the lecture hours of history, not because I did not have a natural
bent for history, but because the professor made the topic, for me,
uninteresting. My mind became a blank almost as soon as I entered
the classroom. Lecture days in history covered me with a darkness
beyond that which I had ever imagined could emanate from the world
of fallen spirits. My powers went into eclipse. There seemed to be
a kind of automatic cut-off between my brains and my note-book.
My only source of comfort consisted in the fact that my miseries
had companionship. In some examinations, I remember, only a small
remnant of the class succeeded in satisfying the demands of our
scholarly teacher.
I can only remember flashes and hints of a long, solemn, student
face, shrouded with whiskers, bending with piercing eye over books
which seemed only slightly less dry than a remainder biscuit,
droning, in “hark-from-the-tombs-a-doleful-sound” incantation,
words, which to our vagrant attention were just words, belonging to
remote centuries, while about me my companions shivered audibly,
waiting to be called up. The professor was called a great student
of history. He might have been. We gladly admitted this: it was
the chief compliment we could pay him. As a teacher and inspirer
of boys, however, he was a good example of the way to make history
impregnable.
[Illustration: A Popular Professor of Chemistry and his Crowded
Lecture-Room]
I hold in memory, also, another professor who taught history.
He was seldom called a professor. The students called him “Benny.”
There was a kind of lingering affection in our voices as we spoke
his name. His lecture-room was always crowded. No student ever
went to sleep, no student became so frightened that he lost his
wits, no student ever took himself too seriously. There was an
element of humor and humanness which was constantly kindled by this
great, manly teacher and which fired at frequent intervals every
student heart. His illustrations were not confined to Horatius on
the bridge, Garibaldi promising his soldiers disaster and death,
or Luther at Worms. He attached history to modern themes. His
historical situations were described not in the terms of tedious
systems, but in the personalities of great men. We somehow felt
that he himself was greater than anything he said; that he himself
was a great man. He found interest in the _life_ of college as
well as in the work of college. He talked about the last foot-ball
game and the reason why the college was defeated and the lessons
that men should draw from their failure. The value of his remarks
was enhanced by the fact that most of the men had seen him on the
running-track in the gymnasium, or on the front row of the grand
stand, cheering patriotically with both voice and arms. I remember
how he used to add driving power to our awakening resolves and
ambitions. We were quite likely to forget that we were learning
history. To-day at alumni dinners the mere mention of the name
“Benny” brings an enthusiasm which the most eloquent speech of any
other man seems incapable of invoking. Here was a man who also
taught history; but the man was more than his book, he was more
than his subject: he was the light and the blood of it, and the
glory of that theme still brightens the path of every one of those
hundreds of students who caught a new and radiant vision of the
march of events in the light of a great man’s eyes. It was of such
teachers that Emerson must have been thinking when he said, “There
is no history, only biography,” and again, “An institution is but
the lengthened shadow of a man.”
It is of such men that other college graduates think to-day, even
as Matthew Arnold thought of Jowett at Balliol:
For rigorous masters seized my youth,
And purged its faith, and trimmed its fire,
Shew’d me the high, white star of truth,
There bade me gaze, and there aspire.
WANTED: THE GREAT TEACHER
But how are we to train such teachers for our undergraduates?
This is no child’s task. It is the matchless opportunity of the
college; it is the crying need of our times. A large proportion of
undergraduates in college lecture-rooms are virtually untouched
in either their feelings or their intellects by the ministry of
the church. Whatever the ministry may have been in our father’s
times, it is not to-day significant or effective in imparting its
message to students. The fact is periodically demonstrated by test
questions of teachers to their students concerning the Bible,
English literature, and church history. I have recently visited
a dozen of the leading preparatory schools whose headmasters
and teachers quite invariably unite in lamenting the inadequacy
of the Sunday-schools and of religious training in the home.
Indeed, many students go up to our best preparatory schools in
almost a heathenish condition as regards religion and Christian
knowledge. It is the day and time of the teacher’s ministry in both
secondary schools and in colleges. No pulpit in our day is more
far-reaching and decisive than the desk of the college teacher.
The college professor who does not forget that he is first a man,
then a professor, and who can get past the friendship of books and
knowledge to a genuine friendship with students, can be the highest
force in our present day civilization. But the teacher says: “I am
only a teacher of literature, or of chemistry, or of engineering,
or of bridge-building. I am not an evangelist or a moral reformer,
or a promoter of polite accomplishments or of social service.” Much
of this is true also of the great teachers of history. Yet somehow
these men found in their specialty the door through which they
entered into the very hearts and lives of their school-boys.
