graduates of North American colleges to tell me what decided
their choice of an institution, the chief values derived from
their college course, and the effect of college training upon
their life-work. The following is a summary of the testimony thus
obtained:
GRADUATE TESTIMONY CONCERNING COLLEGE
I. What were the reasons that led you to choose
your college?
Financial reasons 40
Influence of friends or relatives 18
Type of the alumni 32
Standing of the institution 10
II. What do you consider the most important values
received from your college course?
Broader views of life 21
Friendships formed 18
Training or ability to think 7
General education as foundation for life-work 11
Influence of professors 36
Technical training 7
III. In the light of your experience, what would
you suggest to a boy relative to the kind of
preparatory school to choose?
High school or public school 45
Academy or private school 33
A school emphasizing athletics 22
IV. Did your college training decide your life-work?
Decision before going to college 32
Decision during college 38
Decision after graduation 2
Not yet fully decided 28
The values of a college course are strikingly presented by the
following answers: A Johns Hopkins man attributes to his university
“a desire for, search after, and acceptance of the truth regardless
of the consequences.” A recent alumnus of Boston University
says: “I learned to have a far broader view of what teaching (my
profession) really is. When I entered college I regarded it as a
process of instilling a knowledge of facts in a young person’s
mind; when I was graduated I knew that this was a very small part,
merely a means to the great end--the development of personality.”
A graduate of the University of Georgia says that his college
course meant to him “a self-unfoldment, a diversity of interests
in life, a growth of ideals, of purposes, and of judgment; strong
convictions and friendships.” A student from the School of Mines in
Colorado considers the chief value of his college training was the
giving him “a vision of a life-work instead of a job”; a graduate
of the University of Louisiana writes that the chief value to him
was “a realization that I was worth as much as the average man”;
while an alumnus of Vanderbilt University said that his course gave
him “the feeling of equality and of opportunity to do things and
be something along with other men. It has meant, perhaps, a greater
chance to do my best.”
CHOOSING A COLLEGE
The choice of a college, according to this testimony, is
largely dependent upon one of three things,--the location of
the institution (involving expense), the influence of friends
or relatives, and the advantages the institution may offer for
special training. The selection of the college, however, is not
so important as formerly. Every prosperous institution now gives
sufficient opportunity for the acquirement of knowledge and
training. Apart from the prestige which the name of a large and
well-known university or college gives to its graduates in after
life, the difference between the values imparted by scores of
American institutions is not considerable. There are at least a
hundred institutions in America sufficiently well equipped to give
a boy the foundation of mental training that a college education is
intended to supply. Their libraries are filled with books; their
laboratories contain expensive and elaborate modern appliances;
their gymnasiums are preëminent in equipment; their instructors
are drawn from the best scholars in the country and also from
the finishing schools of Europe; the spirit of athletics and
undergraduate leadership are, as a rule, strongly emphasized, while
the fraternity and social systems afford rare opportunities for
friendship. Temptations and college evils vary comparatively little
in different institutions.
[Illustration: Blair Arch, Princeton University]
The advantages of contact and the acquirement of experience
through the laboratory of a big city institution are frequently
more than counterbalanced by the close fellowship and the lack
of distractions in a small country college. It is true that the
investigators of the Carnegie Foundation found a large variation in
the amount of money expended by different institutions to educate
a student. It is my belief, after visiting more than five hundred
institutions in North America, that the quality of instruction in
any one of these institutions of the first grade does not vary
sufficiently to render the choice of a college on the ground of
educational advantages a matter of great moment. The values which
the small college loses from inferior equipment are usually offset
by the more direct access of the student to the personality of the
teacher, and often by closer friendships with fellow-students.
Indeed, educational results are not always commensurate with
material advantages. As President Garfield said, a man like Mark
Hopkins on one end of a bench and a student on the other end is
still the main essential of a college. Many years ago Henry Clay
visited Princeton, and was asked by President McLean (Johnnie,
as he was familiarly and popularly called) to sit down in the
president’s study. The furniture was not elaborate in those days,
nor did it consist of the most solid material. Mr. Clay sat down,
and the rickety old chair which was proffered him sank beneath his
weight. The statesman, rising from the floor, said solemnly, “Dr.
McLean, I hope that the other chairs of this institution are on a
more permanent foundation.” Indeed, the foundation of learning in
those days was laid upon the personality of great teachers who,
like Dr. McLean, had personal contact with the students, making up
in individual interest what was lacking in material equipment.
It is important that the student should choose instructors quite
as carefully as institutions. What a man selects when he gets to
college--his studies, his teachers, and his friends--will prove far
more vital to him than the institution he happens to choose.
