entire undergraduate body was deeply stirred over a matter that
involved college honor. A senior of high standing socially and
intellectually, the son of a prominent family, high in popular
favor, was overheard to use disrespectful language to his landlady.
The senior was summoned before the student committee having charge
of undergraduate affairs, confronted with the charges, allowed
to make answer, and, being found guilty, was asked to leave the
institution. His family and friends, incensed by this demand, which
seemed to them both harsh and unjust, appealed to the faculty for
redress. The chairman of the faculty replied that the matter
was entirely in the hands of the students. Application was then
made to the student committee to present the young man’s side of
the question to the whole college. The student council readily
acceded to this request, saying that they were perfectly willing to
consider the charges more at length, as their only desire was to be
absolutely just. When he went up for a new trial the young man’s
family engaged a lawyer. The student body also engaged counsel. The
trial was held in one of the largest halls in the university town,
and virtually the whole student body sat through the evening and
far into the morning listening to the presentations of both sides.
A judge who told me of the incident said that during those hours,
looking into those student faces, he did not remember seeing any
man change his expression, but that every one sat in the attitude
of seeking only the truth. The jury, which was chosen from the
faculty and from impartial men in the town, found that the young
man had actually used the words attributed to him, and therefore
pronounced him guilty of the charge.
A few months ago an incident occurred at a Southern college that
impressed me deeply. At one of a series of meetings which I was
holding, a student rose and said that he wished to make confession
to the student body. He had recently won the sophomore-junior
debate, but wished to confess that he had gained it unfairly. He
had overheard his opponent rehearsing his debate in an adjoining
room, and although he stopped his ears and refused to listen, his
room-mate took down the points. Afterward, the debater said, the
temptation was so subtle that he took the notes, arranged his own
debate accordingly, and won. “But,” he said with deep feeling, “I
stole it, and I have come to plead the forgiveness of the student
body.”
Very early the next morning a young man called at the house where
I was being entertained, to tell me that he was the room-mate who
had taken the notes mentioned in the confession. He, too, wished an
opportunity to speak to the students. At the public meeting that
evening, before three hundred college men, he rose and told of his
all-night fight for character on the college campus. He described
the humiliation which he saw confronting him if he should tell of
his part in the dishonorable proceeding, and said:
“I was helped by a power beyond myself to make a clean breast of
it. I am here to tell the students that I, rather than the man who
spoke last night, should take the blame for stealing that debate.”
I do not remember ever having witnessed such deep feeling, or heard
such applause in any assembly, as greeted that sturdy confession.
It was a triumph of college honor and integrity, rooted in manhood,
conscience, and religion.
[Illustration: Amateur College Theatricals]
SOCIETY LIFE AMONG UNDERGRADUATES
But the supreme opportunity for the inculcation and employment of
honesty is not reserved for examinations and public presentations;
it also belongs to the complex social life of the colleges, which
has become important. The club-book of an Eastern university,
for example, records the existence at that institution of ninety
different social organizations, the object of most of them being
to bring men together sociably. Such intermingling is vital for
college friendship. It is true, as former Dean Henry P. Wright of
Yale has said, that, to a student, a friend is a “fellow whom you
know all about, and still like,” and for that reason the social
organizations which bring men together in an intimacy closer than
is found anywhere else are indispensable aids in the formation of
lasting friendships.
The social groupings of college life are also important because
they give an opportunity for concrete and tangible success through
student leadership. College society, in fact, has brought into
being a restricted, but very real, world, with special laws and a
kind of public opinion founded on student initiative and sentiment.
Responsibility and leadership in college affairs have given many
an undergraduate the initial stir to the qualities which make him
successful in after life. These fraternal bodies, democratic,
discriminatingly alert for the best men, and usually emphasizing
worth rather than birth, are vital not only in the discovery
of individuality, but also in their unique contribution to the
corporate strength and unity of college life.
COLLEGE FRATERNITY LIFE
The Greek-letter society is found at the heart of these
undergraduate social activities. Indeed, fraternities have become
in many institutions as much the center of the college itself as
of college society. So far as social and moral influences go, the
character of the fraternity which a young man joins is quite as
important as the college or university he selects. The fraternity
students represent the “system” in college: they choose athletic
managers, they exert the “pull” which controls editorship upon the
college papers, they determine largely the presidents of classes,
and in some cases the elections to senior societies.
The membership of the thirty-five national Greek-letter
fraternities (not to mention a hundred or more local fraternities
or the fifty fraternities of the professional schools) now
comprises 200,000 undergraduates and graduates. These figures do
not include the twenty intercollegiate sororities that claim 250
chapters and 25,000 members. Three hundred and seventy colleges and
universities at present contain chapters of national Greek-letter
fraternities, and millions are invested in the buildings of these
societies. An almanac for 1911 ascribes 1013 fraternity-houses
to American colleges. Half a million dollars is invested in
chapter-houses at the University of Michigan alone. The property of
the eleven fraternities at Amherst had twenty times greater money
value than Yale’s available funds in 1830; and the property of the
fraternities at Columbia, valued at a million dollars, are as great
as the total productive funds of all the colleges at the beginning
of the last century.
