of being a painful duty. Books ought to open new rooms in his
house of thought, start new trains of ideas and action, help him
to find his own line, give just views of the nation’s history
and destinies, impart a mental tone, and give a real taste for
literature, inspired by intellectual curiosity. College reading
should also awaken the soul of the student and attach his faith to
the loyalties of life. A foot-ball coach said to me recently that
his team was defeated in the last half of the game because of a
lack of physical reserve. His men were equal, if not superior, to
the other team in their technic, they followed the signals, but
they had not trained long enough to secure the physical stamina
which is always an element of success in the last half of the game.
Good reading is good training. Good books give mental and spiritual
reserve. They fill the reservoirs of the mind and heart with the
kind of knowledge that arouses, sustains, and steadies a man in
a crisis. The best books assure power in the right direction. A
student whose mind is filled with the best will have neither time
nor inclination for the literature that appeals only to a liking
for the commonplace and the sensational. It will be unfortunate if
Tennyson’s indictment against an English university become true of
our American teachers:
Because you do profess to teach, and teach us nothing.
Feeding not the heart.
[Illustration: The Library and the Thomas Jefferson Statue,
University of Virginia]
To find not simply the laws of chemical and electrical action, but
also the laws of the mind and the spirit, the nature of life and
death, and the character of “that power not ourselves that makes
for righteousness”--all this should determine the lines of reading
for students outside of their specialty. Such reading is not for
acquisition, for attainment, or for facts alone; it is for
inspiration and ideals, and a realizing sense of that passionate
joy derived from all things real and beautiful.
THE PIONEER SPIRIT
College training brings with it responsibility and reward. The
responsibility is that of leadership--the kind of leadership which
comes to the man of advanced knowledge and unusual advantages, who
sees the needs of his time and does not flinch from the hardest
kind of sacrifice in view of those needs. The reward is not always
apparent to the world, but it is more than sufficient for the
worker. Indeed, the American undergraduate is becoming more and
more aware that his pay is not his reward. He is learning that
the world is not keen to pay the cost of new ideas or to reward
professional leadership with material values. Furthermore, his
half-paid service does not tell the whole story of his sacrifice.
His work is often lost in the successes of some other man who
follows him. But the college-trained man who has weighed well
these needs, and has deliberately chosen, is not to be pitied.
Indeed, it is doubtful whether any one is more to be envied. He is
under the impulsion of an inner sense of mission. The college has
given him faith in himself and his mission. Many a graduate, going
out from American halls of learning, feels somewhat as Carlyle
felt when he said: “I have a book in me; it must come out,” or as
Disraeli intimated in his answer when he was hissed down in the
House of Commons, “You will not hear me now, but there will come a
time when you will hear me.”
The undergraduate, spending laborious days upon the invention which
shall make industrial progress possible in lands his eyes will
never see, is carried along by an impulse not easily expressed.
He realizes the feeling that Robert Louis Stevenson expressed
when he said about his writing that he felt like thanking God
that he had a chance to earn his bread upon such joyful terms. He
has deliberately turned his back upon certain temporalities in
order to face the sunrise of some new ideal for social betterment
or national progress. He has heard the gods calling him to some
far-reaching profession that is more than a position. There is
stirring in him always the sense of message. He has caught the
clear, captivating voice of a unique life-work. It urges him on to
the occupation of his new land of dreams. Is this leader worried
because some one misunderstands him? Does he envy the man who,
following another ideal, sweeps by in an automobile which perhaps
his own particular genius has made possible? The pioneer of letters
who has known the sweetness and light of literary satisfaction, the
fine frenzy of that creative, imaginative activity in which ideas
are caught and crystallized in words, does not despair when his
earthly rewards seem to linger.
The college, then, is a means only to the larger life of spirit and
service. It exists to point out the goal the attainment of which
lies inherent in the student. The college is like the tug-boat that
pulls the ship from the harbor to the clear water of the free, open
sea. The curriculum, the play-life, the laboratory, the patriotism
of the college spirit, the buildings, and the men, are only torches
gleaming through the morning shadows of the student’s coming day.
V
THE COLLEGE MAN AND THE WORLD
“How crooked can a modern business man be and still be straight?”
This question was propounded at a college dinner in New York by a
young lawyer who, in behalf of the recent graduates of an Eastern
university, had been asked to give utterance to some of the first
impressions of a young alumnus upon his entrance into the life of
the world. The question was not asked in a trifling manner, but
it represented the query which inevitably arises in the mind of
the graduate of ideals and high desires who to-day leaves his alma
mater to plunge into the confused business and professional life of
our times.
The question awakens the inquiry as to whether the colleges of
America are to-day sending into the world trained leaders or
subservient followers; whether graduates enter their special
careers with a real message and mission, or whether, however
optimistically they may begin their work, their high purposes are
buried or not beneath the rush of practical and material affairs.