A short time ago at the University of Iowa I had the opportunity
of meeting at luncheon thirty members of the faculty. The subject
for discussion was: “What can the professor do really to assist
students at the University of Iowa in discovering the values worth
while in college life?” Approximately one-half of the teachers
for various reasons prayed to be excused from the discussion. I
was specially interested in the answers of the other men--among
whom were the men, according to student testimony, who had a real
hold upon the university life. One man was of the department of
chemistry. He was prominent in student activities. When he was
introduced, a student said, “There is no man more truly liked in
the university than Professor ----.” As he talked, we felt that,
while he might be a good teacher of chemistry, his department was
chiefly important in giving him a point of departure from which he
could go forth to interest himself in the life of young men. After
the conference he said to me: “If professors want influence with
students, let them appear at debates, at athletic games, and at
student mass-meetings; let them show real interest in undergraduate
activities of all sorts, even at personal sacrifice.”
Another professor was a teacher of English. He was not interested
in athletics or in the religious life of the students so much as
in revealing to students in the classroom as well as outside the
classroom the charm of literary things. That was his message--his
individual message to his college. His life-work was more than
presenting the evolution of the English novel: it was a mission
to students to secure on their part habits of reading and a taste
for genuine literature which in after years would be to many the
most priceless reward of their college days. It is not necessary
that two college teachers should present the same truth in the
same way, but when college professors and instructors, presidents,
deans, and tutors, realize that teaching to-day as in former days
is a calling, not simply a means of livelihood, and that every
man who holds any such position must somehow discover how to
reach personally at least a small circle of students, then our
colleges will not longer be defined as “knowledge shops,” but as
the homes of those inspirations and friendships, those ideals and
incitements, which make life more than meat and the body than
raiment.
While the drift of our modern life in the outside world may be
toward technical and scientific education, the drift in college is
still toward the great teacher--the man of thought-provoking power
and of spiritual capacity; sincere and genuine both in scholarship
and manhood, of whom one can speak, as Carlyle spoke of Schiller,
“a high ministering servant at Truth’s altar, and bore him worthily
of the office he held.”
III
THE COLLEGE CAMPUS
Rudyard Kipling speaks of four street corners of four great cities
where a man may stand and see pass everybody of note in the world.
There are likewise vantage-points in our American colleges from
which one may discover not only the influential undergraduate
types, but also the real life of their environment. One of these
places is the college campus.
Undergraduate life falls into two broad divisions: college work,
pertaining to the study and the classroom; and college relaxation,
centering upon the campus. The latter includes social life,
amusements, athletics, and the other voluntary exercises in which
students meet for fellowship and competition. The close tie between
college work and college play is often shown. A change in student
sentiment has instant effect on student work, while no rules of
the faculty can nullify those deeply rooted principles of student
life which make all college men akin.
A WEST POINT INCIDENT
This relation of student feeling to college authority was shown not
long ago at West Point. The cadet corps was under arrest for having
given the “silence” to an officer in the mess-hall during supper,
for reasons deemed by the cadets to be vital to corps honor and
dignity. The first silence occurred at supper. The whole corps of
cadets, 450 men, were marched back to barracks supperless, and were
placed under arrest in their rooms. Again at breakfast the cadets
repeated the silence, for which they were returned to barracks, but
not until they had been made to “double time” up and down the road
for about twenty minutes. That morning the cadets had virtually
no breakfast. At the next formation for midday dinner an incident
occurred which struck a chord even deeper than discipline and
authority, and broke the insubordination of the students. In the
autumn one of the cadets had brought from home a graphophone,
and among the comic-song cylinders was one which pictured a
non-domestic husband about to slip quietly away from home for an
evening at the club, when his wife confronted him with the command,
Put on your slippers; you’re in for the night.
This song was very popular with the cadets. They were drawn up
in front of the barracks, every man indignant, obstinate, and
determined to repeat the silence, and to continue it even at the
risk of starvation and confinement. At this critical moment the
graphophone, which had been set to begin its work five minutes
after its humorous owner had left his room, began to sing in a
high-pitched voice through the open window directly above the lines
of cadets,
Put on your slippers; you’re in for the night.
[Illustration: Student Waiters in the Dining-Hall of an American
College]
The effect was irresistible. It was like the changing of a current
in an electric battery. The eyes of the cadets, despite the fact
that they were at attention, sought the eyes of their fellows;
their faces relaxed, then broke into a smile. By the time they
reached the mess-hall the whole corps was laughing, and their
sense of humor had swept away the sense of anger and pride. This
was the beginning of the restoration of the traditional West Point
discipline. The campus had spoken to the classroom.