IDEALS JOINED TO ACTION
Whether in college or out in the world, the important thing is
that college gives an opportunity not only for the acquirement of
knowledge, but also for the matching of that knowledge against
real problems. Something definitely good is derived from new
adjustments. Education can never be completed at home. The college
boy returns to his old home with new reverence, with a new
conception of its meaning. He has secured a vision that enriches
and liberates by getting in touch with universal interests. He has
gotten out of himself into the life of others.
College brings together ideas and action. It is the practice-ground
for honor and square-dealing. A championship base-ball game was
played recently between Wesleyan and Williams at Williamstown.
This game was the last one of a series, and it was to decide which
college should hold the championship for the coming year. The
tension was naturally great. At the end of the seventh inning the
score stood 1 to 0 in favor of Wesleyan. The last Williams man at
the bat knocked a slow “grounder” to the short-stop. In throwing
it to first base, he drove it so high that the first baseman, in
attempting to get it, stepped about an inch off the base. The
umpire called the man out, but the Wesleyan first baseman, going up
to the umpire, said, “That man was not out.” Williams finally won
that day, but Wesleyan had the satisfaction of knowing that their
man had “played the game.”
TRAINING OF THE INDIVIDUAL
One of the chief functions of the American college is to discover
the man in the student, and to train him for citizenship and
public service. President Hadley of Yale points out the fact that
of the twenty-six presidents of the United States, seventeen
were college men, and of these seventeen, fourteen were graduates
of the old-fashioned classical colleges. Grant was a West Point
man, Monroe and McKinley left college before the end of their
junior year, one to go to the army, and one to teach school. This
contribution of individual leadership to a nation seems to be
proper and fitting, as Dr. Hadley says:
If a college man has used the opportunities offered by
the faculty, he has acquired a wide knowledge of history
and a broad view of public affairs. If he has utilized
the opportunities offered by his fellow-students, he has
acquired the democratic spirit, has gotten a grip upon
public opinion, and has had considerable experience in
dealing with a large variety of men. All these things give
him an advantage in the race, and statistics show that he
makes good use of this advantage.
This power of the American college to develop individual initiative
and leadership has been decidedly enhanced in recent years. The
college in the United States has gradually developed from a
quasi-family institution for growing school-boys to a small world
of wide, voluntary opportunity for young men. There is a decided
difference between American undergraduate life to-day and that of a
century ago, or even of fifty years ago. Then boys were graduated
at eighteen or nineteen years of age, and they were under the
watchful eye of presidents, professors, and tutors, who were _in
loco parentis_. The earlier period was a period of flogging and
fagging and “freshmen servitude rules.” Indeed, the age was one
of black-and-blue memories derived from those educational lictors
who with their rods made deeper impressions than all the Roman
Cæsars. Freshmen were forbidden to wear hats in the president’s or
professors’ dooryards or within ten yards of a president, eight
rods of a professor, or five of a tutor. These young men were
forbidden to run in the college yard or up or down stairs or to
call to any one through a college window. Seniors had the power to
regulate the dress and the play of underclass members. In those
early days fines and penalties for misdemeanors ran from half
a penny up to three shillings, while sophomores had their ears
boxed before the assembled college by the president or a member
of the faculty. The conclusion of the college prayer indicated
the enforced humility of students in those days: “May we perform
faithfully our duties to our superiors, our equals, and our
inferiors.”
American college life had its rise in New England institutions
presided over by rigorous Puritans whose hands were as hard as
their heads, who believed in total depravity and original sin, and
who held the young sternly to account for any remissness. In those
early days student community life differed little from student home
life; both failed dismally to develop initiative or individual
responsibility. They were characterized by strict authority on the
part of the parent and teacher, and ingenious attempts to outwit
this authority on the part of the young. It was this conception
of the college which led the Massachusetts legislature to give
the Harvard faculty authority to inflict corporal punishment
upon Harvard students. At that time it was easy for a student to
determine his life-work, for the great majority of boys either
entered the ministry, or studied law or medicine. The whole college
living was simple and homogeneous.
GOVERNMENT BY UNDERGRADUATES
Existence in the modern American college is quite another thing.
In the college itself there has arisen an interminable round
of activities which make demands on the talents and abilities
of students. Managerial, civic, social, religious, athletic,
and financial leadership is exemplified in almost all colleges.