More than half a million students are to-day studying in our
secondary schools and institutions of higher learning, with a
money expense to the nation involving many millions dollars. Tens
of thousands of teachers and trained educators are devoting years
of hard and faithful service in preparing these American youths
for life. Are these students, after graduation, assuming real
leadership? Are they contributing vision, judgment, and guidance in
great national enterprises sufficiently definite and valuable to
compensate the country for the sacrifices in time, money, and life
that are made for the support and continuance of our educational
institutions?
There seems to be a difference of opinion concerning this subject
even in these times of vast educational enterprises. A business man
of high repute wrote to me recently as follows:
I do not consider that our colleges are meeting the
requirements of modern business life. From your own
observation you must know that the most conspicuously
successful people in business were conspicuously poor
at the start, both financially and educationally. Grover
Cleveland, who was not a college graduate, once said that
the perpetuity of our institutions and the public welfare
depended upon the simple _business-like_ arrangement of the
affairs of the Government.
This is the frequently expressed opinion of men of business and
affairs, who present the successful careers of self-made men as
an argument against collegiate education. This argument, however,
fails to take into account that the same dogged persistence
which has brought success to many of our present-day leaders in
industrial and national life would have lost nothing in efficiency
by college training.
Ask these masters of the business world who have risen by their
individual force what they most regret in life. In nine cases
out of ten the answer will be, “The lack of an opportunity for
education.” And they will usually add: “But my sons shall have an
education. _They_ shall not be handicapped as I have been.” For the
practical proof of the genuineness of this feeling, one has simply
to read over the names in the catalogues of the great universities
and colleges of America, where the names of the sons of virtually
all the great business and professional men will be found.
While, therefore, we must take it for granted that Americans
generally believe in a collegiate education, we may still question
whether the colleges are really equipping for leadership the
young men whom they are sending into our modern life. What, after
all, do the colleges give? Out of one hundred graduates whom I
asked what they had gained in college, twenty-one said, “Broader
views of life,” or perspective. Long ago John Ruskin said that
the greatest thing any human being can do in the world is to see
something, and then go and tell what he has seen in a plain way.
To make the undergraduate see something beyond the commonplace is
still the purpose of education. This enlarged vision is often the
salvation of the individual student. It furnishes the impulse of a
new affection. It attaches him to some great, uncongenial task. It
gives him a mission great enough and hard enough to keep his feet
beneath him. It saves him by steadying him.
THE ART OF RELAXATION
But no graduate is equipped for either mental or moral leadership
until he has learned the art of relaxation. Both his health and his
efficiency wait upon his ability to rest, to relax, to be composed
in the midst of life’s affairs. A real cause of American physical
breakdown has been attributed by a famous physician “to those
absurd feelings of hurry and having no time, to that breathlessness
and tension, that anxiety of feature and that solicitude of
results, that lack of inner harmony and ease, in short, by which
with us the work is apt to be accompanied, and from which a
European who would do the same work would, nine times out of ten,
be free. It is your relaxed and easy worker, who is in no hurry,
and quite thoughtless most of the while of consequence, who is your
most efficient worker. Tension and anxiety, present and future all
mixed up together in one mind at once, are the surest drags upon
steady progress and hindrances to our success.”
We find that one of the supreme purposes of education in ancient
Greece was to prepare men to be capable of profiting by their
hours of freedom from labor. In his writing upon education, Herbert
Spencer gives special attention to the training that fits citizens
for leisure hours.
[Illustration: Harper Memorial Building and the Law Building,
University of Chicago]
The American college graduate is quite certain to receive early
the impression that efficiency is synonymous with hustling; that
modern life, in America at least, as G. Lowes Dickinson has said,
finds its chief end in “acceleration.” His danger is frequently
in his inability to concentrate, to compose himself for real
thoughtful leadership. Many a graduate takes years to get over that
explosive energy of the sophomore, which spends itself without
result. He takes display of energy for real force. His veins are
filled with the hot blood of youth. He has not learned to wait. He
is inclined to put more energy and nervous force into things than
they demand. Like all youth, he is inclined to scatter his energy
in all directions. He is therefore in danger sooner or later of
breaking down physically or mentally, or both, and in spending the
time which should be utilized in serviceableness in repairing the
breakages of an uneconomic human machine. The average American
graduate rarely needs Emerson’s advice for a lazy boy, which was,
“Set a dog on him, send him West, do something to him.”
