IB 2321 #38 CORNELL UNIVERSITY LIBRARY BOUGHT WITH THE INCOME OF THE SAGE ENDOWMENT FUND GIVEN IN 1891 BY HENRY WILLIAMS SAGE 1 DATE DUE *N?£? ttTTHJ?^ X 1 ^UAN 5 1 1 1 ' *< -■». ■*+& 4£/'V-,«. •:^-< jttHW^HSBg p»»«" i»rx'*%S4 LB2321 .KsT Un ' VerS ' ,y L """ y The undergraduate and his college, olin 3 1924 030 601 623 Cornell University Library The original of this book is in the Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://archive.org/details/cu31924030601623 THE UNDERGRADUATE AND HIS COLLEGE THE UNDERGRADUATE AND HIS COLLEGE BY FREDERICK P. KEPPEL BOSTON AND NEW YORK HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY 1917 LB A. 3? 31 55" COPYRIGHT, 1917, BY FREDERICK P. KIFPEL ALL RIGHTS RESERVED Published November iqij C^ CONTENTS INTRODUCTORY I. Introduction i II. Present-Day Types or College . . . .37 THE STUDENT AND THE COLLEGE III. The Raw Material 67 IV. The Undergraduate Point of View ... 92 V. Student Organizations 130 VI. Athletics 157 VH. Religion and Morals 181 VIII. Intellectual Life 195 IX. The Finished Product 216 THE COLLEGE AND THE STUDENT X. Organization 235 XI. Educational Administration 270 XII. Teaching and Teachers 299 XIII. Conclusion 324 THE UNDERGRADUATE AND HIS COLLEGE CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION The people of the United States in times of peace lay aside for investment annually something over two billion dollars, and, although they are willing to take a "flier" now and then, they usually look with con- siderable care into the probable chances for dividends. They make another investment of at least equal im- portance, the years of youth given to general study after the age of possible earning has arrived. Its im- portance is not in the money cost, which is more than ten million dollars annually, but in time. Money can be replaced, but never these years. Our collegiate students in any year number well over two hundred thousand. No other nation in the world makes so heavy an investment in this particular field. And yet it may be questioned whether there is any field in which we invest so carelessly, where the ig- norance of half-knowledge is more widespread. Not 2 THE UNDERGRADUATE that there is any lack of definite views upon the sub- ject of college education. If I, for example, were to tell my lawyer or doctor or banker friends how to con- duct their affairs, with the same quiet but absolute assurance which they almost uniformly adopt in ad- vising me about my particular business as a college dean, they would stare at me in blank amazement. Their advice is sincere enough and given with the best intentions in the world, but unfortunately it is based on the hazy and distorted memories of an undergrad- uate life of twenty years ago or more, — a life different in unsuspected ways from that of to-day, — or upon the headlines of newspaper controversies, or possibly on distressing experiences with some of our less suc- cessful or less typical academic products of recent years. I do not mean that much criticism is not justified Heaven knows that it is. Unfortunately people as- sume that education must of necessity be good edu- cation, whereas the contrary is often the case. A for- mer dean of the Columbia Law School once told me of a talk he had with one of his students. "I know both your father and your mother," he said, "and with the kind of mental equipment that they must have givenj you, I cannot understand how you have succeeded in failing so completely." "You forget," said the young man, "that I put in four years at (naming a INTRODUCTION 3 fashionable college), and that in those four years I naturally lost any habits of industry and powers of concentration that I possessed when I entered." This book will attempt neither to arraign nor to whitewash the present-day American college for men, but to bring together some information about it which may be useful to prospective investors of their own time or that of their children. Any conclusions that I may venture to draw will be of a very general nature, and as you read I hope you will credit me with a willingness at all times to admit the virtues of your particular college and the equally conspicuous vices of its rival. Such merit as the col- lection of material may have will be due to the fact that most of it has come directly or indirectly from the undergraduates themselves. So far as possible I have tried to write from their point of view rather than from that of the professional educator. Too often, both within academic walls and outside of them, the students are looked upon as the inert material of this industry, to be experimented upon, moulded, and fashioned. As a matter of fact, the stu- dents are the College, the Collegium. In the Middle Ages they often selected and paid their teachers, and although no longer having that responsibility, they must be recognized as a human factor at least of equal importance with teachers and trustees. What they 4 THE UNDERGRADUATE lack in experience they make up in that complex of energy and enthusiasm, of curiosity and aspiration, which is youth. Their great numbers mean a wide range in quality, and the group of students constitut- ing the best quarter of the whole furnishes a most important factor in the life of any institution. What is the American college? Where did it come from? and Whither is it bound? I shall try to answer the questions in the order of their increasing difficulty, starting with the second and ending with the third. The pre-Revolutionary beginnings of collegiate edu- cation in this country are familiar enough to us all. Beginning with Harvard in 1636 and Yale (founded sixty-five years later as a protest against the radicalism of Harvard and to preserve the true Puritan ideals), ten colleges sprang up along the Atlantic Seaboard, built more or less closely upon the contemporary English collegiate model and usually under the direct care of some religious denomination or sect. It is sig- nificant, however, that the charter of Brown Univer- sity, although requiring its trustees to be Baptists, enacted and declared that "into this liberal and cath- olic Institution shall never be admitted any religious tests: But on the contrary, all the Members hereof shall forever enjoy full, free, absolute, and uninter- rupted Liberty of Conscience." Local pride was, of course, a factor in the establishment and growth of INTRODUCTION 5 these colleges, then as now. According to the pub- lished list of birthdays, nineteen new colleges came into being between 1776 and 1800. The oldest State university — that of North Carolina — was founded in 1793. The powerful influence of Yale is reflected in the fact that the first presidents of Princeton, Colum- bia, Dartmouth, Williams, and Middlebury were all Yale men. What is not so familiar is the fact that, although the early institutions have determined very largely the path which they and their successors were to follow, they were not colleges in the sense in which we use the word to-day, but elementary boarding-schools, as were the English colleges upon which they were mod- eled. Boys entered at a very tender age, many well- known Americans having been graduated at fourteen or fifteen years, or even younger. The curriculum was really an elementary curriculum in spite of certain high-sounding titles. In the interesting Bogart Let- ters, written from Rutgers College during the Revo- lution, it is amusing to see the references to beginner's Greek and elementary arithmetic for collegians. The youngsters were bedded and boarded, as well as taught, and were held under a set of rules of great complexity; rules evidently not followed very scrupu- lously, however, if one may judge from the elaborate systems of fines and other punishments which appear 6 THE UNDERGRADUATE in the early statutes. In a word, they were secondary schools enjoying the repute of institutions of higher learning only by grace of the fact that there was nothing beyond in the educational system of the com- munity. I do not mean to imply that there was no intellectual life. Considering their youthful years and the slight help from the faculty, the amount of serious reading and solid thinking which some of those young- sters performed should put many a college student of to-day to shame. The chief significance of this background to-day lies not in its influence upon the course of study, — for the course of study has always changed as soon as envi- ronmental pressure became sufficiently strong, and always will, — but in the fundamental attitude of the college toward the student, and of the student toward his environment. College life as we have it to-day in the United States is fundamentally a secondary-school life, based upon the assumption that the student's mind is too immature for a mental load heavy enough to absorb more than a very moderate share of his time and energy. Or perhaps it would be fairer to say, that assumption is no longer made, but the tradition has been accepted. Later on I shall try to show how the disorderly ac- tivities directed against teachers or authorities in gen- eral have come to be transferred into the elaborate INTRODUCTION 7 organization of the present-day college life as an outlet for superfluous youthful energy. The football hero and the manager of the college daily are the legitimate de- scendants of the miscreants who hoisted the cow into the college belfry a century ago. If we want to find the nearest thing to our conventional college life across the Atlantic, we must go, not to Oxford or Cambridge, but to Harrow or Rugby. That may be one reason why "Tom Brown at Rugby" interests us Americans and "Tom Brown at Oxford" is likely to bore us. Of course it will not do to press this point of histori- cal background too far, but it seems to me to serve more completely than anything else as an answer to the question which so often arises to our own lips, and even oftener to those of outsiders, as to why grown men do these particular things, or, if the question is more carefully framed, how they can see things in these particular proportions. It has been the fashion recently to say that the early colleges were really vocational schools, and that what may have been an appropriate vocational training for colonial clergymen we have blindly come to accept as the best liberal culture for all. The statement con- tains a grain or two of truth, but a study of the bio- graphical records of even the earliest graduates fails to show that a preponderating percentage entered the ministry. 8 THE UNDERGRADUATE Whether it was a result of what they were taught in the colleges or because, as seems more likely, the boys themselves were of select stock, the colonial colleges did their full share in the work of the American Revo- lution and in the building of the Constitution. From the graduates of William and Mary came Jefferson, Monroe, and Marshall, and from Kings (Columbia), Hamilton, Morris, Livingston, and Jay. From 1800 to the Civil War two hundred and twenty-two more colleges were established, and in 1870, when college statistics were first published by the United States Bureau of Education, there were in all 37,346 undergraduate students. The institutions were still largely under the guidance and control of the clergy, though the proportion of graduates entering that calling was falling rapidly. Some few had de- veloped professional schools in addition to the colle- giate department, and across the Alleghanies girls bad from the first been admitted to the classes upon the same terms as boys. Such changes in curriculum and policy as developed were due to the presence of some outstanding person- ality in a particular college rather than to any general intellectual ferment within or pressure from without, and such innovations as were made at particular col- leges were not very generally imitated elsewhere. Reversion to type after the passing away of the domi- INTRODUCTION 9 nating personality was the rule rather than the ex- ception. The great figures of this period were Thomas Jeffer- son, who made the University of Virginia the intel- lectual plaything of his declining years, and who em- bodied in its organization many of the ideas which he -learned during his youthful residence in France; Eliph- alet Nott, at Union, who broke away from the pre- vailing policy of the minute regulation of students; and Francis Wayland, at Brown, who was one of the first to look upon matters of curriculum with a discerning eye. The early presidents at Michigan were strong men, and the influence of this first of the state univer- sities to come to prominence was felt in the East as well as in the West. Mark Hopkins, at Williams, is generally included in any Hst of major educational prophets, largely, perhaps, because of his picturesque association with the hypothetical log; but aside from the strong personal power he had over his students, he seems to have contributed relatively little to the de- velopment of the American college. In the second 'quarter of the century, a fundamental influence began to be exerted by the trickling stream of American wanderers returning from the German uni- versities, most of whom settled down as college teach- ers. Between 1815 and 1850, two hundred and twenty- five Americans studied in German universities, and io THE UNDERGRADUATE one hundred and thirty-seven of them became teachers in American colleges. The age of students was generally rising, probably because of the poorer equipment of the schools in the newer districts, and of the older students coming back to college after employment (usually as district-school teachers), and with this increase in age the disciplinary problems must have changed in character. The school- boy attitude, however, persisted, and the statutes still were made up mainly of rules of order, with minute prescriptions as to reward and punishment. Edward Everett Hale's diary, kept when he was a student at Harvard in the thirties, is a very interesting document, and in nothing more interesting than as revealing the entire lack of sympathy and confidence between the college administration and the students. Athletics of a more or less orderly kind were emerging, but they were spontaneous activities of the boys themselves, without any of the present-day stimulation from alumni and the public at large. It is common to hear old men bewail the f alling-off in intellectual interests from these ante-bellum days, but as a matter of fact the amount and the quality of academic work have been probably greatly over-estimated; for the common experiences of the students in those days were largely those of the classroom, and the recollec- tions of alumni are likely to be similarly limited. INTRODUCTION n The general national shake-up which resulted from the Civil War doubtless extended its influence even to the sequestered college campus. At any rate, the mod- ern period began shortly thereafter, with all its devel- opments for good and ill. Up to then the colleges had been fed in general from families of the conforming type, from the more or less established classes, with some background, at any rate, of culture. From now on an influx of more radical stock had to be reckoned with. The new demands caused by the growing needs of the country effected a revolution in its educational system. This movement meant, temporarily at least, the loss to the colleges, in large numbers, of boys of ambition and energy, who did not seek or who failed to find what they wanted in the old-fashioned college curriculum. The first engineering school — Rensselaer — had been founded in 1824, but it found few imita- tors until after the Civil War, when these schools in- creased very rapidly. Schoolboys were hurried directly into these and also into institutions of law, medicine, and the like, which were professional at least in name, and in which the work and atmosphere were wholly different from those of the college. The engineering schools, on the other hand, "were not founded by engineers as the outgrowth of an apprenticeship sys- tem, but by college professors who sought to satisfy ii THE UNDERGRADUATE industrial needs by the methods to which they were accustomed in the colleges." For this reason no sharp line was drawn, many of the subjects of study were identical, and the students to this day make no dis- tinction in their social relations. Indeed, the United States Commissioner of Education does not attempt to separate the two classes of students in his reports. President Hopkins, of Dartmouth, has recently pointed out that the "liberal colleges, with all other types of educational institution, owe the technical schools a great debt of gratitude for their insistence upon the scientific method in the approach to scholar- ship." The combined crudity and virility of the state uni- versities of the period was affecting in larger and larger measure the academic community as a whole, not only in academic matters, — particularly the admission of new subjects of study, — but the students and their attitude. Largely under the leadership of Barnard at Colum- bia and of Eliot at Harvard, there began a general breakdown in the minute oversight of students, with its accompaniment of disciplinary legislation and ad- ministration, but as yet there was little attempt to substitute anything else as a controlling factor in the lives of the students. It was only after much labor on the part of these two leaders and a few others like INTRODUCTION 13 them, including the group which President Gilman gathered around him at the foundation of Johns Hop- kins in 1876, that there came to be any glimmering in the academic mind of the possible vitalizing influence of modern scholarship upon the student body. Con- currently with this dawning light on the part of the teachers came a new type of student, better prepared to appreciate his opportunities than were many of the old American stock. These newcomers were the sons of European immigrants who came to America after the revolutions of '48 to seek intellectual and moral freedom. There were also immigrants of the first gen- eration, of whom there were only a handful at first, but who came and were still coming in constantly in- creasing numbers till the outbreak of the great war. As a counterbalancing factor to this highly desirable type of college student came the sons of our own idle rich, for little by little it was becoming the fashion to go to college. Professor John W. Burgess was called to Columbia College from Amherst in 1876, and in a reminiscent article, recently published, he gives an in- teresting picture of the contrast between the old New England college, where these fashionable influences had not begun to operate, and the city institution: — I came to the old institution within the great city from a New England Puritan country college, where nothing was considered worth while except scholarship and character; i 4 THE UNDERGRADUATE where work began at 7 a.m. and ended at 10 p.m.; where academic rank was the one thing above all else which was coveted; where the Thursday evening prayer meeting was the chief recreation; where teachers and students were in- timately acquainted; where the students, coming from all parts of the country, lived together in the community of the dormitory; where dress was simple, meals were frugal, society was natural, and sport was unknown; where physi- cal and mental vigor in the bracing air of the country made for work and clean character, and the premium was placed upon the man who won the valedictory and yet worked his way through, as the phrase went. The Columbia School of Arts made the decided impres- sion upon me of a day school for the sons of residents of New York, who came rather irregularly to the exercises of the school at about ten o'clock in the morning, attended recitations until one, and then went home again. What they did in the way of study during the afternoons was not very apparent in the recitations of the following day, and, as most of them lived with their parents, it would probably have been regarded as an impertinence on the part of their teachers to have inquired more nearly into this subject. The Amherst College of that day, it may be said, was destined to exert a nation-wide influence through the able men which it was turning out as college teachers. The list of Columbia faculties alone contains the names of nearly a score of professors who were graduated from Amherst in the fifteen years from 1867 to 1882. Although one can trace the beginnings of a con- ventionalized student type, due probably to intermin- INTRODUCTION 15 glings at fraternity conventions and regattas, there was a much sharper line of distinction as to manners and customs than at present. The picture of the " Harvard Man" was already drawn in the mind of the outsider (and persists there unchanged to the present day). The Columbia dandy looked down upon the rural Princetonian, and the Cornellian was regarded by both as a wild-Westem product accidentally deposited on the hither side of the Alleghany Mountains. The smaller colleges were still mainly under the evangelistic influence of their founders, but in all these institutions there was a growing complexity in the social life, due to a greater plentifulness of spending money, and also probably to our American instinct for the organization of everything. The r61e of the faculty in the days of rapid develop- ment along all of these lines in the eighties is a little hard to understand. It is, perhaps, the fairest thing to assume that the professors simply did not see the es- sential point in what was happening about them. For a number of reasons they were glad enough to give up the old disciplinary control. In the case of the best men, the primary interest was in productive scholar- ship. It must be remembered that at that time prac- tically the only career open to the productive scholar was that of the undergraduate teacher. With many men the hours of teaching were regarded as a necessary 1 6 THE UNDERGRADUATE but uninspiring chore, and there was little or no desire to supplement them by individual relations with stu- dents. Outside of the classroom they were also influ- enced, I think, by the German tradition of student freedom, forgetting, among other things, that the German university drew its students only from the very rigorous selection of the Gymnasium course instead of from our helter-skelter secondary-school system. There were notable exceptions, of course, but, by and large, the whole complicated system of or- ganized college life as we have it to-day developed without any competent or sympathetic oversight. At any rate, the professors of the eighties failed to supply either a temporary type of control to tide over the changing conditions in the student body, or, what would have been easier, and, I think, really more effective, to recognize the latent intellectual possi- bilities of these undergraduates to let the pleasure of brain activity supply the correcting and regulating influence. Amherst and Bowdoin, and one or two other colleges, did do this for a while, but instead of setting an example for others to follow, they gener- ally slipped back into the prevailing policy of laissez- faire. Individual alumni exerted some influence during this period, not always, it must be said, for the best, but in general the students were left to themselves INTRODUCTION 17 during the late eighties and early nineties more than at any period before or since. The general results, as manifested in the nineties, and the need of college reform, were first brought to the attention of the American public by Mr. Clarence F. Birdseye, not a wholly safe and sane critic, but one whose service at this time should not be overlooked. His picture of the period is doubtless overdrawn. My personal memories, and the impressions which I can get from talking with thoughtful alumni, are certainly to that effect, but, none the less, there was during these days a shameful waste of good material. Men who should have been retained in college until gradu- ation were permitted to drift away, while others, who now hold their diplomas, should indubitably have been shown the door; and the faculties were apparently oblivious to much that was going on about them. The sense of individual responsibility for conduct, which had been powerful in the evangelistic days, had greatly decreased, and the sense of social responsibility, which is coming to be, perhaps, the most striking factor in the life of to-day, had hardly been born. The fraternity influences, which had been growing daily stronger as these societies took up the problems of boarding and lodging, so largely neglected by the colleges, were not as a rule on the side of good stand- ards in morals or manners. There was far more drink- 1 8 THE UNDERGRADUATE ing than there should have been, very much more than there is to-day, and apparently it was not even neces- sary to know how to "hold one's liquor like a gentle- man." The athletic standards were very bad. The historic cases of brutality in football are nearly all of this period, and there was almost no oversight of either the academic or amateur standing of college athletics. The miscellaneous outbursts of student enthusiasm often degenerated into vandalism. These were the days of "Med. Fac." activities at Harvard, one of which was to embellish the statue of the honored founder by painting on a pair of crimson stockings. The colleges are still paying for these dark days in various ways, some of which are obvious and others more obscure but none the less real. Even before the publication of Mr. Birdseye's in- dictment, however, the tide had begun to turn. Not a few alumni were exerting a more wholesome influence through the fraternities and other social organizations. The American people, by the way, are often criticized by Europeans as lacking the art of natural social inter- course. They seem to need some dinner, convention, or other external excuse for coming together, and per- haps the loyalty of our college alumni to fraternal and class gatherings may be a symptom of this national weakness. At any rate, we may thank the tendency for a supply of devoted alumni to influence under- INTRODUCTION 19 graduate conditions as they had the chance in their own colleges, and to plan for better control and over- sight at national gatherings of various organizations. Much credit should also be given to the Young Men's Christian Association for the earnest and intelligent work of its college branches. Often as the result of flagrant athletic scandals, greater administrative care began to be exercised by the colleges themselves, largely under the influence of the younger men on the teaching and administrative staff. Perhaps the most important factor of all, how- ever, was a raising of the standards for admission and promotion, not only in the colleges themselves, but in the professional schools of the country. This meant the incoming of a better type of student intellectually, boys to whom the joys of disorder and dissipation were relatively less attractive. The placing of the great professional schools of the country upon a basis of preliminary college training restored, furthermore, to the college many serious and ambitious youths of the type which, as we have seen, had during the previous generation been drawn directly from the secondary school into professional study. One must remember that these changes from the historic type of fifty years ago have not come about uniformly. Some colleges have been really revolu- tionized by them, others affected only in part, and still so THE UNDERGRADUATE others very little if at all. Some are still under the old- fashioned faculty discipline, and others represent in their standards to-day the worst traditions of the in- terregnum. There are, for example, not a few colleges, with names well known to those who study the sport- ing pages of the newspapers, which will gladly admit boys two years short of graduation from any standard secondary school, particularly if the boy in question has devoted his school years to the development of athletic proficiency rather than to intellectual prog- ress, and with the public the good colleges share in the bad repute of the others. Nor have the changes in curriculum and manner of teaching, the requirements for degrees, and the like, during the same period, been more uniform. Taking the country as a whole, how- ever, we may observe the following five lines of general development in the last quarter-century. In the first place, the programme of studies has been greatly widened in range. Subjects then only timidly knocking at the door now find themselves firmly es- tablished and in a position to protest against the in- trusion of the present generation of newcomers. Secondly, there has been a very definite swing of the pendulum back from the unrestricted election of the studies which, under Eliot's powerful influence at Harvard, had spread pretty rapidly. The new schemes' bear various devices, "core of fundamentals.," "ma- INTRODUCTION 21 jors," "sequences," "concentration and distribution," and the like, but the main purpose is always to see that the student has not everything his own way. On the other hand, the insistence on particular studies has nowhere been fully restored. Thirdly, the time element has come to be regarded as much more important and the old idea of a four- year course for everybody is doomed. The acceptance of some professional work toward the bachelor's degree is well-nigh universal, and summer-session work and credit for high grades or for additional subjects offered at entrance all tend to release from artificial trammels the student who is willing and able to move more rapidly than his fellows. Fourthly, much more attention is given on the part of college faculties to efficiency in teaching. The old idea that the possession of a Ph.D. degree can cover a multitude of sins, both of commission and omission, has not fully departed, but we hope it is on its way. In the fifth place, the administrative offices of the colleges are devoting far more attention to the indi- vidual care of students and are endeavoring to interest themselves primarily in the most promising rather than in the least promising members of the student body. They are endeavoring to establish closer rela- tions with the parents of students and in general are improving the machinery of supervision in many ways. 22 THE UNDERGRADUATE To appreciate the degree of our paternalism we must contrast it with conditions abroad. In Germany, to quote Professor Swift (and the same thing is true else- where on the Continent) : — It is expected that the student entering upon a univer- sity career will spend one, two, or three years, wandering from one university to another, attending such lectures as he chooses, but on the whole living a care-free life. The faculty is not concerned with his private morals, his at- tendance upon classes, nor the quality of his work, in case he chooses to study. If the youth acquires, during these free years, freie Jakre, morals and habits which prove his undoing, he has simply shown that he was not of the stuff that men are made of, and society and his profession are saved from an undesirable weakling. < There is one change, more fundamental than any of these, which is still in the making. It is not limited to the colleges, but is slowly modifying our attitude to all branches of education. Eliot, after fifty years of study, writes that two fundamental desires have developed within his experience — for a knowledge of facts, and for a chance to be of service. It is with the second that this change has to do. Its nature can best be expressed by contrasting the two words "rights" and "duties." Our fathers heard much of the rights of each young American to an education. We are only just beginning to hear of the duties of the educated man in a com- munity; a careful search of our educational literature INTRODUCTION 23 will reveal very few references to duty at all. Germany was the first nation to develop the social object of edu- cation as contrasted with the individual, and it be- hooves us, now that we are on the same path, neither to drift into her errors nor to resist all progress along these lines because of them. In the colleges this conception will have its effect both on the curriculum and upon student affairs, and is already exerting more influence than the casual observer realizes. Under the individualistic idea education for leader- ship was obvious, and the whole machinery was or- ganized to that end; for instance, in sports only a handful in the community were really trained; but these few had a chance to develop qualities of leader- ship — as witness the famous reference to the playing- fields of Eton. The same is true of fraternity life and other social groupings. As to the course of study, if you want to develop a leader who will lead primarily for the sake of doing so, it does n't much matter what he studies, and the word "study" may be used in its broadest sense. Nowadays, however, when duties are growing in importance relatively to rights, and when the social objects of education are beginning to out- weigh the individual, we shall need a new type of leader, trained for a social rather than an individual purpose; and what and how he learns during the 24 THE UNDERGRADUATE period of his preparation make a great deal of differ- ence. How rapidly and how completely the educa- tional organization can succeed in identifying itself with this new order, and whether it can serve as a guide along paths that are logical and practical, with- out losing the sense of the higher human aspirations, furnishes a problem which is already pressing for solution. Biological development comes, as DeVries has shown, not only through a multitude of infinitely slight changes, but by sudden leaps, "mutations" as they are called; and this is equally true in human life. We all know the phenomenon of sudden and striking change in individuals, due to some powerful influence. The flame of life may blaze up as a result of a religious conversion, or the right girl, or from a new realization of social responsibility, or of scientific truth. What happens to individuals happens also in social groups, and if I am not greatly mistaken the entry of the United States into the Great War will prove to be a stimulus which will profoundly change the nature, not only of countless American collegians, but of the American college itself. Certainly no chapter in the historical development of the American college would be complete without some reference to the events of the weeks following the declaration of war. It is too early to grasp their full INTRODUCTION 25 significance, but that their results will be far-reaching, and will not be merely along lines of military training and efficiency, is certain. Much of the activity has been typical of a desire on the part of all ages and classes of an overwrought nation to do something, and thereby obtain the relief that comes with an emotional discharge. Much also has been along the lines of ex- isting convention and of the herding instinct. Let us admit that sentiment, and even sentimentality, have played their part. It should be remembered further that for many of the changes already made, and others to come, the war, as Simeon Strunsky says in another connection, is not a reason, but an opportunity. To understand them we must look back to forces which have been developing, often unrecognized, for years, forces which have been awaiting some such cataclysm to find an outlet. Out of the mass of individual events two very signifi- cant general facts may be recognized. In the first place, the young man in the colleges who has failed to ask himself as to how he may best take his share in the Nation's responsibility is the rare exception. His ac- tion has been marked not only by proper recognition of the emergency, but by a high degree of intelligence of choice. From the glorious risks of the Aviation Corps to the humdrum work of tilling the fields, or the even harder decision to finish a course in order to be 26 THE UNDERGRADUATE of greater service later on, the undergraduates and young alumni of our colleges have made a record of which the Nation may well be proud. No one, except a few paciphobes who had been alarmed at the growing habit of undergraduates to think for themselves, feared that our students as in- dividuals would stand back in the fear of hardship or danger when the new call to arms should come, any more than they did in '6i and '98; but very few, if any, realized how complete a revolution in our apparently hard-and-fast institutional and social life would be the result, or that this would come almost as a matter of course. The students gave up without a moment's hesitation their cherished games and gatherings and all the careless but comfortable routine of their daily lives. How complete was the overturning may be realized when it is remembered that from one of the smaller State universities more than five hundred stu- dents left during the spring for farmwork alone, and that throughout the country the typical fraternity group, normally of twenty-five or thirty, was cut down last spring with practical uniformity to six or seven. A friend from a New England college wrote to me in May: — I cannot help contrasting in my own mind the difference in the atmosphere here to-day with that back in the winter and spring of '08 when the Spanish War broke out. In that INTRODUCTION 27 spring when the call for men actually materialized, our group joined a volunteer company and, one fine morning, led by the college band and accompanied by the whole student body, marched down to the train and were shipped off in the midst of rousing enthusiasm. Those who re- mained did some drilling on the campus, but in the main conducted their lives as usual. To-day, there is more drilling, but our men are slipping away by ones and twos and threes, some going to France in the Ambulance Corps, some into the Naval Reserve, and many others from all parts of the country returning to their homes preliminary to entering local Reserve Officers' Camps. Concentrated as our life is around six acres of greensward, each new vacancy is apparent to all. Hence, the life has slowed up and almost halted. The thousand or more men who are still with us are hardly seen except at drill time, and there is a singularly quiet air over all the place. The second outstanding fact is that ruthless change may be made in the organic fabric of our colleges with- out interfering with the essential vitality of the institu- tion. Faculties which had seemed forever committed to what they conceived to be the only sound standards of education cast away their measuring-rods and rule- books, and gave credit for all sorts of vocational labo- ratory courses offered by the School of Experience. Teachers have been released right and left for national service, and their colleagues are gladly shouldering the additional burdens thus laid upon them. Whether or not the preliminary trimming of sail, in the way of 28 THE UNDERGRADUATE reductions in the teaching staff which some boards of trustees have made, is justified by the prospect of reduced income, is open to question. Some institutions evidently do not think it is. Dartmouth, for one, guaranteed for next year full security to the members of her teaching staff, and Cornell has actuall y in- creased salaries to meet harder living conditions. The importance of keeping the undergraduate ma- chine in good working order and of keeping the younger boys at work was perhaps overlooked at first, in spite of the tragic example furnished by England in the early days of the war; but it has now been realized, and the resolutions adopted at a meeting of college representatives held in Washington last May made formal recognition of it. The Bureau of Education has sent out the following: — The number of students in colleges, universities, and technical schools should increase rather than diminish. Many of the older and upper-class men will volunteer for some branch of the military service, but all young men below the age of liability to selective draft and those not recommended for special service should be urged to remain and take full advantage of the opportunities offered by the colleges, universities, and technical schools, to the end that they may be able to render the most effective service in the later years of the war and the times of need that will follow. All students should be made to understand that it is their duty to give to their country and to the world the best and fullest possible measure of service, and that both INTRODUCTION 29 will need more than they will get of that high type of serv- ice which only men and women of the best education and training can give. Patriotism and the desire to serve hu- manity may require of these young men and women the exercise of that very high type of self-restraint that will keep them to their tasks of preparation until the time comes when they can render service which cannot be rendered by others. It will be hard, but it will be necessary, for the col- leges to make the students of real possibilities realize that the long road of preparation for scientific and scholarly achievement is for them a patriotic road. Not only the United States, but the world at large, will need, as never before, doctors and engineers and chemists of the broadest possible training; but it will need even more intellectual leaders of thorough his- torical and social preparation for the days to come. When boys of this type withdraw for active service, as many of £hem will do, — and who will blame them? — they should be drawn back after the war, without reference to rules and red tape. To hold the present undergraduates who are not of the draft age, it will undoubtedly be necessary to provide military training more generally than has been our previous national habit, for it would be too much to expect these boys to look far enough into the future to recognize the prac- tical value of purely cultural studies. They will de- mand something more concrete. The move toward 3 o THE UNDERGRADUATE such training had already begun before our entry into the war. The State universities, where military work had in many cases grown pretty perfunctory, had braced up, and in 1916 two thousand undergraduates from other colleges had voluntarily gone to summer training camps. One institution sent fifteen per cent of its undergraduates. For the year 1917-18, at any rate, the Government, with its overwhelming task of creating an army of a million men or more, cannot spare the officers and equipment which would otherwise be at the service of the colleges. The War Department could doubtless look after a few, but it has to play fair to the group as a whole, and the best that can be hoped is that it may be able to continue certain existing arrangements. For this reason the training in general must be by retired officers and by invalided members of the Cana- dian, British, and French forces. The training given by the Frenchmen at Harvard, by the way, has already taught us pedagogical lessons of no slight importance. Since the Government cannot furnish the instructors and the equipment, it cannot well grant such formal recognition of the work done by the students as could be counted toward a commission — a fact which will cause not a little heartburning, but which, in a broad sense, is not so unfortunate. The training will stand INTRODUCTION 31 the recipients in good stead in any event, and the sys- tem of the selective draft, to which the country is now committed, will be strong or weak precisely as the men drawn have a free chance for promotion or not. If commissions fall as of right to college men, or to any other selected group, the draft will give a conscript army and not a national army. How long the military training will remain a part of the curriculum and how permanent will be the present close connection between scholarly affairs and military affairs, it is too soon to say. Perhaps the best forecast is that of " Cosmos ": — National service can no longer remain an empty phrase, but must be given life and meaning and universal applica- tion. As the spirit and principles of democracy require that there be the widest possible participation in the formula- tion of public policy, so this spirit and these principles require that there shall be the widest possible participation in the Nation's service, and, if need be, in its defense. An army of hired soldiers as the chief dependence of a demo- cratic people is as much an anachronism as an army of hired voters would be. . . . Outside and beyond a public educational system of the Nation there should be estab- lished without delay a system of universal training for na- tional service and, should it ever be needed, for national defense. Such a policy is the antithesis of militarism; it is democracy conscious and mindful of its duties and respon- sibilities as well as of its rights. At any rate, the colleges will not have fulfilled their function until they have played their part in the work 32 THE UNDERGRADUATE of reconstruction and reconciliation which must follow the war. If the result is to be a real victory for human- ity, it is for them to break away, when necessary, from the trammels of a conventionalized and un thinkin g patriotism, to remind the nations that justice and lib- erty are as necessary as they were in 1776, and that authority, as Bertrand Russell has pointed out, needs always to be tempered by a spirit of reverence. Our " social consciousness " should not be permit- ted to develop upon an exclusively national basis. The great problems for thoughtful men in the recon- struction period after the war will be questions of international social consciousness, of international con- ciliation. In the meantime, as the natural leaders of thought the colleges have a function in keeping the spirit of patriotism as free as possible from the taint of hatred and bitterness. The Secretary of War, in a recent address to their presidents, has reminded the colleges of an opportunity which is peculiarly theirs: — You gentlemen and the young men who are in your col- leges, who go to their homes and write to their homes from your colleges, and make up a very large part of the direc- tion of public opinion, can exercise a curative influence by preaching the doctrine of tolerance, by exemplifying the fact that it is not necessary for a nation like the United States, which is fighting for the vindication of a great ideal, to discolor its purpose by hatreds or by the entertainment of any unworthy emotion. INTRODUCTION 33 The undergraduates who feel honestly that all armed conflict is unjustifiable are having a hard time of it, and deserve better of the community than they are likely to receive. They had the misfortune to be born in advance of their time. To brand them indis- criminately as cowards is unfair. Any one who thinks it takes less courage to stand out against an excited public opinion than to take one's chance of physical injury, spurred on by the cheers of the Nation, has only to try it to learn better. That some of these young men will seek for conspicuous martyrdom is only human nature, particularly the human nature of in- dividualists, but this will make it all the harder for the others who respect the convictions of those who believe it their duty to fight, and who earnestly seek some opportunity for service to their country. It is also too soon to foretell what permanent changes the war will work in the organization and administration of the colleges and in student life, but that these changes will be profound there is little doubt. Faculties and students alike will have already learned that regulations and customs which seem to be of the very essence of the collegiate structure can be swept aside without shock, to say nothing of catas- trophe. When the normal course is resumed, many of these will never be restored or will be in a form almost 34 THE UNDERGRADUATE unrecognizable. On the other hand, as I have already pointed out, certain tendencies which had been at work, sometimes for years preceding the war, will be greatly accelerated, and will come to fruition without the lengthy, and perhaps bitter, struggle which would otherwise have been inevitable. The change in the faculty point of view, which, of course, has operated and will operate with varying intensity in different institutions, will, I think, be along the following lines. In the first place, the parental attitude which the American college has always maintained toward its students will no longer be limited to matters of per- sonal morals and conduct, but will include the stu- ,, dent's public usefulness, a recognition of his place in the public order. This will mean additions to the curriculum to provide for such usefulness in mili- tary subjects in geography and international studies and in other fields. It will involve also an increased realization of the importance of the physical fitness of the group as a whole, as contrasted with the posses- sion of winning teams of specialists. In order to real- ize Pasteur's conception of democracy as " that form of government which permits every individual citizen to develop himself to do his best for the common good," i it will mean, as individual needs and desires must be < met, a loss of faith in rules and calendars in and for * themselves, and, I hope, a corresponding realization of INTRODUCTION 35 what the individual boy, and what the whole group, is capable of under vivid stimulus. I hope also that it will be recognized that questions of discipline and control are not so terrifying as they have seemed. Boys who have been brought up as badly as it is possible to conceive fall promptly, and not too uncomfortably, into the routine of the military train- ing camp. On the other hand, one must not conclude too much, for the boy with a disciplined body may have an undisciplined mind, and vice versa. The colleges should plan to profit by the present public recognition of the national importance of the part played by the non-technical undergraduate courses, and by the best elements of college life, in producing a type of resourceful young men, willing and ready to take responsible part in any national emergency. The importance of this part just now has been set forth in a recent article in the "New Repub- lic " which closes as follows : — One of the conditions that the Germans counted on, when they decided to risk American intervention, was our notorious lack of officers to make effective our otherwise unlimited man power. They reckoned without our colleges. Here we have tens of thousands of young men, physically fit and mentally alert, willing to work harder than any other class of men in equipping themselves with the essen- tials of the military officer's art. They are not men who fret over the loss of a year or two that might be applied to their training as accountants or physicians or philol- 36" THE UNDERGRADUATE ogists. They have given years to undifferentiated culture and they are willing to give further years to the national service, not doubting that they will fit themselves satis- factorily into the scheme of practical affairs when the war is over. Therefore they have not hung back, waiting for the formal draft, but by thousands have applied themselves to the acquisition of military training with an energy to aston- ish and sadden their former teachers, in whose courses a zeal for work had not been conspicuous. Thanks to the colleges, we shall not lack material for officers when our body of recruits is forthcoming. From the point of view of national military efficiency, then, the American college has succeeded. It has selected a body of young men who are available for the national service and it has animated them with a spirit that will make their services invaluable. And from the point of view of national efficiency in peace, the college, we shall proba- bly come to realize better, has played its part successfully. Its methods have operated, more or less blindly to be sure, toward keeping vigorous the ideal of general adaptability which is perhaps the Nation's greatest asset. It would be a rash man who would venture to be more specific in his forecasts, and, after all, the per- manent elements in our college life will outweigh the changes, profound as these latter are sure to be; for this reason I shall not apologize for the fact that my discussion of the American college in the chapters to follow is, of necessity, primarily on the basis of con- ditions in 1916, rather than in 191 7. CHAPTER n PRESENT-DAY TYPES OF COLLEGE How can one classify our colleges of to-day? Per- haps the most obvious natural division would be as between the institutions devoted wholly to undergrad- uate work and those where the collegiate department is part of a larger university organization. In the for- mer group many of the best-known examples are to be found in New England and in the Middle States, col- leges of fine traditions and good standards, like Bow- doin and Hamilton and Haverford. They are also scattered through the Middle West and the South; Wabash, Earlham, and Beloit, for example, and Trin- ity College in North Carolina. Other institutions, while having one or more professional schools asso- ciated with them, are, after all, primarily collegiate in character, as, for example, Dartmouth and Princeton. The colleges which are integral parts of broader uni-> versity organizations include the whole group of State institutions and the endowed universities like Har- vard, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Chicago. In some of these universities the collegiate department is small in numbers and influence, but in most of them it is a very essential part of the life of the institution as a whole. 