Undergraduate leadership is the most impressive thing in college
life. One reason for the sway of athletics over students exists in
the fact that through these exercises the student body recognizes
real leadership. Loyalty to it is repeatedly seen. At a small
college the students may elect their best pitcher as the president
of the senior class; their best jumper for the secretary; and,
regardless of the subtlety of the humor, may choose their best
runner for the treasurer of the class. The president of another
college has estimated that in his institution the regular college
activities outside of the curriculum reached a grand total of
twenty-seven, and included everything from the glee-club leader
to the chairman of an old-clothes committee. The dean of another
institution who felt this overwhelming change in student affairs is
quoted as recommending “a lightening of non-academic demands upon
the students.”
A college man is surrounded, therefore, with ample opportunity for
individual development. His habits and his executive abilities
are considered quite as important as his “marks” when the final
honors are awarded. In short, the real government of our large
North American institutions is to-day in the hands of the students,
however much the faculty may think that they wield the scepter.
Honor systems, athletics, college journalism, fraternity life,
self-support, curriculum, seminars, unrestrained electives, student
researches, and laboratory methods--all these are signs of the new
day of student individualism. The parental form of government is
less popular; the self-government idea is now the slogan in student
life. The dogmatic college president whom I met recently in a
Western State who insisted that in _his_ college there shall be no
fraternities or no athletics is marching among the belated leaders
of modern education. Meanwhile embryonic statesmen and railroad
managers are discovering themselves and their life-work in the
society and politics of undergraduate days. In the ninety per cent.
of his time which it is estimated the American undergraduate spends
outside of his recitations, there is increasingly the tendency to
make the college a practice-ground for the development of personal
enterprise, individuality, and efficiency.
LEARNING TO THINK
At least twelve college presidents have said to me during the last
year that in their judgment the chief advantage of a college course
is learning to think. It has been stated by Dr. Hamilton Wright
Mabie that to Americans no conquests are possible save those which
are won by superiority of ideas. Professor George H. Palmer tells
an anecdote of a Harvard graduate who came back to Cambridge and
called upon him to express his gratitude for certain help which had
come to him in Professor Palmer’s classroom, and which had directly
influenced his life. The professor, naturally elated, hastened to
inquire what particular remark had so influenced the young man’s
career. The graduate replied: “You told us one day that John Locke
insisted on _clear ideas_. These two words have been transforming
elements in my life and work.”
The colleges liberate every year a tremendous vital force, which
is a prodigious energy. It may drive men aimlessly into all kinds
of trifling, display, and doubtfully acquired possessions, or it
may be harnessed to clear ideas and sturdy convictions on the
great subjects of nationalism, industrialism, and enlightenment
through schools and art and literature and religion. Education
in the fullest meaning of the term is the source and secret of
American success. Some of our colleges are older than the nation.
Harvard was founded in 1636, William and Mary in 1693, Yale in
1701, Princeton in 1746, all before our distinctively national
life began. The colleges are the training centers of the nation’s
life, and to the trained men of any nation belong increasingly
the opportunities and the prizes of public life. Bismarck was
sagaciously prophetic when he said that one-third of the students
of Germany died because of overwork, one-third were incapacitated
for leadership through dissipation, and the other third ruled
Germany. The future welfare of the peoples of the earth is in the
hands of the men who are being trained by the schools for service
and public leadership. The power of leadership is developed in
part at least by the expression of ideas in writing and speaking.
President Eliot is quoted as saying that the superior effectiveness
of some men lies not in their larger stock of ideas, but in their
greater power of expression. Many a student has learned to give
expression to his ideas and convictions, and many an editor has
found his vocation, by writing for the college journals.
[Illustration: Editors of the Harvard _Lampoon_, making up the
“Dummy” of a Number]
COLLEGE JOURNALISM
But the condition of college journalism at present does not confer
high honor on the American undergraduate or on American colleges.
When we look beyond the college daily, we find literary periodicals
nearly at a standstill as to funds and ideas. In the Middle West
especially, the editors of literary journals spend a good part
of their time in drumming up delinquent subscribers. The principal
activity manifested by many a college literary magazine is to start
and to stop. They resemble the ephemeral Edinburgh university
magazine, described by Robert Louis Stevenson: “It ran four months
in undisturbed obscurity and died without a gasp.” To the modern
era of literary productiveness the college man, at least while
in college, seems to be a comparatively small contributor. The
best men are needed to make college journalism popular, for deep
within most students’ hearts is a love for real literature; as
one student said recently, “Many a man is found reading classic
literature on the sly.” It may seem to an outsider that the
student usually prefers his heroes to be visible and practical,
jumping and fighting about on the athletic field, much as certain
persons prefer to hear a big orchestra, the players in which can
be seen sawing and blowing and perspiring, rather than to listen
to mysterious, sweet, but unseen music. Some day strong college
leaders will rise up to champion college journalism and college
reading as to-day they fight for athletics. Then college sentiment
will make popular the pen and the book.