College training must give a man permanent idealism. Too often the
graduate is inclined to fall into the line of march. He begins to
worry and to lose his attractive gaiety and buoyancy. His habits
of thought and study are soon buried beneath the myriad details of
business life or nervous pleasures. He becomes anxious about things
that never happen. His anxiety about future happenings or results
takes his mind from present efficiency. He becomes tense and tired
and irritable. The attitude of composure and self-assurance which
for a time he possessed in college is changed to a fearsome,
troubled state, the end of which is the sanatorium or something
even more baneful. I have sometimes thought that for a month at
least I should like to see the office signs, “Do it now,” “This is
my busy day,” “Step quickly,” replaced by the old scriptural motto,
“In quietness and confidence shall be your strength.”
How shall our colleges assist American youth to secure the art of
relaxation and to obtain the ability to relieve the tension of the
workaday world by beneficial and delightful relief from business
strain? Such gifts will often be the chief assets of a college
man’s training. Business men, and professional men, too, frequently
reach middle life with no interest outside their specialties.
When business is over, life is a blank. There are no eager voices
of pleasant pursuits calling them away from the common round and
routine tasks. It is too late to form habits. The rich rewards
that education may give in leisure hours are lost, swallowed up by
a thousand things that are merely on the way to the prizes that
count. This is a terrific loss, and for this loss our colleges are
in part at least at fault.
In certain institutions, however, we discover teachers who realize
that a real part of their vocation consists in giving to at least a
few students habits of real and permanent relaxation.
In a New England college recently I found a professor spending
two afternoons a week in cross-country walks with students to
whom he was teaching at an impressionable age habits that could
be continued after college days. These walks occurred on Sunday
and Thursday afternoons. With rigid persistence he had followed
the plan of walking with his students for six or eight months, a
sufficient time in which to form habits. He explained his object
by saying that during his own college career he had engaged in
certain forms of athletics which he was unable to pursue after
graduation. While his college physical training had benefited him
physically, he nevertheless found himself quite without habits of
bodily relaxation. He was deprived of apparatus and the opportunity
for many out-of-door games, but had found an immense value in
walking. In passing on to these college boys this inclination for
out-of-door relaxation, he was perhaps contributing his chief
influence as a teacher.
Why should not habits of this kind be definitely organized and
carried out by the physical departments of our colleges? The
opportunity to study trees, plants, and animals, and to become
watchful for a hundred varying phases of nature, would furnish no
small opportunity for projecting the influence of college into
later life.
These tendencies toward relaxation take different forms according
to individual tastes. One graduate of my acquaintance finds outlet
for his nervous energy in a fish-hatchery. To be sure, he bores
his friends by talking fish at every conceivable opportunity,
and people frequently get the impression that his mind has a
piscatorial rather than financial trend, as he loses no opportunity
to dilate upon his latest adventure in trout; and yet his physician
was doubtless right in saying that this man, the head of one of the
largest financial institutions in America, owes his life as well as
his success to this special form of relaxation.
A graduate of one of our large Western technical schools who is at
the head of a big steel foundry has a private book-bindery, where
with two or three of his friends the life of the world is lost
evening after evening in the quiet and delightful air of books and
book-making. The best treatises upon book-binding line the walls.
Old and rare editions of the most famous masters are carefully
sheltered in cases of glass. One end of the room is filled with
his printing and binding-machines. He showed me a beautifully bound
volume which he himself had printed and bound. As he lovingly
fingered the soft leather, reading to me his favorite passages from
this masterpiece, I discerned in him a different man from the one
I had often seen sitting in his grimy office discussing contracts
for steel rails for China and bridge girders for South America. A
deeper, finer man had been discovered in the hours of recreation.
When asked how he happened to become interested in a matter so
antipodal to his life-work, I found that the tendency started in
college days, when he had been accustomed to browse among the
books in the old college library under the faithful and regular
guidance of a professor who once every week took his students to
the library with the express purpose of inculcating a love for old
and beautifully bound books.
The college, moreover, should start the graduate interest in
philanthropic and serious enterprises which in themselves furnish
suitable as well as pleasing relaxation to hundreds of American
university men. Letters received from scores of recent graduates,
many of whom are taking a large share in moral, social, and
philanthropic endeavors, state that the beginnings of their
interest dated with their experience in the Christian associations,
settlement houses, boys’ clubs, and charitable organizations of
college days. One man of large philanthropic interest received
his first view of a field of opportunity and privilege by hearing
a lecturer on a social betterment tell of finding a homeless boy
hovering over the grating of a newspaper building on a winter
night. The story touched a chord deep in the hearer, who saw this
vision of a world until then unknown to him--a world of suffering
and hunger and cold; and when in later life it was made possible,
he devoted his influence and his fortune to the erection of a home
for friendless boys.
What is the college accomplishing toward the solution of that
vital subject, the question of the immigrant? The possibilities of
dealing with such far-reaching international problems is indicated
by the influence of a college debate upon the subject, “What shall
we do with the immigrant?” Through his reading and investigation of
the subject, a certain student who engaged in this debate received
his first impetus toward what has proved to be one of the main
contributions of his life to the nation by the establishment of
Italian colonies that are probably as effective as any plans which
are being suggested or utilized for the betterment of our foreign
population.