38 THE UNDERGRADUATE A very important factor, so far as the college is con- cerned, is the standards of the professional schools in the institutions in question. If these standards are only those of high-school admission, many of the best students never enter the college at all. With higher standards a large share of the men attracted to the university primarily for professional study satisfy the preliminary requirements for such study in the uni- versity college. In practically all of the larger universities the under- graduate student has the privilege of electing one, or in some cases two, years of professional study and offer- ing it toward his bachelor's degree, and this privilege, which obviously shortens the total period of college and university residence, is perhaps the main factor in the rapid growth of the university colleges as con- trasted with that of independent colleges. This dis- parity in growth is a fact which is only just beginning to be generally recognized. Within the five-year period for 1911-16 the number of male undergraduates of the University of California increased by eight hundred, whereas the combined growth of seven large inde- pendent colleges for men, in the same period, was less than half that figure. Colleges divide into other groups on the basis of the sources of their support. The earliest type looked to PRESENT-DAY COLLEGES 39 the support of the devout and generous of some partic- ular religious group or sect, and the "denominational college" still plays a large part in our collegiate scheme of things. Sects which most of us know only dimly by name have their own colleges; indeed, the only large religious body which has not seems to be the Chris- tian Scientists. The original formal relation with the denomination has often broken down, sometimes from the sense of the need of full freedom of conscience, and in a few recent cases for the more practical reason that the welcome Carnegie pensions go only to profes- sors in institutions free from definite religious control. Even in the institutions where such control affects the membership of the president or faculty, there has almost uniformly been entire freedom among the stu- dent body, and to-day certain of the Roman Catholic institutions — which for traditional reasons have been most conservative in this regard — are welcoming students of other faiths. An interesting movement is the establishment of small denominational colleges in the vicinity of the State universities. These colleges get the advantages of the library and other facilities of the larger institution, and in turn act as feeders for its professional and technical schools. The denominational colleges include in their number some of our best and some of our very worst. The worst of them are really semi-proprietary high schools 40 THE UNDERGRADUATE with a college cupola, and the religious affiliation is little but a cloak to cover the loosest kind of academic chicanery. In the good ones the evangelistic mission- ary spirit in which they were founded is still a force, but denominationalism is not permitted to hamper the intellectual growth of the institution. Often the stu- dents of such colleges, even the smaller ones, are drawn from a wide area. The alumni have tended to go into preaching or teaching, and, scattered over the country as they are, their influence has been exerted, sometimes consciously and sometimes unconsciously, to send boys back to their alma mater. An association of American colleges (mainly the denominational ones) is at work to emphasize their place in the scheme of things. Although denominational institutions are still being established, as, for example, the Southern Methodist University in Texas, most [of the more re- cent institutions founded by private generosity, such as Reed College and Rice Institute, have no denomi- national flavor. In the early days all the colleges, even the denomi- national ones, did not hesitate to beg freely and often successfully for governmental aid. The State legis- latures, however, soon adopted the policy of starting their own institutions or taking over existing private foundations. The first to rise to prominence was the PRESENT-DAY COLLEGES 41 University of Michigan, which had grown to one thou- sand undergraduates in the year 1890. That of the youngest State, Oklahoma, has to-day seventeen hun- dred students and an annual income of a quarter of a million dollars. In the modern State-supported uni- versity the income for general purposes usually de- pends upon a mill tax, supplemented by special grants for building and other particular purposes. Many States originally divided the educational funds among two or more institutions and in some this arrangement has persisted, but the general tendency has been toward administrative centralization, if not toward unification. The latest figures available show, in all, one hundred and sixty-six State educational institu- tions, with 133,000 students. The State universities vary greatly in efficiency and standards; by no means all of them yet requiring their students to graduate from high school before entering. In 1862 the Morrill grant made provision for federal support of State institutions, in the form of scrip en- titling the holder to certain public lands belonging to the Government. Many of the State universities let this scrip go for a song to meet current needs, but the wise ones held on and have, of course, been richly re- warded. The present strength of Cornell University is largely due to the courage of Ezra Cornell during its lean years in holding scrip issued to that institution in 42 THE UNDERGRADUATE the absence of a definite state university in New York. The Adams, Smith-Lever, and other laws recently enacted will provide new sources of income from the Federal Government. The State university, in its conception and often in its realization, is a fit crown to the public education system of the Commonwealth, and the best ones instill into their students the realization of what citizenship in a democracy should mean. At the University of Oregon the students acknowledge their obligation in a formal pledge, which reads in part: — The opportunities open to me here for securing training, ideals, and vision for life, I deeply appreciate and regard as a sacred trust, and do hereby pledge my honor that it shall be my most cherished purpose to render as bountiful a return to the Oregon people and their posterity, in faithful and ardent devotion to the common good as will be in my power. The material equipment of these institutions is sec- ond to none in the world. The university spending the most on its library to-day, for example, is not Harvard or Columbia, but the University of Illinois. In a rich State there is practically no limit to the results which may be obtained from a legislature honestly proud of the State and all its works, and a president with the art of showing just how to "wipe the eye" of the neigh- boring "millionaires' plaything" or of the rival State PRESENT-DAY COLLEGES 43 university. Minnesota and Wisconsin each gives its university over $1,600,000 annually, and Illinois averages $2,500,000. Some of them, notably Califor- nia, Wisconsin, and Minnesota, have had their State grants generously supplemented by private gifts. Of course there are corresponding disadvantages as a result of being in politics. A professor in one of the Western State universities recently said that the State- supported institution "must admit to its student body students of moderate ability who would properly be excluded by institutions established and financed by private or denominational agencies. It cannot estab- lish an intellectual aristocracy." Sometimes political interests even find devious ways to influence academic appointments, though this is commendably rare. The typical State university of a decade or so ago was a group consisting of a college and a number of professional and technical schools all starting on the same level. A student could enter any one of them directly from the high school. The girls of the State usually went to the academic department, as the col- lege was called, but in general the boys, including many of the most ambitious and virile, went straight into the technical school, usually to that of engineering or agriculture. As a result subjects like literature and philosophy came to be regarded as "girl food" by the male population, to be pursued, if at all, only at con- 44 THE UNDERGRADUATE venient hours and with the practical guarantee of a passing mark. The rising standards for the profes- sional schools are bringing back the boys to the college course for at least a year or so of preliminary work, but the old-fashioned culture subjects of the college programme are still under considerable suspicion. At the University of Minnesota, for example, out of more than 3500 men, last term, only twenty-five were studying College Latin, and twenty-three studying Greek, including the beginners. It is stated that one of the main reasons for dropping the requirements of the classics for the A.B. degree was to save the coeducational colleges from complete feminization. In 1866 the Old Free Academy of New York City was rechristened the College of the City of New York, but the example of a college supported by municipal taxation found few followers until within recent years, when several strong city institutions have been organ- ized, notably in Ohio, where the city University of Cincinnati had already been active for some time. It looks as if the particular field of these city colleges would prove to be in the training for municipal service, the city departments being used as laboratories of the social and political sciences by their students. The New York City College is now making elaborate plans along these lines. PRESENT-DAY COLLEGES 45 Contrasted with State and municipal institutions are those whose support, beyond the income from fees, comes indirectly rather than directly from the com- munity — from endowments and gifts for current purposes. The private gifts to higher education in this country have no parallel in the history of mankind. It has been said, indeed, that on the average every college student to-day enjoys approximately one hundred and twenty dollars annually from current gifts and from the income on earlier gifts. We have in this group the historic universities of the Atlantic Seaboard with their numberless benefactors; the so-called one-man shows, Chicago and Stanford, though both have ceased to deserve the epithet; all of the denominational colleges, and even some of the most shameless of the proprietary diploma mills. Under favorable conditions the cause of intellectual freedom and progress is best served within their walls. Thus far practically all the important improvements in academic standards have been initiated in them. On the other hand, a short-sighted group in the board of trustees or a capricious donor may sometimes do as much harm as the most mischievous demagogue in a State legislature. Still another classification might be made, between those institutions where there is absolutelyno distinc- tion as to the sexes, like Cornell and Oberlin, and those 46 THE UNDERGRADUATE where separate instruction is furnished for undergrad- uate men and women, as Columbia, Western Reserve, and Tulane Universities. The strictly monastic insti- tutions are relatively few in number, and are nearly all on the Atlantic Seaboard. The United States was the first country to make any general provision for the higher education of women, and the example set at Oberlin in 1833 and at Antioch in 1853 has been generally followed by the institutions since then. Recently published statistics show that from 1895 to 1902 the number of students in separate colleges for women increased from 14,049 to 15,544, while the attendance of women in coeducational col- leges increased from 13,940 to 23,216. If we exclude Roman Catholic colleges, the percentage of coeduca- tional colleges grew from thirty per cent in 1870 to seventy-two per cent in 1902. Still another line of cleavage, broken down more or less in these days by the trolley and the motor, but which still has significance, is the line between the city and the country. On one side are the metropolitan universities like Columbia and Chicago, and also those within the sphere of influence of some large city and certain to be absorbed by it sooner or later; Harvard, for example, is now within eight minutes of Boston Common by subway trains; others are the University of California at Berkeley, across the Bay from San PRESENT-DAY COLLEGES 47 Francisco, and Washington University, in the out- skirts of St. Louis. Then there is the type represented by Yale and Wisconsin Universities, established in smaller cities; and, finally, the rural institutions, most of them much smaller in size than the city types, al- though Cornell, Princeton, and Dartmouth are not- able exceptions. The University of Illinois, originally a rural university, is rapidly building two towns about it. Colleges may be classified and subdivided in ways like these, and as much as you please, and no offense is taken. Each institution is proud of its particular status and regards it as an asset. But one enters upon dan- gerous ground in endeavoring to make any classifica- tion upon the most important basis of all — the basis of opportunities offered for college study and all-round development. The United States Bureau of Education, a few years ago, had the temerity to prepare a classi- fied list of our American colleges, based upon academic standards, but political pressure almost immediately caused the withdrawal of the list from circulation. The materials are at hand, however, for a classifi- cation of this kind, or for a comparison between two given institutions by any intelligent student. The amount of endowment or the lack of it is a matter of record, as are the value of the physical equipment and such significant factors as the amounts of money de- 48 THE UNDERGRADUATE voted to the library. The relative distinction of the faculty is harder to determine, but the facts as to for- mal preparation for the work to be undertaken, mem- bership and activity in learned societies, scholarly pro- duction, and the like, are available. A decision based upon such criteria might do injustice to some one first- rate individual teacher who is side-tracked in some third-rate institution, but it would not do injustice to any academic group as a whole. The quality of the student body as contrasted with its quantity may be determined by a study of the standards of admission and advancement, to be learned for most colleges from the published reports of the Carnegie Foundation, which are a much safer guide than the college catalogue. It is the college of good repute which provides for its undergraduates nation-wide and sometimes international contacts. A chart has recently been published showing the geo- graphical distribution of the undergraduates in Har- vard, Yale, and Princeton. Harvard draws from every State; Yale from all but one; and Princeton from all but five. Another criterion is the success of recent graduates (to go too far back is deceptive) in competi- tion with men from other colleges; as, for example, the competition which develops in the great professional schools of the country. Finally, there is the general attitude of the institu* PRESENT-DAY COLLEGES 49 tion toward its responsibilities. Is its policy coura- geous and progressive, or timid and laissez-faire? When the trustees elect a president, do they choose a man who can "advertise the college and get money," — one whose normal habitat soon becomes the Pullman car, — or an expert with the brains and industry to stay at home and make the college its own advertise- ment? These are all fair and practical avenues of inquiry, but any attempt to make a classification based upon them has always resulted in loud protest from every institution dissatisfied with the relative position in which it finds itself or fears to find itself, to the effect that these are external and material things — that what makes a college is its Spirit, with a capital S, and that the nobility and devotion of the faculty, and the earnestness and high moral qualities of the students, give to this particular college the Spirit which makes the statistics of the jealous outsider by comparison as tinkling brass and sounding cymbal. I don't want to belittle institutional spirit, which is a very real thing, but I submit that it is at least as likely to be found in the many well-equipped institutions with good stand- ards of administration and scholarship, situated in all parts of the country, as in the colleges which protest the loudest. Out of the six hundred and more institutions listed as colleges on the books of the 5 o THE UNDERGRADUATE United States Commissioner of Education, just about one hundred, by a generous estimate, deserve the title. This dangerous distinction between the real thing and the sham cuts across all the other bases of classi- fication. Honest standards have nothing to do with size, and Haverford, one of the smallest of the separate colleges, pays the highest average salaries to its teach- ers, while one of the rapidly growing "universities," which shall be nameless, would almost lead the pro- cession if it were moving in the opposite direction. No one knows which is the worst American college and which is the best, but we do know that the differ- ence between them, as measured in the opportunities offered to students, is literally enormous; and the dif- ference between the topmost tenth, or even fifth, and the corresponding group at the other end of the line, is nearly as great. It is not generally realized that of our American colleges, twenty-five per cent have a total income of less than twenty-five thousand dollars per annum, and that these colleges have a collegiate enrollment of fifteen thousand students. We have all laughed over the story of the local booster who said that his town was the most progressive in the State, that it had two universities and they were hauling the logs for a third, but our amusement is more at some- thing past and gone than the circumstances in many parts of the country really warrant. PRESENT-DAY COLLEGES 51 It behooves serious men and women to think of all these things; both in general as a matter of little rec- ognized fact in our national life, involving enormous waste, and in particular with reference to the young men and young women for whom they may in any way be responsible. One very important factor toward the solution of the problem of the small, poorly equipped college is the present movement toward the establishment of junior colleges; which frankly offer only the first two years of the customary college programme and devote all their energies to doing these two years well. Many have already taken the step, and the movement, particu- larly in the South and West, is likely to become a general one. It has the advantage of giving the student with only two years to spend the feeling that he is fin- ishing the particular job on which he started. The principle of the junior college has for some time been recognized at the University of Chicago and else- where, and the University of Washington, after a study of the whole question, has recently reorganized its undergraduate system with the junior college as a basis. It is easy to misjudge conditions in any particular college because popular repute follows actual condi- tions claudo pede. Almost invariably the reputation, 52 THE UNDERGRADUATE whether for good or bad, is at its height some time after the institution has ceased to deserve it. Colleges, like other living organisms, have ups and downs, and while the colleges with good equipment and standards never fall so low as the highest point reached by those not so blessed, still there is a great choice at any given time among colleges in any given group. This is for varying reasons. Sometimes a college is temporarily handi- capped by an unfortunate administration, with low- ered standards as a result of acute athleticism or a campaign for numbers. In universities the college fre- quently suffers from a focus of interest on some other part of the institution. Very often the college suffers from its own success, after a period of rapid growth without a corresponding improvement in facilities. Sometimes the trouble is a besetting complacency. There are other cases where no single obvious cause can be assigned, but where the institution is none the less evidently having an "off" period. On the other hand, every good college has its great periods, due, I think, more than anything else, to some subtle harmony and balance between the faculty and students. Harvard has had several such periods in her long career, and the Rutgers Class of '36, Yale '53, or Princeton '77, or Columbia in the early eighties, are other examples. Later on, Knox College, in Illinois, and De Pauw, in Indiana, produced a group of striking PRESENT-DAY COLLEGES 53 men within a few years, as did Oberlin and certain State universities of the Middle West. The pioneering days of a college are often very fertile, as was notably the case at Stanford. To-day Illinois and California Universities seem to the Eastern observer to carry the strongest voltage. The growing tendency toward a recognition of the difference between good and bad colleges is partly the result of a growing desire on the part of men and women to patronize the colleges where they think they will make the best investment, and it is partly owing to the influence of certain outside agencies. The Car- negie Foundation has been much abused for a callous and inhuman standardization, but its work of exami- nation has been honestly and courageously done, and will count more and more for the good of our American college life. The gifts to educational purposes of the General Education Board are limited to institutions upon which its investigators are prepared to report favorably. Two or even three small colleges in the same region are not infrequently persuaded to merge by the bait of a gift from the Board made conditional upon their doing so. Every year about thirty colleges, too feeble to stand the competition of stronger institu- tions and too foolish to see the solution offered by the junior college or by a merger, quietly disappear from 54 THE UNDERGRADUATE the map, and the process will doubtless be greatly ac- celerated by war conditions. Such colleges cannot af- ford the reduction in fees, and in the good-natured gifts which have heretofore kept them going, but which will now be turned into other channels. There is no national law forbidding the watering of educational stock, — witness some of the institutions in the District of Columbia, — but some of the States are making vigorous and successful efforts to improve conditions within their borders. If they are unable to drive out the unworthy institutions which have re- ceived charters in earlier days, they are preventing the establishment of new "colleges" by requiring a spe- cific endowment as a prerequisite. In New York State the amount has been for some time $200,000, and in Pennsylvania by recent legislation it is $500,000. Other agencies which have not the advantage of contact with the purse-strings, but which are not with- out their influence, are the National Conference on Standards in Secondary Schools and Colleges, the various examining and certificating boards, and jour- nals like "The Educational Review," and "School and Society," to which, by the way, I am much indebted for modern instances of various kinds appearing in this volume. Strangely enough, the university professional schools, which might have exerted an enormous influ- PRESENT-DAY COLLEGES 55 ence on sounder college standards, have done little or nothing in the way of discriminating between good colleges and bad colleges, and the graduate schools (which it must be remembered are very largely profes- sional schools for the training of college teachers) are only just beginning to penalize the graduate of a weak vinstitution by requiring from him a longer period of residence for the master's or doctor's degree. Colleges vary very widely in the distance they have traveled during the comparatively short time since requirements for admission and graduation were prac- tically uniform throughout the country. It is not my plan to go deeply here or elsewhere into pedagogic theory, but we must remember that these matters have their influence upon the undergraduate, about whom this book is written, and who, although he appears to remain singularly aloof from all these things, is really more concerned with them than any one else. The most striking change has been in the classics. According to Professor Luckey, "in 1895-96 seventy- five per cent of the leading colleges and universities in our country required Greek for entrance to the A.B. degree, in 1907-08 the percentage fell to twenty-two per cent, while to-day it is five per cent. In 1895-96 ninety-seven per cent of the leading colleges and uni- versities required Latin for entrance to the A.B. de- 56 THE UNDERGRADUATE gree, in 1907-08 the percentage fell to sixty-three per cent, while to-day the percentage is forty-one per cent. In one hundred and six leading colleges and universi- ties to-day neithey Latin nor Greek is required for en- trance to the A.B. degree. It is significant that the first-class institutions took the lead in abolishing the classical language requirement. The second-class col- leges held on to this requirement longest." These figures do not tell the whole story. Practically every college which maintains some modicum of Latin for the A.B. degree will admit students without it for some other degree, and no great distinction is made by the faculty or in the student body between the two classes ^f students. A rapidly increasing number of colleges, moreover, tired out by the increasing multi- plicity of baccalaureate degrees (the Standard Dic- tionary now recognizes some thirty-four of them), have returned to the practice of awarding a single degree, and make no requirement of the classics with reference to it. Professor Holland Thompson has recently made a study of the one hundred and six colleges generally regarded as the best, and finds a strong tendency to make the A.B. simply a certificate of the completion of any course of general study. Even the "Yale Alumni Weekly" asks "whether the time is not ripe at the older colleges to reorganize their curricula so as to give the classics their proper and PRESENT-DAY COLLEGES 57 more or less 'elective' place, and face the modem world with a more modern graduation requirement? " In all this movement the classical people have questioned, not without some show of reason, why their particular subject of study should bear the brunt of all the attack. An equally bad case might be made out, they claim, for college algebra or many another subject. One reason why the set is so strong against them is because for years they have enjoyed the bul- wark of a heavy protective tariff, which, though it held back the inundation for a while, made it all the more severe when the flood-gates burst open. They had basked in seeming security while the newer subjects had to fight their way for the attention and interest of the student, and while mathematics, the other gen- erally protected subject, has had the benefit of vigor- ous criticism from the teachers in the many fields for which a mastery of elementary mathematics is pre- requisite. The more progressive teachers in Greek and Latin look forward to a period of more genuine and scholarly interest, during which the quality of the students tak- ing these subjects voluntarily will more than make up for the former quantity under compulsion. Some of them — but, alas, very few — are considering the edu- cational possibilities that are offered by English trans- lations of the classics. It is all very well to quote 58 THE UNDERGRADUATE Professor Shorey that a translation is a type of gas- log culture, but as another professor has pointed out, what about the beauty and grandeur of the Old Testa- ment prophecies and psalms if translations are taboo? For who to-day reads Hebrew? Under the stress of war conditions the movement in the same direction abroad, which had previously been much less rapid, has gone on apace. Compulsory Greek has already gone by the board at Cambridge, and A. C. Benson, although long a classical teacher, writes that there is no place for both languages in our education to-day. Greek is for the specialist only, and Latin, too, must go except for boys of linguistic gifts. Side by side with the elimination of the old require- ments has gone a less conspicuous, but educationally more important, movement toward the admission of new subjects of study for credit toward admission or graduation. A list has been published of one hundred and sixty-six possible secondary-school subjects, each one of which makes its plea for college recognition. Taking the colleges of the country as a whole the attitude toward new subjects to be offered for admis- sion has been pretty generous, partly as a result of open-mindedness and a realization that the schools have their own problems of national importance, en- tirely apart from preparation for college; and partly, PRESENT-DAY COLLEGES 59 doubtless, owing to a zeal for numbers. The most generous statement as regards elasticity in the re- quirements for college admission will be found, per- haps, in the catalogues of Stanford and Chicago. In the latter, for example, no subject other than English is prescribed. The candidate is required to do a certain amount of consecutive work in high school in order that he may meet the requirement of a major of three units and a minor of two units. A free margin of five units is permitted, "whereby progressive schools may develop courses of instruction that seem particularly valuable, either for the purpose of meeting the needs of individual pupils, or for the purpose of meeting special demands of the community." The full influence of the war will probably not be felt at first. Indeed, it has been pointed out that the current of educational change is running far more rapidly in England than it is here. There the daily and weekly press is giving more attention to education in a single month than was ever devoted to it in a single year before the war. As far as the student himself is concerned in his choice of a college, the whole question of the particular subjects that he must study to enter or to graduate is relatively unimportant as compared with a correct answer to questions like the following: Is this college a place where the faculty believes in the vitality of the 60 THE UNDERGRADUATE subjects which it teaches, rather than in the divine and literal inspiration of any particular technical pro- gramme for a degree, — a programme which in all probability it will change in a year or so, — and does the faculty make this belief contagious among the students? Are new subjects of study included because they are popular, or excluded for the same reason? Or has the faculty tried to probe the underlying causes and the probable duration of the popularity, and been guided accordingly? Perhaps I have confused and wearied my readers by all these classifications, but I know no other way to bring home the truth that the question of going to college for any given boy is not simply to be answered by a "yes" or a "no." It is not simple even if the answer is "no," because there are now many other agencies to teach the same subject-matter, even though the environmental conditions may be differ- ent. While the example of the Workingman's College in England, to which Kingsley, Ruskin, and Tom Hughes gave so much time, has not been followed here, the Young Men's Christian Association has al- ready established a North-Eastern College for part- time students in Boston, and other interesting experi- ments are in progress. If, on the other hand, the answer is "yes," there is a variety of choice which de- PRESENT-DAY COLLEGES 61 pends on what the boy in question is like, his general ability and reliability, his health, his dominant inter- ests, and perhaps most important of all, his ambitions. Contrary to general impressions, most boys who have the energy to find their way to college have a pretty definite idea as to what they want to do with their lives, and it is the exception rather than the rule for these ideas to be changed during college residence in any fundamental particular. In spite of its conspicuousness, primarily in fiction and to a less degree in fact, the group which includes the students who just drift to college and, to con- tinue the nautical figure, remain there, so to speak, " in stays," is really of secondary importance. The typical college boy, down at the bottom of all his overlying mass of convention and pretense, has a definite idea as to where he is headed, and in particular whether he is going to continue his formal education after gradu- ating from college. It is for this reason that the most important decision, after that between a real and a sham institution, is between the separate college and the university college. As I have shown, the most rapid growth to-day is in the latter group. A study of their student bodies will show that the typical student in them is headed toward some profession, that he realizes that the worth-while professional schools de- mand at least two years of college preparation, that 62 THE UNDERGRADUATE he wants a college degree, but proposes to "save a year" or so by taking a combined course. Though the professional option may theoretically be defended as a radical development of the group system, this com- bined course is an illogical arrangement, a typical Anglo-Saxon compromise to meet a real need. Where no such option is provided, — as, for example, at Harvard, — the tendency is marked for men to take extra courses while in college in order to complete the requirements within three years. Besides the economic and social disadvantage of postponing too long the entry into professional life, there is a real question of mental and physical plasticity. Most young men are in a better position to grasp the elementary principles of law at twenty than at twenty-four, and there is no question that the dexterity which plays an important part in the equipment of the surgeon, the architect, and the engineer, is acquired more readily and usually more thoroughly by the younger student. The two professions in preparation for which com- bined courses play a relatively minor part are the ministry and teaching, and with these may be grouped finance, which is only recently being recognized as a profession, because, in the absence of good academic training, preparation for it had almost universally to be acquired through apprenticeship — just as law and medicine were learned by our grandfathers. If we now PRESENT-DAY COLLEGES 63 study the membership of the separate colleges, we find that the number of boys with definite professional plans for the future is smaller, both actually and rela- tively, and that those who have such plans are rather likely to be headed toward the pulpit or the profes- sor's chair, or toward Wall or State or La Salle Street. Of course we all know many men who have prefaced a course in the Harvard Law School, for example, by graduation from Williams, or who take the A.B. at Hamilton before going to Johns Hopkins Medical School, but in the enormous mass of students prepar- ing the country over for professional careers these men are relatively few. I am told that at Princeton before the outbreak of the war four sevenths of the seniors were undecided as to what they would do after graduation, and this, in normal times, would usually have meant their going into business; and at Dartmouth, from which during earlier years seventy-seven per cent entered the minis- try, law, or teaching, over sixty per cent have recently been going into business each year. The separate colleges are suffering from the drain of serious-minded and able boys to the university col- leges. One important element in the growth of the lat- ter is the migration from the former of sophomores and even juniors who are headed toward the professions. At Columbia, for example, we admit every year one 64 THE UNDERGRADUATE hundred or more such boys. It looks as if the near future will provide another Anglo-Saxon compro- mise which will permit a student in one of the separate institutions to spend the senior year, and possibly the junior year also, on leave of absence at some profes- sional school, returning to graduate with his class on the basis of having completed during his leave a pro- gramme of approved professional studies. A fair number of colleges are already trying out this scheme experimentally, but the practice has not yet become sufficiently general to influence the attendance upon either type of college. Of course there are counterbalancing factors in favor of the smaller college, factors which should have turned the scales for many a boy now in the univer- sity. In the first place, such energies as the separate college possesses are concentrated on the undergradu- ates, whereas in the complex university organization the particular needs of the college are sometimes over- looked, with the result that it is likely to get what is left over after graduate and professional needs are satisfied. For many a boy the prairie or the New England hills, "the tranquil hills, that took me as a boy and filled my spirit with the silences," would mean more than the opportunities to see new plays and hear PRESENT-DAY COLLEGES 65 symphonies. It is not damning the country college with faint praise to commend it because its students are less likely to be over-stimulated. Many a boy who is ready to enter college is not ready for the turmoil of ideas in which the university will immerse him. Many a shy and awkward boy would be brought out socially in the gregariousness of the rural college, who, unless he is specially looked after, will remain tongue-tied and gauche in the university. In general the boy of striking ability and personality, provided his health is good and his nerves are steady, will make a far better investment of his youth in the city university. In the smaller college, with its slower pace, he would be marking time; he would have, for example, far fewer opportunities for contact with pro- ductive scholars. The most distinguished of these men are often really fond of undergraduate teaching. In Columbia College, no fewer than five of the small number of men who constitute the National Academy of Sciences offer elementary courses for undergradu- ates. The boy of this type can also profit by the library and laboratory facilities, and by the more vivid stimuli furnished by the city environment. The potency of these environmental influences is shown by the strik- ing number of graduates of city colleges who have made music or the drama their profession. For the boy of less strongly marked characteristics, 66 THE UNDERGRADUATE it would in many places be "playing safe" to send him to a country college, particularly if his previous sur- roundings had been in the city, and it must not be forgotten that our national proportion of city dwellers has now risen to fifty per cent. Institutions in a smaller city often provide a good compromise between the two types. Life is more stim- ulating than in the country. Much that is worth while in drama and music comes sooner or later and can be enjoyed by the student who knows how to plan his time. On the other hand, life is simpler and usually cheaper than in the great city, the country is nearer at hand, and, finally, since the relation of college and collegian is more vital to the smaller city, the element of local pride in the home institution can have fuller play. In many small cities membership in the college body provides in itself a very pleasant entry to the social life of the city. Where a choice is possible, the student planning to enter a college of this type should select a city possessing a background of culture, Hart- ford, for example, where Trinity College is located, or Crawfordsville, the home of Wabash College. CHAPTER m THE RAW MATERIAL Twenty-seven years ago Andrew Carnegie stated publicly that "the almost total absence of the college graduate from high positions in the business world seems to justify the conclusion that college education as it exists is fatal to success in that domain. The grad- uate has not the slightest chance, entering at twenty, against the boy who swept the office, or who begins as shipping clerk at fourteen." To-day great organiza- tions like the Standard Oil Company and the National City Bank literally bribe promising college graduates to learn their business by paying them a living wage long before they can be of any practical value to the organization. Of course there still exists the successful business man who decries college on the ground that he himself succeeded without it; but he forgets that the compe- tition which his boy will meet in his generation is not that of non-college men, but of men who in the great majority of cases will have had college training. Even though some of these skeptics may divert boys who would otherwise go to college, their number is far out- balanced by the fathers to whom college was ambition 68 THE UNDERGRADUATE unfulfilled, and who make great sacrifices to send their boys to college in order that the latter may be able to bridge the gap that lies between the foreman and the superintendent, or, for the more prosperous, to know the difference between the outside and the inside of the right club. That is one reason why there are hundreds of boys in American colleges to-day where there were half- dozens when Mr. Carnegie spoke. Another reason for the increase is that a college education, or, to be more accurate, college experience, is now regarded as essen- tial for what is known as a place in society. This was not at all the case a quarter-century ago. In those days going to college was still regarded as something of an enterprise, even for a boy headed toward a profession, since most of the prospective lawyers and doctors went straight into a professional school. To-day no ambitious fellow who is looking forward to professional life will forego a preliminary college training if he can possibly find the means to obtain it. The only exception is engineering, and here also the tendency is becoming marked to follow the example of the older professions as to preliminary general training for young men who really wish to be professional en- gineers in the sense that the term is used in Europe. I do not mean that every parent who sends a boy to college, or every boy who makes his own way there. THE RAW MATERIAL 69 has decided upon the step as business or professional preparation, or as social insurance. Many boys come from sheer imitativeness or inertia without the slight- est attempt to think the question through. But what- ever the reason, or lack of it, the greatest single prob- lem which faces our American colleges to-day is the embarrassing wealth of raw material; and if the reader wishes to make a play of words upon rawness and materialism, it will not lead him far afield. As a matter of fact, the whole movement has gone too far. People do not distinguish between the man who went to college because he was of the succeeding type and the man who succeeded because he went to college. Too often conditions are made easy for those who, either because of a lack of general ability or be- cause their dominant interests he in other fields, ought not to be in college at all, students who are in college to the detriment of the opportunities of those who could really profit by the college career. The public at large does not make much distinction between going to college and doing well there. Parents who have boys remember that out of the last nine presidents of the United States eight were college men, but they for- get that these were all high-stand men. The five who went to colleges where a chapter of Phi Beta Kappa was established all earned election to that society. 