gown. He endeavors in every possible way to
conceal his real identity. He positively refuses to be accurately
photographed or to reveal real seriousness about anything. He is
the last person to be held up and examined as to his interior moral
decorations. He would appear to take no thought for the morrow,
but to be drifting along upon a glorious tide of indolence or
exuberant play. He would make you believe that to him life is just
a great frolic, a long, huge joke, an unconditioned holiday. The
wild young heart of him enjoys the shock, the offense, the startled
pang, which his restless escapades engender in the stunned and
unsympathetic multitude.
This perversity of the American undergraduate is as fascinating to
the student of his real character as it is baffling to a chance
beholder, for the American collegian is not the most obvious thing
in the world. He is not discovered by a superficial glance, and
surely not by the sweeping accusations of uninformed theoretical
critics who have never lived on a college campus, but have gained
their information in second-hand fashion from _question-naires_ or
from newspaper-accounts of the youthful escapades of students.
We must find out what the undergraduate really means by his
whimsicalities and picturesque attitudinizing. We must find out
what he is thinking about, what he reads, what he admires. He seems
to live in two distinct worlds, and his inner life is securely shut
off from his outer life. If we would learn the college student,
we must catch him off guard, away from the “fellows,” with his
intimate friend, in the chapter-house, or in his own quiet room,
where he has no reputation for devilment to live up to. For college
life is not epitomized in a story of athletic records or curriculum
catalogues. The actual student is not read up in a Baedeker.
His spirit is caught by hints and flashes; it is felt as an
inspiration, a commingled and mystic intimacy of work and play, not
fixed, but passing quickly through hours unsaddened by the cares
and burdens of the world--
No fears to beat away--no strife to heal,
The past unsighed for, and the future sure.
It is with such sympathetic imagination that the most profitable
approach can be made to the American undergraduate. To see him
as he really is, one needs to follow him into his laboratory or
lecture-room, where he engages with genuine enthusiasm in those
labors through which he expresses his temperament, his inmost
ideals, his life’s choice. Indeed, to one who knows that to
sympathize is to learn, the soul windows of this inarticulate,
immature, and intangible personality will sometimes be flung wide.
On some long, vague walk at night beneath the stars, when the
great deeps of his life’s loyalties are suddenly broken up, one
will discover the motive of the undergraduate, and below specious
attempts at concealment, the self-absorbed, graceful, winsome
spirit. Here one is held by the subtle charm of youth lost in
a sense of its own significance, moving about in a mysterious
paradise all his own, “full of dumb emotion, undefined longing, and
with a deep sense of the romantic possibilities of life.”
[Illustration: Old South Middle, Yale University]
In this portrait one sees the real drift of American undergraduate
life--the life that engaged last year in North American
institutions of higher learning 349,566 young men, among whom were
many of America’s choicest sons. Thousands of American and Canadian
fathers and mothers, some for reasons of culture, others for social
prestige, still others for revenue only, are ambitious to keep
these students in the college world. Many of these parents, whose
hard-working lives have always spelled duty, choose each year to
beat their way against rigid economy, penury, and bitter loss, that
their sons may possess what they themselves never had, a college
education. And when we have found, below all his boyish pranks,
dissimulations, and masqueradings, the true undergraduate, we may
also discern some of the pervasive influences which are to-day
shaping life upon this Western Continent; for the undergraduate is
a true glass to give back to the nation its own image.
HIS PASSION FOR REALITY
Early in this search for the predominant traits of the college
man one is sure to find a passion for reality. “We stand for him
because he is the real thing,” is the answer which I received from
a student at the University of Wisconsin when I asked the reason
for the amazing popularity of a certain undergraduate.
The American college man worships at the shrine of reality.
He likes elemental things. Titles, conventions, ceremonies,
creeds--all these for him are forms of things merely. To him
The rank is but the guinea’s stamp,
The man’s the gowd for a’ that.