The college fraternity or the college club becomes responsible
for a large and representative part of the undergraduate life
in America. It is usually responsible for the histrionics in
university life, and there is perhaps no literary tendency more
pronounced in our colleges to-day than that toward the making of
the drama. Several important plays of recent years may be traced
to graduates who were members of such clubs as “The Hasty Pudding”
of Harvard and “The Mask and Wig” of Pennsylvania. At a time when
confessedly there is a crying demand for good, strong plays at the
theater, it is agreeable to hear that the classes of professors of
dramatic literature are crowded.
Furthermore, the fraternity is no longer simply a debating society;
it is also a student-home. There is an increasing tendency,
especially on the part of state institutions, to make it possible
for college fraternities to erect their buildings on the campus.
Every fraternity-house is the product of much thought, liberal
support, and often sacrifice, on the part of influential alumni.
College authorities are seriously considering the many problems
connected with these organizations, for thousands of undergraduates
find their homes in them for four very impressionable years. The
general attitude of the faculties is wisely not one of repression
or of drastic regulation by rules, but, as President Faunce of
Brown has expressed it, of “sympathetic understanding, constant
consultation, and the endeavor to enlist fraternities in the best
movements in college life.”
There is, moreover, a plain tendency on the part of members of
college fraternities to face the dangers as well as to enjoy
the advantages connected with such societies. They realize
that these organizations can be effectively influenced only by
a leavening process within the fraternity itself, for external
pressure and rules have never yet succeeded in forming or changing
student sentiment. The fraternity can establish manliness and
decency, or sportiness and laziness, as its ideals, and these
ideals are clearly reflected in the membership. The inclination
of these bodies to assume definite responsibility for the moral
welfare of their members is indicated by the action of some
of the old national fraternities, which have chosen efficient
field-secretaries to travel among the chapters in order to study
conditions and to assist in the direction, control, and general
betterment of fraternity activities. The type of men selected for
membership is being more carefully scrutinized. In a considerable
and growing number of institutions, students are not chosen for
membership until the end of the freshman year; there is thus
needful opportunity on both sides for more intelligent choice.
More and more the coöperation of fraternity alumni is being
sought by the authorities. These graduates, who are often largely
responsible for the fine houses of the fraternities, are justly
called upon by the college to assist in maintaining proper
regulations within them. Moreover, assurance is given that the
fraternity itself wishes to coöperate with the faculty in securing
a higher grade of scholarship, which fraternity life too frequently
menaces, and in demanding the reform of conditions leading to
delinquency of all kinds. There is no police force really effective
for a college community but a student police force, and this
operates not by external pressure, but by internal persuasion.
A real danger of the modern college fraternity lies in its
distraction from the real work of the college--study and the
intellectual life--through habits of indifference, laziness,
or immorality. The chapter-house tends to suggest that college
work is optional, not imperative. “Thou shalt not loaf!” as an
eleventh commandment, written across the doorposts of a fraternity
club-house in the Middle West, is no inappropriate injunction. The
undue and distressing waste of time in inconsequent and foolish
play, the inevitable interruptions, the dissipations of social
events, the inane profligacy, the autocracy of athletics, the
feeble conversations that “skim like a swallow over the surface
of reality”--all these are too often the doubtful compensations
received by the college man as fraternity privileges.
“The modern world is an exacting one,” says ex-President Woodrow
Wilson, “and the things that it exacts are mostly intellectual.”
One often wonders, in visiting the fraternities of America, how
large a place this intellectual work holds in college life. Was
that Eastern college professor justified in saying that some
fraternity men are not unlike the old farmer down East who was
usually to be found in a comfortable arm-chair in the post-office,
and when asked what he did, replied, “I just set and think, and
set and think, and sometimes I just _set_.” The fraternity-house
that becomes a place to “set” rather than a place to work is hardly
a credit to a college campus. As President Northrop said to some
society men at the University of Minnesota, “If your fraternity
is not a place for intellectual and moral incitements, it is a
failure, and it must go the way of all failures.”
Among other gifts, the American college fraternity may justly
be expected to bestow upon its members devoted friendship, the
ability to live successfully with other men, and such habits of
application, industry and sobriety as develop ideas and character.