7 o THE UNDERGRADUATE The impulse to go to college, which was formerly confined to people of intellectual background, has now spread through all classes of the community. The great gifts to education by the National Government under the Morrill grant and by the States to their universities have helped many men to realize that higher education is not a luxury for the few, but a right for all classes of the community. The recent establishment of three thousand scholarships of one hundred dollars each in the State of New York for the boys and girls graduating from the public high schools with the highest standing has to my personal knowl- edge sent a number of talented boys to college who would otherwise have never been able to overcome the parental inertia. What moved the parents was not so much the money grant, though that was important, as the fact that the Commonwealth had, so to speak, officially invited their sons to take part in an enter- prise fostered by the State. College-bred men always send their boys to college if the latter can pass the entrance examinations, and college-bred women see that their boys succeed in do- ing so. It is, of course, regarded as the thing for a man to send his son to the institution with which he has been identified; witness the outcry in Kansas when Governor Stubbs sent his boys to an Eastern college. But fashions change in colleges as in other matters. THE RAW MATERIAL 71 In a recent entering class at Princeton more than eighty different colleges were represented among the parents. Loyal alumni are also on the alert to send on promis- ing boys outside of their own families. A recent study of the entering class at Dartmouth showed that this had been by far the most important factor in the make-up of the entering class. The figures there were as follows: Influence of relatives, forty-two; influence of Dartmouth graduates and undergraduates, one hun- dred and forty-one; location of the college, forty-six; other factors, seventy-nine. Only five boys confessed to athletics as the dominating influence. Other reasons determining why a boy should go to a particular college are various. Sometimes it is cold- blooded social ambition on the part of the boy or his parents, sometimes a chance remark of the girl of the moment. Most often I think it is the influence of close school friends who have already made up their minds, and without whose constant presence life, as the candi- date looks down the years, offers a very dismal pros- pect. It is amusing to observe how seldom these continue to be the boy's intimates in college. The influence of the newspapers, I think, is rather toward getting boys to college in general. Certainly the insti- tutions that they play up most conspicuously as to athletics do not seem to reap any numerical benefit 72 THE UNDERGRADUATE therefrom. Another potent influence is the boy's fa- vorite teacher or his school principal. In private schools this affects only the question of the particular college the boy shall attend, since to-day practically all pri- vate-school boys are headed toward college. Ten years ago I was one of a group interested in the organization of a boarding-school where boys of very limited means might enjoy that particular type of training. We ex- pected that the education of a large share of them would of necessity stop with their graduation from the school and planned accordingly; but to-day almost without exception its graduates go to college as a mat- ter of course. In the public schools, however, the situ- ation is different, and here men like Superintendent Greenwood, of Kansas City, and other leaders, have done much to turn the thoughts of boys and girls under their influence to college training. Twenty-five years ago the private schools provided the great majority of college material, but to-day con- ditions have entirely changed. There are now 1,300,- 000 pupils in the American high schools, with an aver- age daily attendance of about one million, certainly a sufficient supply from which the colleges may draw so far as numbers go; but in the high school of the better type only one third of the entrants are likely to gradu- ate, and in one particular case less than seven per cent THE RAW MATERIAL 73 of the enrollment continued their formal education beyond the high school. I think that the establishment of junior high schools, of which there are already more than two hundred scattered throughout the country and of which there will be more in the near future, will have its effect in increasing the supply of college students. Certainly these schools, which make the seventh and eighth years of training far more interest- ing, succeed in holding for further education boys of a type that used seldom to go to the high school at all, and the number includes many of real ability. Some of the best college material does not come di- rectly from the secondary school at all. The normal schools, for instance, supply many excellent students, most of them girls, but an increasing number of first- rate boys. Others get their preparation through eve- ning extension classes or Y.M.C.A. schools, or are really self-prepared, or coached by some kindly clergy- man or doctor. It is fortunate that there are these other means of preparation for exceptional students, because, according to Cooley, seventy-five per cent of the total school population is unable for economic rea- sons to complete the secondary-school course without interruption. In the stronger institutions many of the new students each year have already had one or more terms of college training. The total number of such transfers to Chicago, Columbia, and Harvard alone is 74 THE UNDERGRADUATE nearly one thousand annually, those to Chicago alone coming from more than two hundred institutions. The development of the junior colleges will doubtless increase this source of supply. Still another type is represented in the colleges — the boy who cannot get through school, but is finally landed in college through the efforts of highly paid tutors. As these boys seldom manage to remain be- yond the freshman year, it is a question whether the process is worth while, except for the tutors. Although there are notable exceptions, especially from schools of the type of Andover, Groton, and Hotchkiss, the high- school boy nearly always outstrips his fellow-student from private school. This shows not so much the in- feriority of the private school as the fact that only the more ambitious boys go to college from the public schools, whereas the business of the preparatory school is to get its good and bad material alike into college. Of course there are exceptions, but in general the teaching is not nearly so good in the private schools; and this is natural enough considering that head mas- ters are likely to ignore the benefits of professional training for their teachers and to pay far lower salaries. One of the many pungent remarks with which Presi- dent Eliot is credited is that to the head master who asked querulously whether Mr. So-and-So was the best teacher of English with which Harvard could pro- THE RAW MATERIAL 75 vide him. "He is the best teacher I am willing to recommend for the price you are willing to pay." From what has gone before it may be gathered that the colleges no longer draw from a selected group in the community. To-day absolutely no class is unrep- resented. One of the most interesting and satisfactory students under my care, for example, was formerly an I.W.W. agitator who has frequently been boarded and lodged at government expense. Taking the country over, I suppose there is hardly a hamlet or a city block which does not contain some college man, past, present, or prospective. Not long ago an old college teacher showed me a letter from one of his former students at the University of Kansas, a widow, who, at the time she wrote, was a rural-school teacher, doing all her own work for a family of six at home and driving eight miles every day to her school. From her letter it was clear that she was planning to send her five children to the State university as a matter of course, and did not regard this as anything extraordinary. Indeed, it was the Middle West that first made going to college a thor- oughly democratic proceeding. Statistics as to the occupations of parents of college students have recently been gathered at various in- stitutions. Those at the Pennsylvania State College, j6 THE UNDERGRADUATE for example, show the following percentages: twenty- one merchants; eighteen industrial and manufactur- ing; eighteen artisans; seventeen agricultural; twelve professional; five clerks, etc.; three public officials; six miscellaneous. An analysis of a recent freshman class at Princeton showed that the fathers of the stu- dents represent fifty-six different occupations. Eighty- five were in business, presumably merchants; fifty-five were manufacturers; there were thirty-nine lawyers, thirty bankers, twenty physicians, nineteen real-estate men, nineteen ministers, eleven insurance agents, eleven brokers, eight professors, seven chemists, and six farmers. One hundred and twenty-nine of the total of four hundred and thirty are sons of college graduates, and two hundred and thirty-eight come from families in which neither parent is a college grad- uate. If some one would collect information showing the training and present occupation of the elder broth- ers and sisters of students now in college, this would bring out even more strikingly the rapidity of the movement in the direction of college training. Of course, this wide background means an equal variability in the financial status of college students, who range from the sons of multimillionaires to boys whose presence in college seems an absolute miracle. The rich include not only the inhabitants of the " Gold THE RAW MATERIAL 77 Coast " at Cambridge, but the sons and daughters of farmers who in bumper years come rolling over the prairies in high-powered motor-cars to the State uni- versities of the Middle West. Taking the country as a whole, however, the wealthy student is the rare ex- ception. Most parents who pay the college expenses of their children do so at very considerable inconven- ience; and in spite of scholarship provisions (which are likely to err on the side of generosity), as we all know, a very considerable number of boys pay their own ex- penses in whole or in large part by summer work and incidental employment during term-time. How gen- eral this is, however, may not be so well known. At the University of Montana more than half the students are primarily self-supporting. At Washington Univer- sity in St. Louis the proportion is between one third and one half. Even at colleges like Princeton and Wil- liams it is probably as high as twenty per cent. Self-supporting students fall into two groups, those who continue to earn money in some calling in which they have already had a preparatory training, and those who have to subsist on incidental jobs about the college or obtained through the college employment office. Of the two groups, the former are likely to be the more interesting. From my experience at Colum- bia I can select the following at random: bootblacks, hospital orderlies, taxidermists, vaudeville performers 78 THE UNDERGRADUATE and "jokesmiths," professional baseball players (I mean openly professional), window-dressers, Pullman porters, tree doctors, theatrical managers, and, most extraordinary of all, a dressmaker. We hear much to- day of the University of Cincinnati plan of half-time students for technical training; but every college has such students, the only difference being that at Cin- cinnati the boys work in pairs, spending week about in shop and classroom, whereas in the other cases the student himself finds what he calls a half-portion job or obtains one through the college. The young men who come to college after a business experience fall into three groups. Some never get the "feel" of the place at all; some celebrate their eman- cipation from the shackles of office hours by a com- plete irresponsibility; and only a few exercise any of the much-needed influence on their fellows toward that most important factor in a well-ordered college life, the orderly planning of time. In addition to the self-supporting student there are very many who come to college on borrowed money, sometimes secured by a life-insurance policy. Per- sonally I wish this were more generally done, because many of the self-supporting students really get the shadow rather than the substance of a college training. Merely as a matter of investment the boy's earning capacity after graduation is relatively so much greater THE RAW MATERIAL 79 that this factor also ought to be taken into considera- tion. I see no reason why a vigorous boy should not work during his summer vacation; but during term- time he ought at least to get enough sleep and enough recreation and enough time to prepare his college work. Where it is impossible for a boy to borrow money, he ought at least to be willing to take a lighter schedule of studies than his fellows, even at the cost of spreading his work over five years. This, unfortunately, he is uniformly most reluctant to do. The wide range in parenthood means not only great differences on the financial side, but great variety in parental attitude toward the boy in college. The nouveaur-ricke makes it clear that money is no object, that tutors are to be purchased ad lib. I have even known a case where a father attempted to bribe a col- lege officer in order that his son might be permitted to continue his liberal education. Then there are the fathers who are obviously convinced, sometimes doubtless on excellent grounds, that their sons are entirely unreliable, and who write or call to check up every statement which the boy may make about bis college work. Any college officer can tell of the tragic cases of parents who have sent stupid boys at great sacrifice to college and who simply cannot be made to understand that for them this is a most unwise invest- ment, parents who, no matter what one may say, point 80 THE UNDERGRADUATE in reply to other boys, the sons of friends, whose col- lege success has raised, the whole family in the social and financial scale. Parents who are obviously interested only in their son's social and athletic progress, and who care little or nothing as to what he does with his lessons, so long as he is not dropped, are unfortunately all too common. Sometimes, on the other hand, we come into contact with a father, or perhaps of tener a mother, who is a real intellectual companion for the boy. The two go over his work together, and the parent makes it a point to know and talk with as many of the boy's teachers as possible. No discussion of the raw material of the American college of to-day would be complete without some ref- erence to the foreign students. These foreign students make a very striking total. At the last summer con- ference of the Young Men's Christian Association, for example, there were three hundred and thirty of them in attendance, divided among more than thirty nationalities. There is, I think, a tendency to over- exploit these foreigners as a group; but the best of them are worthy of all that we can do for them. These students include both the foreign-born and the American-born who come from homes where Eng- lish is not the mother tongue. The presence of the THE RAW MATERIAL 81 latter is natural enough, but the number of young men who have come even during the war from foreign countries to America for their higher education is a very striking phenomenon. Boys have come from the ends of the earth to America as a result of the influence of the missionary schools and colleges, but the greatest single influence was the decision of the Chinese Government (in recognition of the return by the United States of the so-called Boxer Indemnity) to send over the picked young men of that nation to America for their training. The number of such stu- dents who have already come over and returned, or who are here at present, is over a thousand. Several agencies are now at work to increase the number from South America and, just now, from Mexico; and many colleges offer scholarships for this purpose. The university colleges are particularly cosmopoli- tan in their make-up. In the undergraduate body at Columbia, for example, it is easier to make a list of the nations of the world which are not represented than of those that are. The two most extraordinary cases in my experience were a young Zulu nobleman, one of a group of four who went for training to France, Ger- many, England, and America respectively, as a prep- aration for serving their own people; and a member of the Hova tribe in Madagascar who proposed to become a professor of Scandinavian languages! Of the foreign 82 THE UNDERGRADUATE students the most able just now are the Chinese, per haps because they represent the aus Use, as did th< Japanese who came here thirty years ago, or our owt early pilgrims to the German universities. • How recently the men of the second generation — and this term really includes those who came here ir childhood with their parents — have come to be im- portant academic factors may be realized when w< think that in 1890 there were only two Italian lawyers and seventeen Italian physicians in New York City. To-day any Columbia graduation list would contain from one hundred and fifty to two hundred Italian names. The Portuguese, Bohemians, and Greeks are also beginning to make their mark. There are enough of the latter, by the way, to organize their own inter- collegiate Helicon. Of the second generation I should give the palm to the Italians, even above the Jewish students (whose parents now come nearly altogether from Russia and Austria). And this brings us to the general question of the Jew as an element in the student population. Until recently they represented no particular problem. The handful of Jews who went to college were readily absorbed in the student body and were judged as indi- viduals and not as members of any particular race. The early records of the fraternities which are now most exclusive all show a sprinkling of Jewish names. THE RAW MATERIAL 83 The change came after the enactment of the May Laws in Russia in 1882, which not only greatly in- creased the number of Jews coming to the United States, but profoundly changed the social type. There are at present, it is estimated, some three million Jews in the United States; and, thanks to the racial realiza- tion of the value of training and to their almost in- credible persistence, the share of these who are in col- lege is far above the average of the population at large. The presence in a college of a "Jewish problem," which means a situation where the Jews are not readily assimilated, is really a compliment, though sometimes an embarrassing one. The Jew more than any other group looks upon the college course from the point of view of an investment. Both the young fellow and his parents know exactly what he could have been earning in the years he spends in college, and they see that he spends them under the most favorable possible condi- tions. One will find very few of them in the poorly equipped colleges. For this reason, although the total proportion throughout the colleges is said to be less than four per cent, the figures in certain institutions will run much higher. The Jews being essentially urban and domestic, their presence in large numbers was felt first in the city institutions; but with their settling in the small towns throughout the country and the rapid increase in wealth of those remaining in the 8 4 THE UNDERGRADUATE large cities they are now being much more generally distributed among the stronger institutions. The college boy is much nearer to being a man, cer- tainly so far as age goes, than he used to be. According to President Sharpless, the average age of boys at entrance to-day is just short of eighteen and a half. This is nearly two full years above the age forty years ago, and four or five above that of one hundred years ago. Of course, the requirements for entrance have increased greatly in the meantime; but the average age is nevertheless much too high, our boys being about two years older than those of equivalent training in France or Germany. The situation, however, is not as bad as it seems. Under the present social pressure many a dull boy goes to college even though he has to wait until twenty or twenty-one before he can enter. Such boys, I may say in passing, very seldom appear in the statistics of graduation. Many boys of ability and good preparation are forced for economic reasons to stay out of college and work for two, three, or even more years. These conditions mask the encouraging fact that the tide has really turned, and that for boys of good ability and uninterrupted preparation the normal age is now not much above seventeen. This in spite of the fact that the conventional elementary and secondary-school programme in the United States is THE RAW MATERIAL 85 twelve years and that boys very seldom begin school before six. Indeed, the statistics available show no correlation between early going to school and early entrance to college. Boys of ability should not, and in growing numbers they do not, spend twelve years in the conventional lock-step. Professor Russell, of Peabody College, once tried an amusing experiment, and a very instructive one, at an educational meeting at which I was present. He asked all those in the room who had spent twelve years in school to raise their hands. There were very few. Then he asked for those at eleven, ten, and so down. It was perfectly evident from the results that the normal period of school prep- aration of the group, nearly all of them teachers, was not twelve, but somewhere between eight and nine years. With the growing realization of the waste of time, particularly in the upper grades of the elementary schools, it will be progressively easier for the able boy to go ahead at his normal speed. Dr. Boris Sidis has given us an example of sending a normal boyish boy to Harvard at eleven. This is, of course, exceptional; and the group figures recently published by Professor Jones, the Director of Admis- sions at Columbia, are more significant. He shows that of 287 freshmen admitted direct from second- ary schools in September, 191 5, thirty- three entered before their seventeenth birthday. These boys, it may 86 THE UNDERGRADUATE be remarked, did not go direct from the cradle to the elementary school. Most of them entered school at six or seven and only one had completed the tradi- tional twelve years of preparation for college. Profes- sor Jones took the college grades of each of these age- groups and compared each group with the average of the class as a whole, with the following results: the fifteen-year-old boys made the best showing in schol- arship, and the sixteen-year-olds the next best, both being well above the average of the class. The figures for seventeen, eighteen, and nineteen are near that of the class average, but are progressively poorer as the age increases. Twenty, twenty-one, and twenty-two- year-olds are very much worse than the average. As against the prevalent idea that there is danger in forcing young boys ahead too fast, the general feeling to-day among experts is that this danger is negligible in the case of boys of good health and normal nervous organization. We must remember in this connection that our school period, both as to hours in the day and days in the year, is much shorter than that prevailing elsewhere in the civilized world. Dr. Charles L. Dana has stated that in all his wide experience as a nerve specialist he knows of no instance of injury to a boy of normal make-up from overwork in school, and he im- plies that most boys are far more normal than their parents think them. My own experience, which in- THE RAW MATERIAL 87 eludes painful hours spent with at least two or three positively insane boys each year, makes me believe that the chance of nervous derangement is not neg- ligible, and I should hesitate to press a boy of my own beyond what appears to be his natural gait until I had taken expert advice upon the subject. It is not only what a boy can do, but what he will do, which concerns us in college. Every entering class contains its boys who come prepared to do their best entirely regardless of the presence or absence of col- lege machinery to make them do so, and others who will do only what they positively must. The great majority, of course, lie between these two poles and can be guided in either direction by the conditions which they find in college. One type of boy for whom I do not think we make sufficient preparation in our scheme of things, but who is not at all rare, is the boy whose strength is artistic rather than intellectual; the boy, for example, to whom music is the real language of expression, or the one to whom a great picture will mean more than any book on the shelves of the library. One of our problems for the future will be a closer study of boys of this type and of provision to make college a more stimulating place for them. Even with the hordes that we get to our colleges every year, we college people are still unsatisfied, and 88 THE UNDERGRADUATE it is n't wholly a vulgar thirst for numbers. We know that we are missing some of the best material. For example, there are the boys who still go straight to schools of engineering and agriculture. It is not pos- sible to draw the line very closely, because many of these schools are more colleges than professional schools and include many "liberal" studies in their programmes. We believe, however, rightly or wrongly, that a boy who misses the college environment misses also a certain breadth of intellectual curiosity and sympathy, not only from the subjects taught, but in a wider range of interest among the students with whom he is thrown in contact. Then, we miss many if not most of what are called "eye-minded boys," who from the nature of their men- tal make-up are so bored with the auditory and mem- oriter methods that they almost invariably drop out of school before graduation. Some of these, as is evi- denced by their success in later life, are boys of very great ability. To these should probably be added many of the artistic type already mentioned, who are less likely to go to college than are other boys of equal general ability. If our present entrance and promotion tests fail to recognize the able boy who happens to have difficulty in reasoning with symbols as contrasted with concrete things or human individuals, we must find some way of improving them. There is no ques- THE RAW MATERIAL 89 tipn that there are such boys, just as there are many- otherwise highly competent who are tone-deaf or color-blind. I believe, personally, that the "flunkers" and low-standard graduates to whose success in later life so much attention is called are primarily of this type. In our desire to stamp out the athletic evils which came with the special student, we must be care- ful not to exclude this chance of admission in the case of the poorly prepared boy of striking ability. While the problem of expense offers little real diffi- culty to the able boy who has only himself to consider, there are many cases of boys of high intellectual prom- ise with widowed mothers or others dependent upon them, who realize the value of the college investment, but cannot afford to make it. Some generous bene- factor should establish a fund to let exceptional boys in these circumstances go on with their training, by giving or advancing an amount to cover the expenses, not only of the boy, but of the family. We have spoken of the reasons which have brought the raw material to the portals of the college, of its variety in racial, social, and economic status, and other matters. What, now, can we count on a particu- lar freshman's knowing? The only safe answer is that he knows enough to get into that particular college. Over and above that, the supply ranges from practi- go THE UNDERGRADUATE cally zero to an astonishing amount of both general and special information which some boys carry packed, often inconspicuously, about their persons. The for- mal part of learning, even the most elementary parts of formal knowledge, are often lacking. Freshmen, or at any rate thousands of them, cannot spell, their grammar is very erratic, they cannot add or subtract nearly so well as they can pad and distract, and as a whole their capacity for making accurate obser- vations and drawing conclusions therefrom is all too limited. What they know outside the formal range depends nowadays more on the fashion of the moment than on the old-fashioned conception of what every boy should know. The bicycle and telephone have had their day, and now the automobile and wireless are giving way to the airplanes and submarines. On the other hand, a boy who can tie up a respectable parcel is, indeed, a rarity. The popularity of summer camping is increas- ing the number of boys who know some little about nature, but their numbers and the amount of their information are still distressingly small compared with that of the boy from the old New England farm or the pioneering West of two generations ago. Their knowl- edge of the usages of good society, or at any rate their practice of them, is conspicuous chiefly by its absence; but, of course, we are in the midst of a period of great THE RAW MATERIAL 91 carelessness in these matters, and the boys should not be blamed too much. To me the most interesting and important thing about the bulk and range of our raw material is the high variability which it signifies. In order to get one boy of vivid personality and striking ability any col- lege should willingly endure scores who really do not belong in college at all. The colleges that consciously or unconsciously appeal only to a certain type lose the chance of getting the exceptional boy from any other type, and I am inclined to think from their own type also; for the intelligent boy, no matter what his social status, wants to find a different horizon line at college from the one he left at home. The effect of the pres- ence of such students is not solely upon one another; they exercise a very great stimulating influence upon the teachers, by meeting them on a common plane of intellectual competence, and this is breaking down the las,t of the barriers that stood for so long between the faculty and the students in American colleges. CHAPTER IV THE UNDERGRADUATE POINT OF VIEW What are the factors, conscious and unconscious, which guide the common conduct of a student body within the walls of some particular college, a group consisting as it does of individuals whose variety I have tried 'to picture in the foregoing chapter? On the whole, the unconscious factors are the more im- portant, and among them we must recognize first the general collegiate traditions which have hardened into the intense conventionalism of much of undergrad- uate acting and thinking, to which is superadded the store of local traditions of each particular college, and finally we must not forget the influence of the non- collegiate fashions of the day, and of our permanent American attributes — if we have any which are really permanent. Leaving out for the moment the influence of the faculty and of the studies (sometimes they are left out for more than the moment), we will try to see how these varied elements fuse into college life so-called, a strictly American product. Whether I succeed or not, I shall at any rate try to avoid dogmatism. There is, of course, great variability among the dif- POINT OF VIEW 93 ferent colleges, and even in the most convention-ridden ones there are always startling exceptions to any rule that may be laid down. Under some vivid stimulus the real boy not infrequently breaks through the conven- tion. Some few students seem quite unaffected by the prevailing mode, and if such boys possess qualities of leadership they are likely to start new traditions and conventions for their successors. In general, it is not easy to overestimate the influence of the college-life environment. Being an undergraduate has almost become a career in itself. It affects many boys far too much; we hear of the college putting its stamp upon a y boy, sometimes it stamps so hard as to crush all indi- viduality out of him, and there is nothing to which a boy has a clearer right than to his personality. At present our college life receives considerably more blame than praise, but, nevertheless, it is being sedu- lously cultivated by the authorities even of technical institutions like the Massachusetts Institute of Tech- nology. There are many pitfalls in the way of an ade- quate presentation of it. In the first place, a conven- tional and inaccurate picture has already been built up. I am not referring to the picture of newspaper humorists, though this, perhaps, influences more out- siders than we realize, and may keep some hard-headed men from permitting their sons to go to college. I am thinking rather of an equally mythical undergraduate 94 THE UNDERGRADUATE who has been set up by critics, internal and external, for the purpose of knocking him down, and who has about as much real existence as the "economic man." I admit that such a figure has considerable superficial accuracy, but being a man of straw, his internal anat- omy is far from correct. There is really no such animal as the typical college student. I don't say that the actual product is any better, but I am sure he is differ- ent. Even when one tries honestly to get at the actual boy, there are difficulties in the way. One of the most potent of student conventions is that the undergradu- ate should keep his inner, or real, self and his outer self in separate compartments, — just as many a business man keeps his office and his home life, — and if only one compartment is visible, no true picture can be drawn. The professional stories, long and short, which deal with college life range from the extravagances of Fitch to the subtleties of Flandreau, but college life changes so rapidly that all, even Owen Wister's classic "Philosophy 4," are likely to give a wrong impres- sion of present conditions. These college stories have a significance, however, not from their truth, but in the fact that they are eagerly read by schoolboys and under-classmen and in this way tend to fix the con- ventions of conduct and speech. One can get some light, however, by reading be- POINT OF VIEW 95 tween the lines in editorials and other products of col- lege journalism, always remembering that what stu- dents ostensibly write about is not necessarily what they think about; and by taking advantage of the cases where one gets to know a boy well enough to penetrate the outer integument. In studying our American college life of to-day, we must remember that the roots of its non-intellectual side go very deep into the past. Boas's "History of Oxford" shows that hazing was a recognized student activity in the Middle Ages, and youths in training for the priesthood wrote songs beginning, "Magis quam ecclesiam diligo tabernam." Or take the follow- ing from John Addington Symonds's translation of another mediaeval student song: — "Cast aside dull books and thought; Sweet is folly, sweet is play; Take the pleasure Spring hath brought In youth's opening holiday! Right it is old age should ponder On grave matters fraught with care; Tender youth is free to wander, Free to frolic light as air. Like a dream our prime is flown, Prisoned in a study; Sport and folly are youth's own, Tender youth and ruddy." In considering our own development in the United States, we must again remember that the early college 96 THE UNDERGRADUATE students were not men, but boys, and that they were controlled in a manner which was then, and is still in certain places, regarded as the proper way to treat boys. As a result most of college life consisted in more or less organized pranks against the authorities. Even the drinking-bouts and the cock-fighting were, we may assume, carried on more to annoy the faculty than to give pleasure to the students. In pondering over the mysteries of sophomore-freshman ructions, we may remember that the Statutes of King's College, adopted in 1763, include the following: "The junior students shall pay such respect to the seniors, and all of them to the president, professors, fellows and tutors as the said president (etc.) shall direct and under such pen- alties as they shall think proper to prescribe." The Revolution and the half-century following it brought few changes in undergraduate life except that literary societies were organized, where the boys in- dulged in pompous debates. For the boy who did not join these, and who had no turn for mischief, college life must have been pretty empty. There was evi- dently none of the modern get-together spirit. Some years ago I sent an inquiry to the oldest living alumnus of Columbia, about another member of the class of '27 (which numbered thirty-six students), regarding whom the editor of the Alumni Catalogue desired infonna- POINT OF VIEW 97 tion. My letter brought the reply that, since the stu- dent in question "sat at some distance from me in the classroom, I had no personal acquaintance with him." Shortly after this period came the fraternities and other social clubs, and by the thirties there was cer- tainly a pleasant life, both intellectual and social, — to judge by such documents as Edward Everett Hale's diary, in spite of the fact that the students were evi- dently treated like children by the authorities. It was still a very simple life, however, and it would be interesting if space permitted to trace the steps which have led to the over-elaborate complexity of the present day. Not long ago I received a pamphlet from the University of North Dakota, an institution with fewer than two hundred and fifty male collegiate un- dergraduates, containing the treasurers' reports of thirty-seven different student organizations, and one could doubtless find an even more impressive record if he looked for it. When we remember that at every college there is a considerable number of men who take little or no part in these activities, we can realize what the burden must be on the really prominent student. There has recently been published a record of the time spent by the students of Purdue University in student activities during senior year. Four men reported more than four hundred hours each, and their records do not include fraternity duties and pleasures, nor, naturally, 98 THE UNDERGRADUATE "girling," which is coming to make heavier and heavier demands on the time of most undergraduates. I should say that I have no personal acquaintance with these particular young men. They may be anchorites, but they probably are not. No wonder that the faculties and student councils are trying to develop plans to give the boys some relief from their diversions! I have had the privilege of seeing a "chromatic diary" kept by one of this year's seniors in a New England college — an ingenious device whereby the author, by the use of chalks of divers colors to indicate different occupations, has recorded in half a dozen pages how each hour has been spent for an entire col- lege term. I commend the "chromatic diary" to the boys who are letting their time run away from them. In general this document shows a pretty well-balanced ration — regular attendance in the classroom with plenty of skiing and tennis, time for class and society duties, church, three days at the Smith Prom, followed by increased correspondence, some earning of money, and even some study, increasing sharply in intensity in the fortnight before examinations. Certainly an absorbing way in which to spend one's days, but with little time for reflection. The pathetic thing about it all is that the world at large was never a more interest- ing or exciting place than it is to-day, and that stu- POINT OF VIEW 99 dents of this type, evidently boys of real ability, were until the outbreak of the war so busy with little things, many of them artificial survivals or imitations, that even if they managed to keep up their formal college duties, they certainly had no time to ponder on the big things all about them. It is apparently the human tendency for any system to go on elaborating and complicating its machinery — take chivalry or any one of the great religious systems as an example — until some new factor breaks in like a beetle into a spider's web, with sufficient force to crush the useless threads and enable the organism to start afresh. I am in hope that the growing sense of social responsibility may do this in our colleges. The ante-bellum rush to military training was a manifesta- tion of a real desire to be of service to a larger com- munity. Yet after all, in this instinct for conformity lies a certain practical value. The almost universal turning of our undergraduates to military and other forms of service since the outbreak of war reflects in many cases a serious personal sense of responsibility, but the fact that these heedless boys rose practically as one man reflects the training of the group to do something when "everybody's doing it." The way in which every fall a college can absorb and ioo THE UNDERGRADUATE mould to its pattern a body of new students half as great as the total of those returning is miraculous in its speed and thoroughness. Imitation is not only the sincerest flattery, but it is the most powerful single factor in human conduct. The speed with which a freshman, even one who has not learned the tricks of the trade at school (where conditions are coming to be nearly as elaborate as in college), will put on the gen- eral appearance and manners of the college man in general, with the particular shades appropriate to his college in particular, is simply marvelous. And there is always a real boy underneath it all which it is the business of the faculty to "get at." It repays the teacher and the executive to know the students and their folk-ways. Like the ductless glands in our own bodies certain elements in the student organization perform functions of an importance only appreciated when something goes wrong with their workings. This process of imitation also spreads from college to college in these days of "following the team" and of fraternity and religious conventions. Not only do tricks of speech, costume, and manner spread quickly over the country, far more rapidly, it may be said in passing, than educational ideas spread from faculty to faculty, but the complexity of student life is greatly increased by the blind copying of student activities, and the element of distinctiveness, which is what our POINT OF VIEW 101 student bodies chiefly lack, seems harder of achieve- ment than ever. I remember my sorrow when I saw at the University of Virginia, an institution which had always cast a glamour over my youthful imagination, a game of football with the University of Georgia on a day so hot that some of the players went without stockings, with a young Virginia gentleman acting as cheer-leader and performing all the conventional an- tics of the calling. The Weather Bureau sometimes records a difference of as much as one hundred and thirty-four degrees between the temperature in Florida and in Montana on the same day. Why should all our colleges over this broad land feel that they must have the same sports at the same seasons? Complexity does not bring color and spontaneity, and these are the qualities which are the scarcest in our undergraduate life. It is hard to think of an activity of the student body in a man's college that is really sui generis. I can think only of the ski-running at Dartmouth, and some of the outdoor pageantry of the Pacific Coast colleges. In this matter of originality the college girls make a much better showing than their brothers. Like imitation the closely related quality of emula- tion is a tremendously strong incentive to youth. We had an amusing example at our one hundred and fifti- eth anniversary at Columbia. The Japanese students, io2 THE UNDERGRADUATE in recognition of the event, made a graceful gift of some characteristic object of art, whkh was duly re- corded in the press. The next day an equally hand- some gift appeared "from the Chinese students." It was only by accident that we found that there was but one Chinaman in the institution at the time, and that he had done the whole thing himself. Emulation is beautifully developed in athletics and in fraternity rivalries, but it is hard to get it working effectively in other fields. While President Lowell and others are endeavoring to hitch it as a motive force to the stu- dent's intellectual tasks, undergraduates are trying to find means to do the same for many non-athletic activ- ities. In some cases, indeed, the tradition is well estab- lished; the men "heeling" for the "Yale News" have to give their word that they will cease their labors at i A.M., if I remember correctly. In the Middle West the "oratorical" contests arouse great rivalry. The whole machinery of managers and assistant managers, about which there is incidentally more buncombe than about most college activities, manages to keep the can- didates busily "scudding" about on often trivial and useless tasks. In general, however, we can observe elaborate systems of insignia for non-athletic service, and stirring editorials to demonstrate that even though nature has not endowed you with the equipment for athletic success, there are still ways in which you can POINT OF VIEW 103 serve your college. Some of us had hoped that the growing tendency of undergraduates to come to sum- mer courses, where every one seemed to get along com- fortably without the conventionalities of college life, might prove to be a help, particularly since the sum- mer course had already done something to show how much faculty machinery is unnecessary. The effect on student life however has been the other way about, and the summer life is now becoming rapidly con- ventionalized. A whole book — and it would be a very dispiriting one — could be written about these conventionalisms of undergraduates. The few examples that I shall give vary in virulence from college to college and from year to year, but they affect very nearly all students some- what, and far too many they affect very seriously. To begin with, there is the convention of unconvention- ality, which accounts for much of student bad manners and slovenliness. An enterprising business manager of a college newspaper, for example, in the laudable en- deavor to increase his subscription list, recently sent a circular letter to the professors in his college and in a single page succeeded in including thirteen examples of bad English. It is to this convention that we owe so much silly profanity and pseudo-picturesqueness of conversation. When the Lingua Franca of the student 104 THE UNDERGRADUATE body is made up of local words and phrases, some of an antiquity entitling them to certain respect, one may allow some claim to justification on the ground of picturesqueness, but when it is culled wholly from musical comedy and baseball reports with a flavoring of profanity and other liberties, as is too often the case, it is a pretty dreary business. The use of such a language in many cases does not imply a weakness of legitimate vocabulary, but is an example of sheer imitativeness, and many boys can without apparent effort jump from one language to the other. Secondly, there is a convention that all their pleas- ure is in college life and that nothing will interest an- other student except its details. A student must not be seen in the act of doing college work except just before examinations. To this is related the convention that a student attends class only because he has to, and hence that a man must take all the cuts allowed him each term or he will feel himself disgraced. I have personally never seen any difference between deliber- ately using up one's cuts at the end of a quarter and throwing away the last two of a dozen tickets because the railway offers no objection to one's doing so. Pro- fessor Erskine is on record as saying that the only ad- vice which the average student will take from his duly constituted academic adviser is as to how to avoid inconvenient faculty regulations. They exhibit extra- POINT OF VIEW 105 ordinary stoicism in the face of academic regulations which they see no way of evading, apparently regard- ing them as part of an elaborate and quite inexplicable faculty rite, bearing no relation whatever to their own education. This convention that the faculty is hard- hearted and uninterested is sheer vestigial survival from the old days, and results in what seems to be a willful blindness on the part of many students to its new attitude. I remember in the public schools that the slightest degree of politeness to the teacher was branded as the crime of " sucking around teacher," and was, of course, carefully avoided. Many of our under- graduates seem to have the same attitude. At the same time they are careful to take full advantage of all the favorable evidences of faculty paternalism. Pro^ fessor Carl Becker has written a delightful skit de- scribing a colloquy between the "Faculty's Conception of the Student" and the " Students' Conception of the Faculty," which ought to be included in the prescribed reading not only of all conventionally minded stu- dents, but of all conventionally minded professors. £-* One of the most trying conventions is that of insula- tion from the world. Even last fall, with the great war in progress and a presidential election at home, I ven- ture to guess that a dictaphone placed under many a fraternity dining-table would have recorded little but athletic chatter, girls, and plans to circumvent some 106 THE UNDERGRADUATE particular rival. The conventions of luxury give us the elaborate fraternity houses, in sharp contrast to the austere buildings of the German student clubs, and the fussy dormitory rooms which compare so badly with the students' rooms at Oxford. Even the self-support- ing student is often working for luxuries he would be better without. The preternatural solemnity of class proceedings, from the moment when a solemn junior turns over the first class meeting to a super-solemn freshman, the lugubrious songs which most colleges select as favor- ites, and the cheering and other forms of hollow mer- riment, often most depressing of all, are all sheer convention. The convention of conformity is a tre- mendously strong one. A boy must do nothing to queer himself, whatever happens. Many a student would refuse a thousand dollars if it were offered on condition that he should wear a celluloid collar for a week and not be able to explain that he really knew better. The most poisonous convention of all is that of vice and disorder at certain predetermined times and places — the Sophomore Triumph, for example. Sometimes one is almost tempted to think the better of a boy who if he must needs get drunk, does so on his own hook. The desire to "do something for the college" is not all convention by any means, but a lot of convention POINT OF VIEW 107 is mixed up in it, as well as the personal desire to see one's name in the Year-Book and elsewhere in print. It takes boys who could really accomplish something worth while in scholarship and fritters away their time in a distressing way. The head master of one of the boarding-schools tells me that his school is periodically visited by undergraduate missionaries from a well- known college, who explain to his boys that at this college everybody does something. If they are unfitted by nature and training to "go out" for anything else, they at least go out for religion. Before blaming the boys too seriously, we had better look about us and observe how much of our own lives is ruled by conventions which are often quite as ab- surd. There may be some primordial instinct within us all against which it is vain to struggle. Why, other- wise, should a thousand selected men behave at a presidential nominating convention in such a way as to remind us of totems and taboos and all the other marks of the most primitive culture? In our moments of optimism we may discern signs of a limit to the growth of college conventionalism, even of a change for the better. No matter how rankly they shoot upward, the trees do not actually grow into the sky, and we can never tell when the wind will blow down even the tallest and stoutest-looking of them. 108 THE UNDERGRADUATE The right influence can promptly break up a local con- vention which has every outward appearance of being deep-rooted. I have more than once seen a single man attack and conquer a cult of dirty story-telling, for example. Particularly in the university colleges — where there is almost danger of a convention of iconoclasm — more and more men are holding forth like Mr. Owen John- son's protagonist in " Stover at Yale," in college rooms or college papers, and are getting more serious atten- tion than the hearers and readers are usually ready to admit. Perhaps the promptitude with which nearly every undergraduate put away childish things with the call to arms last spring may come to be recorded as marking a new order by the academic historian of the future. One great hope is in the development of men with a sufficient sense of humor and sufficient tact in its exer- cise to get the victims of a convention to laugh at themselves. And in this connection students may well ask themselves how a man may hope to gain the power to smile in misfortune, if he inhibits and finally loses his power to laugh at absurdities in undergraduate days? A convention can stand moral denunciation far better than it can a temptation to snicker on the part of its devotees. We can watch the whole process in the case of the secrecy and ritualistic aspect of fraternity life. POINT OF VIEW 109 Nothing had a more authentic pedigree, back to the very childhood of the race. In nothing here in Amer- ica do the boys' parents set a clearer example with their lodges and badges and watch-charms, or the col- lege itself with its elaborate pageantry at commence- ment. The very keystone of the whole edifice was Tap Day at Yale, a ceremony which for brutal dis- regard of the sufferings of the unselected can find its parallel only in Central Africa. And yet Tap Day, the historic Tap Day, at any rate, has gone — and I venture to say that it was an inner realization of the absurdity rather than of the immorality of the pro- ceedings which brought about its downfall. A real sense of humor among students is rarer than they themselves realize. College comic papers have many amusing jokes, but they nearly always depend upon verbal ingenuity rather than upon any realiza- tion and expression of the deep-lying incongruities of human nature. There are glaring instances at every hand of an absence of a sense of the ludicrous, the presence of which one might expect more naturally than of a sense of humor. One of the senior societies at Dartmouth, for example, has a clubhouse in the form of an Egyptian tomb, and the members appar- ently see nothing to detract from its impressiveness in the obvious presence of electric-light wires. I should no THE UNDERGRADUATE not condemn the members to Cimmerian darkness, — even the shrine of the temple of Abu-Simbel is lit by electricity to-day, — but the boys might have buried the wires. Present-day student "stunts" are likely to be elaborate and stereotyped rather than spontane- ous and amusing. To find anything like the brilliant blagues of the French university student, we have to go back twenty-five years to the historic Am- herst gymnast who walked on bis hands across the campus, to the confusion of the poor professor who had turned his classroom into a camera obscura with a pin-hole through the window curtain, in order to demonstrate the reversal of the optical image. But if college students are weak in humor they are \y / strong in sentiment. It is true that this often degener- ates into sentimentality — witness the maudlin dirges already referred to; but none the less, there is a fine body of wholesome and sincere, if sometimes naive, sentiment for alma mater and for one another. Such a feeling will turn out a whole college to work like navvies upon the grading of an athletic field or, more heroic, in soliciting for the endowment. It is the force which soof ten enables a boy to do better than he knows how in some contest in which he holds the honor of the college to be at stake, or to galvanize into life a dying magazine or inanimate fraternity chapter, or to per- form acts of unobtrusive unselfishness for a fellow- POINT OF VIEW in student, utterly inexplicable on the basis of his in- adequate home influences and careless college life. It is the force which last spring turned such a large pro- portion of our students into the Aviation Corps. Institutional sentiment usually seeks some focus, from the group of moth-eaten elms at one end of the continent to the lone palo alto at the other. It may be a mountain, or a fence, or a lake; at Missouri, it is a line of classic columns, — all that is left of the original college building; at Princeton, a half-buried cannon (whose condition of complete unpreparedness does not seem to have struck the students). Sometimes, though more rarely, it is a man, — Mr. Jefferson at Virginia, for example, — or even a living professor, as when "Van Am" was dean at Columbia. Whatever the symbolic object is, it is a potent force in pulling the whole student body together. Any human group divides naturally into leaders and followers, and the significance of the former is nowhere greater than in the college community, in which no type of historic or mythical leader has not had his counterpart. We all know the Napoleons of the cam- pus or the Metternichs, and many an Eastern college has been carried off its feet by some young Lochinvar come out of the West. Sometimes a college will be ruled with a rod of iron by a cold-blooded fellow of the ii2 THE UNDERGRADUATE Parnell type, — a cat who walks by itself, — or by a conscientious bore whose only asset is an inhuman capacity for work. Often the ruling genius operates behind a more ornamental and impressive figurehead. Undergraduates are such chatterboxes that by con- trast the silent man has often great influence, regard- less of whether the silence comes from reserve or from the absence of anything to say. I think it is only exceptionally that a student sets out deliberately to be a leader. He is much more likely, if he seems " to have the goods," to be pushed forward by an elder statesman of his fraternity. Once in a while, however, we have a boy who has thought out his whole plan of campaign in advance, and who, for example, deliberately refuses fraternity invitations in order that he may have the neutral vote when he needs it later on. No matter how a student gets started, it is, of course, only human nature for him to fight to retain his leadership when he has once achieved it. It is in- teresting to watch the procession of leaders in any class during the four years of its undergraduate exist- ence. In freshman year, authority usually rests with the older boys, particularly those who have had the 1 training of boarding-school life and the athletic prow- ess that counts so largely with their fellows. As time goes on, however, these are almost sure to be out- stripped by the younger and naturally more able boys, POINT OF VIEW 113 usually by those whose sense of responsibility and in- itiative outweighs the lack of social and personal and athletic advantages. Other leaders who come to prominence later on come from the class of students that has had some " down-town" business experience between high school and college. The greatest college leaders — men like Marshall Newell at Harvard or Gordon Brown at Yale, to men- tion two who have died in early manhood — come from the small group who "have everything to begin with and promptly acquire the rest," but too often the boy who starts with all the incidental advantages settles back comfortably into the position of a chronic fol- lower. I have sometimes thought that the rigidity of our entrance tests has its share of responsibility for the appalling number of "trailers" in our Eastern colleges to-day. These tests can be passed by docile following of the tutor, but they often deter men of the impatient, individualistic type from entering an examining col- lege, often from entering college at all. Of course, in any community there are some mem- bers who from lack of ability and personality are pre- destined to a place in the background, but many and many a trailer has the qualities which fit him, if not for positions of large leadership, at least for a responsible and useful position in some field of college service. Sometimes these boys can be spurred into action, but ii4 THE UNDERGRADUATE it must be done promptly, for long-continued trailing completely dulls the sense of personal responsibility. The student's sense of honor is a real thing in spite of its extraordinarily illogical and incongruous manifesta- tions with respect to matters of intellectual honesty and the like. Before we laugh these out of court, we must remember how widely standards of right and wrong differ throughout the civilized world, and the almost equally wide range of environments from which the boys come, to say nothing of a peculiarly unpromis- ing background for the development of intellectual honesty in the evolution of the American college. We all come upon cases of conduct by boys which seem utterly "out of the picture," and we usually find that the student in question is living two separate lives and shutting off all stimuli not affecting the life which he is living at the moment. We see boys turning a blind eye — or perhaps it would be more appropriate to say a tightly held nose — to patent athletic evils, or to evasions, as they appear to outsiders, of solemn fraternity agreements. We have cases of the bribery of a monitor of easy virtue, or the deliberate misplacing of a reference book in the library so that the trans- gressor alone can find it when he wants it. Detailed consideration^ only one or two examples of these sur- prising manifestations is all that space permits. POINT OF VIEW 115 The honor system in examinations, which is dealt with elsewhere in this book, is pointed to as evidence of the higher standards of students in matters of honesty in college studies, but even this system ad- mirable as it is, so far as it goes, seems often to be carefully deposited in a water-tight compartment. Students customarily make the same kind of ethical distinction that their fathers do in matters that are "law honest." By keeping the letter of the law they think they fool the teachers, when they only fool them- selves. This obvious fact, that it is always himself and his fellows that the student cheats, and not the college, seems never to be a factor in student conduct, except that it is usually regarded as discreditable to cheat in competition for a prize. The old attitude of hostility to the faculty, and the feeling that the student through- out is playing a game in which it is quite as legitimate to use one's wits as it is in baseball, have much to do with their present conduct. Take, for example, the beautiful instance of the party of Harvard sophomores joyously playing poker in the middle of a room, while four freshmen, commandeered for the purpose, were placed at its corners, simultaneously reading aloud the four books which constituted the prescribed read- ing in some course of which the poker-players were members. We must not forget, indeed, that faculty demands n6 THE UNDERGRADUATE are often unreasonable and the marking system for checking these demands is sometimes of the stupidest. The punishments prescribed for student misdemeanors are nearly always either too heavy or too light to be effective. And then there is the fact that there is really no sharp line — and undergraduates need very sharply marked lines to keep them on the path — between a chance shot or a clever bluff in recitations and down- right dishonesty. There are unfortunately academic parasites who prey upon students and help to corrupt them. Take, for example, the following from a printed circular which by some accident found its way into my mail: — RESEARCH ON A SPECIAL PHASE OF A SUBJECT — Here we take some topic of your theme which you wish specially developed, and assist in working it out . . . $ 2 . 