The strain of the real, like the red stripe in the official
English cordage, runs through the student’s entire existence. His
sense of “squareness” is highly developed. To be sure, in the
classroom he often tries to conceal the weakness of his defenses
with extraordinary genius by “bluffing,” but this attitude is
as much for the sake of art as for dishonesty. The hypocrite is
an unutterable abomination in his eyes. He would almost prefer
outright criminality to pious affectation. Sham heroics and mock
sublimity are specially odious to him. The undergraduate is still
sufficiently unsophisticated to believe that things should be what
they seem to be: at least his entire inclination and desire is to
see men and things as they are.
This passion for reality is revealed in the student’s love of
brevity and directness. He abhors vagueness and long-windedness.
His speeches do not begin with description of natural scenery; he
plunges at once into his subject.
A story is told at New Haven concerning a preacher who, shortly
before he was to address the students in the chapel, asked the
president of the university whether the time for his address would
be limited. The president replied, “Oh, no; speak as long as you
like, but there is a tradition here at Yale chapel that no souls
are saved after twenty minutes.”
The preacher who holds his sermon in an hour’s grip rarely holds
students. The college man is a keen discerner between rhetoric
and ideas. No decisions are more prompt or more generally correct
than his. He knows immediately what he likes. You catch him or
you lose him quickly; he never dangles on the hook. The American
student is peculiarly inclined to follow living lines. He is
not afraid of life. While usually he is free from affectation,
he is nevertheless impelled by the urgent enthusiasm of youth,
and demands immediate fulfilment of his dreams. His life is not
“pitched to some far-off note,” but is based upon the everlasting
now. He inhabits a miniature world, in which he helps to form a
public opinion, which, though circumscribed, is impartial and sane.
No justice is more equal than that meted out by undergraduates
at those institutions where a student committee has charge of
discipline and honor-systems. A child of reality and modernity,
he is economical of his praise, trenchant and often remorseless
in his criticisms and censures, for as yet he has not learned to
be insincere and socially diplomatic. This penchant for reality
emerges in the platform of a successful college athlete in a New
England institution who, when he was elected to leadership in one
of the college organizations, called together his men and gave them
two stern rules:
First, stop apologizing! Second, do a lot of work, and don’t talk
much about it!
HIS NATURALNESS
The undergraduate’s worship of reality is also shown in his
admiration of naturalness. The modern student has relegated into
the background the stilted elocutionary and oratorical contests
of forty years ago because those exercises were unnatural. The
chair of elocution in an American college of to-day is a declining
institution. Last year in one of our universities of one thousand
students the course in oratory was regularly attended by three.
The instructor in rhetorical exercises in a college to-day usually
sympathizes with the remarks of one Professor Washington Value,
the French teacher of dancing at New Haven when that polite
accomplishment was a part of college education. At one time when
he was unusually ill-treated by his exuberant pupils, he exclaimed
in a frenzy of Gallic fervor: “Gentlemen, if ze Lord vere to come
down from heaven, and say, ‘Mr. Washington Value, vill you be
dancing mast’ at Yale Collège, or vill you be étairnally dam’?’ I
would say to Him--‘’Sieur, eef eet ees all ze sem to you, I vill be
étairnally dam’.’” The weekly lecture in oratory usually furnishes
an excellent chance for relaxation and horseplay. A college man
said to me recently: “I wouldn’t cut that hour for anything. It is
as good as a circus.”
The student prefers the language of naturalness. He is keen for
scientific and athletic exercises, in part at least because they
are actual and direct approaches to reality. His college slang,
while often superabundant and absurd, is for the sake of brevity,
directness, and vivid expression. The perfect Elizabethan phrases
of the accomplished rhetorician are listened to with enduring
respect, but the stumbling and broken sentences of the college
athlete in a student mass-meeting set a college audience wild with
enthusiasm and applause.
Henry Drummond was perhaps the most truly popular speaker to
students of the last generation. A chief reason for this popularity
consisted in his perfect naturalness, his absolute freedom from
pose and affectation. I listened to one of his first addresses in
this country, when he spoke to Harvard students in Appleton Chapel
in 1893. His general subject was “Evolution.” The hall was packed
with Harvard undergraduates. Collegians had come also from other
New England institutions to see and to hear the man who had won
the loving homage of the students of two continents. As he rose to
speak, the audience sat in almost breathless stillness. Men were
wondering what important scientific word would first fall from the
lips of this renowned Glasgow professor. He stood for a moment with
one hand in his pocket, then leaned upon the desk, and, with that
fine, contagious smile which so often lighted his face, he looked
about at the windows, and drawled out in his quaint Scotch, “Isn’t
it rather _hot_ here?” The collegians broke into an applause that
lasted for minutes, then stopped, began again, and fairly shook
the chapel. It was applause for the natural man. By the telegraphy
of humanness he had established his kinship with them. Thereafter
he was like one of them; and probably no man has ever received more
complete loyalty from American undergraduates.