When book-life is as popular as play-life, college conversation
will have new point; the fraternity man will be able to spend an
hour away from the “fellows” and the rag-time piano, and the docile
professor, starting out reluctantly to visit his students, will
not need to pray “Make me a child again just for to-night!” as he
immolates himself for a long, dreary evening trying to smile and
talk wisely of college politics and base-ball averages.
A NEW REALISM IN LITERATURE
How is the undergraduate to be interested in writing? How
can college journalism be made to take a real hold on the
undergraduate’s life? One might answer, present literature and
writing in an interesting manner, bring out the humanity in it;
for, above all, the undergraduate is intensely human. New college
ideals and interests have been born, and have grown up in a new
age of literary aspiration and method. The times demand literature
instinct with human interest, vital with reality. We may quarrel
with the type; we may call it vulgar and yellow and thin and
realistic, but the fact remains that it is the literary temper
of the day; and there are those whose opinions are worthy of
consideration who believe that this new realism in literature is by
no means to be treated lightly, even in comparison with the poetic
and stately form of Elizabethan letters.
BOOKS AND THE UNDERGRADUATE
The opportunity offered for cultivating acquaintance with good
books is not the least reason for spending four years in a college
atmosphere. In the year 1700, when William and Mary were on the
throne of England, James Pierpont selected eleven trustees, nine
of whom were graduates of Harvard, who, it is recorded, met at
Branford, Connecticut. Each of the eleven brought a number of
books, and, laying them on the table, said, “I give these books
for the foundation of a college in this colony.” This was the
early foundation of Yale. The influence of such foundations upon
the ideals of American students has been considerable. Many
a man has discovered in college what Thackeray meant when he
wrote to his mother in 1852, “I used, you know, to hanker after
Parliament, police magistracies, and so forth; but no occupation
I can devise is so profitable as that which I have at my hand in
that old inkstand.” Robert Louis Stevenson--and who can forget him
in thinking of books?--said twenty years after his school-days, “I
have really enjoyed this book as I--almost as I used to enjoy books
when I was going twenty to twenty-three; and these are the years
for reading. Books,” he continued, “were the proper remedy: books
of vivid human import, forcing upon the minds of young men the
issues, pleasures, business, importance, and immediacy of that life
in which they stand; books of smiling, or heroic temper, to excite
or to console; books of a large design, shadowing the complexity of
that game of consequences to which we all sit down, the hanger-back
not least.”
HOW TO INTEREST STUDENTS IN GOOD READING
Some critics tell us that the undergraduate of to-day reads
only his required books, and talks nothing but athletics. One
gets the impression that the average college man feels about his
prescribed work in literature much as D. G. Rossetti felt about
his father’s heavy volumes. “No good for reading.” The fault is
not wholly with the undergraduate. There is need for a change of
method in interesting students in books. Too early specialization
has frustrated the student’s literary tendencies. College men are
forced into “original research” before they know the meaning of
the word bibliography. They rarely read enough of any one great
author to enter into real friendship with him. Classroom study
is often microscopic. Literature is made easy for the student by
the innumerable sets of books giving dashes of the world’s best
literature, and chosen from an utterly different point of view than
the student would take were he to make his own choice, thus often
prejudicing him against an author whom he might otherwise have
loved.
Grammatical and syntactical details too often obstruct the path to
the heart of classical education. A student in one of our colleges
had read the first six books of Vergil’s Æneid in a preparatory
school, and when his father asked him what it was about, answered,
“I hadn’t thought about that.” The real charm and interest of this
classic had entirely escaped him. It had been buried beneath a
mountain of philology. When we fail to make the student realize
that the best literature of the world is interesting, why should
we wonder that the student’s literary realm is invaded by the
pseudo-psychological novel, the humanly human though indelicate
memoirs which tend frequently to keep the mind in the low and
morbid levels?
Emphasis is needed on a few great books, not upon everything.
The student is often discouraged by long lists of books, and it
frequently happens that he reads without assimilating. A college
friend of mine became an example of devotion to Bacon’s injunction
about reading until one becomes a “full man.” He was literally
full to the brim and running over with reading. He rarely laid
down his books long enough to prepare for his course lectures; he
certainly never stopped long enough to think about what he had
read. His chief delight was in recounting the titles of the books
he had consumed in a given period. He was something like Kipling’s
traveler in India, who spent his time gazing intently at the names
of the railway stations in his Baedeker. When the train rushed
through the station he would draw a line through the name, saying
in a satisfied manner, “I’ve done that.”