00 COMPLETE DEVELOPMENT OF SUBJECT —We contemplate in this work the full development of the outline or brief, supplying references, and finally read- ing, criticising and revising the paper in which you have elaborated the outline. Our suggestions will enrich the product, but the product is to be your own $3.00 As regards hazing, the object theoretically to be at- tained is worthy enough. In these days of spoiled only sons, Heaven knows that every freshman class con- tains its share of members who need dressing down. There are prigs, and sissies, and poseurs ("jonquils," as POINT OF VIEW 117 they are called at Yale), who must be dealt with if life in their vicinity is to be endurable. There are also the more important members of the community who have the makings of excellent college material, but whose ability is smothered by conceit, or who are just un- bearably "fresh." Good-natured "jollying" of such folk is really an excellent thing, and most freshmen are not in the least averse to being singled out as worthy of treatment. Personally I do not mind when a fresh- man is sent into my office by some astute sophomore for his gymnasium towels or for a reserved seat in the chapel. When the question of abolishing "horsing" was up at Princeton not long ago, several of the pro- fessors came out publicly in favor of its retention. The trouble has always been that treatment of this kind almost invariably degenerates into cowardly bullying of any freshman, just because he is a fresh- man. This may or may not do the freshman good, but it certainly does the sophomores harm. In its most brutal forms hazing is now doomed, because after the faculties, supported by public opinion as expressed by letters and editorials in the press, had struggled unsuccessfully with the problem for generations, the students themselves are finally grasping the elemental fact that it is really a manifestation of cowardice and it is now generally regarded as an attribute of the "mucker college." n8 THE UNDERGRADUATE Dead conventions die slowly, however, — if I may be forgiven the Irishism. Rough horse-play at initia- tions, really a form of hazing, has practically disap- peared in the colleges whose conventions are usually copied most slavishly, but it will probably persist for years in nooks and corners. As to the bullying of fresh- men, those who believe that with the elimination of actual brutality this matter ceases to be important should read a recent editorial in the "Independent." This points out that while tying men to the railroad track or burying them alive is not a pastime "in which one is apt to find delight after his sophomore days, the habit of imposing one's will upon others in the matter of dress and conduct is not so easily out- lived. A man who has been allowed to dictate to younger and less educated men what color neckties and socks they shall wear, what they shall sing and where they shall walk, is apt to carry into later life the belief in class distinctions and intolerance which his college training has given him." Class fights or rushes have the support of the most authentic historical tradition, and it is an excellent thing for the new students to stand shoulder to shoulder and to learn to work together. College at- tendance, however, is no longer limited to those who are, technically speaking, gentlemen, with the instincts of the sportsman, and this fact, with the enormously POINT OF VIEW 119 increased size of the classes, has made the game so dangerous that it is no longer worth the candle. It is bound to follow hazing, although the conventional traditionalism among students is so strong that a col- lege usually has to suffer a fatal accident, like that at Pennsylvania last year, before student opinion is suffi- ciently educated to bring about abolition. Perhaps we can hit upon some safe and sane substitute for the in- discriminate "scrap," but the attempts thus far lack spontaneity, and, indeed, are so hedged about with rules and oversight as to be bores to all concerned. Of course this college life varies in its intensity. In some colleges there is literally little else doing; in some others, particularly city colleges where the boys live at home, the home life smothers the college life. In the stronger city institutions which draw a number of their boys from a distance, there is usually an active college life of the traditional sort embedded in the surround- ing mass, and it is usually a life of a pretty good sort, because from the nature of the case its insulation is less complete. College girls have developed their own conventional life, and in the West I understand that this is as much of an academic problem to the authorities as is that of the boys. In the East the girls are more conscientious about keeping up their college work; they put more i2o THE UNDERGRADUATE emphasis on the activities which have an intellectual content, and the possession of brains is much more of an asset so far as student prominence goes. As I have already intimated, the men's colleges could learn much to their advantage from a study of the life in Barnard or Bryn Mawr or Vassar. If I were asked to name the three things which col- lege life ought to do, and too often fails to do, I should say, first, to improve student manners; second, to in- culcate a spirit of human charity; and third, to develop habits of personal responsibility. Of course the three merge into one another, but it may be possible to em- phasize each separately. Bad manners come from selfishness or ignorance, or both, for most selfish persons are sublimely uncon- scious of the fact. Each year I have to remind several boys, who are doubtless really fond of their mothers, of the propriety of occasionally writing home to them. Superficial tricks of speech or gesture don't constitute good manners. The boarding-school boy who calls the dean " sir " at the end of every sentence and apologizes for taking his time, but who neglects to answer his letters and invitations, is a case in point. It seems hopeless to try to make students see that the anonym- ity of the mob gives them no leeway in their personal standards. Boys who would as soon think of flying to POINT OF VIEW 121 the moon as of whistling at a girl from the window of their own homes, will do this from the window of a classroom — but will desist when it is explained that such action gives the college a bad name. This mob psychology has to do with most of a student's sins of commission, and a complete lack of conscience and method about time and its inexorable flight, with his sins of omission. A recent essay, "In Defense of Good Taste," by a Columbia undergraduate reminds me how rare is an intelligent appreciation of this quality, and how much more subtle and personal it is than mere good manners. Every college boasts of its democracy and does so sincerely, but the students very seldom realize how broad democracy really is. They point to the fact that the rich boy's dollars are really a detriment to his so-- cial progress, and that the boy who waits on table is elected president of his class. But while it is true that there is much less snobbery of certain kinds to-day than there was twenty years ago, a boy of impeccable breeding is ignored socially because he happens to be a Jew. It is easy to say that the same things occur in the world outside. Indeed, the student's attitude is often sedulously fostered by his parents. But I submit that in such matters privileged people like college stu- dents should lead and not follow. The cultivated Jew is not the only type of student who fails to receive his iai THE UNDERGRADUATE deserts. Take, for example, the boy who before the United States entered the war had his own ideas as to international matters and who was accordingly cried down as a poltroon. As I have tried to show in a previous chapter, the rapidly increasing number of college students of the Jewish race presents a problem that it is particularly important for the future welfare of our colleges to have solved upon a broad and equitable basis, and it will only be so solved when the Jews of social experience are given a chance to cooperate. In the meantime, the fortitude of such boys in the face of conditions existing in some colleges is beyond praise. They are in the position of the cultivated American traveler in Europe who sees his country judged by the grotesque perform- ance, in hotels and elsewhere, of the other kind of American. When students say democracy, they very often mean oligarchy. A group of generous alumni recently wished to furnish a smoking-room in one of our col- leges, and consulted a prominent senibr about their plans. He replied, with the unconscious brutality of youth, that there was absolutely no use in doing so, because that particular room was never used except by "kykes" and other down-and-outers. The "signifi- cant" people, of course, had already their clubs to go to. t POINT OF VIEW 123 Habits of personal responsibility will, we hope, im- prove manners and develop democracy, and they are sorely needed by most students for other reasons also. Any employment secretary can tell of men who really need work in order to get through college, but who never can be found when work is there for them. It would not seem to be too great strain on a man's time and attention to call once a day for his college mail or to keep in telephone touch with the office, yet this is just what they cannot be made to do. A large part of the drudgery of the administrative offices is caused by these irresponsible men who have no realization of how much labor their carelessness causes to others. A sense of responsibility need not entail a wrinkled brow and a rushing about from one thing to another with fox- terrier-like incessancy ; there are men who are responsi- ble who look and act in this way, but alas, there are many others with these outward and visible signs who are not. From the foregoing, one might think with the Psalmist that " there is none that doeth good, no, not one," but in some miraculous way the boys succeed, or at least most of them succeed, in being worth while in spite of their natural and acquired handicaps, and they will be more worth while when they realize that most of their handicaps are readily removable. In view of 124 THE UNDERGRADUATE the present tendency on the part of faculties to throw increasing responsibility on the students themselves, I have hopes that the general movement toward a social conscience throughout the country will have its effect in due season on college snobbery and shif tless- ness. The following, from an editorial in the " Harvard Crimson," seems to me significant: — When a man is put on probation his friends slightly de- plore the fact, but seldom do they exert any moral pres- sure to impel the man to attend his classes and do the rea- sonable amount of study that is required to save him. . . . If probation were looked upon as a disgrace, and if a little healthy missionary work were done by classmates, — in other words, if undergraduates realized some responsibility for their fellows, — the sinking probationer would more often make an effective effort to reform his ways. A I don't think the advice and suggestions of parents have much influence on the college life of their sons. They are too likely to take at its face value the assur- ances of the latter that these are esoteric matters in which the parent, even though a college graduate him- self, can have no real understanding. Out West intelli- gent college presidents are beginning to arrange for a Parents' Week each year, during which fathers and mothers and sons and daughters can all live together on or near the campus, and the parents will doubtless learn just how much like ordinary existence this mys- terious college life really is. For more sophisticated POINT OF VIEW 125 households, I should recommend Mr. Edward S. Martin's essay entitled "A Father to his Freshman Son." Perhaps it may be considered as class advice, but it is very good of its kind. For example: "Show respect for people; for all kinds of people, including yourself, for self-respect is at the bottom of all good manners." Also; "Go to church; if not invariably, then variably. They don't require it any more in col- lege, but you can't afford not to; for the churches reflect and recall — very imperfectly, to be sure — the religion and the spirit of Christ; and on that the whole of our civilization rests. Get understanding of that." Along with his less amiable manners and customs, the college student has acquired certain qualities which it is only fair to place on the other side of the ledger. He is really generous of his time, his money, his affection, in proof of which any one who has had to do with college boys can readily provide his own ex- amples. The first, for example, and most eager to take part in Belgian relief and in the drudgery of the prison camps were American college instructors and college students. When a stranger is taken in, he is taken in whole- heartedly — as is befitting in the country still more completely in the pioneering stage than perhaps we realize. Americans may go to Oxford, but they cannot 126 THE UNDERGRADUATE ever be Oxford men, but Englishmen or Germans or South Americans can and do become utterly and en- tirely Yale or Dartmouth or Pennsylvania men. The undergraduate's cheerfulness may mean too many over-confident to-morrows as regards his studies, but I am sure it helps him when he does study and it helps all who come into contact with him. Whether the college environment can lay any claim to it, or whether it is just an attribute of selected young America, I do not know, but in every college group there is always some one capable of rising to the occasion, whatever it may be, and sometimes the occasion requires not only ability and initiative, but considerable moral, courage. The resourcefulness of students cannot be better shown than in the ways they earn money to make their expenses. The cooperation of the college administra- tion in this work has already been described, but no employment agent is needed by the pachyderm who collects new pipes, and "breaks them in" at a price for his more sensitively organized friends, or for the boy who finds he can sell his blood from time to time for transfusion at the hospital, or that he can get two dollars an hour for playing chess with some devotee of that game. I actually know of a nimble-footed undergraduate who made two thousand dollars as a teacher in one summer during the dancing craze. The POINT OF VIEW 127 most extraordinary method of working one's way through college of which I ever heard was that of two downy-cheeked undergraduates of Dickinson College who would drift down to the hotel at Carlisle on Sat- urday night and permit themselves to be lured into a poker game by the wicked commercial travelers whom they were sure to find there. The boys were not Ah Sins, but when they returned to college they usually had enough in their pockets to keep the wolf from the door until the following Saturday night. From this very fragmentary collection of examples which I have brought together, it will be seen that whatever he may take into his lungs in the classroom, the college student breathes a pretty highly charged atmosphere outside it. That it is noxious to some, there can be no doubt. The failure of the college in the case of a boy who becomes a drunkard or a libertine is obvious, but such cases are the rare exceptions as com- pared with the often unrecognized failures of boys of great potentiality to choose, among the many paths which college offers to them, the path which will lead as high as they are capable of rising. Not one boy in five hundred thinks of the "why" of the whole thing, and that in college he himself, and not the activities, is the important thing. The thing which emphasizes how unconscious the whole process is, so far as its edu- 128 THE UNDERGRADUATE cational value goes, is the way a chap stands out who enters the various college activities for the experience they will give him. I know one able and rather cold- blooded fellow who had to work hard to earn the money to take him to college and who deliberately de- voted money and time he could ill afford to being a conventional college man, a task which cost him much more effort than did his Phi Beta Kappa; later he de- fended himself on the ground that he recognized his lack of social experience and since the college life seemed to be a recognized and stimulated part of the show he took it just as seriously as any other part of his course. The test for any boy is to look into his heart and see if what he is doing is really worth while for him. If not, what he is doing is probably not worth while for the college; for, after all, the college, as he understands it, consists of himself and his fellows. With the develop- ment of student responsibility we may hope that the leaders, at any rate, will tend to get a clearer percep- tion of what student life and participation in it really mean, the realization that in college, to quote Professor Erskine once more, "are represented all the important ideals of civilized man. It is our part to choose our ideals and to pay the price, knowing that the essentials of our choice will become incorporated into our habits and so into our character." POINT OF VIEW 129 In the chapters which follow I shall try to consider college life, not as a thing in itself, but in relation to other factors, and to venture some prophecies as to its future development. CHAPTER V STUDENT ORGANIZATIONS In studying the organized life of students to-day we must do so in the light of the student psychology of which we have been getting some hints in the last chapter, remembering, of course, that the student point of view is partly innate and partly the result of the development of these activities themselves. The most important factors to remember are the tendency to- ward imitativeness and conventionality, as a result of which many forms of activity are established merely because they exist somewhere else, and many others continue long after any real usefulness has ceased. Then there is the element of loyalty which urges boys to do something for the good of the college. Almost before they are matriculated the freshmen are sorted and seized and attacked by the assistant managers of the various activities; and while all this makes for social acquaintance and often for a very useful train- ing, it is often a serious waste of time for the boy of intellectual promise. Another factor which confuses the issue is the student convention that undergradu- ate activities may be talked about and boasted about, whereas one must be reticent about his intellectual STUDENT ORGANIZATIONS 131 interests. This convention, which persists among the alumni, gives a somewhat unfair picture of neglect by the student body at large of the things which presum- ably it went to college to gain. As a matter of fact, student activities are often direct helps to the faculty rather than hindrances to it. I don't mean that many boys do not make the mis- take of giving the second-best of their brains and in- terests to their studies, nor that too many first-rate fellows are not dropped out of college as the result of over-participation, nor that the timid and inconspicu- ous boy who does n't happen to get into activities is not, because of their general prevalence, rendered more timid and more inconspicuous than ever. What I do mean is that many "concrete-minded " boys would not remain to take advantage of the curriculum if the curriculum were the only stimulus offered to them, and that the sorting-out process which goes on in these activities is of advantage, not only to the student body, but to the faculty, in bringing to light the student with the sense of responsibility, almost the rarest of undergraduate virtues, and of singling out the "four- flushers." Later on I shall have something to say about the cooperation of the faculty in many activities which have a direct vocational and intellectual value and also as to the growing movement toward student or- ganizations which share with the college administra- i 3 2 THE UNDERGRADUATE tion the general responsibility for the good name and usefulness of the institution. I shall make no attempt to describe these activities in any detail. Any good college Year-Book could do it better. Their historic background is somewhat con- fused, but two elements, I think, stand out pretty clearly. In the first place, the oldest types, the liter- ary society, the fraternity, and the informal athletics were unconscious attempts on the part of the student to make up what the college itself failed to offer, and in spite of the overlying mass of conventionalism to- day, this educational idea still persists and should not be overlooked. Secondly, the activities are, it seems to me, in large part the lineal descendants of the old dis- orders as an outlet for superabundance of youthful activity, and in many cases their natural appeal is to boys of the tender years of the earlier undergraduate, rather than to the grown men in our colleges to-day. Student organizations may be divided roughly some- what as follows: There are the groups of students en- deavoring to produce or to perform something; sec- ondly, there are the clubs, like the fraternities, which are now primarily social in character; and finally, there is the political machinery of the student body. At first this last had almost wholly to do with the class organ- ization, but to-day there is usually a general college STUDENT ORGANIZATIONS 133 body, selected by the students themselves and often sharing to a very important degree in the general ad- ministration of the institution. These activities may be divided, in another way, between those which are, so to speak, standard, which may be found with slight variations in almost any col- lege, and those which are local in their character. The latter are likely to be the more free from the blight of conventionalism. A good example of this type is the organization which is composed of teachers and stu- dents on practically an equal basis, usually that of interest in some intellectual field. Leaving athletics for the moment at one side, the standard activities of the productive type are those having to do with writing, with debating and other forms of public speaking, and with musical and dra- matic activities. Of these the last seems to me to-day the most significant. College journalism, though it usually turns out a product that is a great convenience to every one in the college, is very much convention- alized, and with occasional brilliant exceptions the purely literary work of students is very imitative. Even the radical essays and editorials are convention- ally radical. Debating and public speaking are, of course, excellent activities for young men and par- ticularly in the Middle West are very highly devel- oped; students will voluntarily put an enormous 134 THE UNDERGRADUATE amount of work upon a debate or an oration, but col- lege debating seems to me to have developed along lines of verbal trickery when it threw off the shackles of the old-fashioned, spread-eagle bombast, rather than in the direction of meeting the issues at stake frankly and sincerely. In selecting dramatics for particular praise I am not forgetting the awful banality of the average college show (which usually completely ignores the wealth of local color which the students could find all around them in their college life) or the simpering convention- alities of the typical glee-club performance. Though these are often the most conspicuous, they are the least significant expressions of an almost universal human instinct. There were many distinct elements of the dramatic in the old disturbances and outrages that gave them a certain justification even in the minds of the long-suffering professors, as there is to-day in the planting of the 'Varsity letter high up on the hillside. Boys are naturally excellent actors. The schoolboy productions of Shakespearean plays at the Riverdale School and elsewhere are really extraordinarily good. Growing self-consciousness makes some of them, at any rate, lose the knack at the college age, but in general it is much better retained than is the art of public speaking, at which high-school boys are admittedly better than collegians. STUDENT ORGANIZATIONS 135 In many of the colleges there is a well-organized dramatic society which, notably at Yale and Dart- mouth, gives excellent performances. Sometimes one of the literary societies, as the Delta Upsilon at Harvard or the Philolexion Society at Columbia, makes itself responsible for the performances of old plays. As for the conventional college shows, the best are on the av- erage those of Princeton, Pennsylvania, and the Massa- chusetts Institute of Technology, where a good deal of time which one would suppose should go into the struc- ture of bridges and dynamos is given over to dramatics. In general the value of these shows is in the social good times at rehearsal more than in the public performance. College dramatic performances range from impromptu slap-stick farce on fraternity meeting nights to the most elaborate presentation of modern problem plays. They include a number of plays in foreign languages. At the larger universities there is always a French and a German and usually also a Spanish and an Italian play, sometimes even one in Chinese. The perform- ances which I myself enjoy the most are those of the robust old English comedies, where the taking of wo- men's parts by men is all "in the picture." I must con- fess that this feature always gets a little on my nerves in modern serious plays. Many college graduates, whose chief interest as students was in the drama, have taken respectable and sometimes distinguished places i 3 6 THE UNDERGRADUATE in professional life after graduation, both as actors and dramatists, and the same is true, though to a less de- gree, in music. A number of students are genuinely and intelligently interested in the problems presented by the extraordi- nary development of the moving picture. I should be glad to see a company of college boys try the experi- ment of setting up their own studio and laying out a film play of college life, with themselves as the actors. A very important part of the organized activities of the college is that connected with the religious life. This, however, had best be dealt with in connection with the general religious and moral conditions in colleges. The incidental and often accidental organizations among students are frequently unknown to the more prominent undergraduates, but I believe they are among the most important elements of the whole. They are more likely to develop at the larger institu- tions. In the small college, except for incidental mor- tality, the material stays put. Everybody knows what everybody else is doing and what he ought to be doing. In the larger places there is a constant weaving in and out of human material, and on the whole the pressure of the conventional activities is less strong. This means of necessity less intimate general contact, but groups of boys thrown together accidentally from the STUDENT ORGANIZATIONS 137 fact that they live in the same entry, or board at the same table, develop all sorts of interesting little groups. — I myself have most pleasant memories of a Sabbath- Day's Journey Association — it was easier in those days to get away from the city pavements in New York — and also of a body which modestly called itself the Societas Bardorum Vatiumque Columbiae. Of college organizations whose purpose is primarily social, the most conspicuous, and on the whole the most typical, is the Greek letter fraternity. In the college secret societies for men there are, in round fig- ures, a total enrollment of three hundred thousand (more than four times the enrollment of thirty years ago), and an investment in lands, buildings, and en- dowment of more than twelve million dollars. The fifteen hundred living chapters are scattered through the colleges over the length and breadth of the United States and Canada. The only exceptions are the colleges of Mississippi, where they are forbidden by law, and Princeton, Oberlin, with one or two of our new colleges like Reed, and most of the Catholic and some few other denominational institutions. Besides the chapters there have developed alumni associations, city clubs, an elaborate heraldry, catalogues, histories, magazines, and song books. Phi Beta Kappa was formed in 1776, but the clubs 138 THE UNDERGRADUATE that really began our present system were founded at Union and Hamilton a half century later. Their rapid spread throughout the college world was due to an in- teresting combination of two influences. The college curriculum lacked literary subjects and opportunities for self-expression, and there was intense interest at the time in freemasonry and the like. With time the fraternities took on widely different functions and re- sponsibilities. First renting and later building their own houses, they took up the problem of the home life of the students, and to-day are perhaps more than anything else schools of social training. If any one thinks the value of this training in a fraternity is neg- ligible, let him pick out at random ten fraternity and ten non-fraternity men from any graduating class, and he will see a difference in social efficiency much greater than can be explained by the obvious retort that it is the gregarious type of boy that naturally goes into the fraternity. If it had not been for the development of club life, the fraternities might have entirely disappeared with the growth of athletic and other interests among the students. Each college chapter of the "line" fraternities bears a definite relation to the college administration, to the student body, to the other fraternities in the college, to its own alumni, to its national organization and sister chapters, to the whole fraternity world, and STUDENT ORGANIZATIONS 139 finally to the nation itself. In addition there are spe- cial developments at certain institutions, the senior societies at Yale, the Harvard clubs, and the local societies here and there. In all this complexity the important thing is always the relation of some particular boy to some particular society. If the freshman when he gets to college has had a father, an elder brother, or a chum to pave the way, or if he brings an athletic reputation or even if he is comparatively unknown but has enjoyed the ironing out process of a boarding school, or has acquired else- where the necessary tricks of dress and manner, he is "rushed" by one or more societies — a very com- plicated and in many ways an absurd performance. Under the pretense of entertainment he is filled with information calculated to show the overwhelming su- periority of the society in question to all others, and the critical importance to himself of accepting an invi- tation to join. It is impossible, of course, to guarantee the result of acquiescence in any individual case. Any boy may be harmed by membership in any society, but if he has chosen a good college in the first place and taken the trouble to learn something about the fraternities repre- sented there, and which of them is likely to be best for him, he will be benefited in numberless ways. " These clubs have their ups and downs, and pleasant 1 4 o THE UNDERGRADUATE as it is to be a member of an organization of long historic tradition, intimate association during one's undergraduate days with the best group of students available is really more important. The chances are that a younger society will get the prestige later on, if it is now getting the best boys in open competition. The main thing for a freshman to consider is whether the young men whom he meets appeal to him as prospective intimate friends, and are likely to bring out the best that is in him. In general the'old and socially prominent organiza- tions are losing their lead over the younger and less well known fraternities, as the result of complacency and laziness. They are also likely to suffer from in- breeding. I recently visited a chapter where eighteen of the twenty-four members are the sons or younger brothers of former members. The newer societies have few "legacies" and consequently have a freer hand hi their selections. They are willing to take a chance with boys overlooked at first. They have usually developed a more effective central organization. For example, some of them keep the boys' parents informed as to the member's standing in scholarship and under- graduate activities throughout his course. Some few of the older societies, it should be said, early saw the wisdom of such policies, one of the oldest being the first to appoint a paid traveling secretary. STUDENT ORGANIZATIONS 141 The undergraduate chapter, except for occasional visits from alumni, is all in all in a separate college. In a university, on the other hand, there are always graduates from other chapters more or less closely affiliated, and while chapter life is likely to be less in- timate, since more of the members live outside the chapter house, it usually represents a wider, social, geographical, and intellectual horizon. The relative educational value of the life in different chapters, even in the same fraternity, varies widely; conversation may be limited to trivial athletic details, or girls, or clumsy local joking; or it may show that the men are not afraid to be interested in intellectual matters or public affairs. Let me give an example or two of chapter spirit at its best. At a country chapter house the boys set apart enough of their scanty spending money to keep a brother with tuberculosis at Saranac for two years. And at least one city chapter, as an organization, makes itself responsible for work at a down- town settle- ment. At McGill and the University of Toronto the chapters have been virtually wiped out by the unanim- ity with which the members enrolled for service at the outbreak of the great war, and the same process has already begun at many a society on our own side of the line. The standing in scholarship of any chapter always 142 THE UNDERGRADUATE bears a very close relation to its finances, its sobri- ety, and its morals, which is a fact worth while for parents and mature-minded undergraduates to re- member. The scholarship lists are usually published nowadays, and information may always be had from the college. If any chapter appears consistently at or near the bottom of the list, or if the members have a bad reputation among the local tradesmen, it is almost certain that a closer inspection will reveal drinking, gambling, or other undesirable activities. An untidy house usually indicates slovenly administration and a lack of pride in the society. Where the non-fratemity students are numerous enough to be significant, the general scholarship aver- age of the fraternity students is still distinctly lower than that of the former, but thanks to vigorous efforts, the fraternity men are now advancing somewhat more rapidly than any other group in the community. The percentage of them who leave college without graduating is twenty-nine per cent, which is to-day slightly less than that of college men as a whole. In considering the fraternity as a college phenome- non we must not forget the boy who is not invited to join. The activities of the fraternity chapters, their "rushing," their dances, their dabbling in college politics, is regarded by the complete outsider as a peculiarly offensive combination of snobbery, frivolity, STUDENT ORGANIZATIONS 143 and corruption, and he rather rejoices at being recog- nized as a different order of being. A boy in what Arthur Train calls the "gray zone," however, is likely to suffer acutely from the thought that he has been sized up by all the groups and not considered as good enough for even the poorest of them, and if a boy has set his heart on some particular club and is overlooked by it, other invitations give him scant pleasure. Many such students in colleges where the fraternity tradi- tion is most potent, leave at the end of their freshman year for some university where the conventional fra- ternity machinery is less in evidence. It would be a pious deed, if it were possible, to abolish some chapters in every college, and even every chapter in some colleges, but until we find a better vehicle for a certain kind of training that boys need, I am inclined to think, though many of my academic friends would disagree, we had better stick to the machinery that has grown up spontaneously. Man is a gregarious animal, and his impulse to form groups is based on a deep-seated instinct. As I have said earlier in this book, the fraternities deserve their full share of blame for the wave of general irresponsibility and laxness of about twenty years ago, but much of the intemperate charges now leveled at them is based upon conditions that, except in rare instances, no longer exist. 144 THE UNDERGRADUATE The element of secrecy is soon accepted by most members at its real value. They realize that, as a matter of fact, fraternity secrets are almost non- existent. Secrecy is not the main reason for the lack of democracy in many fraternities. Delta Upsilon, a non-secret society, is little better than its rivals in this matter, and at Princeton, where secret societies are forbidden, but where there is the same spontaneous grouping of young men as at other institutions, we recently witnessed a protest against these non-secret clubs on the very grounds of exclusiveness and lack of democracy so familiar to all students of the fraternities. In my judgment the fraternities are on the whole moving in the right direction. Better standards in the good colleges mean that fewer idle-minded boys are eligible for election, or if elected, the harm they are sure to do to the fraternity group is much briefer in its duration. In most institutions the fraternities are under faculty control to the extent that eligibility for initiation means passing in a majority of first-term subjects. Further- more, the dean usually has good friends in each senior "delegation," whom he consults as to the scholarship and general welfare of the under-classmen. The stu- dent council often limits, to the benefit of the chapters, the number of house parties and dances to be held in a season. The alumni of each chapter have a very defi- STUDENT ORGANIZATIONS 145 nite influence in chapter affairs, which also is usually exerted for good. They take legitimate advantage of the fact that the money for the chapter house has come from them, and that in most cases they hold title to the property. The millennium, however, is still a long way off. Although scholarship has been greatly improved by cutting off at the bottom, the fraternities as yet do little to stimulate the really talented men. Many a boy of brilliant scholarly promise is so overloaded with minor duties "round the house," or pressed into out- side activities to enhance the chapter reputation, that he has to content himself with a barely respectable passing mark. The fraternities, particularly the older ones, seem to me also ta be too cautious. In selecting their new members they lay so much stress on what is supposed to be social position that they are afraid to take chances, and as a result are likely to get a majority of rather negative-minded boys, and this results in what seems to me to be the most important danger — a narrowing of social horizon and of human charity. Their general reputation suffers severely from the arro- gance and stupidity of the least enlightened members. The withdrawal from the New York City College of a well-known fraternity was deemed of sufficient impor- tance for widespread editorial discussion, and the i 4 6 THE UNDERGRADUATE right of a State to abolish secret societies in its public institutions was carried up to the Supreme Court and there sustained in 1915. There are examples enough of snobbery, inconsider- ateness, and selfish stupidity, but at least the begin- nings of a new spirit of individual responsibility for social justice and tolerance may be recognized. The question as to whether a man is his brother's keeper, moreover, is not limited to the radicals and iconoclasts in any good college, but is being honestly faced by a growing number of serious-minded boys who do not believe that whatever is is wrong, and who are willing to do their share in improving the social and political institutions that they find to their hand. In the best fraternities such men are doing much to break down the silly conventionalism and injustices that furnish the basis for criticism of fraternity life to-day, and every November about a hundred alumni, many of them distinguished in various walks of life, meet in an Inter-Fraternity Conference, in New York, and give serious consideration to plans for checking the evils and emphasizing the good qualities of the American fraternities — a significant tribute to the weight of opinion in favor of the fraternity as a college institution. Turning now to the political machinery, it should first be noted that the changes within recent years STUDENT ORGANIZATIONS 147 have been very rapid. In the good old days the class was the primary unit of organization, and the interest in class politics often reached a pitch of intensity which colored the entire after lives of the participants. Now- adays with the development of the elective system, and the social and athletic groupings which cut across class lines, the class bond is relatively less strong. The freshmen, nevertheless, are promptly gathered to- gether by the junior president, and they proceed to elect their own officers, and to frame a constitu- tion designed to provide for every conceivable and inconceivable contingency. Thereafter, meetings of decreasing frequency are held, at which zealous youngsters make fervent and lengthy speeches upon matters of slight importance. The sophomores keep up the organization largely for the purpose of see- ing that the freshmen are properly received into the community, after which class meetings are likely to languish until Class Day and graduation. Formerly the classes were expected to provide opportunities for social joys. Now that the fraternities are no longer lodges, but clubs, with all too frequent house parties and chapter dances, and astute managers are arranging dances to stimulate attendance at basket-ball games and concerts, there is really little left for the class to do in this field except to arrange for a hectic Junior Week, and for the social side of its commencement activities. i 4 8 THE UNDERGRADUATE The whole question of the relation of the college to the eternal feminine has changed as much as anything else in the evolutionary processes of the institution. Even in my own day, although undergraduates were known to have girl friends and from time to time to see them, their college life was kept very distinctly apart from their feminine interests, except on certain clearly marked occasions; as, for example, the Junior Ball or on Class Day. To-day girls play a very prominent part in college life, personally I think a far too promi- nent part at many institutions; and one of the ques- tions which a thoughtful parent should ask about the college he is considering for his son is whether its life contains too many of the elements of the summer hotel. The matter is largely one of local tradition and de- velopment and depends surprisingly little upon the statutory organization of the institution. There are coeducational colleges where the boys and girls really have very little to do with one another, and so-called "monastic " colleges where the students are incessantly importing girls from near-by and even distant towns for dances and parties of all kinds. But I have wandered from my subject, which the reader may recall is the student as a political animal. The most interesting and important development of recent years is the growing responsibility of a body of STUDENT ORGANIZATIONS 149 seniors, elected by the student body at large and usually called the "Senior Council," though it some- times has a classical appellation, as at Dartmouth, where it is known as the "Palaeopitus." At most in- stitutions to-day the senior council has powers and responsibilities which would have been simply un- thinkable to professors or students half a century ago. The colleges which refuse to throw such responsibilities on the students are severely criticized even by their own members. For example, George Ade recently re- signed as a trustee of such an institution, his reason being that he was "still of the opinion that you cannot teach a bird to fly by tying him to a limb." One important matter in which the student council often succeeds where the college administration has failed is in the control and oversight of the local repre- sentatives of the daily press, whose ill-considered activ- ities have often done a college serious injustice. This may be because the student body represents a large number of potential purchasers of any journal, whereas the college administration does not, but at any rate the results are most satisfactory. Some of the other activ- ities of the council are very interesting. For example, at Princeton lectures are being arranged by profes- sional men representative of different callings, so that the students may have some idea of the relative merits of the occupations which they may enter after gradua- 150 THE UNDERGRADUATE tion. Of course the council sometimes bites off more than it can profitably chew, but this also happens to governmental heads upon much older shoulders. For example, the Harvard council was unable to force com- pulsory membership in the Harvard Union, desirable as that arrangement would have been to the finance committee of the Union. In dealing with matters of discipline, which are being more and more referred to the council by the college faculty, they sometimes err on the side of over-severity, but usually they have an instinct for making the punishment fit the crime, which was often lacking sadly under the older regime. A fellow-dean and I once referred a rather serious case to the Columbia Student Council. A horde of triumphant sophomores had paraded at a late hour through one of the girls' dormitories of the university. Though the boys meant no harm, they had certainly committed a grave indiscretion and had brought a deal of unpleas- ant newspaper notoriety upon their alma mater. The senior council realized the gravity of the situation, but before they agreed to take it up they very properly asked what would be the exact status of their findings. One of the boys, I remember, put it as follows: "Sup- posing we go into this thing thoroughly, and supposing I, for example, vote for the punishment of some very intimate friend, a fellow in my own fraternity, and then supposing the college does n't do anything — STUDENT ORGANIZATIONS 151 where does that leave me?" It was an embarrassing question, to which my colleague and I finally replied that, while naturally we could not commit the president or the trustees, he and I would agree to recommend publicly that the findings of the council be approved, so that if they were overruled we should be overruled with them. This seemed satisfactory, and the boys went into the affair very carefully and fixed upon the ingenious punishment for the entire class of prohibiting the holding of the historic Junior Ball. It was a severe punishment to the class, but it bore upon all equally and it was supported by student public opinion. That was several years ago, and we certainly have had not the slightest sign of a recurrence of the difficulty. The experience which the members themselves get from the senior council is of the greatest value. The high average of efficiency is all the more surprising when we remember that election is too often due to a successful athletic career or some other largely irrele- vant factor. At some colleges an interesting system of multiple or preferential voting is being tried out, to discourage "deals," and to keep the successful candi- dates from being limited to a small group of the pro- fessionally prominent men. Once elected, the mem- bers are likely to lose a good deal of their popularity, because in their activities they necessarily tread upon many toes, but the fact that the students as a body 152 THE UNDERGRADUATE are in a position, through their own representatives, to change unsatisfactory conditions has done much to eradicate the old habit of idle "knocking." The most widely discussed instance of the taking over of responsibilities by the students in matters formerly exclusively in the hands of the faculty is the so-called "honor system" of examinations. This is really a misnomer. The point is the transfer of the responsibility for honorable conduct from the faculty to the students, but the name is not really important after all. Mr. Lester, of the Hill School, recently gath- ered some interesting statistics, based upon three hundred and fifty letters of inquiry to colleges and two hundred and eighty replies thereto. At present he finds about thirty per cent of the colleges have systems which have superseded faculty supervision of exami- nations more or less completely. He gives no figures as to colleges where the matter is still under active dis- cussion, but to any one who reads the educational items in the newspapers it is evident that the matter is " up " at many additional institutions. Sixty per cent of the colleges now having such a system are for men; forty- four per cent of them are in the South, which is natural, because the honor system was originally established in 1842 at the University of Virginia, which still holds a position of hegemony throughout the whole region. Of the institutions having the system, about one third STUDENT ORGANIZATIONS 153 require a definite promise from a student to report dis- honesty on the part of a fellow-student. So far as my own experience goes, the system suc- ceeds when the student body is homogeneous, as at Virginia, Princeton, or Williams. In institutions of this type sending to Coventry really means something, and the danger of it may be expected to act as a deter- rent. Such conditions are to be found only in a com- paratively small number of the more important col- leges, but this does not mean that the system should not ultimately prove to be the best for all institutions. It does mean, however, that it should be adopted at places not having this natural advantage, not as a mat- ter of collegiate imitation, as has sometimes, I fear, been the case, but only after thorough study and a demonstration of the presence in the institution of a social conscience and a sense of social responsibility. In matters of this kind a convention, even if nothing higher, of honor is absolutely essential. Such a con- vention, by the way, exists in the English and Scotch universities in spite of very close faculty supervision of examinations. This point of view is developing rap- idly in the United States as a result of improved rela- tions between faculty and students, and I expect to see the honor system the normal thing before many years, but in the meantime I believe more harm than good is done by its premature establishment. 