HIS SENSE OF HUMOR
Furthermore, the college man’s love of reality is kept in balance
by his humorous tendencies. His keen humor is part of him. It
rises from him spontaneously on all occasions in a kind of
genial effervescence. He seems to have an inherent antagonism
to dolefulness and long-facedness. His life is always breaking
into a laugh. He is looking for the breeziness, the delight, the
wild joy of living. Every phenomenon moves him to a smiling mood.
Recently I rode in a trolley-car with some collegians, and could
not but notice how every object in the country-side, every vehicle,
every group of men and women, would draw from them some humorous
sally, while the other passengers looked on in good-natured,
sophisticated amusement or contempt. The whole student mood is as
light and warm and invigorating as summer sunshine. He lives in a
period when
’tis bliss to be alive.
Rarely does one find revengefulness or sullen hatred in the
American undergraduate. When a man with these traits is discovered
in college, it is usually a sign that he does not belong with
collegians. His place is elsewhere, and he is usually shown the
way thither by both professors and students. Heinrich Heine said
he forgave his enemies, but not until they were dead. The student
forgives and usually forgets the next day. The sense of humor is
a real influence toward this attitude of mind, for the student
blots out his resentment by making either himself or his antagonist
appear ridiculous.
He has acquired the fine art of laughing both at himself and
with himself. A story is told of a cadet at a military school
who committed some more or less trivial offense which reacted
upon a number of his classmates to the extent that, because of
it, several cadets were forced to perform disciplinary sentinel
duty. It was decided that the young offender should be forthwith
taken out on the campus, and ordered to kiss all the trees,
posts, telegraph-poles, and, in fact, every free object on the
parade-ground. The humorous spectacle presented was sufficient
compensation to sweep quite out of the hearts of his classmates any
possible ill feeling.
The faculty song, the refrain of which is
Where, oh, where is Professor ----?
Way down in the world below,
and is indulged in by many undergraduate students, usually
covers all the sins and foibles of the instructors. One or two
rounds of this song, with the distinguished faculty members as
audience, is often found sufficient to clear the atmosphere of any
unpleasantness existing between professors and students.
Not long ago, in an institution in the Middle West, this common
tendency to wit and humor came out when a very precise professor
lectured vigorously against athletics, showing their deleterious
effect upon academic exercises. The following day the college
paper gave on the front page, as though quoted from the professor’s
remarks, “Don’t let your studies interfere with your education.”
The student’s humor is original and pointed. Not long ago I saw a
very dignified youth solemnly measuring the walks around Boston
Common with a codfish, keeping accurate account of the number of
codfish lengths embraced in this ancient and honorable inclosure.
His labors were made interesting by a gallery of collegians, who
followed him with explosions of laughter and appropriate remarks.
Not long ago in a large university, during an exceedingly long
and prosy sermon of the wearisome type which seems always to be
coming to an end with the next paragraph, the students exhibited
their impatience by leaning their heads over on their left hands.
Just as it seemed sure that the near-sighted preacher was about to
conclude, he took a long breath and said, “Let us now turn to the
_other side_ of the character of Saint Paul,” whereupon, suiting
the action to the word, every student in the chapel shifted his
position so as to rest his head wearily upon the other hand.
[Illustration: A Protest against Prosiness]
RELIGION AND THE COLLEGE MAN
I have often been asked by people who only see the student in such
playful and humorous moods, “Is the American college man really
religious?” The answer must be decidedly in the affirmative. The
college boy--with the manner of young men somewhat ashamed of
their emotions--does not want to talk much about his religion,
but this does not prove that he does not possess the feeling or
the foundation of religion. In fact, at present there is a deep
current of seriousness and religious feeling running through the
college life of America. The honored and influential students in
undergraduate circles are taking a stand for the things most worth
while in academic life.