“GROWN-UP” COLLEGIANS
It is through an understanding of this spirit of the campus that
the work of American undergraduates can be adjusted to modern
demands. The work of the classroom and examination-hall makes
for democracy, while the social life of the college makes for
conservatism and aristocracy. Campus life is increasingly difficult
to understand because of its growing complexity. The material needs
of our time have created a class of undergraduates bent on becoming
specialists, and these men have increasingly less time for either
college work or college life; for them the undergraduate course
is something to be hurried through as a short cut to professional
efficiency. Even athletics and college affairs have only a slender
hold upon these utilitarian specialists. They have a “grown-up”
look on their faces as, eager for scientific research, they rush to
and fro between their rooms and their laboratories.
Undergraduate life is now likewise influenced by the influx
of students who are not the sons of college men, but who come
from homes the chief ideals of which have been derived from
counting-rooms and laboratories, from brokers’ and railroad
offices. These students, scions of a property-getting class, in
conjunction with the social and the scientific students in college,
help to change the classical traditions. They emphasize the campus
side of college life more than that of the lecture-room. Their eyes
are upon the stadium rather than upon the library; the delights
of scholarship influence them less than ambition for leadership
and the importance of “making good” in student affairs. They are
in college for “popular” reasons, and too often fail to learn how
to think. But they are eager, versatile, adaptable, with a ready
capacity for social adjustment and modern expression.
COSMOPOLITAN LIFE AT COLLEGE
Furthermore, the student world has been subdivided until it is a
wholly different thing from what it was fifty or even twenty years
ago. While in the seventies the college student knew every man in
his class, in the large institution to-day an undergraduate will
meet in the college yard scores of classmates who are perfect
strangers, and to whom he has no more idea of speaking than to
persons whom he has never seen before. The student who has been
brought up always to dine in a dinner-coat will have for his
table-companions men who have never owned a dress-coat and who see
no immediate prospect of needing one.
The influx of foreign students has added to the cosmopolitan life
of American institutions. So far as they are Orientals, the English
departments are specially modified both in the character of the
attendance and the instruction by their presence. The professor’s
task of adjusting instruction to a mixed assembly of American,
Indian, Mohammedan, Porto Rican, Chinese, and Japanese students may
be inferred from the answer of a young East Indian student who was
asked to describe in English his daily routine:
At the break of day I rises from my own bed, then I employ
myself till 8 o’clock, after which I employ myself to
bathe, then take for my body some sweetmeat, and just at 9½
I came to school to attend my class duty, then, at 2½ P. M.
I return from school and engage myself to do my further
duties then I engage for a quarter to take my tiffin, then
I study till 5 P. M., after which I began to play anything
which comes in my head. After 8½ half pass to eight we are
began to sleep, before sleeping I told a constable just 11
o’ he came and rose us from half pass elevan we began to
read still morning.
The familiar din of dishes at the commons of Columbia, as
well as at the University of California, serves to raise the
pitch of a polyglot table-talk that often represents a dozen
nationalities. Last year in American colleges there were hundreds
of undergraduates of alien speech, customs, ideals, temperaments,
and religion. Among these were a specially important delegation
of three hundred Chinese young men who were beneficiaries of the
Boxer indemnity fund. These students from foreign nations still
further subdivide undergraduate life through their race clubs,
societies for learning English, special religious conferences, and
new studies.
COLLEGE TRADITIONS
College tradition adds its distinctive and forceful factor to the
campus life of the undergraduate, particularly in the older seats
of learning. A good tradition makes it easy to accomplish things
worth while without the spasmodic campaigns that characterize many
younger institutions. Students are often more zealous to uphold
the ancient customs of their college than anything else connected
with it. The annual conflicts between freshmen and sophomores have
become a part of the institution. Certain traditional habits, often
humorous, sometimes doubtful, in character, have grown up in nearly
every North American college. An old account of life at Cambridge
tells of the manner in which both occupant and furniture of a
freshman’s room were menaced by a missile as big as a cantaloupe
that was thrown into it. It was described as a _transmittendam_
(it went with the room), and was handed down in some such forcible
manner from one generation of freshmen to another. The desire
to link the past with the present at Harvard is also shown in
the custom of registering the name of each occupant on the doors
of certain old frame buildings long used as lodging-houses by
students. The old college pump has been a traditional means of
grace to many freshmen, and the customary restriction to upper
classmen of caps, canes, and pipes has added pugilistic zest to
undergraduate life.
College tradition is not an unmixed blessing when it results in
provincialism and the loss of that breadth of mind and appreciative
sympathy which should characterize educated men. When any
undergraduate body becomes blindly a law unto itself, refusing to
learn from other institutions; when faculty and students take the
position that because certain ideas have never prevailed at their
college, therefore they never should and never shall prevail, they
show their unfitness for leadership in an age of vast and varied
opportunity.