154 THE UNDERGRADUATE Other examples of the turning over of important responsibilities to students is in the self-government system of many college dormitories and in the designa- tion, preferably by the senior council, of older students to act as informal advisers to freshmen. Senior advisers are now appointed at Harvard, Michigan, Minnesota, and elsewhere. At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology the system is very carefully developed. The candidate for admission receives a letter during the summer from a boy of whom he has probably never heard, duly authenticated by a confirming letter from the dean, telling him when and where to report upon his arrival at Cambridge. The adviser, who usually has four freshmen in his charge, takes a real personal interest in them. He sees that they successfully master the intricacies of registration, helps them choose a room, and advises them about various undergraduate societies and other activities. We are trying at Columbia an interesting experi- ment in the way of an informal organization to em- phasize the spirit of cooperation between the students and the faculty. At the meetings of our College Forum, which are called only when there is something worth while to discuss, officers and students meet on a plane of absolute equality and discuss matters of educational or social importance with the utmost STUDENT ORGANIZATIONS 155 frankness. We are in hopes that the Forum will prove an important factor in the life of the college, not merely as a place for frank interchange of views, but as a means of making the student body at large appreciate at his true worth the man who has an idea, who gets up and expresses it clearly and forcibly, and who then sits down. One reason why the athlete's reward in public appreciation is so great is that he has an obvious way of showing the quality of his performance to the stu- dent body, and where the thinker and speaker is given the same opportunity — he has it, for instance, in the Union at Oxford or Cambridge — he will get the same recognition from his fellow-students. Is the game of college life, of which I have been giving only the most incomplete suggestion of the complicated rules, worth the candle ? On the whole, I think it is. I do not mean that it was necessarily worth while as played by the individual boy under the con- ditions immediately preceding the war, particularly by the boy who overlooked the fact that there are only twenty-four hours in each day. We must find better means to check the tendency of overloading am- bitious men. In many places the senior council is working on this problem and with some degree of success. A second problem is to find the proper com- bination of spontaneity and efficiency. This depends upon just the right amount of participation by the 156 THE UNDERGRADUATE faculty in student affairs. These problems are difficult, but not insoluble, and with the simplification of stu- dent life which I am confident will come as a by- product of the war, it is my belief that they will be solved. CHAPTER VI ATHLETICS The fact that I am devoting a separate chapter to athletics alone among the myriad student activities is significant of the place which they occupy in the minds, not only of the students, but of all who talk or write about colleges to-day. This interest, which all too often amounts to an obsession in the case of intercol- legiate contests, is of surprisingly recent growth, but that growth has been so rapid and so widespread that it deserves serious study both by the friends and the enemies of athletics. When we read of the way in which so clear-headed a people as the ancient Greeks went mad over the Olympic games, we realize that the interest in athletic contests must be based upon a fun- damental human instinct, and that attempts to guide it will prove much more profitable than attempts to check or stamp it out. Under the irritation of the evils which accompany athletics we are prone to overlook the really good points. That men are no longer either blind to the accom- panying evils or silent in their presence is evident from many recent publications, of which the most conspicu- ous is an article in the "Atlantic" in which President 158 THE UNDERGRADUATE Foster states that his impression is that at least three fourths of the teachers he has met the country over be- lieve that the American college would better serve its highest purposes if intercollegiate athletics were no more; and he closes his article with the following para- graph: — Typically American though our frantic devotion to inter- collegiate athletics may be, we shall not long tolerate a sys- tem which provides only a costly, injurious, and excessive regime of physical training for a few students, especially those who need it least. The call to-day is for inexpensive, healthful, and moderate exercise for all students, especially those who need it most. Colleges must sooner or later heed that call; their athletics must be for education, not for busi- ness. At the last meeting of the National Collegiate Ath- letic Association it was proposed that the executive committee request one of the great educational funds, the Carnegie, the Sage, or the Rockefeller, to make an impartial and searching survey of the condition of ath- letics in American colleges "with particular reference to their moral influence." As a matter of fact, in spite of such symptoms as the monumental stadia and other evidences of over-em- phasis, a reaction has already set in. Not long ago I was at a men's dinner when President Foster's article was discussed. There were fourteen of us, all college men, in different professions, and all fond of athletics. ATHLETICS 159 It developed that ten out of the fourteen were in favor of the abolition of intercollegiate athletics until the present hysteria should have subsided, and the other four favored radically reduced schedules and simplifi- cation of administration. One of the results of the out- break of the Great War was the immediate and almost complete cancelling of intercollegiate athletic contests. This was, of course, a real sacrifice on the part of the students, but it did not involve, I think, so violent a wrench as would have been the case a few years ago. Later on, when we have time to think these things over, this experience may help us in the reestablish- ment of these contests upon a more reasonable basis. Mr. Lawrence Perry, who is a keen student of ath- letic conditions, writes: — Present indications are that, when athletics are again resumed, they will be conducted upon a saner, more reason- able, more economic basis, at least in institutions whose au- thorities in the present interregnum are sufficiently clear- sighted to grasp the trend which extra-curricular affairs have been taking in the past few years. Those who are aware of the attitude of athletes graduating from second- ary schools with reference to the selection of institutions of higher learning; who know of the competition among alumni of these institutions for the services of these school stars; who are cognizant of the system under which highly paid coaches work — those, in brief, who have marked, not without amazement, or trepidation, or both, increasing manifestations of topheavy growth of our athletic system, will appreciate the opportunities which the present break 160 THE UNDERGRADUATE presents to those whose sense of proportion and ideals have not been warped through association more or less close with university sports. Intercollegiate athletics — and no one hears any criticism of intramural athletics, except when the base- ball breaks a window — began in the decade after the Civil War, with the sports of rowing, — the first to come into general popularity, — baseball, and foot- ball; and these, with track athletics, which developed soon after, are still regarded as the four major sports. To them have been added a dozen or more others. It is not necessary to try to draw too sharp a line. Walk- ing and canoeing may be genuine enough athletics, but what we are talking about is, of course, what street boys (and too many college boys) call "atheletics," and includes not only the performers and their per- formances, but the whole cult that has grown up about the contests, and the elaborate conventionality with which the proceedings are conducted. The best friends of reform in athletics are those who do not shut their eyes to the actual facts. Dr. Ray- croft, of Princeton, for example, writes: — It must be recognized as a biological fact that the adoles- cent animal of any species naturally holds in higher esteem honors which represent preeminence in physical achieve- ments, plus brains, than he does purely intellectual attain- ment, which is instinctively regarded as of secondary im- portance during this period of rapid bodily growth and development. ATHLETICS 161 Nor must it be forgotten that many a man can point honestly to the training he received in college sports as a very important part of his intellectual and moral, as well as of his physical, education. The danger of injury has been greatly reduced, even in the rougher games, by more rigid medical oversight, and in some cases by changes in the rules, and there is now no doubt that the injuries, serious as they are sometimes, are more than counterbalanced by the gen- eral physical improvement in the student body. This is a matter of closer interest to an educational institu- tion than is sometimes realized, because the correla- tion between good health and good scholarship is a definitely positive one. A study of the mortality sta- tistics of a group of students of school and college age recently made at a state university has shown in a striking way that the deaths among young people of this age are predominantly from the lowest group in scholarship rank. Nor is there any question as to the value of the lessons taught in team work and loyalty. The trouble is, not that the lessons to be learned from athletics are not in themselves good, but that they are imperfectly, or rather lopsidedly, learned. The boy hears so much about his service to the college that he begins to look upon himself as a contributor, and as conferring a favor instead of enjoying a privi- 1 62 THE UNDERGRADUATE ; lege. Toward other colleges generous rivalry too often degenerates into dislike and suspicion. One of the recommendations of the recent official State Educa- tional Survey of Iowa was the discontinuance of the annual football game between two of the State institu- tions, because of the bitterness which it had engen- dered. Team play ought to break down selfishness if anything can, but boys often do not see the wider im- plications. Many athletes blandly expect academic privileges per se. Boys stop at the development of physical courage in too many cases. There are exam- ples of whining and pettifogging about grades and even of actual dishonesty and graft. Even making proper allowance for the fact that every college man who gets into the newspapers is a famous athlete, by definition, we find in the divorce courts too many names which we recognize as those of athletes. The essential factor is, of course, that the boys are no longer playing the games for themselves or even for their colleges. They are part of a great highly organ- ized amusement enterprise, like horse-racing, with its public, its press, and its profits. The interest of many an alumnus in the team of his college is really no more academic than is that of the Chicago man in the "Cubs," and many a father holds forth upon his son's performances at college exactly as he would upon those of a promising three-year-old in his stable. It is this ATHLETICS 163 externality of the whole business which has made over- developed athletics so much of what President Butler appropriately calls "an academic nuisance." It is not a cooperating, but a splitting, factor between students and faculty, and it has done more than anything else to delay the coming of the new spirit of working to- gether and thinking together; and, indeed, in some in- stances it has involved a turning back to the attitude of forty years ago on both sides. For the students themselves the games are no longer the natural outlets of youthful exuberance. Very few men play football for pleasure. Even under the new rules they play it for the prominence to be gained or as their contribution to the renown of the college. I remember the naive com- ment of a 'Varsity oarsman on the wisdom of keeping another member of the squad in the first boat: "He may have his faults, but don't forget that he is the only one of us who really likes to row." Baseball is the only one of the major sports which the players seem to en- joy unanimously and which they would play just as hard without the publicity elements which we have introduced into all our athletic contests. The reason that many ball-players slip into summer professional- ism is, I think, not inherent depravity, but because they need the money to meet college expenses, and this method of getting it is not only pleasant, but adds to their efficiency as contributors to the prestige of the 1 64 THE UNDERGRADUATE college. This reasoning is not very straight, but it is understandable. The unmoral attitude which many boys, whom I know to be honest about other matters, adopt toward such things as beating the throw-in is discouraging, but while we regard winning as ninety per cent of the game, it also is understandable. The bad eminence of football in all these matters is partly accidental. It provides copy for the press and pageantry for the public, at a very convenient season, between professional baseball and pugilism. There is no denying that it is pleasant to have an excuse to de- sert one's desk and spend an afternoon out of doors before winter actually closes down. I venture to guess that the development of professional football — there is no reason why it should not develop here as it has in England, it has indeed already had its beginning in Ohio and Minnesota — would do much to clear the air so far as the colleges are concerned. But we must not wholly condemn the public and the press, because it was the protests of the former that led to the elim- ination of much of the brutality of the game, and the best sporting editors are now strongly supporting the new code of ethics in football. The alumni are more responsible than any single fac- tor for football evils, but the colleges should take some blame for not training these men better when they ATHLETICS 165 had them under their influence. It must be remem- bered that the alumni who to-day set the standard of conventional public opinion were undergraduates during that period of interregnum when the faculty had lost control and had not begun to develop co- operation. When the boys now in the senior councils, who are learning to share the responsibilities for the good name of the institution in an intelligent way, become the representative alumni, I am sure we may hope for better influences. The athlete's father is often an alumnus, and is always influenced by the standards of the general pub- lic. The average father would much rather have the chance to mention casually to his friends his son's elec- tion to the football captaincy than the boy's winning academic distinction, and often he does not hesitate to let the boy know it. I know one father, at least, whose only interest in his son's term reports is that he can judge from them whether the latter is still eligible for athletics. The most serious element of all is the professional coach, usually paid for by alumni or out of the profits of the game, and often paid as much as the president himself. The coach is not always a bad influence on the boys, particularly if he is not of the itinerant va- riety, but when his influence is good he should be tied into the faculty, and not left outside as a free lance. 1 66 THE UNDERGRADUATE Faculties are often to blame for not giving men of this kind academic recognition, just because they don't happen to be college graduates. They may not have degrees, but they know their subject quite as well as their fellow-teachers, and, frankly, are likely to possess a stronger supply of personality and- leadership. What does the student himself think about athletics? Often he does not think at all. He may not be so im- personal as the Shah of Persia who refused to go to the Derby on the ground that "it is already known to me that one horse can run faster than another," but in the university colleges there is a large mass of men who are utterly indifferent, and there are more of them than is generally realized in the smaller institutions. When the student does think, his efforts are very much con- fused, and sometimes may be called " thinking," only by courtesy. Boys who come from athleticized prepar- atory schools bring with them a complete supply of athletic lore, and others of the imitative type pick it up from them and from older students. The attitude of their fellows toward boys who are bought and paid for is sometimes one of cynical acceptance of the inevi- table, but more often it is a convenient ignoring of the obvious. Undergraduate athletic opinion is riddled with convention. Take, for example, the almost uni- versal belief that one must continue to play a discredit- ATHLETICS 167 able rival until he is beaten. Then, and then only, may relations be broken. It is only the very exceptional undergraduate who does not firmly believe in the good influence of athlet- ics. They are regarded — that is, successful athletics are regarded — as the only means of making the in- stitution grow. Student opinion on this point is often shared by trustees, presidents, and even by professors, but in view of the statistics gathered by President Eliot and others, it is evident that the influence in this direction is very greatly over-estimated. What turns a boy toward a particular college is its all-round life, including the athletics, not athletics alone; and al- though a dual code of honor is still too prevalent, never- theless boys are coming to a realization of what a good athletic reputation means, and they are unwilling to go to a college where conditions are so notorious that they will have to bear the pleasantries of their friends on the subject. Fifty years ago the boy's sports and pastimes were sublimely ignored by the faculty, and the first serious attempts to control them were taken up unwillingly and only in the face of scandal. At first popular pro- fessors were selected for the task, often men unsuited by training and temperament, and lacking the highly necessary knowledge of human nature. Many of them 1 68 THE UNDERGRADUATE were spineless. Many others were careless, and often left all the details to some clerk, who might be "reached." Not a few professors themselves were cor- rupted, as also have been other college officers not directly connected with the administration of athletics. I know of at least one college president who admits privately that the make-up of the football team is a source of great distress to him, but that he dare not in- terfere because by doing so he would lose the support in educational matters of certain powerful trustees and other alumni. Athletic "scholarships," so-called, are usually looked after by the athletic lobby, but some- times college funds are corruptly used for this pur- pose. Boards of trustees are not wholly without blame. They have often accepted, and even solicited, gifts for athletics out of all proportion to the intellectual needs and equipment of the institution. What is the student to think of the relative value of things when he finds an immense stadium or a marble-lined swimming-pool on the one side, and ill-planned, ill-lighted, and ill- ven- tilated classrooms on the other? Some professors, having lived through the period of storm and stress, are now experts, and exert great in- fluence for good, not only in their own institutions, but throughout the college world at large. I have in mind such men as Dean Briggs, of Harvard, Professor Cor- ATHLETICS 169 win, of Yale, and others. Let me quote a few sen- tences from a recent address by the former: — The time when boys at college, after playing with each other for pure fun, played for pure fun with boys from other colleges is about as likely to come again as the Golden Age, which it is believed to have resembled. Nowadays, even little children are not suffered to play without direction, and the forcing of the play into some educational system. In the highly developed sports of college students, there must be some steady, controlling power such as cannot be demanded of amateur graduates, who presumably have to earn their living and cannot devote their time to the gratuitous coaching of college teams. With no- table exceptions, amateur coaches are inconstant and transient, tempted to graft, unable, for want of time and of tenure, to carry out a well-considered policy. There are still some of us who may take a lesson from those of you who put athletic sport where it belongs, recognizing the men who have charge of it as educators in spite of them- selves, determining that no man shall have charge of it who is not fit to be an educator, and choosing men of sound knowledge whom they are not ashamed to make professors in their faculty. Such men are professionals, as every sal- aried officer of the college is a professional, and in no other way. Despite the principle of supply and demand, there may be reasons why the athletic coach should not receive three times as much salary as the professor of Greek; but there is no inherent reason why he should not hold a posi- tion of equal dignity. He can do more good than the pro- fessor of Greek, and a great deal more harm. Thus faculty control in athletics should be like faculty control in Greek, or economics, or chemistry — not intervention in details, but that power of adjustment in common interests which i 7 o THE UNDERGRADUATE may fitly be exercised over a department of physical edu- cation — a department composed, like other departments, of experts or of persons engaged as such. Faculty con- trol, then, in the best sense, means taking the coaches into the faculty team. It means, also, choosing coaches who are not out of place therein. There is no more reason why the teacher of football should curse his pupils than why the teacher of Greek should curse his, who may be quite as exasperating; and there is every reason why the leader whose manners and conduct are more catching than any others should lead straight, whether on or off the field. The tendency to-day is fortunately strongly toward thus turning over the responsibility for athletics to the academic departments of physical education, where, of course, it obviously belongs. The absurdly high salaries of professional coaches is due largely to the fact that the coach is paid from "easy money," namely, gate receipts, which is as appropriate as would be the pay- ment of the president of the institution in proportion to the gifts he secures. The amateur coach has, as Dean Briggs says, been tried and" found wanting. The physical education departments have in general taken up their responsibility in an admirably intelligent way, and it is a striking sign of the times that the under- graduate students at Hamilton, observing the results at sister institutions, have themselves petitioned their trustees to take that step. ATHLETICS 171 There has been far too much faculty legislation about athletics and too much of it has been enacted in the old spirit of suspicion toward students. Vain attempts to legislate against poor ethical standards have been made, without the courage to remove the crying cause of these low standards, the itinerant coach. Faculties have too often reversed their decisions because of stu- dent and alumni outcry. There was a notorious case last year as to the removal of a football coach. Much of the faculty legislation — and this is also true of the operations of the various intercollegiate rules com- mittees — has been far too complicated. The essential difficulty in games involving physical contact, like foot- ball and hockey, is that these games came down to us from the past, essentially as imitations of warfare, and just now we are only too vividly reminded of how deeply rooted is the feeling that all is fair in war. In spite of their failures, the legislative reformers have done some good things. The tendency toward shorter schedules, and particularly fewer games away from home, is good, and the one-year attendance rule has broken up the practice of bidding men from one college to another. But we have still to overcome the evils of bribing boys of athletic promise before they leave the preparatory school. The bribes are not al- ways in money. The assurance of membership in a coveted club is even more effective. The head masters 172 THE UNDERGRADUATE of some of the important boarding schools are fortu- nately interesting themselves in this question from the point of view of the school and its life. Indirectly the colleges have improved athletics by improving the standards for admission and promotion. In the good colleges, at any rate, the type referred to by Mr. Seymour Deming as mens nulla in corpora sano is rare if not extinct. There remains, however, the tendency here, as in other fields, to let men off with their second-best intellectual performance. Acting on the fallacy that the standard should be the same for all students, faculties stand helpless before the student of intellectual promise who spends far too much time in athletics, provided he secures a passing grade in his subjects. The most crying need of the moment is a more general participation in sports. President Garfield in a recent paper quoted figures to show that in the New England colleges the average expenditure per student for athletic purposes was one hundred and seventy dollars, with only sixteen per cent of the students participating in them. The figures for the country at large were correspondingly fifty-nine dollars and seventeen per cent participating. It will never be easy to prevent an overload upon particular students, because the lad who is good in one sport has a much ATHLETICS 173 better chance than the average of being good in the others, and, furthermore, many boys can say with truth that they study better when training and com- peting. We must, however, find some way to keep our student hive from dividing sharply into the workers and the drones, with the "Queen coach" at the apex of the system. I should like to see more development of indigenous sports, and also more activities bringing students and faculty together in outdoor life. The long walks of the German student clubs are among the pleasantest in- cidents of Continental student life. Other institutions here should follow the example of the Dartmouth Outing Club, which does both these things. Every winter a group of teachers and students climb Mount Washington on skis and creepers. During the Easter holidays the Walking Club of the University of Penn- sylvania sets another good example by a trip of three hundred miles or more. A more direct incentive to greater participation in athletics by the student body is found in the develop- ment of intramural sports. Some of these have sprung up spontaneously, as, for example, fraternity baseball games, and others have been inspired by the faculty or by the department of physical education. These games lack the evils that come from over-intensity and develop an excellent spirit of comradeship, and, 174 THE UNDERGRADUATE finally, their development is based on common sense. You can't get students to improve their health by pull- ing chest weights. They want a game to play, and in most colleges the prescribed work required of freshmen to-day takes the form of some kind of contest. The institutions most successful in developing a general participation in athletics have naturally been the smaller colleges and those larger ones where the student body is so homogeneous as to be easily led. At Haverford, for example, one hundred and fifty out of the one hundred and eighty-six students take regular outdoor exercise; at Miami the percentage is said to be ninety-seven; and at Princeton it is estimated that two thirds of the student body are engaged in one or more sports in connection with intracollegiate teams. Still we have a long way to go before we can reach the con- ditions of Oxford and Cambridge before the present war. I once took a walk through the Oxford playing- fields on a raw afternoon in February, and as far as the eye could penetrate through the foggy atmosphere I saw games of football and terrestrial hockey, no one looking on except an umpire or two. Then I crossed the " High " and, going down to the tow-path, I counted thirteen college eights on the river, plus the 'Varsity. It is n't a question of climate. The Dartmouth winter sports have disproved that comfortable theory. It's a question of habit. What we need is to add to our ATHLETICS 175 already plentiful supply of conventions that a man should keep fit, regardless of whether he is capable of breaking records or making teams. If I am not mis- taken the vigorous open-air life of the officers' training camps, for which thousands of our best undergraduates have deserted their colleges, will teach its lesson of the joys of being thoroughly in condition, and it may have a permanent effect on our undergraduate life. The striking development within recent years of the so-called "minor sports" not only leads to a more general participation, but has other merits as well. Hockey and basketball, which, indeed, have practically become major sports at many colleges, occupy the active students during the winter months and have had much to do with breaking up the sorry traditions of winter dissipation. Some of the minor sports like golf and tennis bring with them high standards of generous sportsmanship, which ought to have their influence on the more technically played games. The minor sports also are likely to be less conventionalized, though I was amused to see at a recent swimming-meet how every one of the candidates for the dive "walked the plank" with exactly the same affected gait. We have had difficulties in America from the very start with regard to amateurism, because we have copied the English standards and applied them to the 176 THE UNDERGRADUATE •widely different temperamental and social conditions over here. The home conditions of some boys, whose names are famous the country over as amateur colle- gians, would appall an Oxford man, but as a matter of fact many of these boys, trained as they have been in the excellent physical education departments of the public high schools, have really sounder ideals of sportsmanship than certain youths from the boarding schools. As a matter of fact, I never saw how a distinction based on money worked in England either, where grown boys will accept a tip of half a sovereign from family friends, and undergraduates are proverbially greedy about money prizes for scholarships. In this country, where so many of the students have to earn money in order to stay in college at all, it is hard to, make them realize an ethical distinction between sell- ing books or kitchenware or playing summer baseball. Not a few close students of college athletics think that conditions would be greatly improved by wiping out entirely the present technical distinctions between amateur and professional conduct, and trusting to high academic standards, honestly administered, as the only criterion. Whether or not this policy will ever gain the day I do not know, but certainly we see at present a new emphasis on the spirit rather than the letter of the law. Dean Briggs has said: "Let our colleges keep at ATHLETICS 177 the head of their athletics men who try to be honest. Let these men trust one another down to the ground, and half the evils of athletics will die a natural death." What we call "professionalism " and try to define by so calling is really a point of view. As Professor Hall says, no rule can make a gentleman out of a mucker. The recent code of football ethics is a promising sign, and it is hoped that this may soon be followed by a similar code for baseball and basket ball. Colleges should real- ize that ethical responsibilities exist for institutions as well as for individuals and that those with high stand- ards should use the power which they possess for good by exercising their right to refuse to play games with colleges of poor standards. Definite action of this kind would certainly be better than the present alternative of casting stones at one's competitors or of adopting a "holier than thou" attitude of implication that the standards of others are matters of supreme indiffer- ence to the Lord's anointed. In athletics to-day we are in the same position of intense nationalism in which the countries of the world find themselves, and we must hope that the future will bring in both instances a broader spirit. It would be silly to pretend that things do not need improvement in this field of undergraduate life, just because so much of the criticism is unfair. All the 178 THE UNDERGRADUATE factors in the college organism have their place in bringing about a better state of affairs. The students themselves must realize the seriousness of the attacks on athleticism, and how much of it is deserved, and must develop a social responsibility in the matter. At present the swing of the pendulum is far away from student responsibility in athletics, with the despotic power of the coach, and the graduate or faculty man- ager. In our desire for victory we have lost some of the most powerful educational factors in our sports. For the coach to direct from the side lines, either openly or covertly, may be the best way to win and give the alumni a pleasant (and profitable) afternoon, but it is the worst way for the boys and particularly for the captains to learn lessons of responsibility. As to the general influences of intercollegiate contests, the stu- dents should realize that what counts is not how many men keep from drinking by having a place on the ath- letic squad, but how many who do not play at all get drunk after the big games because the team has won, or lost. They must realize how serious is the waste of time about things which do not help athletics at all; the chatter about statistics of records, and the undue devotion to the fetish of "supporting the team." Teachers of other subjects must realize that the pre- dominance of athletics is not wholly the fault of athlet- ATHLETICS 179 ics. To put it frankly, other interests have not taken the same trouble. If athletics are over-developed, let other factors compete for the interests of the students. They look to athletics for color and vividness in their life. It is possible to get more of these qualities into the other parts of college life, including the classroom. After all, for many students this would not be very hard. Their real interest in athletics is pretty super- ficial. Such boys may talk about little else, but that is one of their conventions. Wise men may sometimes take advantage of the ups and downs of athletic success. It may or may not be a coincidence that it has been during a gloomy period in Yale athletics that that institution has shown a sur- prising intellectual renaissance, and that Harvard's athletic triumphs during the same period have been accompanied by a growth in conventionalism that is distressing to some of her best friends. In the general policy of the college, the athletic situ- ation must be considered not by itself, but as a part of the whole student life. Those responsible must not be discouraged by its conventional prominence or by its existing evils. If there is any sting in the nettle, the best thing to do is to grasp it firmly. An intelligent policy, however, goes farther than a mere stamping-out of eyils. There is always the danger, as the old saying goes, of throwing the baby out with the bath. The 180 THE UNDERGRADUATE essence of an intelligent policy must lie in an emphasis upon the good qualities. Professor Josiah Royce has said, "We must always build on what we have, and therefore any hostility to the athletic life is profoundly objectionable." What we must do is to adopt a con- structive rather than a defensive policy. Blind unbe- lief is sure to err, and, as Professor Corwin has pointed out, we will never make progress with a house divided against itself, the faculty on one side and the students and alumni on the other. We must not close up this valuable laboratory in the art of living. The time seems to have come for the colleges to take away, even from the alumni, the responsibility and leadership in athletic matters. Particularly in the physical educa- tion departments the faculties are developing real ex- perts about the whole complicated business, and they are beginning to realize the power they possess, if they choose to exercise it. In the troublesome matter of the professional coach they need not be helpless unless they want to be. They can control his selection, and, as I have already said, bring him into the faculty when his influence is good. The path of progress often leads from neglect through repression to intelligent encour- agement, and in athletics it may be said that, having first endured, then pitied, the college authorities are about ready to embrace. CHAPTER VH RELIGION AND MORALS There is no section of our field of inquiry where it is harder to deal fairly with the material than the one which has to do with the religious and moral standards of undergraduates. Much harm has been done, I think, by endeavoring to judge the present situation by mid- Victorian standards. If one compares, for example, the students of to-day with those of two generations ago on the basis, say, of church-going, there is no doubt as to the conclusion. Boys to-day don't go to formal re- ligious exercises, church or prayer meeting, as they used to — but neither do their parents, nor the boys who don't go to college. They no longer look upon an honest agnostic as a wicked man, nor upon a fellow- student of a different faith as less likely to go to heaven. There are far fewer boys who are intensely interested in the saving of their own souls, but, on the other hand, there are, I firmly believe, many more who have really strong aspirations to be of service to other souls. Very often the beliefs of such students will not fit into the tenets of any of the conventional creeds — which may be all the worse for the creeds. In the matter of personal morality, similarly, we 1 82 THE UNDERGRADUATE must remember from how much more inclusive a back- ground our students come. Those of foreign stock bring with them very different standards, some worse and some better, than our own. We must also remem- ber that the present college generation coincides with a very bad period in parental relations. When our present undergraduates were in the nursery, the old disciplinary attitude, harsh but often effective, had broken down, and as yet no painstaking development of intimacy and mutual confidence had been built up to take its place. I am speaking, of course, in very general terms, but I am confident that better relations between fathers and sons are tending to develop, and that in many ways the boys now in short trousers will make better college material when their time comes. When we remember these things and others that will doubtless rise to the mind of the thoughtful reader, we must come to the conclusion that, although conditions are, Heaven knows, far from what we should like to have them, they are really not so discouraging after all. We sorely need a reclassification of virtues and vices before we can make any useful appraisal. New faults have sprung up which too often are not recognized as such. Careless inconsiderateness of others, for exam- ple; or lack of charity, let us say, in the application of the Christian system of ethics to the race of which RELIGION AND MORALS 183 Christ was a member; or sinning against the intellec- tual light in various ways, as, for instance, carefully trained blindness as to athletic dishonesty. Regarding the more generally recognizee! forms of departure from the best standards, conditions vary widely in different colleges. None, I think, are the abominable sinks of which we hear from time to time in newspaper crusades. Low standards as to college admissions and promotion, however, mean a poorer and less disciplined type of student to deal with, and as an inevitable result the development and mainte- nance of bad student traditions in fraternities and gen- eral student life. I don't mean that all boys who can pass stiff examinations are, ipso facto, morally perfect, but those who are in a position to know can see a pretty close correlation between good intellectual standards and good moral standards. It is largely a question of a conflict of interests. Satan finds some mischief still for idle brains as well as idle hands. So far as drinking is concerned, athletics, and espe- cially all-the-year-round athletics, have done much, and so have the better fraternities. In the majority of chapter houses to-day no liquor is permitted, and even though the original reason for the rule may have been to obtain donations from straight-laced alumni, the general effect is good. The man who drinks nothing is 1 84 THE UNDERGRADUATE no longer regarded as a mollycoddle nor the man who drinks too much as an interesting and diverting com- panion. In this matter of drinking, college conven- tions and imitativeness often play an unfortunate part. A boy who feels no yearning for alcohol whatever will get drunk after the "big game" or at a fraternity ban- quet. It is certainly true, however, that men who de- velop an alcoholic craving in college are distinctly rarer than in former years. Personally I think there is more physical injury in the student body to-day from inces- sant smoking than from drinking. Although I have no personal knowledge on the subject, I am told there are some cases of drug addictions among college students, and in our present restless and hurried life this is a difficulty which may need careful watching as time goes on. Gambling is largely a matter of the local college tra- dition. Everywhere there is some betting on athletic events, but the increasing number of boys who have to earn their own is developing a salutary realization of what is best to do with money. Card-playing as a time-wasting factor is decreasing as a result of winter athletics and stricter standards as to college work to be performed. Card gambling is not a serious problem except at the colleges where boys are given more money than is good for them, where, as Dean Briggs says, they lull themselves with the idea that they are RELIGION AND MORALS 185 playing with money (of which there seems to be an inexhaustible supply at home) rather than for it. As to sexual indulgence it is very hard to get at the facts. There is every reason, however, to discount the lurid stories from well-meaning but pestilential cranks about its awful prevalence, with their "statistics" as to the percentage of college students infected by vene- real diseases. For a very considerable number of boys, the ques- tion of absolute continence was settled before going to college — the life of small country towns is notori- ously lax in these respects. Some of these boys con- tinue their practices and doubtless influence others, but more of them are brought under better influences while in college. Many boys, though I think their number is lessening, who are neither drunkards nor roues, follow the crowd at one of the conventional times of saturnalia, breaking training or Sophomore Triumph, and bitterly regret the results of their lack of self-control. So far as my experience goes, however, the college student in good colleges, whose indulgence is deliberate and habitual, is the rare exception. We must remember, clear-cut as the issue may seem to us, that while civilized standards the world over frown upon extreme physical indulgence, it is only for those following the English Puritan tradition that this is a matter of right or wrong per se. Many of 1 86 THE UNDERGRADUATE our students come from family backgrounds in which the Puritan tradition has never existed, or from which it has completely died out. On the other hand, the old argument of biological necessity for indulgence has been pretty well exploded and we are feeling our way toward a frank and wholesome basis of instruction in the hygiene of the whole matter. This will make its appeal, not by endeavoring to inculcate fear of the personal results of infection, — fear is always a poor emotion to call upon, — but by using the idealism of which youth has a plentiful supply. In emphasizing what the family relation should be, boys can get a positive incentive to clean living which far outweighs any negative stimuli. When mothers, and more par- ticularly fathers, recognize their full responsibilities to their growing children and meet them intelligently, the college will be able to build upon a far sounder foundation than is the case at present. This question and those related to it are not matters that can be comfortably discussed in a book of this kind, and for further information the reader is referred to the most careful and temperate study in the writ- er's knowledge, that of Dr. Exner, of the International Committee of the Young Men's Christian Association. While we may draw some comfort from remember- ing that the conditions described in his study are not those specifically of the colleges, but of the commu- RELIGION AND MORALS 187 nity at large, we must remember that it is the place of the colleges to do what they can, and they have al- ready done much, as natural leaders toward better standards. The influence of a good college doctor is an important factor; if he gains the confidence of the students, he has often the chance to relieve physical conditions which often lie at the base of what appear to be moral delinquencies, and he has also the chance to weed out the unbalanced students, of whom there are a few in every community. Let me quote a paragraph from Dr. Exner's book: — This study must not be taken to indicate that a great amount of gross immorality exists among college students. This would be an unfair inference. It is true that serious immoral conditions do exist in some institutions, especially in those situated in or near cities having open prostitution. But on the whole college students are morally clean, much above the average, and the tendency is steadily on the up- grade. What is true among college students, however, is general prevalence of struggle with sex problems. This is another matter. We find a very large proportion of stu- dents in whom the subject of sex occupies altogether un- duly the field of consciousness and creates severe struggle for self-control. Often the finest of our men have their energy and attention taken up so largely with personal struggle as to seriously handicap their efficiency and to cause much mental misery. This is the natural outgrowth of the perverted and selfish interpretation of sex which the neglect of proper education in early years has forced upon them, and of the poisoning of the imagination which neces- sarily accompanies it. We find that the great majority of 1 88 THE UNDERGRADUATE male students need to have their sex thinking entirely re- constructed and the whole subject reinterpreted in higher terms. The whole subject needs for them to be lifted out of the sphere of vulgarity and depression into one of purity, dignity, and respect. They are much in need of construc- tive help in making a sensible fight for self-mastery and in reducing the sex problem to a minimum. Most of the sex teaching thus far has been on too purely a physical basis. The psychologic and idealistic aspects of the question need most to be stressed. It is such teaching that brings the best results with college men. The most pressing problem of the average college student is the hygiene of the imag- ination. It is usually assumed, as it has been by Dr. Exner, that conditions as to drinking and laxity in sexual relations are worse in the city universities than in the country colleges. In my judgment the real dis- tinction lies, as I have said, between the colleges with good standards and those with bad; those from which the rotten apple is almost inevitably removed by fail- ure to meet the educational tests and those where it is permitted to remain indefinitely, to contaminate the rest of the barrel; those where the teachers and other officers earn the respect and confidence and often the intimacy of the students and succeed in interesting them in wholesome intellectual pleasures, and those where the students get no help of this kind from the faculty and are chronically idle-minded and bored. A friend of mine, a national officer in one of the well- RELIGION AND MORALS 189 known fraternities, tells me that he has had constant trouble with the undergraduates in these regards at certain institutions situated in the country or in small cities, but only very rarely at the chapters in the strong city universities. Of course one cannot guarantee the moral integrity of any boy in any col- lege, but the environmental influences are very impor- tant factors for any student body as a whole. The question of what constitutes a religious man is no longer a simple one. We find in college, as elsewhere, men who conform closely and without conscious hy- pocrisy to the observances of the religious creed in which they have been brought up, but whose souls are dead within them; and side by side with them others, openly boasting of their freedom from doctrinal tram- mels of every kind, who give every minute they can spare to work among the destitute. Certainly the emphasis, even among the professedly orthodox, is less and less on matters of dogma and observance and more and more on social service of various kinds. The majority of students, like the Ancient Mariner, believe that he prayeth best who loveth best. Compulsory chapel attendance is disappearing, and where it is retained through student opinion it is often pretty frankly as a factor in keeping up college spirit. Even in denominational colleges there is very little 190 THE UNDERGRADUATE proselyting. The general church agencies often desig- nate some local clergyman or "chaplain" to see that the boys of their faith do not stray from the fold. In general, however, there are no denominational clubs except among the Episcopalians, who are likely to have a more or less separate group, or among the Roman Catholics, who are coming in rapidly increasing num- bers to non-Catholic colleges. The Newman Club, as it is usually called, is carefully watched over by Mother Church and has often an imposing building for its headquarters. It is but fair to say that her activities in this direction, so far as I have observed, are rather the result of the anti-Catholic campaigns which occur from time to time than the reason for them. The orthodox Jews have their Menorah Society, to empha- size the historic traditions of the race, and to com- bat the cynical agnosticism which is very prevalent among its younger men. As in the world at large, interest in religious matters has its ups and downs. Certain leaders, differing as widely in personality and attainments as John R. Mott and Dean Brown of Yale and Billy Sunday, con- duct meetings which exert a powerful influence on college communities. At these meetings there are fewer conversions than in earlier days, but there is an undoubted quickening of religious interests — with results often lamentably brief as to the student body in RELIGION AND MORALS 191 general, but with permanent influence upon not a few individuals. The larger institutions often have their own chap- lains, but speaking generally the active day-by-day religious agency in the American college is the Young Men's Christian Association. Its work throughout the colleges is pretty well standardized by the efficient ad- ministrative control and guidance of a central group of very able men. These men watch conditions closely, and their growing emphasis on the constructive side of religious activities is significant. They recognize that the college is no longer a place to be shielded from the world, but that the men in college must come into con- tact, particularly in social service, with what is going on outside. Accordingly, much of its work is really extra-mural. It provides settlement workers and plans week-end deputations of undergraduates to near-by country towns, and it supports missionary movements. The undergraduates and alumni of some colleges ac- tually maintain a missionary college in China or else- where. The Association has done work of twofold value in organizing social work in industrial certers, which not only gives help to those who sorely need it, but provides for not a few undergraduates their first realization of the tremendous social problems which must be faced and mastered by the employers of to- morrow. A recent example of what the Association can 1 92 THE UNDERGRADUATE do with its world-wide organization and its prompt realization of opportunity is the work supported by American students and largely carried out by them in the prison camps of Europe. Nor does the Association neglect the opportunities that lie at its doors. It does much to help the freshmen to find themselves, and it pays particular attention to foreign students, of whom there are surprisingly large numbers in the university colleges. The Association's equipment is usually excellent. It is likely to have a good building and an able young man to run it, and to be very practical in its methods of getting men to use the building. Lectures on subjects of general interest to students are arranged, such as first aid, professional ethics, the human side of engineering, etc., and men to whom the student body looks up for other reasons are carefully identified with its work. The Association has been a very important factor in improving the moral conditions in colleges and college environ- ments. It is with no desire to belittle its striking services that I question whether the Association completely meets the needs of to-day. Its methods of attack have become pretty thoroughly conventionalized — who, for example, would not recognize the Y.M.C.A. hand- shake? — and they are acutely irritating to many students to whom religious matters are essentially RELIGION AND MORALS 193 intimate and personal. Others are alienated by its prudent attitude in refraining from takiag a vigorous stand as to athletic evils which must sometimes be a veritable stench in the nostrils of its workers. The delegates to the intercollegiate exercises seem some- times to be selected quite as much on the basis of ath- letic prowess as of spiritual earnestness. Sometimes the Association leader takes part, unrebuked by his fel- lows, but not unobserved by the outsider, in some slick fraternity deal. In a desire to be practical, the Association has in a large degree lost the sense of the mystery of religion and of the possibility of appeal through those aesthetic influences which through the ages have been perhaps the most potent of all. To a boy with a touch of the mystic in him, and there are many such, an efficiency engineer is worse than useless. In any college the men are not rare, who, whether they know it or not, are essentially religious in nature, but who are too honest to subscribe even by implication to the creed of the Association, broad and liberal as it is, and who for that reason find no organized outlet for their aspirations. Whether any one agency can do more than the Young Men's Christian Association now does, in view of the highly different types to be found in a modern college, is a very debatable question. Certainly within its chosen limits the work is admirable, and time may 194 THE UNDERGRADUATE develop agencies to influence the boys whom it does not reach. To sum up conditions, as compared with those, say, of the seventies or eighties, there is less orthodoxy, much less hypocrisy, and far stronger recognition of the elements of service. There are as many men as ever who, so far as conduct is concerned, are guided by a given set of working ideals, but too many of them, and their number includes some of the finest men in our colleges, are untouched by religious agencies and are learning to live their lives with no provision for any religious element whatever. This to my mind is one of the most serious problems which the present genera- tion is leaving for solution to those which are to follow. CHAPTER VIH INTELLECTUAL LIFE Cogito, ergo sum. Man is the thinking animal, and colleges are maintained at great public and private ex- pense to help him in his thinking. How much real think- ing do college students do? A great deal more than they usually get credit for. Folly is always more con- spicuous than wisdom, and there is, alas, enough of the former in our colleges to make it difficult sometimes to perceive the latter. Most of the thinking is done in the good colleges. Not that there are not boys with good brains and the art of using them who are still in the bad ones, just as there are operatives in mills and clerks in counting houses, but they are the exceptions, and the colleges which enroll them deserve little credit for them and have comparatively little to do with their development. We must realize that even in the best institutions there are two classes of students who come to college — the socially minded and the intellectually minded; but even though it may be over-sanguine to refer to any "industrious revolution," it is a fact that an increasing number of those who are primarily so- cially minded on entrance are intellectually minded when they graduate. 