The undergraduate’s religious life is not usually of the
traditional order; in fact it is more often unconventional,
unceremonious, and expressed in terms and acts germane to student
environment. College men do not, for example, crowd into the
church prayer-meetings in the local college town. As some one
has expressed it, “You cannot swing religion into college men,
prayer-meeting-end-to.” When the student applies to people such
words as “holy,” “saintly,” or “pious,” he is not intending to
be complimentary. Furthermore, he does not frequent meetings “in
derogation of strong drink.” His songs, also, are not usually
devotional hymns, and his conversation would seldom suggest that he
was a promoter of benevolent enterprises.
Yet the undergraduate is truly religious. Some of the things which
seem at first sight quite out of the realm of the religious are
indications of this tendency quite as much as compulsory attendance
upon chapel exercises. Dr. Henry van Dyke has said that the college
man’s songs and yells are his prayers. He is not the first one who
has felt this in listening to Princeton seniors on the steps of
Nassau Hall singing that thrilling hymn of loyalty, “Old Nassau.”
I have stood for an entire evening with crowds of students about
a piano as they sang with a depth of feeling more readily felt
than described. As a rule there was little conversing except a
suggestion of a popular song, a plantation melody, or some stirring
hymn. One feels at such times, however, that the thoughts of
the men are not as idle as their actions imply. As one student
expressed it in a college fraternity recently, “When we sing like
that, I always keep up a lot of thinking.”
Moreover, if we consider the college community from a strictly
conventional or religious point of view, the present-day
undergraduates do not suffer either in comparison with college men
of other days, or with other sections of modern life. The reports
of the last year give sixty out of every one hundred undergraduates
as members of churches. One in every seven men in the American
colleges last season was in voluntary attendance upon the Bible
classes in connection with the College Young Men’s Christian
Association.
The religious tendencies of the American undergraduates are also
reflected in their participation in the modern missionary crusades
both at home and abroad. Twenty-five years ago the entire gifts of
North American institutions for the support of missions in foreign
lands was less than $10,000. Last year the students and alumni of
Yale University alone gave $15,000 for the support of the Yale
Mission in China, while $131,000 represented the gifts of North
American colleges to the mission cause in other countries. The
missionary interests of students on this continent are furthermore
revealed in the fact that 11,838 men were studying modern missions
in weekly student mission study classes during the college season
of 1909-10. At Washington and Lee University there were more
college men studying missions in 1910 than were doing so in the
whole United States and Canada sixteen years ago.
During the last ten years 4338 college graduates have gone to
foreign lands from North America to give their lives in unselfish
service to people less fortunate than themselves. Six hundred of
these sailed in 1910 to fill positions in foreign mission ports
in the Levant, India, China, Japan, Korea, Africa, Australia, and
South America.
THE BACCHIC ELEMENT
Furthermore, the standards of morals and conduct among the American
undergraduates are perceptibly higher than they were fifty years
ago. There is a very real tendency in the line of doing away
with such celebrations as have been connected with drinking and
immoralities. To be sure, one will always find students who are
often worse for their bacchic associations, and one must always
keep in mind that the college is on earth and not in heaven; but
a comparison of student customs to-day with those of fifty years
ago gives cause for encouragement. Even in the early part of the
nineteenth century we find conditions that did not reflect high
honor upon the sobriety of students; for example, in the year 1814
we find Washington Irving and James K. Paulding depicting the usual
sights about college inns in the poem entitled “The Lay of the
Scottish Fiddle.” The following is an extract:
Around the table’s verge was spread
Full many a wine-bewildered head
Of student learn’d, from Nassau Hall,
Who, broken from scholastic thrall,
Had set him down to drink outright
Through all the livelong merry night,
And sing as loud as he could bawl;
Such is the custom of Nassau Hall.
No Latin now or heathen Greek
The senior’s double tongue can speak.
Juniors from famed Pierian fount
Had drank so deep they scarce could count
The candles on the reeling table.