THE UNDERGRADUATE’S PHILOSOPHY OF LIFE
But this hint at the somewhat free-and-easy life of the fraternity
chapter-house should not leave the impression that the American
undergraduate is, as a rule, a thoughtless creature or that he
fails to formulate a philosophy of life. Gilbert K. Chesterton
remarks, “There are some people, and I am one of them, who think
that the most practical and important thing about a man is still
his view of the universe.” Certain beholders of collegiate
conditions have evidently become acquainted with only those
students who have thoughtlessly taken their serious views,
in second-hand fashion, from their ancestors or from current
opinion. These spectators have perhaps justly concluded that the
undergraduate has no view of life--no view, at least, which is
complimentary to him.
[Illustration: The Main Hall, University of Wisconsin]
Such an impression is not general among those who are familiar
with the inner working of the undergraduate mind and have watched
the result of his philosophy in practical works. Many of the
vital movements of the time have originated among these seemingly
thoughtless college men. It was in a small room at Princeton, in
the year 1876, that Cleveland H. Dodge, W. Earl Dodge, and Luther
D. Wishard, after earnest conversation regarding the moral and
religious life of the institution, decided to send delegates to
the next year’s Convention of the International Committee of Young
Men’s Christian Associations, held in Louisville, Kentucky. This
delegation presented to the International Committee plans for the
Student Young Men’s Christian Association at Princeton. Other
groups of undergraduates took similar action both in America and
in other countries, until at present the World’s Student Christian
Federation includes 148,300 students and professors in its
membership. These federated movements represent twenty-one nations.
In connection with these societies during the last college season
66,000 students met regularly for Bible study.
These associations at the colleges have given rise to many other
organizations which have stimulated the educated life of the
world. The Student Volunteer Movement for Foreign Missions, which
originated in connection with a student conference at Mount
Hermon, Massachusetts, in the year 1886, has been responsible for
enlisting thousands of collegians who have been sent by churches
and Christian organizations to serve in foreign lands. This student
missionary organization is also accomplishing an educational work
in familiarizing undergraduates with the social, political, and
religious conditions of foreign nations. The college Christian
associations now have 163 graduates among their employed officers
in the institutions of higher learning in North America.
Undergraduate philosophy of life is an evolution. It consists of
three stages: the first is characterized by a sense of calamity or
fear as the student leaves behind the observances and conventional
creeds of childhood, held with unquestioning and often unthinking
assent. He begins to think for himself. He enters an atmosphere of
thoughtfulness and scientific discovery, an environment in which
facts come before opinions. His first alarm is because he thinks he
is losing his religion. He says, like the prophet Micah, when the
hostile Danites took away his images, “Ye have taken away my gods
... what have I more?”
In the second period of his thinking he changes his early
ceremonial god for breadth of mind. He revels in his impartial view
of men and the universe. By turns he calls himself a pantheist,
a pragmatist, or an agnostic. His religious position is at times
summed up in the description of a young college curate by a bishop
who said the young man arose in his pulpit with a self-confidence
begotten of fancied wisdom, saying to his expectant hearers:
“Dearly beloved, you must repent--as it were; and be converted--in
a measure; or be damned--to a certain extent!”
The third stage of the undergraduate’s philosophy is usually in
line with constructive action. He begins to be interested in doing
something, and practice for him, as for men generally, helps to
solve the riddle of the universe. The best test of college theology
or college philosophy is its serviceableness, its power to attach
the student to something which needs to be done, and which he
can do. Many an undergraduate whose college course has seemed an
intellectually unsettling period has found himself upon solid
ground as soon as he has begun seriously to engage in the world’s
work.
Indeed a strikingly aggressive social propaganda is now in
operation in the North American colleges. The college student,
like the modern American, is a practical being and is interested
in securing practical results. His first question regarding any
movement usually is, “What is it doing that is really worth while?”
Recently a graduate of an Eastern university was secured to give
his entire time to the study and promotion of social service in the
colleges of the United States and Canada.
An example of such service is demonstrated by the social work that
the University of Pennsylvania is doing in connection with its
settlement house in Philadelphia, which is owned and conducted
by the Christian Association of the university. The settlement,
erected in the river-front district, immediately opposite the
university, at Lombard and Twenty-sixth streets, consists of
a group of buildings built at a cost of $60,000; a children’s
playground adjoining the house; an athletic field across the river;
and, forty miles from Philadelphia, a beautifully situated farm of
sixty-four acres, used for a camp for boys and girls, for mothers
and children, in the summer months. Every year one hundred students
and members of the faculty take part in the active service and
support of the settlement. Among the activities are the following:
Boys’ and girls’ and adults’ clubs; industrial classes; athletics;
dispensary; modified milk station; visiting physician; resident
nurse; public lectures; entertainments; religious meetings;
social investigation; political work; and the usual activities of
a playground, athletic field, and summer camp. Former residents
and volunteer workers of the settlement are scattered throughout
the world engaging in social and religious work. Four are medical
missionaries in China, one is a missionary in Persia, another
in Honolulu, another in South America, while three are holding
prominent positions in social work in this country.