196 THE UNDERGRADUATE It is now eight years ago since President Lowell delivered a Phi Beta Kappa address at Columbia on "Competition in College," which was reprinted in the "Atlantic" and attracted wide attention. In this he called attention to the only too evident fact that com- petition in scholarship had been "almost banished" from our colleges. In these eight years we cannot say that it has been almost restored, even in the stronger colleges, for in them the students still make their con- ventional distinctions between study and pleasure, but it is fair to say that the tide has turned, and that in eight more years it should be possible to point to some tangible results. I have spoken elsewhere in this book of the new policy in these colleges of aiming higher than the bottom of the class. This is already having its results. Failure is regarded as a good deal more of a disgrace than it was in my time. Then getting an "F," like getting drunk, was too often regarded as an amus- ing performance. Now the corresponding under- graduate desires to be an able "C" man (though he would n't boast about being an able fourteen-second man in the hundred). The element of rivalry is, how- ever, creeping in and is beginning to have its effects. In the contest for the fraternity cup, he has no vision of seeing his chapter "lead all the rest," but he is will- ing to exert himself slightly to perform his share in keeping ahead of the Alpha Delts. INTELLECTUAL LIFE 197 The men who are headed toward the professions go farther. They are rather rapidly learning the fallacy in the old saying that you should have your good time in college because there is plenty of time for your hard work in the professional school. Let those still in doubt read President Foster's article in the September, 1916, "Harper's Magazine," in which he has collected all the classic instances of statistical researches as to the correlation of undergraduate distinction in scholarship and later professional success. Of course, all these statistics prove a little too much, because it is the nat- urally able boy who tends to do well wherever he is, but they nevertheless throw a strong burden of proof on the boy who thinks he can afford to do less than his best in college. There is such a thing as a reduction in natural ability, by physical dissipation, as happens to hundreds of students in the European universities, or by mental dissipation and by the development of bad mental habits, as is more likely to be the cause over here. All this is to the good, but what we want to achieve is a general appreciation of and striving for excellence for its own sake — of hard thinking for the fun of it. The old incentives were rewards and punishments, which developed to an extraordinary complexity. The reprobates were fined in order to provide prizes "for 198 THE UNDERGRADUATE such as shall excell in the course of their studies." With these developed a certain rivalry for a place at the head of the class — this sometimes involved a particu- lar seat of honor — which meant something when the curriculum was uniform and all students were graded by the same man. With the elective system and the entry of the personal equation in difficulty of courses and generosity of grading, class standing provides far less stimulus. Even an election to Phi Beta Kappa, though the society retains a good deal of its old pres- tige, sometimes means merely a careful selection of courses and of teachers, and, of course, when this oc- curs it is recognized by the college group as a whole. In the old order the demands of the classroom were almost wholly for memorizing. Most of the thinking that was done was as to ways and means to circumvent and outrage the faculty, or in rare instances in the literary clubs and other student coteries. The emphasis on high average class standing and upon memory work in class developed the type of student known as the " greasy grind." He still persists, sometimes having learned his ways in school and re- maining satisfied with the old incentives in college, but he is much less prevalent. It is only the blindest of the sons of rest in a college community who look down upon all high-stand students as grinds. The grind is the man who presumably can do nothing else and INTELLECTUAL LIFE 199 wants to do nothing else but his lessons. This lies back of the common sentiment that a high-stand man must "do something for the college," often at an absurd waste of his time, before being received among the elect. The self-centeredness and narrowness of the grind discount his obvious industry, a quality which these others might well emulate, but which discourage them from trying to break through his shell and give him the social training he usually sorely needs. Some grinds are hopeless, but many of them could be made into first-class citizens, even from the conventional student standpoint. The new ideals of college administration and teach- ing, which have really been under headway only since Mr. Lowell's paper was published, are all working to stimulate intellectual rivalry in the better colleges. The higher standards of admission have enabled the pace in the classroom to be speeded up, an important factor, for the boredom of a bright boy in a group of dullards and the habits of inattention which he ac- quires to avoid such boredom are not trivial dangers. The individual attitude toward all students brings to light promising material for direct attack. Better organization and presentation of teaching material are even more important for the able boy than for the others, the waste of his time being more expensive aoo THE UNDERGRADUATE directly and indirectly. The growing interest in under- graduate teaching is important, among other things, as looking forward to a broader conception of the teacher's function. The whole teaching of history, for example, has been revolutionized within a decade, and the titles of three recent articles which I came upon in looking up material for this book will further indicate what I mean: "English as Training in Thought," by Professor Aydelotte; "The Humanization of the Teaching of Mathematics," by Professor Keyser; "The Place of Chemistry in the Rehabilitation of the College," by Professor Alexander Smith. In the last named, the author asks the following pertinent ques- tion: "Can it be that all the unpleasant things that are being said are intended to apply to the whole structure of the American college, with the sole excep- tion of the department of chemistry?" Yale, Princeton, and other colleges have followed Columbia in the establishment of special honors pro- grammes, and Amherst is trying an interesting experi- ment in breaking up the senior class into seminar groups of ten men or more, "for the purpose of placing emphasis upon the broad aspects instead of scraps of learning, and a refusal to regard any course as separate by itself, but rather as a significant contribution to a broader insight into life." The colleges are not ashamed even of going back to INTELLECTUAL LIFE aoi the old stimuli. They not only sow beside all waters, but use all kind of fertilizer — old as well as new- fangled. Dean Jones is proposing to grade and rank the Yale students upon some equitable basis, and President Faunce at Brown announces the elections to Phi Beta Kappa and Sigma Xi before the whole stu- dent body, assembled for the purpose. The various chapters of these societies are modifying their require- ments so that elections may coincide, more closely than has been the case in recent years, with the best faculty and student opinion as to intellectual ability and performance. The whole process of finding and stimulating the able boy — "the lad o' pairts" as he is called in Scot- land, where he is perhaps best appreciated — is still groping and imperfect. For example, last winter I dropped a freshman on what appeared from the rec- ords to be an utterly unpromising terms work, and the youngster in his consequent retirement proceeded to write, and publish, a rather striking little book on certain practical applications of algebra. And for the boys whom the dean doesn't drop there is too often pretty complete insulation from the things of the mind. One of the writers in the "New Republic" painted a picture not long ago which de- scribed the process and its results all too clearly. Let me quote a paragraph or two^ for this is a type of 202 THE UNDERGRADUATE college failure which deserves more consideration than it usually receives: — In college Albert achieved the right club after many nights of worry, and a rather strenuous campaign con- ducted by his mother. I saw something of Albert in those days when we were freshmen together, and he was always cordial when we were alone. In public he did not know me so well, and there were times in the month before his elec- tion when he did not know me at all. I did not mind, for I knew that election to the club meant all the difference be- tween success and failure. Albert could have lost his de- gree and laughed about it with the feeling of a good loser, but the club he required to give meaning to his life. He "made" it, and was never afterwards seen without the striped necktie which was its mark. No other ambition troubled Albert in college. . . . After graduation Albert entered his father's bank and was elected to the right club. From these two foci Albert gathers all the opinions he displays. Of course he has never known it. Albert is not the sort of person to admit that opinions, like people, have a birthplace, a family tradition, and a basis in income. Whatever Albert believes he be- lieves to be self-evident. There is not a touch of insincerity in him, for it is entirely beyond the range of his mentality to realize that what everybody says at the bank and the club is not a norm of sanity and decency. . . . This is Albert to-day, and with this equipment he faces the future. He is going to be very rich and his power is sure to be very great. He will be quoted in the newspapers. He will dine with editors and statesmen. Albert is one of those men who have power thrust upon them, and his opinions will carry more weight than a million humbler men's. As I look upon Albert's education I can't help trem- INTELLECTUAL LIFE 203 bling a little. Those nurse girls, valets, chauffeurs and butlers who encased his youth, that school where the ideal was a gentleman who had brushed against dead languages, the college course insulated in the best club, the bank where he met his own kind, the dances and week-end parties where the social inbreeding is almost incestuous, have given Albert a sense that his world is all the world. I worry at the thought that he will grow up to govern, whether in office or out of it, to govern industry and influence politics, to command the loyalty of America. . . . I know Albert for what he is, a charming, well-mannered, unconscious snob, who knows nothing of men outside his class, an uneducated, untrained, and shut-in person who has been born to power by the accident of wealth. One question regarding the intellectual life of stu- dents which it is hard to answer is how much worth while reading they do "on their own hook." The new methods of teaching with prescribed and recommended reading mean a great increase in not wholly voluntary reading, which is excellent when the interest of the stu- dent is properly stimulated in advance by the teacher. When, however, it is just a dehumanized imposition, too often it is not only a waste of time, but it develops in the students an immunity from any danger of ever looking at the same books again. Of course, in these days of motors and movies, and the "Saturday Eve- ning Post," the standard book as a means of relaxation has more serious competition than ever before, and the habit of serious reading is distressingly rare. Still ao4 THE UNDERGRADUATE some students do read. A year or so ago the librarian of the University of Minnesota asked three hundred and fifty seniors to report their reading for a year. Of the one hundred and sixty who replied, one hundred and thirty-four had read the " Pilgrim's Progress," eighty "Faust," sixty-six "Tess," eighty-five "The Auto- crat," eighty-five some play of Ibsen, seventy-seven the "Bluebird," fifty-nine "Diana of the Crossways," one hundred and thirty-two " Gulliver," one hundred and three "Tom Sawyer." Forty-four standard books upon the list were reported as read by more than half of the students. Probably a good many of the books were prescribed, and probably also the girls in the class raised the average, but in any case the showing is not so bad as it might be. Thirty years ago serious-minded boys, upon the advice of recognized authorities, read certain books to round out their culture, but nowa- days no two experts are in agreement as to what cul- ture is or is going to be, and the corresponding youth of this generation is inclined to wait until some con- clusion has been reached in the matter. It is interest- ing in this connection to note that a distinguished American critic, Mr. William C. Brownell, is inclined to blame the elective system in our colleges for the ' absence of standards and the sure taste which comes of specialization in study." I have a theory that students would read more if INTELLECTUAL LIFE 205 college library administration retained less of the old- fashioned attitude of suspicion toward the student. It is significant that this is almost the only branch of educational machinery in which fines persist. The fact that the incentive for the purchase of books comes from specialists often means the existence of surprising gaps for the general reader. I myself had to plead not so many years ago for a complete set of Meredith in the Columbia Library. The huge railway-station type of reading-room has its chilling effect, whereas the cozy libraries of such places as Haverford are so rare that even the visiting stranger is promptly tempted to sit down and pick up a book. To return to direct intellectual stimuli, I think it is true that not only individual teachers in the class- room, but the same men in faculty meeting, — where they are sometimes hardly recognizable by their works, — are learning something of student psychol- ogy. Largely through the growing confidence of stu- dents, they are often able to get the real student point of view, shorn of its encircling conventions; for the real criticism of an intelligent student is a very different thing from the official "bellyaching" of a college edi- torial. One of my students, by no means a shining light so far as grades go, recently proposed a carefully thought-out scheme for encouraging a spirit of intel- ao6 THE UNDERGRADUATE lectual rivalry among the sections into which large classes are to-day being broken up. I don't know whether the scheme will work, but we are going to try to find out. Teachers are learning that, though it is a convention that one must love idleness and ensue it, boys really prefer to be absorbed. This is one reason why, when a passing mark is all that the faculty seems interested in, students will rush into too many undergraduate activ- ities. The undergraduate engineering course, in spite of the narrowness of its curriculum, is a strong rival of the college for boys who have no serious intention of becoming engineers, just because the boys in it are given no time to be bored, and in a fraternity group in any college where both types of student are represented it is interesting to see that the alert faces are so often those of the professional students. This, however, is not the case when the college really makes a serious demand on the time and attention of its undergradu- ates, and when the teaching is what the students call "practical," though what they really mean is "vital." Teachers in these colleges are beginning to realize also that their boys can really be taught to respect accu- racy and to abhor slovenly thinking when the former is not debased into pedantry, nor intellectual order con- fused with meticulousness. The instinct for sound, clean workmanship in any field of activity is a real one, INTELLECTUAL LIFE 207 and the good teacher knows how to recognize and use it. Speaking of the fruits of learning some one has said that the result of the right kind of teaching of the right kind of subjects is like an apple growing upon the liv- ing tree, as contrasted, in the opposite case, with the apple stuck for purposes of adornment upon the Christmas tree. Another realization is that the tendency to form groups, even exclusive groups, is human, and may more profitably be used than combated. If boys will not work in the classroom, why not go outside it and get at them where they will work? As an answer to this ques- tion, professors are identifying themselves, sometimes wholly informally, sometimes by official designation, with the formation and carrying-on of these student clubs, semi-social, semi-intellectual in character, which are in themselves one of the most encouraging signs of the times. The departmental clubs are being organized, not only in obvious fields like geology, with its oppor- tunities for trips, and economics and politics, but with equal success in so superficially unpromising a subject as mathematics. The most picturesque of them is the Elizabethan Club at Yale, which is built around a priceless collec- tion of folios and first editions, given by an alumnus of wealth, not to the university, but to the club itself. 2o8 THE UNDERGRADUATE This, as might be expected, has really touched the im- aginations of the undergraduate members. To be sure, it is all a little conscious. When Ivisited the clubhouse, for example, the various members of 'Varsity teams in the reading-room were somehow brought to my atten- tion. But it is a princely experiment and has already done much to stimulate a love of letters at Yale. The weekly broadside "Bulletin" of Yale University, by the way, shows a wealth of intellectual opportunity outside the classroom which merits the attention of those who are prone to dismiss that university as an athletic college. Other schemes, less ambitious, are equally interest- ing. At Union, Professor Hale recently wrote a moral- ity play for the English Club and took part himself in the performance. I am sure the presentation of char- acters like "Athletics" and "Knocking" gave the stu- dents a keener realization of what the mediaeval origi- nals meant to the people who saw them than the most learned lecture could do. In the literary club at an- other college, the members in turn, under the guidance of one of the professors, wrote chapters in a serial novel — and it was n't a particularly bad novel at that. My own happiest hours in college I owe to a scheme of the late George Rice Carpenter, one of the pioneers in the elder-brotherly attitude toward students, which brought half a dozen of us together to start a new INTELLECTUAL LIFE 209 kind of college magazine. Never before or since has it proved so much fun to try to write. The instinct for self-expression is in us all and is strongest in youth. It is the lack of an opportunity in our industrial system, with its separate processes, to create anything from start to finish, that Professor HolHday and others finds to be the underlying cause of industrial unrest and discontent. And the instinct is the most powerful lever at the hand of the college. In its highest developments within our field it means liv- ing scholarship, just as in other fields it means the great picture or the beautiful building. Even when the pro- duction is halting and feeble, as in the nature of things it usually is, it may mean much to the producer. It may be a poor thing, but it is his own. The wise teacher knows this. He no longer attempts to keep the student in a receptive attitude of mind, since, as one of my colleagues says, the attitude we de- sire to cultivate in him is the precise opposite. Boys can be set upon a higher emprise than the learning of lessons out of a book or from the lips of some ipse dixit. He should, to quote other colleagues, be given the feel- ing " that he is creating something. This can be de- rived not only from manual work, but even more from intellectual effort, from the discovery of new facts, the solving of problems, the composing of themes. Stu- dents should be made to feel also the inspiration aio THE UNDERGRADUATE of intellectual adventure, in exploring new fields and in grappling with difficult tasks. . . . Nobody knows anything unless he is able to control a fact, a law or a force." Experience has shown that undergraduates, under friendly guidance, are capable of original scien- tific research that is often distinctly more than respect- able, and a history theme of one of my undergraduates recently appeared in the "Forum." The spoken or written word, often the only form of self-expression possible, furnishes a harder prob- lem. Many are naturally tongue-tied, and others are hedged about by conventions of reticence, particu- larly in the East. Farther West, there is a tendency toward slopping over, which is equally unfortunate. I confess to a private hope that one result of the forces which are now at work will be a renaissance of the al- most extinct art of conversation, which is not only a natural, if neglected, form of self-expression, but fur- nishes an important stimulus toward more permanent forms. Any American who has had the opportunity to hear the talk of a group of young English university men of intellectual interests will share my hope. Some boys who might contribute more than their share are embittered and rendered intellectually sulky by bad treatment. This is often true of the Jew, who, in spite of his wanderings, is still enough of an Oriental to need a sunny environment to bring forth his best INTELLECTUAL LIFE an fruit. On the other hand, there is such a thing as in- tellectual immodesty, and we all know individuals who suffer from it. Sometimes, however, these are boys who have been over-stimulated by their college ex- periences and who will settle down later on. In spite of adverse conditions, the amount of actual self-expression through literary and sometimes musical production in American colleges is important in range and quality. The proportion of our best American writers who served their apprenticeship as contribu- tors to college magazines is strikingly high, and the best undergraduate work itself not infrequently shows realization as well as promise. College verse in partic- ular is often really excellent. One manifestation of this tendency of students to do their own thinking and to express the results in their own way is causing much alarm among the older gener- ation. Colleges are stigmatized as hotbeds of Social- ism and all the other abhorrent isms. Of course, this is partly merely a manifestation of the eternal conflict between the generations. The escape of the young from the old is to-day, according to Mrs. Parsons, " the most important if but little noticed social fact of our times." History warns us that it is the customary fate of new truths to begin as heresies and to end as super- stitions, and the grandfather of the college Socialist of ai2 THE UNDERGRADUATE to-day probably spoke under his breath of being an evolutionist. The form of conflict at present is deter- mined by the fact that, broadly speaking, the focus of intellectual interest to-day is in the social sciences. It is only a few years since the battlefield was in theology and biology. President Meiklejohn, of Amherst, tells us of "fa- thers in planning for the training of a son who would see to it that in the preparation for his trade every bit of knowledge he could have must be applied, and the boy must learn that in such a way as to be the leader and the guide, that he may give orders rather than obey them. But how often the same father is un- willing that his boy attempt to understand his own re- ligion, his own morals, his own society, his own politics! In these fields, surely the father's opinions are good enough! Keep the boy's mind at rest regarding his religion and his economics; what has been believed before had better still be believed." How recent is the grip which economic and social problems have on our students is shown by the fact that in Dean Briggs's most discerning books about col- lege students, published hardly more than a decade ago, one finds very slight, if any, mention of them. It may be of some comfort to the older generation to remember that professional radicals in the world out- side mourn equally loudly over the blindness of college INTELLECTUAL LIFE 213 students to the really important things of life. "Noth- ing," says the author of the "Profane Baccalaureate," "could be more respectable than the colleges and less revolutionary. The elaborate inutility of college studies, the withdrawal of college from the affairs of the world, the upbuilding of a petty college principality with a ridiculous little college patriotism, manners, and standards of its childish own; the contact of that secluded world with the great world only through the medium of commercialized amateur sport; the parochi- alism of college intellectuality." And there is a pro- found suspicion of the American college on the part of the lower classes on the ground that it represents "enlightened despotism" rather than democracy. Owing to the fact that the college is a pretty com- plete cross-section of American humanity, the truth lies between these extreme opinions. How much do the great movements of changing values touch the un- dergraduate? It is hard to say. Certainly the boys at Columbia would not now jump in to break up a Sub- way strike as they did ten years ago, just for a lark, and without at least trying to find out what the men were striking for. Many, however, are really only playing at being Socialists, and in general it is the more spectacular aspects of any new cult that appeal to them. They will have none of the decorous radicalism 214 THE UNDERGRADUATE of the "New Republic." It must be "The Masses" or nothing. On the other hand, radical ideas do get their hold on certain individuals "good and proper," but whether these cases are due to the college environment or in spite of it, I would n't venture to say. Entirely apart from the question of whether these radicals are right or wrong, by the way, their convictions usually give the possessors an excellent chance to display moral courage and some of us who may not agree with them rejoice in this by-product. Many of these college radi- cals become professional agitators after graduation, a fact which the conservatives should welcome, but don't. Is n't it important that the mass of the ignorant dissatisfied should be leavened by men (and women) who realize, as their companions do not and cannot, that mankind has a past as well as a present and a future, and that this past has its lessons to teach, — for example, regarding social experiments that have been tried and found wanting, — and who realize that there is such a process as thinking a question through? Strange as it may seem, there is a certain advantage to the intellectual interests from the fact that they are so much out of the conventional swing. Some of us will recall President Lowell's description of an apocryphal island in the Southern Pacific where the INTELLECTUAL LIFE 215 college course consisted of prescribed athletics, which the students neglected as much as they dared in order to devote themselves to reading, writing, and debating. CHAPTER IX THE FINISHED PRODUCT These ought, of course, to be no such thing as a finished college product. What the college should give is the art of remaining unfinished, of going on learning through life. In one sense, however, it is fair to regard the alumni as a finished product — sometimes, alas, they are finished, so far as intellectual progress goes. In a broad sense they represent our best basis of ap- praisal of the results and values of the training of any college in particular, and of colleges in general; and, furthermore, they must be reckoned with under our American scheme of college government as a very vital influence upon the present and future of the institu- tions they have left. Our judgment of colleges by their alumni to be of value, however, must be made on a very general basis. It is easy to over-estimate the part played by the college in the development of any par- ticular man ; his native ability and his previous training and environment and the degree of his immersion in other interests after graduation must all be taken into account. One is likely, also, to make an inaccurate judgment of a college from the product of even a few years back. Colleges are developing so rapidly, for THE FINISHED PRODUCT 217 better or worse as the case may be, that older alumni are not likely to represent the present product with any degree of accuracy. It must be remembered, also, that it is the conven- tional-minded alumnus, rather than the individualist, who fits into and gives the note to alumni activities. Another thing to be remembered is that no social dis- tinction is made between the man who has his diploma and the man who has not, or even between the "quituate" andthe"bustitute." Some of the best and most useful children of any college have failed, for one reason or another, of formal graduation. Often the reason is most creditable to the man concerned. He may, for example, have had to leave in order to help out at home or to give a younger brother or sister a chance. The only point I want to make is that the colleges are represented and judged in large part by these cases where the institution was unable or un- willing to finish the job, and that in organized alumni activities there is always a strong representation of those who loved college life, not wisely, but too well. The relative prominence of alumni is also confusing. It not infrequently happens that some man who is not really representative of the best that his college can produce, but who wants his place in the sun, will push himself forward along the only line open to him, in his capacity as alumnus; and the effect of his identification 2i 8 THE UNDERGRADUATE in local communities is sometimes rather unfortunate for the college. Not long ago I cut out the following newspaper letter written from the New York Club of one of our best-known universities, for preservation as a document humaine: — Why all this hullabaloo about a few college students who failed to know about the habits, customs, and lives of a few rulers in this fearful tangle across the seas? Are college men expected to know so much more than the ordinary man ? They are human and not latest editions of the encyclopae- dia. As a matter of fact, the average college student has little time for the daily papers, and while not engaged in locating the cosine of x or scanning the works of Byron, he is usually perfecting his mind and body to carry on the work of his country. And what is more beneficial and help- ful than good, clean athletics ? What is the general impression on the public of the present-day product? Underlying all the superficial criticism, it is really pretty favorable. So far as the learned professions are concerned, the lack of a college degree is a very great handicap, an unfairly heavy one in many cases. In business, college graduates are no longer looked on with suspicion, but are eagerly bidden for at commencement time. They are pretty well paid at the start, and rise much more rapidly than the average. The average earnings of the graduates of the Class of 1906 at Yale who went into business were reported as follows: — THE FINISHED PRODUCT a 19 In the first year $ 705 second 1061 third 1516 fourth 1931 fifth 2405 Even making deductions for a picked group and for the fact that their chances were probably better than the average, this is a remarkable showing. The college man has a good reputation for resource- fulness. He is often given a chance to show what he can do in some new field just because he is a college man. Another equally recognized asset is that he is socially agreeable, cheerful, and adaptable. He is ambitious — the sin by which certain angels fell, but by which many who are neither angels nor geniuses have risen. If he appears a little bumptious at first, it is understood that this can soon be knocked out or laughed out of him. On the other hand, he is often criticized, and often justly, for lack of accuracy and for slovenliness, and less frequently for lack of industry. Several years ago a classmate of mine sent me a letter of application for a position from a graduate, not in this case from our own but from another pre-revolutionary institution of learning. I wish I could reproduce the writing and the general lay-out of the letter, but the wording itself is worth reproduction: — aao THE UNDERGRADUATE Dear Sir. Having read your ad in todays world in regard to a private secretary and being just out of college I would like to get such a position. My age is 21 and at present y I am not employed having but rec'd my degree from this year. Would very much like to have a personal inter- view with you. Respectively yours (Name quite illegible) Ave To make it all the worse, my friend sent, also, two or three excellent letters from foreign-born and trained applicants which he had received in the same mail. The concluding paragraph of his own letter is signifi- cant: — I make no complaint against the American youth, but only against the method of educating him. Combine the American energy and brain with a thorough education in the essentials as given in the best schools abroad and we would really begin to see things happen! Personally, I think the colleges are to-day providing better training in matters of this kind, and the boys themselves are maintaining higher standards as to accuracy and order; and although examples as bad as, or worse than, the foregoing can be brought forward against any of the better colleges, they would be, I think, much less common to-day and increasingly rare as time goes on. When the employer seeks the advice of the college THE FINISHED PRODUCT aai before engaging a man, he fares far better than when he does not. The National City Bank of New York and other large enterprises select their men only after careful examination of their records and consultation with their teachers and deans, and as a result they do not waste time and energy on material that the colleges know to be below average. An interesting feature, by the way, of the training courses at the National City Bank is an informal self-criticism of the students. Their comments as to their own business efficiency are to be published by the bank and should receive wide circulation through the colleges. The social training which a boy has received in the give-and-take of a wholesome college life stands him in good stead in after life. A man of first-rate intellectual power is not infrequently passed over because he un- wittingly errs in appearance or manner on the side either of a certain scrubbiness or of an even more un- fortunate "nobbiness." Accepted social conventions, after all, are like office systems. They may become rigid bonds for the little man, but they save the time and attention of the big man, and leave him free to exercise his individuality and live his life. But the only test of college education is not in the making of money. How does he five? So far as general conduct goes, his reputation is high and deservedly so. 22a THE UNDERGRADUATE He has a good record as to public service. The college man in politics is no longer a joke, but a power to be reckoned with both as to numbers and effectiveness. And in social enterprises of all kinds college men are more generally represented than would be the normal expectation from their numbers. I have already re- ferred, in the opening chapter of this book, to the college man as a public asset in times of national emergency like the present. As to his inner life, and particularly his intellectual life, opinion is varied. Leaving out, perhaps, half the men who go on into learned callings, the proportion of alumni who have either never learned or who have forgotten the pleasures and profits that come from good books, intellectual conversation, and intellectual hobbies, and serious contemplation, is far too high. Many of them have a vague feeling that something is expected of them, which too often merely leaves them the prey of the book agent with his installment sets of "standard works" often by second-rate authors, and always in second-rate editions, if handsome bindings. And even these are usually left unread. The whole question of education for the wise use of leisure is too often overlooked in this country. Success in a business or professional career is a barren triumph, if, when the means in time and money to gratify a man's individual tastes have come, he finds himself without intellectual THE FINISHED PRODUCT 213 or aesthetic tastes to gratify. Here again, however, the academic optimist has hopes of better things from the boys now in college, and younger alumni, particu- larly those with college wives, are already taking ad- vantage of extension courses and other opportunities for keeping intellectually alive. To me the most pitiful examples of college failures are the men who learned little or nothing but how to be trailers when they were undergraduates. On a late afternoon before the war dozens of such college grad- uates could be found looking out of the club win- dows on Fifth Avenue, sleek, well-groomed, a corps of Alberts." Each had been a schoolboy full of aspira- tions and ideals, but his soul had been clogged with con- ventions and imitations of the real things, so that he has been held back when his chance came to step out as a leader, if, indeed, he saw the chance at all. The saddest part of it is that these men are usually those whom God has pleased to call to an estate where qualities of broad-minded, intellectual, and moral leadership would be of particular value to the com- munity at large. In justice to these men it should be said that many of them have come forward bravely enough to take their places as soldiers and sailors, but their "bit" would be far more valuable to their country to-day if their lamps had been trimmed and ready for the emergency. 