While emulous freshmen, hardly able
To drink, their stomachs were so full,
Hiccuped, and took another pull,
Right glad to see their merry host,
Who never wine or wassail crost;
They willed him join the merry throng
And grace their revels with a song.
There has probably never been a time in our colleges when such
scenes were less popular than they are to-day. Indeed, it is
doubtful whether the American college man was ever more seriously
interested in the moral, social, and religious uplift of his times.
One of his cardinal ambitions is really to serve his generation
worthily both in private and in public. In fact, we are inclined to
believe that serviceableness is to-day the watchword of American
college religion. This religion is not turned so much toward the
individual as in former days. It is more socialized ethics. The
undergraduate is keenly sensitive to the calls of modern society.
Any one who is skeptical on this point may well examine the
biographies in social, political, and religious contemporaneous
history. In a recent editorial in one of our weeklies it was
humorously stated that “Whenever you see an enthusiastic person
running nowadays to commit arson in the temple of privilege,
trace it back, and ten to one you will come against a college.”
President Taft and a majority of the members of his Cabinet are
college-trained men. The reform movements, social, political,
economic, and religious, not only in the West, but also in the
Levant, India, and the Far East, are being led very largely by
college graduates, who are not merely reactionaries in these
national enterprises, but are in a very true sense “trumpets that
sing to battle” in a time of constructive transformation and
progress.
THE PLAY LIFE OF THE AMERICAN UNDERGRADUATE
Undoubtedly one of the reasons which helps to account for the
lack of knowledge on the part of outsiders concerning the revival
in college seriousness is found in the fact that the play life
of American undergraduates has become a prominent factor in our
educational institutions. Indeed, there is a general impression
among certain college teachers and among outside spectators of
college life that students have lost their heads in their devotion
to intercollegiate athletics. And it is not strange that such
opinions should exist.
A dignified father visits his son at college. He is introduced
to “the fellows in the house,” and at once is appalled by the
awestruck way with which his boy narrates, in such technical
terms as still further stagger the fond parent, the miraculous
methods and devices practised by a crack short-distance runner
or a base-ball star or the famous tackle of the year. When in an
impressive silence the father is allowed the unspeakable honor of
being introduced to the captain of the foot-ball team, the autocrat
of the undergraduate world, the real object of college education
becomes increasingly a tangle in the father’s mind. As a plain
business man with droll humor expressed his feelings recently,
after escaping from a dozen or more collegians who had been
talking athletics to him, “I felt like a merchant marine without
ammunition, being fired into by a pirate ship until I should
surrender.”
Whatever the undergraduate may be, it is certain that to-day he
is no “absent-minded, spectacled, slatternly, owlish don.” His
interest in the present-day world, and especially the athletic
world, is acute and general. Whether he lives on the “Gold Coast”
at Harvard or in a college boarding-house in Montana, in his
athletic loyalties he belongs to the same fraternity. To the
average undergraduates, athletics seem often to have the sanctity
of an institution. Artemus Ward said concerning the Civil War that
he would willingly sacrifice all his wife’s relatives for the sake
of the cause. Some such feeling seems to dominate the American
collegian.
CONCERNING ATHLETICS
Because of such athletic tendencies, the college student has been
the recipient of the disapprobation of a certain type of onlookers
in general, and of many college faculties in particular.
President Lowell of Harvard, in advocating competitive scholarship,
in a Phi Beta Kappa address at Columbia University, said, “By free
use of competition, athletics has beaten scholarship out of sight
in the estimation of the community at large, and in the regard of
the student bodies.” Woodrow Wilson pays his respects to student
athleticism by sententiously remarking, “So far as colleges go, the
side-shows have swallowed up the circus, and we in the main tent do
not know what is going on.”
Professor Edwin E. Slosson, who spent somewhat over a year
traveling among fourteen of the large universities, utters a
jeremiad on college athletics. He found “that athletic contests
do not promote friendly feeling and mutual respect between the
colleges, but quite the contrary; that they attract an undesirable
set of students; that they lower the standard of honor and honesty;
that they corrupt faculties and officials; that they cultivate
the mob mind; that they divert the attention of the students
from their proper work; and pervert the ends of education.” And
all these cumulative calamities arrive, according to Professor
Slosson, because of the grand stand, because people are _watching_
foot-ball games and competitive athletics. The professor would have
no objection to a few athletes playing foot-ball on the desert
of Idaho or in the fastnesses of the Maine woods, provided no one
was looking. “If there is nobody watching, they will not hurt
themselves much and others not at all,” he concedes.