PHILOSOPHY OF SERVICEABLENESS
Such works, with numerous other tendencies which might be
mentioned in the line of unpaid and voluntary service for college
publications, musical organizations, debating organizations,
and athletics, lead one to define the American undergraduate’s
philosophy of life as one of service. Unlike the German or Indian,
his seriousness is not associated with metaphysical or theological
discussion or expression. He asks not so much _What?_ as _What
for?_ His aims belong to “a kingdom of ends.” Student theory
operates in a real world--a world where contact is not so marked
with creeds and laws as with virile movements and living men. The
undergraduate is enamoured of a gospel of action. To him “deeds
are mightier things than words” are. His spirit slumbers under
sermons and lectures upon dogma and description, but rises with
an heroic call to give money, time, and life for vital college
or world enterprises. Difficulties stir him as they always stir
true men. He admires the power that is “caught in the cylinder and
does not escape in the whistle.” More and more plainly in all his
undergraduate and graduate work the American student is revealing
his love and ability for that serviceableness to the state, to
the church, and to industrial life which, though often unpaid and
unappreciated, brings to the servant a satisfying reward in the
doing.
A few years ago a Harvard athlete played in a hard and exciting
foot-ball game against Yale. Toward the end of the game, when it
was nearly dark, this man was fairly hurled through the Yale line
in a play that shortly afterward resulted in giving the game to the
Cambridge men. It seemed a strange irony of circumstance that just
before time was called the heroic player was disqualified. When the
game was over and the crimson men were marching wildly about the
field, yelling for Harvard and carrying the foot-ball players on
their shoulders, the man whose playing was largely contributory to
this triumph was down in the training-quarters, almost alone, but
with the satisfaction that, although forgotten by the crowd, he had
“played the game.” Certain alumni, who had seen this man’s plucky
but unpraised fight for his Alma Mater, sent to him these words of
Kipling:
And only the Master shall praise us, and only the Master shall
blame;
And no one shall work for money, and no one shall work for fame,
But _each for the joy of the working_....
We must admit that the undergraduate’s philosophy of life may be
obscure at times, even to himself; that it is as subtle and evasive
as the moods of youth; and that its expression is as cosmopolitan
as nationality, and as varied as human nature. For some students,
too, we must conclude that trivialities and immoralities bury far
out of sight the true meaning of college training and life-work;
but in other students, and these are the majority, underneath his
curriculum and his customs, his light-heartedness, his loves,
and his seeming listlessness, one may discern the real American
undergraduate, energetic, earnest, expectant, and strenuously eager
for those great campaigns of his day and generation in which the
priceless guerdon is the “joy of the working.”
IV
REASONS FOR GOING TO COLLEGE
Recently I attended the commencement exercises at one of our large
universities. As undergraduates and friends of the graduating
class were gathered in a large church awaiting the arrival of the
procession, in a seat directly in front of me sat a middle-aged
woman and a man whose appearance and nervous expectation drew
general attention. The man’s clothes were homely and of country
cut. His face was deeply lined, and wore the tan of many summers.
I noted his hard, calloused hand resting on the back of the seat
as he half rose to look at the door through which the seniors were
to enter. The woman by his side was a quiet, sympathetic person to
whom a phrase from Barrie would be applicable: she had a “mother’s
face.”
While many eyes were turned toward the old couple, the commencement
procession entered the church. The two seemed scarcely to notice
the dignitaries who led the procession, but their eyes were
straining to catch the first glimpse of the seniors. At least half
of the audience were now interested in this father and mother. The
latter suddenly placed both hands upon the man’s arm. Her face
beamed, and an answering light appeared in the face of a strong
young man who marched near the head of the seniors. That day some
persons in the audience heard only listlessly the commencement
speeches. Instead, they were picturing the couple back on an upland
farm of New England, dedicating their lives to the task of giving
their boy the advantages which they had never received, and which
they must have felt would separate him forever from their humble
life and surroundings. It had been no easy path up which this pair
had struggled to the attainment of that ambition. This was the day
of their reward. All the gray days behind were lost in the radiance
of pride and love. The father was full of joy because he had had
the privilege of working for the boy, while to the mother it was
enough that she had borne him.
Such scenes are still frequent in commencement time, and they
are significant. Does it really pay to send boys to college in
America? Is the game worth the candle? Is the contemptuous notice
placed by Horace Greeley in his newspaper office still applicable:
“No college graduates or other horned cattle need apply”? We can
probably take for granted, as we consider the vast expenditure of
money and time and men in the cause of American education, that the
people of the country are believing increasingly in the value of
college training; but to many persons there arises the question, To
what college shall we send our young hopeful? There is even a more
basic question, Why go to college at all?