MENTAL RESOURCEFULNESS
According to President John G. Hibben of Princeton, graduates
on the average earn only six dollars per week at the start. He
justifies this low earning power by saying, “It is our endeavor to
create a high potential of mental possibility rather than actual
attainment.”
We are inclined to consider efficiency only as expressed along
social, economic, industrial, or mechanical lines. It is not
strange in a period when financial standing bulks large in the
minds of a comparatively new people that the recognition of the
learned classes should be less noticeable than formerly. Yet
reactive tendencies from strictly utilitarian education are
evident. Individual and ideal aims of education are beginning
to emerge above the commercial and mechanical aims. Already
the salaries of college presidents and college teachers are
increased, offering additional incentive for men of brains and
scholarly achievement. Masters of industry who have been slaving
for industrial and social progress are now becoming eager to push
their accomplishments onward to mental and spiritual satisfactions.
How otherwise can we explain such establishments as the Carnegie
Foundation, the millions of Mr. Morgan for art, the vast sums
contributed to religion and education in this and other lands? The
ethical and social ideals of to-day are attaching thousands of our
best youth to far-reaching endeavor. There is a new quest for that
philosophy of life which, as Novalis stated it, could indeed bake
no bread, but would give us God, freedom, and immortality. These
are the signs of a new age of mental productivity--an age in which
scholarship and learning will have a value for themselves; when
people will appreciate that it is not merely the book one studies,
but how he studies it that counts; that if we can produce a man of
scholarly, thoughtful ability, we are sending into the world a
person who will be proficient along any line in which he may engage.
In a Harvard address a few years ago, it was remarked by Mr. Owen
Wister that America possessed only three men of unquestioned
preëminence to whom students could turn for academic tuition in
their respective lines. I believe it was Edmund Gosse who said that
America had not produced a single poet deserving to rank with the
unquestioned masters of English poetry. While these statements may
be questioned, one realizes the general truth behind them when we
contrast the marvelous and expensive architectural equipment of
American universities with the paucity of great men and teachers.
The trend of the times, however, is slowly but certainly toward a
new individualism. Attention is being focused more and more upon
the values of life rather than upon the volume of life. The college
graduate may not be able to deliver an oration in Hebrew in the
morning and in Latin in the afternoon, but he is able to think
through and around his problem, and this is mental resourcefulness,
truly a chief aim of collegiate education and one of the first
necessities for success. Emerson’s prophecy may be realized in our
day:
Perhaps the time has already come, when the sluggard
intellect of this continent will look from under its iron
lids and fill the postponed expectation of the world with
something better than the exertion of mechanical skill.
Our day of dependence, our long apprenticeship to the
learning of other lands, draws to a close. The millions
that around us are rushing into life cannot always be fed
on the sere remains of frozen harvests. Who can doubt that
poetry will revive and lead in a new age, as the star in
the constellation Harp, which now flames in our zenith,
astronomers announce shall one day be the pole star for a
thousand years.
The challenge is to our undergraduates. And it will be accepted.
The colleges will teach men to think, to be mentally alert and
resourceful, and then the man will count in the leadership of
modern life, in the sense intended by Dr. Simeon who, upon seeing
a trained graduate approach, exclaimed, “There comes three hundred
men.”
In order to accomplish this, however, the college must make it a
point to teach principles rather than dogmatic methods. Too often
our systems of learning are too bookish. The boy is inclined to
get the impression that there is only one way to do a thing, and
that is the way he has learned from his professor or his text-book.
A business man told me that he was recently obliged to dismiss
one of his college graduates because the young man could not see
or think of but one way to work out a mechanical proposition. His
training had circumscribed him, cramped, limited, and enslaved him
instead of freeing him. He was unable to move about easily in his
sphere of chosen activity. He had gained a prejudice rather than a
principle. He still lived in a classroom, though out in the world.
His progress was water-logged in academic conservatism.
LIFE-WORK PROPAGANDA
It is, moreover, time for constructive action on the part of both
college and alumni in the matter of directing students to their
proper calling. While it is impossible for our colleges to make
great men out of indifferent raw material, it is possible to
assist undergraduates to discover their inherent bent or capacity.
Until the student has made such a discovery, the elective system
which is now general in our American institutions is something of
a farce. The lazy student, undecided in his vocation, uses it as
a barricade through which he wriggles and twists to his degree,
or at best is tempted in a dozen various directions, selecting
disconnected subjects, in no one of which he finds his chief
aptitude. The elective system to such a student is an art-gallery
without a key, a catalogue without the pictures. He does not know
what he wishes to see.
[Illustration: The Arch between the Dormitory Quadrangle and the
Triangle, University of Pennsylvania]