Meanwhile, regardless of their doom,
The little victims play.
In fact, such argument appeals to the average collegian with about
the same degree of weight as the remark of the Irishman who was
chased by a mad bull. The Irishman ran until out of breath, with
the bull directly behind him; then a sudden thought struck him, and
he said to himself: “What a fool I am! I am running the same way
this bull is running. I would be all right if I were only running
the other way.”
It will doubtless be conceded by fair-minded persons generally
that in many institutions of North America athletics are being
over-emphasized, even as in some institutions practical and
scientific education is emphasized at the expense of liberal
training. It is difficult, however, to generalize concerning either
of these subjects. Opinion and judgment vary almost as widely as
does the point of view from which persons note college conditions.
A keen professor of one of the universities where athletics too
largely usurped the time and attention of students, justifiably
summed up the situation by saying:
The man who is trying to acquire intellectual experience
is regarded as abnormal (a “greasy grind” is the elegant
phrase, symptomatic at once of student vulgarity,
ignorance, and stupidity), and intellectual eminence falls
under suspicion as “bad form.” The student body is too much
obsessed of the “campus-celebrity” type,--a decent-enough
fellow, as a rule, but, equally as a rule, a veritable
Goth. That any group claiming the title _students_ should
thus minimize intellectual superiority indicates an
extraordinary condition of topsyturvydom.
During the last twelve months, however, I have talked with several
hundred persons, including college presidents, professors, alumni,
and fathers and mothers in twenty-five States and provinces of
North America in relation to this question. While occasionally a
college professor as well as parent or a friend of a particular
student has waxed eloquent in dispraise of athletics, by far the
larger majority of these representative witnesses have said that in
their particular region athletic exercises among students were not
over-emphasized.
[Illustration: University Hall, University of Michigan]
Yet it is evident that college athletics in America to-day are
too generally limited to a few students who _perform_ for the
benefit of the rest. It is also apparent that certain riotous
and bacchanalian exercises which attend base-ball and foot-ball
victories have been very discouraging features to those who are
interested in student morality. In another chapter I shall treat
at some length of these and other influences which are directly
inimical to the making of such leadership as the nation has a right
to demand of our educated men. In this connection, however, I wish
to throw some light upon the student side of the athletic problem,
a point of view too often overlooked by writers upon this subject.
In the first place, it needs to be appreciated that student
athletics in some form or other have absorbed a considerable amount
of attention of collegians in American institutions for over half
a century. Fifty years ago, even, we find foot-ball a fast and
furious conflict between classes. If we can judge by ancient
records, these conflicts were often quite as bloody in those days
as at present. An old graduate said recently that, compared with
the titanic struggles of his day, modern foot-ball is only a
wretched sort of parlor pastime. In those days the faculty took
a hand in the battle, and a historical account of a New England
college depicts in immortal verse the story of the way in which a
divinity professor charged physically into the bloody savagery of
the foot-ball struggle of the class of ’58.
Poor ’58 had scarce got well
From that sad punching in the bel--
Of old Prof. Olmstead’s umberell.
It will be impossible to fully represent the values of athletics
as a deterrent to the dissolute wanderings and immoralities common
in former times. Neither can one dwell upon the real apotheosis of
good health and robust strength that regular physical training has
brought to the youth of the country through the advent of college
gymnasiums and indoor and outdoor athletic exercises. Much also
might be said in favor of athletics, especially foot-ball, because
of the fact that such exercises emphasize discipline, which,
outside of West Point and Annapolis, is lamentably lacking in this
country both in the school and in the family. While there is much
need to engage a larger number of students in general athletic
exercises, it is nevertheless true that even though a few boys play
at foot-ball or base-ball, all of the students who look on imbibe
the idea that it is only the man who trains hard who succeeds.