The students of the Middle West and the Far West are more sensible
of their freedom from the past than are our Eastern undergraduates.
They realize that they are at least a hundred years behind Eastern
colleges in the dignity of their traditions, and they therefore
seek to crystallize college spirit about college customs; but their
customs do not interfere with progress, as sometimes happens in the
East, and a question is decided on its merits quite regardless of
precedent or policies. If a proposition seems sensible and right,
it is adopted, despite its novelty or its conflict with tradition.
Keeping close to modern needs, those colleges have gone ahead and
accomplished things while more conservative institutions have been
leisurely thinking about them. It is this audacity of spirit, this
dash and action, which endear to the undergraduates of the West all
men of achievement. When among them one thinks of the old verse:
Oh, prudence is a right good thing
And those are useful friends,
Who never make beginnings
Until they see the ends,
But now and then give me a man
And I will make him king,
Just to take the consequences,
Just to _do_ the thing.
THE GAIETY OF UNDERGRADUATES
Traditions are closely connected with college gaiety, and gaiety
forms a real part of the comprehensive life of the American
student. “Cheerfulness,” says Arnold Bennett, “is a most precious
attainment.” The undergraduate cultivates it as an art, puts worry
behind him, and faces the world with a laugh.
About his gaiety there is a kind of humorous bravado. He likes
to defy the lightning. An old graduate of Princeton relates how,
in 1857, when the paper called _The Rake_, because of its daring
criticisms, had brought its editors under the ban of suspension by
the faculty, the editors injected fun into the dismal situation by
printing the statement, “We have authority for supposing that even
the faculty do not coöperate as heartily with our undertaking as
they could and should.”
At the University of Michigan a professor, lecturing on
electricity, wished to show that the fur of a cat is raised by an
electrical current. He asked one day, “Will some student bring a
cat to-morrow, in order that we may show this experiment?” The next
day every one of the forty students entered the lecture-room with a
cat under his arm!
Mechanical laws seem never to baffle the collegian in search of
gaiety. Indeed, when one studies some of the mysterious happenings
on and about the college campus, one ceases to wonder at the
mechanical triumphs of the Egyptians. At one college which I
visited, the stilly night was disturbed by half a hundred students
who, with riotous yells, ran a two-horse wagon back and forth
on an upper story of a college dormitory, to which place they
had succeeded in hoisting it. This occurred at midnight, for the
delectation of three hundred students and members of the faculty
who were sleeping below. Next day the college paper declared that
the president of the institution had been seen at his bedside
supplicating against earthquakes and thunderbolts.
I once visited a small college where the chapel exercises were
abruptly ended because six or eight barn-yard fowl had been placed
inside the pipe-organ. As several hundred students marched into the
chapel, the old German professor, who was deaf, began to play the
organ. The commingled sounds that issued from that instrument when
the levers began to work were described as extraordinary.
Much of the enduring loyalty of college men clings about the
memories of such events. A college president once said to me that
some of the most important gifts to his institution came from
men who remembered college fun and “idlesse” long after time had
blotted out the serious impressions of the classroom. As one
apostle of the easy-going side of student days has said:
“There is some chill and arid knowledge to be found upon the
summits of formal and laborious science; but it is all around about
you, and for the trouble of looking that you will acquire the warm
and palpitating facts of life.”
Still, there is the duty of drawing a distinct line between college
fun and fundamental decency and good order. When this line is
crossed, all the authority of the faculty and, if necessary, the
laws of the land should be brought to bear upon the offenders.
There should be no dallying with undergraduate law-breakers, no
special exemptions for students. Reprehensible and even criminal
acts have been committed by college men in the last few years which
called for severer punishment than seemingly they received. It is
no kindness to the undergraduate to overlook acts of dishonesty,
ruthless destruction of property, or dissipated license. Respect
for property and conventions should be impressed upon a boy
before he reaches college age. It is because lawlessness has been
tolerated by parents in the home, as well as by over-lenient
masters at boarding-school, that we read continually of offenses
against common sense and respectability, committed by persons of
supposed cultivation. Few things are more needed in American life
to-day than strengthening the respect for discipline and lawful
authority.
COLLEGE MEN’S HONOR
Such abuses of liberty, as well as nearly all other college
delinquencies, can be largely prevented by a consistent appeal to
the undergraduate’s sense of honor. Recently I asked the president
of a North Carolina college what he regarded as the chief
characteristic of American students. He replied promptly, “College
honor.” At Princeton, at the University of Virginia, at Amherst,
and at many other institutions, the honor system in examinations
arranged and managed by students, represents the deliberate
intention of the undergraduates to do the square thing. These laws,
which the students voluntarily impose upon themselves, are enforced
more vigorously than the rules of the faculty.