224 THE UNDERGRADUATE College conventions, both temporary and perma- nent, are carried on into alumni life in an interesting way. It is coming to be the fashion for the classes to celebrate their academic birthdays which end in "5" or "o",by some special activity at commencement. This fashion involves the printing of pamphlets or even books. It was very amusing to study the publications of the Columbia classes of 1876 and 1906 and to see how faithfully are reflected the college life and interests of the day; and yet even the forty-year production showed the influences of present-day college con- ventions. To these inherited traditions must be added certain others which have sprung up with the elaborate or- ganization of alumni activities as such. Being an alumnus is coming almost to be a profession in itself. When you hear a man described as a "professional" Princeton man, or Yale man, you get a pretty accurate picture of the alumnus in question. These permanently professional alumni set a standard for those who are more or less like anybody else for most of the year, but who at the appointed times and seasons take on the attributes of the professional alumnus. One of these attributes, that of setting a very bad example to the undergraduates as to drinking, is happily falling into disrepute, and Yale has this year set the admirable precedent of a "dry" commencement. THE FINISHED PRODUCT 225 Of course there are many alumni who don't appear as such at all, and we are prone to forget how large their number is. They are scattered, and for the most part silent, though they sometimes protest in alumni journals and elsewhere about things in general or in particular. One social phenomenon which may be inevitable, but is certainly unfortunate, is the crowding of college alumni into the great cities. In the country or the smaller towns they would have better opportunities for a reasonable success, earlier chance to marry and start families, and, in general, wider opportunities for usefulness. The young men, however, are dazzled by the few great prizes in the metropolitan cities, and no matter where the college is situated, the "big" alumni dinner must nearly always be held in New York or Chicago. The country sorely needs a wider distribu- tion of its college men, and particularly of its more able college men. I said at the outset that one of the significant things about the alumni was their influence individually and as groups upon their colleges. The direct influence of individual alumni on the students trickles down from father to son, or from other alumni to the boys whom they have persuaded to go to college, or from alumni members to undergraduate members in ii6 THE UNDERGRADUATE the student organizations; the loyal alumni brethren, for example, who come back to fraternity meetings or interest themselves, as so many do, in oversight of the financial affairs of the chapter. In athletics the influences up to a few years ago were nearly always bad. The alumni lobby was a real menace; it still is in many colleges, and its members sometimes continue to display the same ideals and practices as the sport- ing man who promotes prize-fights from his saloon on Fourteenth Street or his Broadway cafe. From widely different motives alumni are returning in greater numbers each year to their colleges. The visits at commencement or for the final football game are not of particular significance, because they are largely due to a sense that it is the thing to do, and on such occasions they pay little attention to the students or the students to them, except, perhaps, that the latter may smile with the kindly superiority of youth upon middle-aged antics. But when a man goes back alone or with a friend or two, at a time when the college is neither a pageant nor a hippodrome, he often has a chance to do a great deal of good or of harm. There is the baleful alumnus who comes back for an undetected spree or to enjoy the bad eminence of being a cynical man of the world before an admiring circle of juniors. Others, who do not realize how much water has run under the bridge since their time, try to restore the THE FINISHED PRODUCT 227 pristine virtues which in their day were marked by a proper contempt for the faculty and all its works. Sometimes the efforts of those who really try to un- derstand existing conditions, and if necessary to im- prove them, seem rather futile, it must be admitted. I think the influence on athleticism and exaggerated fraternity life is usually not deliberate, but is due to the fact that these are the easiest things to talk about. Conversation upon the boys' studies, for example, might betray an embarrassing rustiness on the part of the elder. The students, however, are confirmed in their tendency to believe that the former are the only things worth talking about. Nearly always the conscious influence of the alumni is conservative and exerted along conventional lines. The social colleges tend to send their graduates into front-window jobs and they become bond salesmen and the like. These alumni usually have time and opportunity to return to their colleges, and their in- fluence upon the students is to emphasize the tradi- tional habit of mind and attitude toward the world. Alumni exercise little influence, if any, toward radical- ism, not because many alumni are not radicals, but because these alumni radicals are likely to be men who were too individualistic to fit into the social scheme when they were undergraduates, and hence have no clubs to return to. 228 THE UNDERGRADUATE One most important influence of the alumni comes from their part in getting boys to go to college. Wher- ever the entering class has been questioned on the sub- ject in any college not close to a great center of popu- lation, it is the influence of some alumnus which is usually shown to be the moving cause for a student's selection of that particular institution. Leaving out the cases of athletic purchases, which are conspicuous rather from their flagrancy than from their number, the alumnus interests himself in some boy he likes, which usually means a boy who is like himself, and this tends to fix the institutional type. High-school teachers are perhaps the most influential sources of supply, followed by clergymen and doctors, though often a lawyer or business man will make it possible for a promising office boy to get an education at his old college. Though some pretty poor stuff comes from over-enthusiastic alumni, this recruiting in general is good for the college. Sometimes, however, it is rather hard on the boy if the recruiter has not kept familiar with the downward progress of his alma mater in academic standards, or if he thinks or pretends to think that, after all, these don't matter very much. The influence of the alumni on the policies and for- tunes of the college is of very great, often of control- ling, importance. When a new president is to be ar> THE FINISHED PRODUCT 229 pointed, he is first sought for and usually found among the alumni. Other things being equal, a teacher prefers a chair at his own college, and in some of them there is a dangerous degree of inbreeding. Trustees are usu- ally alumni, and in most colleges some are the direct representatives on the board of their fellow-graduates. Organized alumni influence is also exerted through such bodies as the Harvard Board of Overseers and the various alumni councils, and almost every- where through the alumni secretary, who is coming to be a most important person in our collegiate scheme of things. As in the case of the influence of individuals, this organized or corporate alumni influence is usually conservative. We have, to be sure, nothing to com- pare with the ante-bellum phenomenon at Oxford and Cambridge of the Masters of Arts trooping back to kill every scheme of educational reform. Still, when the influence of the alumni or of a small group of them in an American college is all-controlling, we are not likely to see in that institution many signs of intel- lectual progress. In these days of rapid shifting one very quickly gets out of touch, and one is naturally out of sympathy with that which he does not understand. Alumni will seldom try to learn, education, like politics, being something about which every one can, or at any rate does, speak with unembarrassed dogmatism. rjo THE UNDERGRADUATE The more intelligently run colleges are, however, taking great pains to bring proposed educational plans clearly and effectively to the attention of alumni, — Harvard does this particularly well, — and are suc- ceeding in some cases beyond their hopes. The seem- ingly absorbing interest of alumni in athletics and other side-shows is largely superficial. When their minds are prepared they show keen interest in aca- demic matters. There are those who say that the present President of the United States would be some- body else, if Mr. Wilson when President of Princeton a decade ago had taken pains to prepare the minds of the Princeton alumni more carefully for the considera- tion of the "Quad" plan. It is significant that the inaugural address of one of our most recently elected college presidents, Ernest Martin Hopkins, of Dartmouth, should have dealt primarily with this question. In it he says: — Such strength as the American college lacks, it lacks, in the main, because of the too great confinement of interest among its men to the college of their undergraduate days. Many a man, through lack of opportunity for anything else, draws all the inspiration for his enthusiasm for his college from his memories of life when an undergraduate, and feeds his loyalty solely upon sentimental reverence for the past. The misfortune of interest thus confined falls alike upon the individual and upon the college. In general, the alumni of our American colleges have little knowledge of educa- tional movements or college responsibilities on which to THE FINISHED PRODUCT 231 base any interest that they may be disposed to give to the evolution of college thought. It is needless impoverishment for a man to be a recipient of the bounty of his college for the brief season of his membership and thereafter to miss being a participator in its affairs as a going concern. The ability of Dartmouth to continue to justify its exist- ence in a large way will be greatly increased or seriously cur- tailed by the degree of willingness of the alumni to seek knowledge of what the function of this college should be, and how its function should be accomplished. Any college which could have the really intelligent interest and cooper- ation of a large part of its alumni body in working out its destiny to major usefulness would become of such striking serviceableness as to be beyond comparison. An interesting plan, started at Columbia a few years ago and now being tried at other institutions also, is to bring the graduates back on some selected day when the college is in actual operation, when they can visit classrooms, hear lectures, and see the students at work in laboratories and the like. One important factor of this plan is that it gives the alumni from outside a chance to keep in touch with the faculty alumni, whose position in graduate matters is often difficult. They are, perhaps, a little too near the focus, but their spe- cial knowledge is often discounted, there being little realization as yet of the new attitude of intimacy be- tween students and teachers. The faculty alumni may, through meetings of this kind, and possibly visits of outside alumni to classes, be able to teach their breth- 232 THE UNDERGRADUATE ren that it is no longer possible, if it ever was, to tell students what to believe. An interesting sign of the new spirit is shown at Cornell, where the organized alumni recently adopted resolutions looking forward to cooperation with the faculty in maintaining schol- arly standards. The influence of alumni is largely and justly due to their extraordinary generosity. Their giving may be the result of careful stimulation and may be of a con- ventional and imitative type, and perhaps sometimes for relatively unnecessary purposes, but it is none the less a splendid tribute to what his college means to the average graduate. Many of the gifts, particularly of the younger alumni, represent real sacrifice. Classes just out of college all over the country are starting schemes for class funds. At Dartmouth, for example, the seniors recently adopted a plan which is to add fifty thousand dollars to the endowment of the college twenty-five years after their graduation. Besides these gifts for general purposes, individual alumni will support special things which interested them in college or for which they have later developed a hobby. Take it all in all, there is nothing else here in the world to compare as a social phenomenon with the generosity of our American alumni. It is only the rarest exception that an alumnus thinks that his gifts THE FINISHED PRODUCT 233 give him any special right to interfere in the running of the college. That is more likely to happen in the case of non-academic donors. Alumni loyalty is a queer complex. Sometimes it involves a blind personification of the college as a being something like the German State, which by definition can do no wrong. Sometimes the devotee has not the slightest idea what the college is now really trying to accomplish. Often in such cases the love is really for the place rather than for the institution of learning. A man is expected to send his son as an auto-da-fe to his own college, whether or not it happens to be the best place for that particular boy. If his college falls off in intellectual prestige, the dutiful alumnus will do what he can to provide other attractions, and will boost the college none the less vigorously, without reflecting that in his daily life he would not think of backing a business "proposition" without an idea inside it. It is easy to find things we might like to have other- wise, but alumni loyalty is fundamentally a very fine thing. It is nearly always unselfish, and is the most generous motive in many a rather narrow-gauge char- acter. As to its influence on the college, signs are not wanting of an improvement where this is needed. Now that the colleges themselves are beginning to realize that they have some responsibility as to the 2 3 4 THE UNDERGRADUATE students' sense of values, the alumni are taking more interest in non-athletic matters. Indeed, the wave of athleticism had probably already passed its crest even before the war. Not a few fields which the colleges, from oversight or lack of funds, have failed to develop are now being taken up by alumni, as, for example, the Yale Press and the "Yale Review" and the De- partment of Fine Arts at Harvard. In the tradition and the fact of alumni loyalty, col- leges have an engine of terrific power, and we have rea- son to hope that, in spite of switches and cut-offs, its progress will be on the right track. CHAPTER X ORGANIZATION In this chapter I shall not attempt to describe with any completeness the machinery which operates our American colleges, but only to outline it in the most general way, and so far as possible from the angle of the relations of the several parts to the individual stu- dent. For any one who cares to go more fully into these matters, I should recommend President Eliot's book on "University Administration," and that of President Sharpless on "The American College," both of which give a fair and discriminating picture of the college organization and operation. Our American colleges are often criticized by visitors from abroad for sharing in the natural fault of over- elaborate machinery. Probably the criticism is in part deserved, but one must always remember that we have never given up our original attitude of being in loco parentis to the students. Much of our organization concerns itself wholly with questions of personal care and some of our best administrative work has been in this field. Much of its influence is indirect. The whole question of intelligent ventilation and lighting, for ex- 236 THE UNDERGRADUATE ample, has a striking influence on the value of a college course, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology was justified in making elaborate preliminary obser- vations of the sun's position and elevation throughout the academic year at their new site before the archi- tect's plans were approved. In institutions where the organization is bad, on the other hand, one may profit- ably consider the effect upon the intellectual honesty of a body of college students that is produced by spe- cious college catalogues or other official announce- ments. The final authority and responsibility in an Ameri- can college lies in the board of trustees or regents. These men are usually not professional educators. In the older institutions the alumni will always be pre- dominant, whether or not provision is made for their formal representation on the board. It is the general impression that the value of such representation where it exists is mainly psychological, because on the whole the board is at least as likely to select good men to fill the vacancies as is an alumni vote. Many experts be- lieve that the only direct relation of the trustees with the details of operating the institution should be through the president, and certainly the evils of un- official short-cuts are beyond question. There is, however, a movement toward providing some formal opportunity for conference between faculty repre- ORGANIZATION 237 sentatives and trustees' committees. The statutes of Cornell, for example, have recently been altered to make provision for the election by the faculty at large of such a conference committee, and Trinity and other colleges are doing likewise. Elsewhere the same result is obtained by the arrangement of informal conferences between trustees and officers concerned during the preparation of the annual budget. It is rather the fashion to-day to attack the Ameri- can college trustee, and it must be said that some individuals have laid themselves open by acts of amazing foolishness. But it would be most ungrate- ful to forget the devotion and unselfishness with which these men, as a whole, have met their re- sponsibility. It is no small advantage to have fac- ulty and presidential plans checked by intelligent and sympathetic men, who are sufficiently removed from details to see the problem as a whole, and though academic radicals would not agree with me, I see no more reason why trustees should be technical experts than why good legislators need be jurists. There is little question as to the value of their super- vision and control of financial and physical matters, and in general policies of extension and growth. The students of many an institution might profitably be brought to realize the relation between their present comfortable situation and wide range of opportunity, 23 8 THE UNDERGRADUATE and certain wise decisions reached by the trustees of years before. In the old days the trustees used to legislate upon the most minute details of discipline and administra- tion, but to-day one finds very little of this. There are, however, sporadic cases in which they attempt to con- trol mores and provide beliefs by enactment. Or, by their action as to the appointment, promotion, and sometimes dismissal of particular teachers they in effect set themselves up as experts in matters of scholarship, particularly in the fields of social and economic theory. These cases have increased in num- ber during the excited and overwrought days since August, 1914, and have sometimes been colored and confused by questions regarding patriotism. It is earnestly to be hoped that during our participation in the war their number will, through acts of considera- tion on the part of all concerned, be kept just as low as possible. There is a sound reason for this. Just now our greatest need is national unity, and every such case operates in the other direction. Professors and in- vestigators in these fields are, from the nature of the case, critical of the existing order. Trustees, on the other hand, are usually selected because they are successful men. Some one has recently taken the trouble to look up the occupations of the trustees of seventeen endowed colleges and twenty-two state ORGANIZATION 239 universities and found fifty-six per cent in the first and sixty-eight per cent in the second to be of the success- ful business man type. The list contained out of six hundred and forty-nine names no representative of labor and only fourteen professors. Generally speak- ing successful men are conservative. Why should they not be? The existing order has worked well for them. The important thing is, not whether trustees are right or wrong in any particular question, or whether a radical professor is a detriment to the prosperity of the college at the moment, or may even be the cause for the turning away of gifts; the real point is whether the college is to have a faculty free to follow the truth wherever they see it, or whether, in order to be sure of their jobs, they will look in only certain safe directions. This question is, I need hardly say, one of fundamental importance to students. The need of tolerance, patience, and self-restraint, however, is not all on one side. Academic liberty and academic license are not synonymous, and a professor when he is dealing in public with debatable questions may profitably remember that not only he but the institution with which he is connected will be judged, not by what he may actually say, but by what the newspapers and particularly the head- line writers will say that he said. a 4 o THE UNDERGRADUATE The college president of to-day is a far cry from the clergyman who used to teach the "Evidences," and administer the complicated system of rewards and punishments — chiefly the latter — to the students of a century ago; and it is well that he is, for, rightly or wrongly, our system of college organization throws a load upon the president that only a strong and re- sourceful man can bear successfully. In his relations with the faculty, on the one hand, and the trustees on the other, he must know when to lead, when to drive, and when to wait, often the hardest of the three. He must do the ornamental things for which the position calls without having his head turned by them and without wasting a second's unnecessary time. He must be in a position to know what is going on in his college and in the field of education at large, and must see that the college funds are spent as fairly and effectively as possible. And he must do all these things without pil- ing up for himself a burden of routine duties which will keep him from giving his full energies to meeting emergencies as they arise. He must learn to bear both praise and blame for things for which he is n't in the least responsible. He must be a judge of men, both to pick new teachers who have their futures before them and to get the most out of those already on the staff. Finally, — and I think most wickedly, — faculty and alumni and trustees look to the president ORGANIZATION 241 to get money, — in unrestricted gifts or legislative appropriations if possible, — but to get it, anyway, even if it must be spent for a useless professorship or an expensive and unnecessary building. No wonder that the best of them make bad mistakes out of sheer worry and fatigue. No wonder some of them degener- ate into pompous drum majors who "slick over" the less showy but really fundamental parts of their jobs. And no wonder that the students are likely to feel that the president is pretty remote from them and their in- terests. Often he knows a great deal more about them than they realize. A wise president sees to it that he meets the worth-while students of each college genera- tion, even though he makes no attempt to know the whole mass. Provided he keeps his human interest in young men, he is likely to be of use to the students just in so far as he refrains from doing the obvious things. Picturesqueness, by the way, seldom goes with admin- istrative efficiency. It was, I think, the picturesque- ness of the presidents of the older generation, men like Dr. McCosh, of Princeton, which gave to the students of their time the illusion of close contact with the presi- dent. It was not so much that he knew them as that they had a vivid external picture of him. Another responsibility usually left to the president is that of "advertising the college." Sometimes he confuses this with the opportunity to advertise him- 242 THE UNDERGRADUATE self. Sometimes he engages a press agent, although this practice is falling into disrepute. Sometimes he leaves it to the athletic coaches, merely seeing that the faculty is not permitted to interfere by indiscreet legislation or administration with the development of winning teams. Of course there are legitimate occa- sions and methods for bringing pertinent facts about any college to the attention of the public, but in general the best way to advertise the college is, as has been said before, to see that it is good enough to be its own advertisement. In dealing with academic finance, I must again bear in mind that this is a book which concerns the student primarily, and I shall refrain from any attempt to do justice to the fascinating subject of the pursuit, capture, and domestication of donors or such more technical questions as the conditional gift and its good and bad aspects. It is, however, appropriate to speak of the recent tendency toward publicity and clarity in finan- cial matters, because intelligent parents may often pursue modern college reports to their advantage, bearing in mind that when student fees are the major source of income it is practically impossible to main- tain academic standards. It is worth while also for them to observe how much of the resources of a given institution goes into teaching and how much into ORGANIZATION 243 administration and other non-curricular activities. It is pertinent also to point out that while much of the giving to colleges is still capricious, it is becoming more and more true that gifts are made because they are deserved and needed, rather than from pure senti- mentalism, or for the same reason that the man in the parable arose from his bed and made his donation to the importunate neighbor. War and war finance are sure to reduce gifts of this kind for the future. The question of academic fees, needless to say, touches the student very closely. Every college col- lects them. The State universities began as free insti- tutions, and college tuition is still technically free to residents of the Commonwealth, but there are labora- tory and other incidental fees to be garnered; Wis- consin manages to produce a total of $441,000 per annum from these sources. The cost of college education has been steadily rising. For some time after the increase began, the whole matter was obscured by complicated and un- intelligent bookkeeping, but recurring deficits finally removed doubt upon the subject. This increase has come about in part from the extraordinary physical developments of the last quarter of a century. Not only is science teaching in the laboratories more ef- fective than didactic lectures, but it is infinitely more expensive. The gymnasia, swimming-pools, luxurious 244 THE UNDERGRADUATE dormitories, and the like are not only costly in the initial expense of construction, but in annual mainte- nance. The rising cost is also due in part to the fact that in these days of higher prices for everything, even pro- fessors' salaries had to go up in the face of the relatively greater ease of making a comfortable living in other pursuits (to say nothing of the possibility of getting rich). It is n't necessary to meet the financial prizes of other callings, for the teacher has rewards that are all his own, but the professor, if merely as a matter of efficiency, has to be freed from the sordid worry of butchers' and bakers' bills. As a result of this increased cost, college finance com- mittees have been put to it to find ways and means of adding to their income. At first this implied even more intense donor-hunting, almost to the point of extermination, but at length it occurred to some wise man that there was nothing sacred about the tradi- tional college fees and that it might be worth while to see what the traffic would stand. As a result of this new line of thought tuition fees have already gone up about twenty-five per cent in the last ten years and the movement is still in progress. Professor Hull, of Cornell, has proposed a special increase of fifty dollars in the fees for students on probation, but this cruel and unusual form of punishment has n't, as yet, gone into ORGANIZATION 245 effect. Apparently the traffic stands it, at least so far as the stronger institutions are concerned, because the very colleges which have made the most drastic changes are the ones which are growing most rapidly in numbers. This does not mean that the increase is easy to meet for the typical college student. As a matter of fact the old charges provided problems enough, but it does mean, I hope and believe, thai the conception of a college course as an investment is becoming more general, and an investment in which the time spent rather than the money is the really important factor. Of course all colleges make provision for scholarships, many by the simple device of writing off the tuition charges, a process which obviously puts accurate accounting out of the question. Even when proper budget provision is made, too many scholarships are usually awarded. In many of the colleges they run up to thirty and forty per cent of the total attendance, and this means a most unfair draft on the fee-paying student. The whole question of granting scholarships is beset with difficulties. What relative weight should be given to financial need and what to "promise of future use- fulness." Is the possession, for example, of a dress- suit a disqualifying factor? What should be done with the pert little grade-getter as against the student of 246 THE UNDERGRADUATE lower standing whom everybody knows is more of a man? Which is the better criterion, an "A" won by a boy who has the front window qualities to pick up a highly paid tutoring job in the summer and devote the winter comfortably to study, or a " C " by the one who has to drive a milk wagon to pay his living expense? Should the conscientious and reasonably capable boy who has been encouraged to come by a freshman schol- arship be deprived of it as a sophomore merely be- cause the committee on awards guessed wrong as to his ability? What weight may legitimately be given to prowess in student activities, particularly athletics? That this factor receives great weight at some institu- tions is evident from the naive preliminary shopping for the best "proposition," indulged in by many boys with schoolboy reputations. Should some alumnus be encouraged to carry a boy whom you like personally, but whose academic record is, to say the least, "sketchy"? If any of my readers can furnish me with the correct answers to these and similar questions, what is at present the most difficult and trying of my own academic duties will be greatly simplified. In addition to scholarships, increasing provision is being made for loan funds. The University of Mis- souri has recently a bequest of two hundred and fifty thousand dollars for this purpose. This is really a more logical, as well as a more economical, way to look after ORGANIZATION 247 most of the impecunious students. Scholarships should be awarded as they are in England, as prizes, and wholly on the basis of striking intellectual promise. Some of the present details of fee collection, like so many other things about our colleges, are survivals, coming down from conditions that have long since ceased to exist. The colonial president, for example, received honest graft in the form of a pistole for every diploma he signed. Consequently there is usually to- day a separate diploma fee which, needless to say, the president no longer pockets. When flogging went out of fashion, the fine, or mulct, became the favorite form of punishment, and certain of the present charges are essentially punitive in character. When laboratories were a novelty, they were separately financed by a system of fees, which still persists, although there is no more reason to-day why a student should pay extra for his work in the laboratory than for his study of the books in the library. As a result of all this, there is in most colleges, in addition to the regular tuition charges, a complicated system of what the student designates as "chicken-feed fees," not so many, perhaps, as at old-fashioned Oxford, but enough in all conscience, and intensely irritating to the student. The better admin- istered colleges are now substituting for these a fiat fee, corresponding more or less to the dues of a club, as 248 THE UNDERGRADUATE the tuition charges (which are coming pretty generally to be based on the number of hours of attendance) correspond to the house charges. Even though the amount of this fee is as great or even greater than the total of the incidental fees, the students pay it in a wholly different spirit. In the colleges where the collection of fees is no- toriously slack, and there are many such, the adminis- tration takes a serious responsibility for the inculca- tion of bad business habits among their students, and they also lose a great deal of money. The pockets of careless youths are very easily perforated, and every fall, hundreds of boys come to our colleges with the money for their college fees on their persons, and fritter it away before the administration gets around to ask- ing for it. Frequently this money cannot be replaced and the student has to give up his college course. On the other hand, many colleges give far too little dis- cretion in meeting exceptional cases to their collection officers. As a result many an alumnus goes through life with a smouldering sense of injustice which is likely to cost the college far more than the original five or ten dollars in question. It is not easy to administer a system which is at once firm and human, but it can be done. I have gone into some detail in these matters to emphasize the principle that whether a student's rela- ORGANIZATION 249 tions with the college organization are satisfactory or the reverse depends directly on the efficiency and sym- pathy with which he is met at the points of most fre- quent contact. One would think that the sympathy, at any rate, would always be forthcoming in so highly competitive a business as catering to students, but here again we must not forget the historic background provided by the old-fashioned disciplinary attitude toward small boys, an attitude to which the student naturally reacted by a tradition of disorder, culminat- ing frequently in what was really a state of guerrilla warfare. As a result of this background the points of contact developed themselves almost wholly for the purpose of checking and punishing; any policy of help- ing, or more particularly, of cooperating with the stu- dents being very recent. Not long ago I had occasion to go over some voluminous records of administrative memoranda of former days, and in not a single in- stance did I find any inkling of a desire to work with the students for any purpose whatsoever. The salary of the porter, for example, was to be paid from fines collected, presumably as an incentive to that func- tionary to catch the students "with the goods." It need hardly be said that to-day, in the good colleges at any rate, this old point of view has disap- peared, and the most earnest desire of those in re- sponsible charge is for cooperation with the students. 2 so THE UNDERGRADUATE The inevitable reaction on their part has been an almost complete cessation of disorder. Nevertheless, the influence of the old background appears too often in the administrative attitude at some of these points of contact, in impatience, dogmatism, in a general tendency to "deny everything and demand proof." It must be admitted that students are often madden- ing people to do business with, by their insistence, by their surprising ignorance of the most elementary facts, and their reluctance to find them in catalogues and other material readily available to them. Students usually appear only to make work, and it is hard to remember that such work is exactly what the adminis- trator is there for. The type of attitude I have de- scribed tends to persist because it saves trouble for everybody concerned, excepting always the student. Its most widespread manifestation is the prevalence of what I may call the "catalogue mind." It is much easier to point to a rule on page 24 than to take a mo- ment to explain to a student why a certain rule is pro bono publico, to say nothing of considering whether its infraction in this particular case would not be serving a greater good. When the law is laid down not by an officer, but by a clerk gloating in his little brief authority, and quick to imitate the tone of his superiors, the situation is at its worst. I admit that a student is often just trying it on, ORGANIZATION 251 in pursuance of the Irish policy expressed in the phrase "which harm it can't and good it may"; but some- times his sense of equity is thoroughly aroused by the ruling given and an affront to this sense is not easily forgotten. At first the president did all the administration that was to be done. As things grew more complicated, he got the faculty to help him and the college servants took on certain routine tasks. At Columbia, for ex- ample, the first catalogues were issued by the janitor as a private venture. The appointment of academic officers other than the president to give their whole time to administration is a recent development. I know of no case earlier than 1890. So far as the students are concerned, the question to-day is between administration by faculty committee and so-called functional administration, by officers appointed and paid ad hoc. In the larger universities the latter system is becoming firmly established. In the separate colleges the former persists pretty gener- ally, except that there is usually a dean and a registrar. Even at Reed College, which is receiving much atten- tion to-day as the pioneer of a new type of American college untrammeled by tradition, the recently adopted statutes make provision for no fewer than fourteen standing faculty committees. My personal feeling as 252 THE UNDERGRADUATE to this matter is very definite. It is not convincing to point to the brief period when, under conditions very different from those to-day, faculty administration worked successfully in the New England colleges and perhaps elsewhere. Under present conditions the pro- fessor should have his say either directly or upon some representative basis upon all matters of constructive administration. The three-year study made recently by the Oberlin faculty on college efficiency, for exam- ple, seems to me a perfectly appropriate enterprise. With routine administration, however, he should have just as little as possible to do. He has been bred to an- other type, and disregarding the exceptions to which attention could be called in any general statement, his work of routine administration is badly and expen- sively done; badly because it is not the work in which he is primarily interested, nor that for which he is temperamentally suited, and there is almost sure to be unnecessary and harassing delay in getting things done; expensively, because its cost must be measured not in terms of money, but in terms of contributions to scholarship, in teaching, and research which might be accomplished in the time thus employed. It is this apparent but fallacious saving in dollars and cents that causes administration by faculty committees to persist so generally to-day. Still worse is the intrusion into faculty meetings of twopenny details depending upon ORGANIZATION 253 the application of principles already determined upon by all hands after long consideration, because here the time not of one professor or of a small committee, but of the whole group, is being wasted. Experience has proved that the principle of func- tional administration can be adopted even in small colleges which cannot afford to pay full salaries both to teachers and administrative officers, by the assign- ment of versatile professors to do specified adminis- trative jobs, giving them time for this work by reliev- ing them from some teaching, and charging a proper proportion of their stipend to administration in the budget. One important reason why the old kind of relation- ship between student and administration is on the wane, and indeed has almost disappeared at the best institutions, is because a new type of servant has en- tered into academic life, usually a young alumnus, one whose interest has been, perhaps, rather in student affairs than in the attainment of high grades. Admin- istration by men of this kind is supplementing not only the operations of faculty committees, but of clerks who fail to take responsibility, and under their influence the growing tendency is toward an effective coopera- tion, based upon a recognition of the fact that the stu- dent is an organic part of the whole enterprise. These men know the students and their point of view, and 254 THE UNDERGRADUATE they are anxious to magnify their own jobs in legiti- mate ways. Of course, they make mistakes, mistakes usually due to ignorance of faculty, rather than of stu- dent, psychology, but they make progress as well. The president of one of the large New England col- leges tells a story about a young alumnus whom he took as his secretary. For about six months the secre- tary limited his activities to doing what he was told, in- telligently enough, but without comment, and then one day he presented to the president a careful memoran- dum showing the amount of time which the latter, in a given week, had devoted to trivial tasks, and with it an estimate of what these activities had cost the college, basing the figure upon the annual salary of the presi- dent. He then asked whether it would not be worth while to try the economy of having the secretary, at his salary, do these particular things for the future. One element in college administration which has de- veloped to an extraordinary degree is that of record- keeping, and as this is an element which touches the student very closely, the registrar's may be taken as an example of the college administrative office. Much of the growth in our recording machinery has been necessary and inevitable. The elective system, or the elaborate substitutes for it which have developed more recently, with the separate course as a unit instead of ORGANIZATION 255 the class, necessarily mean more complicated systems of record and check than the prescribed course and class organization of earlier days. The "point" (the hour-per-week unit) as the unit of measurement has grown out of these new conditions. The new college policies which insure individual- attention to students mean much extra work for the recording officer. Deans, advisors, fraternity chapters, all are asking for records, and copies have also to go to the students' parents and must be made out for possi- ble employers or employment agents, or for professional schools. From the nature of the case, therefore, the system of records in any modern college cannot be a simple one, but it is often made unnecessarily complex and dehumanizing in its influence -- beautiful blanks of all kinds for students to fill out (with the vacant spaces invariably too small for the sprawly handwrit- ing of American youth), with double and sometimes triple sets of records for different officers, a constant demand on unstatistically minded professors for sta- tistics, and minute instructions, based often upon a single case that has gone wrong, finding their way into catalogues to make the confusion there worse con- founded. There is no more hard-working or devoted set of col- lege servants than the registrars as a class. Because of the strength which comes from accurate knowledge, 256 THE UNDERGRADUATE the registrar has often a powerful influence on the pol- icies of the institution, and fortunately the best men of them see the human side of their problem very clearly. Where this is not the case, a catalogue-minded registrar can often undo the efforts of the professors and of the other administrative officers to build up an atmosphere of confidence and cordiality on the part of the student toward the institution. The very titles of other administrative officers who are to be found in most well-organized colleges indi- cate the care of the institution for all sides of the student's activities: health officer, physical educa- tion director, chaplain, Y.M.C.A. secretary, resident alumni secretary, and the men who under various titles look after the dormitories and the restaurants. One of the most characteristic is the employment and appoint- ment agent, and his work too may be summarized as an example. Student employment has developed, from a hap- hazard permitting of boys to work out their term bills by chopping wood or doing other chores, to modern offices with a director, stenographers, and card in- dexes. The same machinery is ordinarily used for plac- ing men after graduation. In the country college much of the work, except in the summer, is necessarily in connection with the institution, though there are agencies for various articles which are sometimes bona ORGANIZATION 257 fide opportunities for work, but perhaps as often a vehicle for graft. The experiment of running a farm on the Princeton campus, for the purpose of providing work for students, was tried in unconscious prophecy of the labors of thousands of college boys this year, and a very interesting comment and suggestion comes from the librarian of the same institution: "The present difficulty," he says, "is that a very large amount of academically trained student labor is employed in such unacademic and unskilled tasks as clothes-pressing, farming, waiting on table, and other non-literary occu- pations which do not contribute to academic education or intellectual stimulus and do not require scholarly preparation. This is a real economic waste," the libra- rian states, " and it would be easy to organize useful tasks in research, or in the preparation of bibliographi- cal aids to research, which would utilize any amount of this labor to the advantage of the university and of science, and to the intellectual profit of the men them- selves." The picture of certain types of our colle- giate youth engaged upon bibliographical research is a little startling, but the proposal is a most sugges- tive one., In the cities the opportunities for competent men are legion. Students are in demand as subjects for all sorts of experiments psychological and dietetic, as artist's models, ushers, extra salesmen, as political 258 THE UNDERGRADUATE workers, and finally there is the whole range of sum- mer opportunities for tutors, hotel clerks, stewards, canvassers, in which the country and city college stand on even terms. Many of the students, as I have already said, find their own jobs, leaving the employment office to look after the less experienced men. There is a good deal of confusion in the public and indeed in the aca- demic mind about self-supporting students, and this is largely due, I think, to the fact that we don't distin- guish between the man with regular employment who devotes a part of his time to study — as he might to religious or social work — and the one whose real busi- ness in life for the moment is to be a college student, and to whom the earning of money, though more or less necessary, is incidental. While the college of the municipal type, as at Akron or Cincinnati, may be closely concerned with the students' part-time employ- ment in industry or city affairs, the average college employment office is naturally chiefly concerned with the latter type, though it uses the earnings of the former to swell the institutional totals. These to- tals, by the way, are coming to be very impressive. At Columbia, for example, student earnings have amounted in the last fifteen years to more than a million and a half dollars. The employment officer should be in close touch, as ORGANIZATION 259 he too often is n't, with the machinery for scholarships and loans, both because he is often the first to know of cases where help is sorely needed, and also because he learns a good deal about the candidates which does n't come out in the classroom. No one has better oppor- tunity to spot the "four-flushers." Another sign of the times is the increasing care given to the general health of the student body. Some- times this is combined with the prescribed work in physical education, sometimes there is a separate offi- cer. Yale, Columbia, Kansas, and other institutions have given particular care to this matter, and the les- sons which the war is teaching as to the value to the community of a high average of health and vigor will help to make the movement universal. The colleges which are interested in quality rather than quantity in the student body are requiring at entrance not only a certificate of moral character, which is a general re- quirement, but also a certificate of health. The rela- tion between good health and good scholarship is closer than is generally realized. Let me tell a true story to show the importance of a close oversight of student health. A certain student who was living alone became more and more depressed until finally his melancholia became so acute that he carried off a supply of cyanide of potassium from the 260 THE UNDERGRADUATE laboratory for the purpose of doing away with himself. One day he woke up with a sore throat, and as a mat- ter of habit went to the college physician for treatment. The doctor immediately saw that the boy was suffering from acute intestinal poisoning, and prescribed a thor- ough house-cleaning and a change of diet. With the return of his normal good spirits the boy put back the cyanide where it belonged and later on confessed to the doctor. Academic administration, as we have it, is unknown in other countries, and while its complexity is largely due to our peculiar conditions, it is true, nevertheless, that many colleges are spending more time and energy on administration than the conditions warrant, and the student pays for this in decreased educational oppor- tunities. This, however, is a swing of the pendulum which naturally followed the days of administrative chaos. The adjustment of these matters must be busi- ness-like, but not in terms of cost-accounting, because here money is not the proper unit with which to meas- ure values. That unit, if it exists, is something more intangible and imponderable. For this reason the reor- ganizations which the outsiders, chartered account- ants, efficiency experts, and the like, have proposed from time to time are not likely to work satisfactorily. While it is important to know about the progress of business-like methods, it is more important to study ORGANIZATION 261 the recommendations of experienced men like John Dewey or even the brilliant guesses of such a theorist as Bertrand Russell. The student's first point of contact with the college is when he wants to find out something about entrance. Here progress has been very rapid. Not so long ago the college from which inquirers could expect a prompt and intelligent reply to a summer letter could be counted on a single hand. I have been told that at Columbia, before Mr. Low's reorganization, the sum- mer mail was dumped, unopened, into a closet, to await the opening of college in the fall. To-day the good colleges are pretty competent in this regard. Some of them maintain careful mailing lists, whereby prospective candidates are kept informed as to the dates of examination, changes in requirements, and other facts of importance. The indirect relations of the candidate through his school have also been much improved. In the old days the college blandly ignored the fact that a good schoolmaster knows many important things about his boys, often more than their parents, and that it is a waste of time, to say the least, not to tap this source of information, instead of finding out the same things empirically all over again. Nowadays the colleges see the value of close cooperation in the common task a62 THE UNDERGRADUATE of turning boys into men, and even in the examining colleges the report of the schoolmaster is given great and often deciding weight in the admission of a given student. One of the basic factors in the future of the college as a national institution will be the success of the efforts now being made to check the mortality among the boys which begins in the upper grades of the elemen- tary schools and continues throughout the secondary schools. We need the boy of restless mind whose going to college is not a matter of social custom or pressure, and where we lose him is not between the high school and the university, but before then, sometimes years before. We fool ourselves when we think this is pri- marily an economic question. It is really much more a question of unsatisfied interest. A boy who is impelled to continue his studies by ambition or intellectual curiosity can earn nearly as much by odd jobs and summer work as he will at a trade. Those of our great-grandfathers who went to college were tested by oral examinations for admission. The president conducted the proceedings, flanked on his right by the senior professor of classics and on his left by the professor of mathematics. As numbers grew the Eastern institutions substituted written examinations and the Western State universities, taking advantage of a single system of State education, set the example of ORGANIZATION 263 admission by school certificate rather than by exami- nation. This system spread rapidly, until to-day the colleges which do not accept these certificates are rare exceptions; among the large colleges for men only Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and Columbia remain. Some few others, while admitting primarily on certifi- cate, set one or more examinations for all candidates. Williams, for example, insists upon its own examina- tion in English. Harvard, however, and doubtless the other examining colleges, have granted certificates of admission this year to boys joining the colors. Both systems have gone through dismal periods of inefficiency. Before the establishment of the College Entrance Examination Board in 1900, the entrance examinations of colleges were carelessly or stupidly framed and badly administered, and there was little or no uniformity as to requirements. This board, which prepares its questions through committees of experts representing both colleges and secondary schools, soon acted as a standardizing influence even on the colleges which continued to offer their own tests. It must be admitted that at first its examinations were much too difficult, for the very human reason that the school-men on the committee were over-careful to prove that their scholarly standards were no whit lower than those of their collegiate colleagues. To-day, however, the examinations provide a very fair test 264 THE UNDERGRADUATE of the candidate's capacity to take college work. The fact that they are offered simultaneously at centers in all parts of the country and even abroad has proved a great convenience and economy, and a means of bringing many boys from a distance to the stronger in- stitutions. It should be understood that the board simply conducts the examinations and rates the answer books, leaving the interpretation of grades, etc., to the colleges. Its operations, it must be said, have tended to foster rather than to hinder the piecemeal process of taking a few examinations at a time, beginning often two years before the candidate expects to enter, a proc- ess which has grown up to the joy of the private tutor. The board, however, now offers comprehensive examin- ations as well as tests in separate subjects. By this plan, devised and first tried at Harvard (and incidentally advertised throughout the land with the dignified effi- ciency of which Harvard alone seems capable), the can- didate takes only four examinations, each designed to test his capacity in some broad general field. He takes a single examination in Latin, for example, instead of separate tests in Latin grammar, composition, prose, Caesar, Cicero, and Virgil. On the basis of these exam- inations he is admitted or rejected by the college — there are no conditions. This is a very significant step. The ends which it aims to reach are obviously most de- sirable. Yale and Princeton are adopting the new plan ORGANIZATION 265 with modifications, as are Vassar, Smith, Mt. Holyoke, and Wellesley. The action of these last is of particular importance, because it must be confessed that many of the most important innovations in college education in America have been first developed at the girls' colleges. The certificate system, on the other hand, lays se- vere burdens upon the honesty of the good-natured school principal. In any calling it is unnatural to " cry stinking fish," and for a time the colleges were inun- dated with boys whose certificates represented just about the value of the paper on which they were writ- ten. Within the past few years conditions have been much improved by a greater severity on the part of the certificating colleges themselves, involving of the taking-away of the privilege from schools whose stu- dents have done unsatisfactory college work; and even more by the cooperative action of the various regional associations of schools and colleges, and particularly by the certificating boards established by these asso- ciations, the New England board being notably effi- cient in its work. To-day it takes a good certificate to get a boy into a good college. Any certificate will get a boy into a bad college, but after all the bad college, which has to get students by hook or crook, would doubtless admit him, certificate or no. No one who knows anything about the subject pre- 266 THE UNDERGRADUATE tends that we have as yet found the best basis of artic- ulation between school and college. The examination system too often serves as a test of the capacity of the "crammer" rather than of the candidate. The com- prehensive examination has not yet been in operation long enough to see whether the benumbing influence which seems to attack the framers of examinations can be successfully resisted. If they once become conven- tionalized the "Widow" Nolan (as the Cambridge expert is called) and his fellow-craftsmen will learn how to "beat" them, as they now beat the separate exami- nations. Also, in spite of the school record which is required of all candidates and scrutinized as a basis for permission to take the comprehensive examinations, there is danger that the system may result in neglect in school of the subjects not to be covered by the examina- tion. On the other hand, the certificate system at its best is the friend of mediocrity rather than of excellence, and decency forbids me to say what it is at its worst. It is of the very essence of the new attitude of coop- eration between teacher and student, and of the policy of substituting for discipline new stimuli based upon opportunities for intellectual pleasure, that the admis- sion system should keep out the unfit and admit the fit, — by the "fit" I mean primarily boys who know how to think, — and we all know that as yet neither system does this with any degree of uniformity. ORGANIZATION 267 But it is well for the pessimist to look backward. In the twenty-odd years, let us say, since he himself took entrance examinations, we have certainly moved far, and most of the progress has been in the last decade. Then a schoolboy had to know long in advance, not only whether he was going to college, but which par- ticular system of tests he had to meet. To-day, if we exclude a very few institutions which confuse