There is, too, a feeling among those who know intimately the
real values of college play life, when wholesale denunciations
are made of undergraduate athletics, that it is possible for
one outside of college walls or even for one of the faculty to
produce all the facts with accuracy, and yet to fail in catching
the life of the undergraduate at play. Inextricably associated
with college athletics is a composite and intangible thing known
as “college spirit.” It is something which defies analysis and
exposition, which, when taken apart and classified, is not; yet
it makes distinctive the life and atmosphere of every great seat
of learning, and is closely linked not only with classrooms,
but also with such events as occur on the great athletic grand
stands, upon fields of physical contest in the sight of the college
colors, where episodes and aims are mighty, and about which
historical loyalties cling much as the old soldier’s memories are
entwined with the flag he has cheered and followed. While we are
quoting from Phi Beta Kappa orators, let us quote from another, a
contemporary of Longfellow, Horace Bushnell, whom Henry M. Alden
has called, next to Emerson, the most original American thinker
of his day. In his oration before the Phi Beta Kappa Society of
Harvard sixty years ago, Dr. Bushnell said that all work was for
an end, while play was an end in itself; that play was the highest
exercise and chief end of man.
It is this exercise of play which somehow gets down into the very
blood of the American undergraduate and becomes a permanently
valuable influence in the making of the man and the citizen. It
is difficult exactly to define the spirit of this play life, but
one who has really entered into American college athletic events
will understand it--the spirit of college tradition in songs and
cheers sweeping across the vast, brilliant throng of vivacious
and spell-bound youth; the vision of that fluttering scene of
color and gaiety in the June or October sunshine; the temporary
freedom of a thousand exuberant undergraduates; pretty girls vying
with their escorts in loyalty to the colors they wear; the old
“grad,” forgetting himself in the spirit of the game, springing
from his seat and throwing his hat in the air in the ebullition
of returning youth; the mercurial crowd as it demands fair play;
the sudden inarticulate silences; the spontaneous outbursts; the
disapprobation at mean or abject tricks,--or that unforgettable
sensation that comes as one sees the vast zigzagging lines of
hundreds of students, with hands holding one another’s shoulders
in the wild serpentine dance, finally throwing their caps over the
goal in a great sweep of victory. One joins unconsciously with
these happy spirits in this grotesque hilarity as they march about
the stadium with their original and laughable pranks, in a blissful
forgetfulness, for the moment at least, that there is any such
thing in existence as cuneiform inscriptions and the mysteries of
spherical trigonometry. Is there any son of an American college
who has really entered into such life as this who does not look
back lingeringly to his undergraduate days, grateful not only
for the instruction and the teachers he knew, but also for those
childish outbursts of pride and idealism when the deepest, poignant
loyalties caught up his spirit in unforgettable scenes:
Ah! happy days! Once more who would not be a boy?
A friend of mine had a son who had been planning for a long time
to go to Yale. Shortly before he was to enter college he went with
his father to see a foot-ball game between Yale and Princeton.
On this particular occasion Yale vanquished the orange and black
in a decisive victory. After the game the Yale men were marching
off with their mighty shouts of triumph. The Princeton students
collected in the middle of the foot-ball-field, and before singing
“Old Nassau,” they cheered with even greater vigor than they
had cheered at any time during the game, and this time not for
Princeton, but for Yale. The sons of Eli came back from their
celebration and stopped to listen and to applaud. As the mighty
tiger yell was going up from hundreds of Princetonian throats, and
as the Princeton men followed their cheers by singing the Yale
“Boolah,” the young man who stood by his father, looked on in
silence, indeed, with inexpressible admiration. Suddenly he turned
to his father and said: “Father, I have changed my mind. I want to
go to Princeton.”
[Illustration: The Serpentine Dance after a Foot-ball Game]
Such events are associated (in the minds of undergraduates) not
only with the physical, but with the spiritual, with the ideal. The
struggle on the athletic-field has meaning not simply to a few men
who take part, but to every student on the side-lines, while the
pulsating hundreds who sing and cheer their team to victory think
only of the real effort of their college to produce successful
achievement.
Standing beneath a tree near Soldiers’ Field at Cambridge, with
undergraduates by the hundred eager in their athletic sports on one
side, and the ancient roofs of Harvard on the other, there is a
simple marble shaft which bears the names of the men whom the field
commemorates, while below these names are written Emerson’s words,
chosen for this purpose by Lowell:
Though love repine and reason chafe,
There came a voice without reply--
’Tis man’s perdition to be safe,
When for the truth he ought to die.
Not only upon the shields of our American universities do we find
“veritas”; in spirit at least it is also clearly written across
the face of the entire college life of our times. Gentlemanliness,
open-mindedness, originality, honor, patriotism, truth--these are
increasingly found in both the serious pursuits and the play life
of our American undergraduates. The department in which these
ideals are sought is not so important as the certainty that the
student is forming such ideals of thoroughness and perfection.
This search for truth and reality may bring to our undergraduates
unrest or doubt or arduous toil. They may search for their answer
in the lecture-room, on the parade-ground, in the hurlyburly of
college comradeships, in the competitive life of college contests,
or even in the hard, self-effacing labors of the student who
works his way through college. While, indeed, it may seem to many
that the highest wisdom and the finest culture still linger, one
must believe that the main tendencies in the life of American
undergraduates are toward the discovery of and devotion to the
highest truth--the truth of nature and the truth of God.
II
EDUCATION À LA CARTE
“If I were to return to college, I should take nothing that was
practical,” remarked a recent college graduate. This attitude
reveals by contrast a somewhat wide-spread tendency of opinion
toward practical and progressive studies.
At a public gathering not long since, the president of a great
State institution in the Middle West said that he believed within
another decade every course in the institution of which he was the
head would be intended simply to fit men to earn a livelihood. A
cultivated disciple of quiet and delightful studies who overheard
this remark was heard to say almost in a groan, “If I thought that
was true of American education generally, I should want to die.”
An even more significant note of warning against merely
bread-and-butter studies comes from Amherst College, where the
class of 1885 recently presented to the governing board the radical
plan of abolishing entirely the degree of bachelor of science,
with the purpose of building up a strictly classical course for a
limited number of students admitted to college only by competitive
examinations. The plan provides for the raising of a fund to meet
any deficiency caused by the temporary loss of students and also
for the increase of teachers’ salaries. The general idea in the
mind of the Amherst committee is expressed as follows:
The proposition for which Amherst stands is that
preparation for some particular part of life does not make
better citizens than “preparation for the whole of it”;
that because a man can “function in society” as a craftsman
in some trade or technical work, he is not thereby made
a better leader; that we have already too much of that
statesmanship marked by ability “to further some dominant
social interest,” and too little of that which is “aware
of a world moralized by principle, steadied and cleared of
many an evil thing by true and catholic reflection and just
feeling, a world not of interest, but of ideas.” Amherst
upholds the proposition that for statesmen, leaders of
public thought, for literature, indeed for all work which
demands culture and breadth of view, nothing can take
the place of the classical education; that the duty of
institutions of higher education is not wholly performed
when the youth of the country are passed from the high
schools to the universities to be “vocationalized,” but
that there is a most important work to be performed by an
institution which stands outside this straight line to
pecuniary reward; that there is room for at least one great
classical college, and we believe for many such.
[Illustration: Johnston Gate from the Yard, Harvard University]
These opinions are impressive. No one can visit widely our American
colleges without feeling the appropriateness of such warnings and
demands. A story is told of the president of a college praying in
chapel for the prosperity of his school and all new and “inferior”
institutions. The prayer would seem to have been answered in the
last decade, which marks the marvelous growth of modern technical
institutions in America. This growth has been specially pronounced
in the great State universities and in the institutions fitted to
train men in practical education.
GROWTH OF PRACTICAL EDUCATION
Dr. William R. Harper is quoted as saying shortly before his death
that “no matter how liberally the private institution might be
endowed, the heritage of the future, at least in the West, is to
be the State university.” An ex-president of a State university
has given the following indication of ten years of advance in
attendance of students at fifteen State universities in comparison
with attendance at fifteen representative Eastern colleges and
universities:
1896-97 1906-07
State universities 16,414 34,770
Increase 112%
Eastern institutions 18,331 28,631
Increase 56%