high standards with catalogue-minded inelasticity, it is true that any boy of good ability who has had a four- year high-school course, and many a boy who has had to prepare himself, is able to choose among all the col- leges in the country. He may have to enter with a load of conditions, or as a candidate for some baser degree than the time-honored A.B. (a matter which the stu- dent will find seems to be regarded as of importance only by the registrar), or temporarily as a special stu- dent, but he has his chance. This is no doubt due in part to our voracious appetite for more students, but it reflects also the fruits of hard and careful study on the part of administrative officers and the development of a much more human and intelligent attitude. It re- flects as well the tendency to substitute expert officers of the right temperament for clerical or overworked professorial machinery. All this is of particular im- portance, because the freshman year is the critical one for most undergraduates. Whether or not his college 268 THE UNDERGRADUATE proves to be a wise investment depends largely upon his getting off to a good start, and in this matter an intelligent and sympathetic entrance system shares the responsibility with the assignment of first-rate teachers to freshman classes and with a wholesome student public opinion. We are also making progress toward the elimination of trivial and irritating entrance conditions. It would x probably be a mistake to give them up altogether at the present stage of the game. The correlation between freedom from entrance conditions and success in col- lege is not without significance. An inquiry made not long ago into the records of four colleges (about sixteen hundred cases) showed not a single case of an under- graduate dropped for poor scholarship who had en- tered clear of conditions by examination, and the per- centage of such students graduating in the first third of the class was strikingly high. Conditions, in a word, should be the exception and not the rule. It is, I think, a good thing that the colleges are not rushing too eagerly to adopt the devices for admitting students which are being urged upon them by their critics. For one thing these counsels are often mutually contradictory except as to the immediate need of abolishing the present system, root and branch. Even along the lines which show most promise, and which, by the way, the better-equipped college officers are ORGANIZATION 269 watching closely, the psychological tests of general and special capacity, as contrasted with verbal mem- ory, it will do no harm to go slowly. Even psycholo- gists are prone to go off at half-cock, and as a class they seem oblivious of the dangers of "rocking the boat." We shall be in a much better position to move forward intelligently when we have available the results of the careful studies now being made in this general field under the auspices of the Carnegie Foundation, and have had a chance to watch and adapt to our particu- lar needs the interesting experiments as to educational measurements, by scales and standards, which are being tried lower down upon the educational ladder. CHAPTER XI EDUCATIONAL ADMINISTRATION The point of contact between the mechanism of the institution and its human membership, often between administrative literalness and common sense, is the dean. Until comparatively recent years the president was the sole representative of administration, and when the separate position was first established the dean was usually the senior professor, and his duties, which were added to those of his regular teaching, were primarily to administer discipline on behalf of the faculty. Since that time " the conception of the part has changed," as the theatrical people say. If he does any teaching, the dean does it incidentally. Most col- leges have a single dean, but at Harvard there is an assistant dean who gives his whole time to the fresh- men, and in several of the State universities there is a separate dean of men and another of women, who deal with the social affairs of the students, but have no direct responsibility as regards their educa- tional standards. In institutions like the University of Chicago there are a number of collegiate deans, each one a teacher in active service, but with duties lightened in order that he may look after a definite ADMINISTRATION 271 number of students. There is no particular merit in any one of the systems as such. The main point is to have the interests and progress of each student under the eye of a man who feels a direct responsibility for him, and who has the time and intelligence to exercise this responsibility. In most colleges the position of the dean is now pretty clearly defined, but in some of the smaller ones the president still does whatever deaning there is to be done, and at Cornell deans may come and deans may go, but Davy Hoy, the registrar, runs on forever; and for most of the students is the primary representa- tive of authority. The modern college dean has certain formal duties, but woe betide him if he makes them too formal. He has his relations with the president and sometimes with the trustees, and must, under their guidance and with the cooperation of the faculty, formulate the educational policy of the college. He must know how to use the facilities of the institution in the interests of the students under his charge. For example, a college dean ought to be in close touch with the health officer of the institution. I know personally of three cases of incipient tuberculosis which were recognized by the medical officer in time to prevent serious consequences, only because the dean had observed that the boys were out of form and had sent them to the doctor for an a 7 a THE UNDERGRADUATE overhauling. In his relations with the faculty, which is often a large and complex body, it is well for the dean to have in existence a small executive committee elected by their colleagues. At Columbia, furthermore, we do much of our important work, not in formal faculty meetings, but in a sort of go-as-you-please evening gathering at the Faculty Club, where the men may smoke if they want to, and where we have the benefit of the counsel of the younger instructors, who are not members of the formal faculty, but are often nearer to the students. The dean is still a disciplinary officer, but student disorder is disappearing very rapidly and there are only comparatively rare cases of "cribbing" and other similar delinquencies to occupy his time. On the other hand, it is his duty to approve the programmes of each student and to authorize changes in them. This ought to mean a very large number of individual con- ferences. He should keep in touch with the parents of students and the schools from which they come. In many colleges the Greek letter fraternities also coop- erate with him as to the scholarship of their members. It is his painful duty — sometimes on his own initia- tive, more often after the case has been considered by the faculty, or a committee of it — to sever the rela- tions of students found, after a period of probation, to be hopelessly deficient in scholarship. Princeton has ADMINISTRATION 1273 dropped as many as eighty-one boys at the end of a single term. The informal duties are really more important. For instance, the dean of a city college must make himself responsible for seeing that the lonely boys, particularly those who are not in residence at the college, get that "certain personal touch and influence on their char- acters" of which the small colleges make so much. His hardest duties in this respect are in providing social opportunities for the shy youngsters, who show great reluctance to come to one's house and almost complete incapacity to leave it when they have once arrived. On the other hand, the dean of the country college must see that his students get whatever outside stimu- lus and touch with outside affairs is possible for them, and must do what he can to break up what has been called the annual football-poker-baseball trilogy. A dean must know something about boys in general, and the outstanding facts of youthful psychology. He must understand, for instance, their tendency to slump from time to time, and how to overlook trivial delin- quencies during such periods. He must know that many a boy who will not actually he sees no harm in presenting selected aspects of the truth. A student may seem to have no interest in getting an education, but he will move heaven and earth to obtain the outward evidences thereof in the shape of credits. I know of no 274 THE UNDERGRADUATE more striking examples of youthful ingenuity than some of the pleas put forward for an undeserved "point." Then he must be able to decide what is or should be the thing which will light up each boy intellectually and socially. He must therefore know the dominant interest of each, which is often shown by bis motive in coming to college. He must be able to appreciate not merely the boy who starts well prepared and goes ahead steadily, but also the boy with poor prepara- tion or the one to whom intellectual maturity comes slowly, boys who may be problems for the first three years and first-rate seniors. And he must look after the boys who are off the normal type, a very consider- able number in any large college community. The dean must know how to see that the emphasis of the institution is placed upon the best boys rather than upon those who have a natural capacity for getting into administrative trouble, and he must see that these best boys have as well-rounded an experi- ence as possible while in college. A famous under- graduate dean, now retired, saves his face when one of his former students comes up to speak to him and is not recognized. He says, "Well, then, you must have been one of the good students, because I remember all the bad ones." That would not be a satisfactory excuse under present conditions. ADMINISTRATION 275 In dealing with crimes and punishments and in particular with the moral failings of students, the modern idea of deliberate substitution of some new interest to take the place of the deleterious one is rapidly taking the place of the old policies of repression and terrorization. The natural curiosity of man is a tremendously powerful instrument, which it is easier and more profitable to direct into new channels than to attempt to extinguish. The qualities which the modern college dean most needs are, I should say, the ability to retain his faith, hope, and charity in the face of a pretty heavy load of duties, no one of which seems of any particular im- portance, but the aggregate amount of which is very considerable. He must learn to face the facts as they lie before him — the good qualities and the limitations of the general college adniinistration,- the teaching staff, and the student body itself. In a word, he must do his job with the material he has at hand and not sit back and construct castles in the air as to what he could do with the kind of faculty and student body that never was on land or sea. He must be able to turn away from the dispiriting contemplation of his failures, and there will be many such, and get consolation from the many men who go forward with credit, and the handful who do so with distinction. 276 THE UNDERGRADUATE One of the hardest things for an ambitious man in this position to realize is that he cannot do it all him- self. No man can supply the atmosphere for a com- munity to breathe. He must use what organized * machinery exists in the way of faculty advisers and upper-class counselors (usually known among the students, I regret to say, as "nursemaids"), and he must be shameless in the use of his friends within and without the college in order to see that his boys get the particular kind of advice or other help that they need. If a man does not unload work of this kind successfully he cannot hope to keep himself fresh to do his own share of it. College people in general are prone to think themselves particularly devoted to their duties when they are constantly overworked and tired, and for that reason really incompetent to perform them. It is both brutal and fatuous to try to deal with youth when one's own elasticity has gone, either temporarily or permanently. The great secret of suc- cess in dealing with young men is to be at the top of one's game, otherwise the atmosphere of good humor and sympathy, in which alone admonition, and usually advice also, can be effectively given, is hope- lessly lost. The human relationship can be best maintained if there is just as little routine as possible, and the ele- ment of surprise is of the greatest value. The wonder- ADMINISTRATION 277 ful hold which Dean Briggs had upon his men was due not only to his sympathy and tact, but to a cer- tain Haroun-al-Raschid knack of knowing unexpected things. Another dean of my acquaintance cured a youngster with great intellectual promise, but appar- ently an incorrigible "smart Aleck," by making the boy read aloud to him an impertinent essay, regarding which one of the boy's instructors had complained. Of course a man in his position needs an instinctive sense of fairness. There is one particular kind of fair- ness which is also good policy in the long run, and that is frankly to advise an unhappy or other "misfit" student to change his college. A man must try to use his likes to the advantage of colleagues and students without letting his dislikes work to their disadvantage. Personally I feel that far too much has been made of precedent in our college affairs. There are very few real precedents, because the human factors underly- ing superficially s imil ar cases may be fundamentally different. It is wrong to think, as some college admin- istrations evidently do, that the quality of mercy is necessarily a confession of weakness. If each individual case is really studied, the rules may go by the board in a few of them to the profit of all concerned. From the foregoing one might imagine that the dean is "the whole show," which is very far from being the case. In fact, his statutory authority is usually very 278 THE UNDERGRADUATE slight. Such power as he possesses is based upon the confidence of his colleagues, supplemented possibly by their indolence. Whether the dean is appointed by the trustees or elected by his colleagues makes very little difference; whether he is trusted by the latter makes a great deal. Students and public alike use the word "faculty" loosely to include all teachers, but the faculty is really a designated body of teachers with the power to vote upon college matters. The trustees have a power of control over faculty legislation, but they very seldom exercise it, and it is fair to say that in a modern college the real power lies in the faculty. In the old days their duties were mainly judicial in character. Miscreants were called before the faculty and were solemnly admonished or otherwise punished. There was very little educational legislation. Indeed, the course of study seemed to be divinely appointed and settled for all time. To-day in the better colleges disciplinary duties have almost wholly disappeared and functional ad- ministration has taken over matters like schedule- making and examination machinery, which used to take the time of the faculty as a whole. The body has, therefore, time to devote to legislation regarding academic policies and requirements, which it uses ADMINISTRATION 279 sometimes to the advantage of the institution and sometimes otherwise. There is great variety through- out the country as to the relations of the college faculty as such to the appointment of new officers. In general they have some say in the matter, but in the larger institutions the department, an administrative unit composed of all the men in a given field, is likely to have the power which comes from initiative. In practice this usually means only that the same men get what they want accomplished, but in a different technical capacity. In the university colleges, how- ever, it is really important for the college faculty or its representative committee to keep a close watch over new appointments; otherwise the graduate professors will unload specialists whom they would like to have as colleagues for the purpose of rounding out the de- partment, but who have neither interest nor skill in undergraduate teaching. The departments, by the way, need constant watching or their courses will all tend to become merely preparatory for the next higher course — which most of the students will never take. The great changes in college requirements as to en- trance and graduation which have taken place during the last twenty-five years have all come about by fac- ulty legislation. There has been, as elsewhere in this lan d of ours, a lack of realization as to what legislation can do and what it cannot do, there has been a good a8o THE UNDERGRADUATE deal of legislation based upon arguments to the excep- tion, and in general there has been over-legislation all round. Too much of it represents compromises be- tween opposing camps of eloquent theorists, in which, moreover, fatigue has not been the least powerful fac- tor. On the other hand, it is hard to over-estimate the value of the good faculty enactments, or to appraise at their full worth the time and devotion, and the sym- pathy and interest in the human subjects of the legis- lation. I have already said something about the require- ments for admission to college. As to the requirements for promotion and graduation most faculty action has been, so to speak, defensive. It has been designed to set a line below which the student should not fall, either in quantity, quality, or variety of work, based upon the value set by the faculty on particular courses of study and the performance of individual students therein. Fifty years ago there were no doubts, except perhaps at Harvard, as to what constituted a course of liberal culture. New subjects were let in here and there as extras and optional, but the course itself was fixed. Then came the fight of these extras (which in- cluded all of the modern language work and most of that in science, history, and economics) to get breath- ing-room. Slowly the vested interests were forced to ADMINISTRATION 281 share their powers. It is a curious thing that when once a subject is in, it becomes immediately conservative as regards the subjects which are still out. The fight of the laboratory sciences for decent recognition in Amer- ican colleges and their present attitude of unconscious arrogance would form an interesting chapter in the history of American education. The sciences, I may say in passing, represent a particularly large and bulky camel in the collegiate tent because of their in- herently heavy load of laboratory hours, which is the cause of the chief difficulties which beset the schedule- maker. Fights as to whether students might omit some par- ticular subject have usually resulted temporarily in the establishment of some new degree. This has hap- pened only very recently at the University of Wiscon- sin, where a Ph.B. has been created for the benefit of students who desire no foreign language instruction; but in general the present tendency is, as I have said, toward the restoration of a single undergraduate de- gree. In the matter of prescribed subjects of study the pen- dulum for some years has been swinging away from the complete freedom of choice advocated by President Eliot and imposed by force of his personality upon the college world at large. The feeling to-day is that too great freedom results in a scattering of the students' a82 THE UNDERGRADUATE energies, and the devices to check this without going back to the old inelasticity of a prescribed course have been many. There are various types of groups, majors, and sequences, and much legislation designed to insure the proper blend of continuity and diversity in college work, as, for example, the so-called "much of some and some of much" plan devised at Harvard under Presi- dent Lowell. Much of the impetus for this legislation may be traced to a realization, based on the closer per- sonal relations between teacher and student, of how greatly the background of the typical college student has changed, and the number of things with which his father was familiar, but of which the average boy comes to college hopelessly ignorant. This may be shown all too clearly by an allusion to even one of the major characters of the Old Testament. It is not alone that more boys come to college from homes of poverty, but that the motor and other means of spending youth- ful time have broken down to an almost equally low level, for many of the rich, the old-fashioned founda- tions of common knowledge. There is one particularly amusing thing about all this legislation designed to steer the undergraduates into paths acceptable to the faculty, and its bulk and variety the country over are simply enormous. When all is said and done the student goes ahead and takes what he wants, in so far as the college offers it. He may ADMINISTRATION 1183 have to perform a chore or two to satisfy the faculty, but in general he gets what he wants. The very com- plexity of much of the legislation tends to provide numerous loopholes for the ingenious student. The degree requirements of Harvard and Princeton and Columbia might have been devised upon separate planets, but a recent analysis of the actual programmes taken by the students in the three colleges shows an extraordinary similarity as to the subjects taken. Barring the men who have some strongly dominant interest, say in a particular field of science, or those who are preparing for some profession demanding the mastery of certain tools, as in engineering and medi- cine, practically every student will put the major part of his time into the group of social and political sciences — history, economics, government, sociology — with English and to a less extent other modern literature as "fillers." Any time which the student has left over will be devoted to the chance of hearing particular pro- fessors whom his friends recommend for divers reasons, regardless of the subjects which they may teach. From some very careful statistics recently gathered by Presi- dent Ferry, when he was dean at Williams, from eight- een American colleges, it appears that students the country over divide their time as follows: foreign lan- guages, 24.5 per cent; English, history, etc., 46.78 per cent; sciences, 28.72 per cent. 284 THE UNDERGRADUATE Besides the problem of seeing that the student shall take certain subjects because these should be included in any liberal education, the faculty is responsible for seeing that the student shall not take certain other sub- jects, or at any rate shall not receive credit for them toward a degree. This is a particularly live problem in the university college, where, so to speak, all sorts of meat is being offered to vocational and other idols, and then left lying around in the sight of undergradu- ates. The comment of Dr. E. E. Slosson upon this sub- ject may be of interest: "Educators are apt to get tangled up in the web of their own spinning and then make a big buzzing getting out. The distinction be- tween cultural and professional study as drawn is largely fallacious. This, of course, can be determined not by the nature of the subject nor how it is taught, but only by whether the student did or did not use his knowledge of it for pecuniary advantage in after life, a question which from the nature of the case may not be determined until he is dead." In the matter of collegiate credit for professional studies I have already shown how a line is being drawn between the university college, with its combined courses, and the separate college. Both types of insti- tution, however, have to consider problems relating to new subjects not professional in their character, many of them strongly urged upon the attention of the col- ADMINISTRATION 285 lege by outside influences. What is discreetly called "moral prophylaxis" is one example. Military train- ing, even before we entered the war, had been brought forward by advocates of preparedness, and interna- tionalism by its supporters. Then there are the so- called "practical" subjects like accounting and sten- ography. Another aspect of this general question is the pressure brought by various student activities for academic recognition. In many colleges a certain credit is given for the performance of certain more or less intellectual duties in the college world. It usually begins with membership on a debating or oratorical team, and has extended to editorship of college maga- zines and journals, and sometimes to other activities. Certain colleges, in recognition of the vitality and im- portance of what President Wilson has called the "side shows," have also included under the "main tent," and usually prescribed, courses in college life. The syllabi of such courses as they are offered at Brown and Reed are very interesting documents, and throw much light upon the growing recognition of the student in the college scheme of things. Even where no such course is formally offered, the English department is likely to base its composition work in part at least on material of this type. » A second general type of defensive legislation has to 286 THE UNDERGRADUATE do with the standards which the student must meet in carrying out the programme approved by the faculty. Much has been accomplished in organization to check student performance; monthly or mid- term reports of progress, announced and unannounced quizzes, better machinery for examinations. Lehigh has tried the experiment of conducting, at the expense of the insti- tution, what is practically its own tutoring school in the most devastating subjects, at which attendance is invited but not prescribed. I am glad to see that the oral examination, which plays so large a part in other countries, but which for years has been almost wholly neglected here, is showing signs of coming back to its own. The comprehensive examination, as opposed to killing off separate parts of the subject and promptly forgetting them, is also re- ceiving increased attention, as is the matter of requir- ing accurate English by students in their work in all departments. Besides the repetition of courses in which the student has failed, instead of perpetual re- examinations, other penalties for poor work have been devised; less than the normal credit is given for low passing grades and the privilege of taking more "ad- vanced" (and often easier) courses is curtailed either by requiring a certain class standing, or, where the class organization is breaking down, by prescribing definite prerequisites for each separate course. Non-eligibility ADMINISTRATION 287 for student activities is another strong weapon, though in this case other factors than the maintenance of aca- demic standards are, of course, involved. For flagrant cases of neglect or incapacity there are the penalties of probation, suspension, and finally dropping from the rolls. Perhaps the most thorough investigation into under- graduate scholarship conditions is the one which was recently made at the University of Illinois and it may be worth while to summarize the recommendations of the committee making it. In the first place, the junior- college or under-class, courses should be actually stud- ied and approved by an appropriate faculty committee. At present such approval is customarily by a matter of form merely. It is also recommended that the regis- trar prepare and distribute tables showing the distri- bution of grades in the introductory courses. The committee also offers some excellent suggestions with regard to the improvement of elementary instruction. It is interesting to observe that it does not, as some of us are inclined to do, dismiss the lecture as an inappropri- ate form of presentation. It insists on the importance of bringing these younger students, by some means or other, into contact with teachers capable of provoking real intellectual enthusiasm. A sharp distinction is made in the recommendations between the lower and the upper half of the four-year 288 THE UNDERGRADUATE course. It is felt that real university methods could be applied more largely than at present for the older undergraduates and that the controlling principles should be the development of intellectual initiative and the sense of responsibility for one's own perform- ance. The transition to upper-class standing should be marked by something more than the completion of a specified number of credits. If some machinery could be devised for a real test of such standing, many of the problems of student eligibility would be solved, since students lacking such a certificate after two years would be ipse facto ineligible. The Committee recog- nized the danger of over-development of student activ- ities which have evidently reached even greater lengths in the state universities than in some of our Eastern institutions. On the other hand, the temptation to take too heavy programmes is observed, and it is recom- mended that no student should take more than fifteen semester hours per week, exclusive of physical exercise. For some reason there has been, in recent years at any rate, very little competent supervision of college teaching. "The mere suggestion of such a thing," as Professor Seis has said, "will be considered heresy by many, but no one familiar both with college teaching and with the effects of skillful supervision of teaching in elementary and secondary schools can doubt the potential efficacy of supervision in the college. Super- ADMINISTRATION 289 vision of instruction is distinct from administration. The college administrator is found everywhere, but the supervisor nowhere." The Massachusetts Institute of Technology has recently appointed an educational expert to study the methods of undergraduate teaching, and, as chairman of a faculty committee, to recommend improvements as they are needed in this field. The experiment should be watched with interest by other institutions. The educational survey, undertaken upon invitation by im- partial outsiders, has already become more or less the fashion in school systems and there have been four or five examples of surveys of higher institutions. The process runs counter to all the sufficient-unto-ourself traditions of our colleges, but, carefully and sympa- thetically conducted by competent men, there can be no question as to its value, and I look forward to see not a few of those surveys during the coming decade. The actual effectiveness of all faculty legislation de- pends, of course, most of all on the general quality and moral fiber of the college administration. In many cases rules rapidly become a dead letter, either through a willingness on the part of the faculty after adopting drastic legislation to "reconsider" practically every actual case, or by an accommodating blindness as to how its regulations are actually aclministered by the dean or registrar. In general, however, there has been 2 9 o THE UNDERGRADUATE a great improvement all along the line, and the mini- mum requirements for a college degree are far severer than they were fifteen or twenty years ago. The college machinery and its traditions of caution and precedence have been broken rudely by the out- break of war and the necessity for a host of rapid decisions, not in the interest of the college and its re- vered standards, but of the national welfare. In gen- eral the colleges have stood the test better than their critics might have expected, their legislation having been in the main sound and sensible, and, what is most surprising of all, prompt. On the other hand, the bet- ter managed colleges have realized that you can't put knowledge into a boy's head merely by saying that it is there, and in the progressive subjects like mathematics the students, when they are ready to resume their col- lege duties, will find make-up classes ready for them as a preparation for the more advanced work. Thus far all the faculty activities I have described have been defensive in character. The faculty has another function to which nowadays it is fortunately giving more and more attention, i.e., the placing of emphasis on excellence, upon increasing the intellec- tual opportunities within the college course, and get- ting students of ability to take advantage of them. We lack in America the constant stimulus to make a stu- ADMINISTRATION 291 dent do his best which comes from the social and finan- cial prizes open in Europe only to men with high rec- ords as students. It is typical that with us an employer very seldom asks whether an alumnus whom he is con- sidering for appointment was a high-stand man, and that when the information is volunteered this is not always to the benefit of the candidate. In the field of scholarship the element of rivalry, so strong a factor in the outdoor life of the very same boys, plays a small part for the great mass of students, in- cluding many of the ablest. The prizes which are open to them, some of them of considerable money value, draw out surprisingly few candidates, and the winning of them too often attracts little attention. To some college faculties the thought has come that the fault lies not wholly with the students, that the latter put a low estimate, not upon intellectual ability, but upon the capacity of the faculty to test and recog- nize and reward it. Much of present legislation in the more progressive colleges, those where personal inter- est and attention to the individual student is a strong factor, has been colored by this new point of view. One general type of change has been in the clearing of the decks for the rapid worker. This, I should say in passing, does not result in too brief an exposure to academic influences, since nearly all the students who take advantage of legislation of this type are profes- a 9 2 THE UNDERGRADUATE sionally minded and continue their formal education for two or more years after graduation from college. In most colleges the student, at the beginning of each year, orders (and pays) d la carte, i.e., by the separate course. He is graduated when he has completed the requisite number of units, at commencement, or at mid-year, or at the end of a summer session. Of course the amount which a student may take has to be lim- ited, for the capacity of boys of a certain type, when unwatched, to amass credits, is almost unbelievable. I know of one junior, — it was in the dark ages about 1900, to be sure, — who, by juggling his programme in the fall, registered for enough courses in which no roll was called (several of them were conducted simul- taneously) to get credit for thirty hours a week, and thereby catch up with his classmates, who had forged a full year ahead of him during his freshman and sophomore years. The tendency to let boys of more serious purpose take heavy schedules, in spite of the present checks put upon them, has gone a little too far, because it has resulted in a general lessening of the demands in each separate course, but on the whole the influence has been salutary. Then there is the whole new machinery for credit for additional entrance subjects, for taking work in summer sessions, or, as at Chicago, during four terms per annum. In many colleges the fundamental courses ADMINISTRATION 2 93 are so arranged that a boy may enter in February as profitably as in September, and this often saves an entire year for a capable student. The plan now in general vogue for assigning extra credit for consist- ently high grades, with a natural obverse of penalties for low grades, was invented, it is good for us compla- cent Easterners to recall, at the University of North Dakota. It must be confessed that all these devices have the disadvantage of producing, as a sort of by-product, a type of student who seems to believe that to become a scholar and a gentleman all one has to do is to accu- mulate a certain number of "points "; but in my judg- ment the freedom which they give to the really able and worth-while man more than outweighs this unfortu- nate tendency, which, after all, can be largely checked as it arises, by frank advice to the student who appears to be threatened with a false sense of values. Besides introducing elasticity in the general ma- chinery, certain college faculties (and their number is increasing) have established a special degree with honors, usually more or less on the Oxford plan with modifications to meet American conditions. The Columbia scheme, with which I am naturally more familiar, was established in iqio. With us the em- phasis is placed primarily on the student's own work 294 THE UNDERGRADUATE and particularly his general reading outside the class- room, and is tested by a searching oral examination covering three years of work in his two fields of special study. The details of organization at different places vary and, indeed, the whole movement is still in the experimental stage. The characteristic thing about it is that the college recognizes that it has some students, at least, toward whom the defensive attitude is not nec- essary, for whom the red tape which encircles his fellow- students may be cut, and for whom even the routine of class instruction may largely be broken down. In the colleges which have established honor degrees a gratifying number of students have been found who may be counted upon to work under their own steam, not from fear of penalty, but from pleasure in the job. It must be admitted that the stimulus of recognition by their fellows is not as yet a potent factor as it is at Oxford and Cambridge, but this may come with time. This whole movement is a very significant one, and I, personally, have great hopes for it, but its friends must be constantly upon the alert or it will tend to become conventionalized and arid, and, as a result, fail to accomplish its purpose. Upon the situation at Oxford I received involuntarily the following light from over- hearing a conversation in the smoking compartment of a trans-Atlantic steamer some years ago. A Cambridge man was bemoaning the reforms recently adopted ADMINISTRATION 295 there, which had operated to take much of the joy out of life for the pass-men, and his Oxford companion told him that the same kind of thing had been put through at Oxford, but that he had been warned in time, and had gone in for what he called a rotten honors degree. As soon as his dons discovered that he had no ambition to make a first or a second class, they had left him to his own devices, and he had had a lovely time and in due time had been presented with a fourth (honors) class, " to get him off the books." Besides making this special provision for the man who is willing to be singled out as a candidate for academic recognition, much has been done (although much more still remains to do) to develop a sense of respect for the ability of the college to recognize the ability of any student. Faculty committees carefully check examination question papers and deal patiently with the misguided authors of a certain type, as, for example, the man who in the "correct" answer to an algebra paper has a boat sailing at the rate of two hundred and twenty-five miles an hour. Similarly, curves are plotted to show a man how much higher he is marking than his fellows, or, in other words, how many chronic loafers he is attracting to his classroom. Attempts are made to check the constant tendency for courses to overlap in subject-matter, a tendency which 296 THE UNDERGRADUATE astute students use as a basis for materially reducing their load of outside preparation. The details of com- petition for prizes are, as a rule, much more intelligent than they were a few years ago. Plans for rewarding high quality and penalizing low quality have gone faster than plans for accurate de- termination of quality. College grading is now nearly everywhere a purely personal matter. In many places this is recognized, and methods are being sought for standardizing grading without offending the offending professors, who are usually, but not always, the elder statesmen of the faculty. The new methods of grading are based on the "normal probability curve," whereby about one half the grades given in any class would be C, with B and D each having about twenty per cent, and A and E each about five. As soon as faculties can be educated up to it some such system whereby a student's grade is based primarily on his relative standing in the class, rather than on the varying stand- ards of teachers of varying ideals and temperament, is sure to be adopted. The plan at Missouri University was first adopted and is best known. An interesting variant is that at the University of Nevada, which provides a correction factor based on the grading hab- its of each professor. Changes along these lines will probably not be rapid, however, and should obviously be accompanied by changed methods in determining ADMINISTRATION 297 college honors, as, for example, election to Phi Beta Kappa. Of course in the whole movement toward better standards formal action by the faculty is of little worth unless it is supplemented by careful personal work on the part of deans and individual professors. If the average student is to get the most out of his college course, either the dean or some other adviser must see to it that it is properly coordinated, a task which in the English universities is the function of the "Chootor," as he is pronounced, whose nearest relation in this country was the preceptor in the days of Woodrow Wilson at Princeton. A friend of mine, now a distinguished professor of philosophy, would probably have been one of life's failures if one of his teachers had not taken the trouble to tell him in just the right way that he was throwing away real talent for scholarship by a devotion to beer and skittles; and to many an able man Dean Briggs found the chance to say the one thing which could awaken a sense of intellectual pride. The most important factor of all is, of course, the matter and manner of teaching in the college, and it must be confessed that no machinery, faculty or other, has as yet been devised which can insure a programme consisting of well-balanced courses, not in water-tight 298 THE UNDERGRADUATE packages but articulating properly with one another, and making progressively greater demands upon the thinking capacity of students. After each long and painful process of rearrangement, such as takes place every few years in every college, the student can usually say: "Well, I don't see that they've really done anything. The prescribed courses are still nothing but chores and the electives are most of them snaps." And the chance of getting really good teachers for un- dergraduates or even the best teachers the institution can afford, seems equally discouraging. Here again, however, the thing to do is not to brood too constantly upon the troubles of the present, but to look back a few years and see what has been accomplished in the interval. Imperfect as conditions are now, they are far better than they were, and it perhaps is just as well for us to feel that there will be no harm in leaving some things to keep our successors busy. CHAPTER XH TEACHING AND TEACHERS I HAVE tried to point out the distinction between the professor as a member of a legislative or judicial body, and the individual teacher as he meets his students in the classroom. What I have to say now has to do with him in the latter capacity. Ask any cartoonist to draw a picture of a college professor, or ask the man in the street to describe one, and you will get results that will be practically uniform. The college professor has become a type like the stage Irishman. He seems never less than eighty years old; he lives in cap and gown; he usually wears octagonal glasses; and he answers to the name of Dr. Dryasdust. As a matter of fact, college professors as a class furnish to-day about as accurate a cross-section of the popula- tion as can be furnished by any calling. They are men from all sorts of backgrounds, of every age and type and quality of ability, with ideals running from the lowest to the highest. The original of the conventional picture, in so far as it had one, was the professor in service a half-century or more ago. Although there were always striking exceptions, the men of this time were pretty remote from what was going on in our 300 THE UNDERGRADUATE pioneer development. They were usually clergymen who had turned to teaching because their interests seemed philosophical rather than pastoral. As science and modern literature forced their way into the college curriculum, however, engineers, men from government bureaus, journalists, and men of letters were drawn into the calling, and so were also the men who had returned from university studies in Germany. To-day instead of isolation, it is really becoming hard to secure from the successful professor enough of his time to make sure of efficient teaching. Even in a supposedly theoretical subject like the dismal science, our econ- omists are spending more and more time upon state and federal commissions of various kinds. With the development of new subjects and the growth of new colleges the total of college teachers has become great enough to form a pretty significant class in the community; it is a group, however, that has as yet but little class consciousness, although there has recently been formed an Association of American Professors. Practically all professors of to-day have been specially trained, although it may be pointed out that the train- ing is mainly in the acquisition of learning and very little in the art of teaching. This is typical of a strange lack of a recognition of the place of the college teacher in the profession of teaching as a whole; a symptom also displayed in an attitude of superiority toward TEACHING AND TEACHERS 301 secondary-school teachers very seldom justified by the facts. The economic status of the group is not so hopeless as might be supposed from the wails which rise from disgruntled members. Salaries are low, it is true, too low, but they are rising, and a professor can usually supplement his stipend by outside work not too remote from his intellectual interests. They have the advantage of a pretty definite secu- rity of tenure. The price which the community pays for this in the retention of hopelessly incompetent teachers is, of course, a heavy one, but an intelligent admin- istration can keep it down as far as possible by par- ticular care in junior appointments in the same field. The actual load of teaching, formerly far too heavy, has already been reduced in the stronger institutions and is beginning to come down in the others. If a man really wants to do productive scholarly work, he gets the chance to do it. I know this is contrary to the general impression, but this impression is sometimes the result of publicly indicting a soulless administra- tion for the plaintiff's failure to do at fifty what he was able to accomplish at twenty-five, when the fires of enthusiasm were burning brightly. If the daily routine during term time is wearing, the professor can count on a considerably longer vacation 302 THE UNDERGRADUATE than the average, and the researches of those engaged in making pension provision for him (another asset) show that his life is likely to be considerably longer than that of men in other callings. In spite of exceptions here and there, intellectual freedom is pretty well established. Certainly this is so in the stronger colleges, where a man can be as radical as he pleases within the bounds of intellectual fairness in presenting both sides of questions upon which there is a difference of opinion among trained men. When trouble arises it is much more likely to be a matter of tact than of belief on the part of the professor, although it is only fair to admit that errors of tact are more likely to be expensive to the professor whose views on social and political relations are disturbing to those about him. Even so watchful a critic as Professor Jas- trow, of Wisconsin, bears witness to how generally the legal authority of governing boards in matters of ten- ure has been ''most wholesomely exercised by a judi- cious neglect." The recent increase of cases of conflict between trustees and teachers reflects, I think, the overstrained nerves of war-times rather than any per- manent change for the worse in their relations. It was, by the way, an Englishman under far greater strain who recently pointed out in Parliament the profound truth that an anxious and depressed teacher is bad; that a bitter teacher is a social danger. TEACHING AND TEACHERS 303 At a recent college reunion a professor is quoted as having said to a classmate who is a bank president: "Well, John, you may have a Rolls Royce or two and a place at Newport, but I have a Ford and a farm in Vermont and more time to enjoy them. Besides, I am a much freer man, and living my life with young people is keeping me young too. No, I would n't swap with you." Unfortunately too many American professors are too much worried by living on a close margin to enjoy life as much as their hypothetical colleague. Even more unfortunately, too few of the best all-round un- dergraduates in any college realize that there are pro- fessors who would n't swap with a bank president, however clearly they may come to realize the good points of the calling when it is too late for them to enter it. It is an interesting fact that much of the best ma- terial in our college faculties to-day comes from Canada and from the Southern States, regions with good cul- tural backgrounds, but with relatively less tempta- tion at the time these men graduated, at any rate, from the gods of mammon. The supply of teachers that is now coming from the large cities and from the more prosperous parts of the country is likely to contain a certain amount of second- grade material. The graduate schools of the country, 3 04 THE UNDERGRADUATE by scholarships and other subsidies, provide a powerful stimulus toward entering upon the Ph.D. path which is the normal route to college teaching. At one state university it was found that fifteen out of every seven- teen students in the graduate college were subsidized in one way or another. This state of things makes a dan- gerous appeal to students to whom the social position, security, and privileges of the professor are already temptations. The relation between the degree of Ph.D and under- graduate teaching is an interesting one. When the first doctors came back from Germany seventy-five years ago, they went to the colleges as the only market for their wares, and they were most valuable, not prima- rily because of the training they had received, although this was important, but from the fact that they were men with initiative enough to go abroad at all. In a word, they constituted a highly "selected" group of intellectual pioneers. Then came our own pro- duction of Ph.D.'s, closely copied from the German model. The industry began modestly enough. Even as late as 1884 the annual output, which is now something over six hundred, was only twenty-eight. These early American doctors, notably the group produced at Johns Hopkins, were also picked stock, and they also went into undergraduate teaching — there was as yet TEACHING AND TEACHERS 305 no market for graduate teachers. From the almost uniform success of all these men, a confusion arose between the merit of the men who have received the degree and the merit of the degree in itself as a guar- anty of good college teaching. When the Ph.D. octo- pus, as William James called it, was most powerful, many a man was appointed to a college position just because he had a Ph.D., and many unsuccessful pro- fessors, long past the age when the training would do them any good, went bravely through the drill and wrote their dissertations and in due time became doc- tors themselves. The surprising thing is not that so many utter failures hold Ph.D.'s, but that so many of them have made good. We must remember that whether or not the doctorate furnishes the best prepa- ration for a chair in a Continental university, the duties of a collegiate professor in America are very different. We have seen that the students are younger, that their preparation is more irregular, and above all that we accept a parental responsibility which is unthought of in Europe. For a while things were pretty bad, and this I am sure has had its effect upon the reluctance of the lead- ers in the undergraduate world to go into college teach- ing. These boys felt, and I venture to put the feeling into their own language, "Even if this Ph.D. business did n't make a dub out of a fellow, you would n't want 3 o6 THE UNDERGRADUATE to have to associate with a lot of other dubs for the rest of your life." With all its "outs" the whole movement did serve to bring about a realization that learning is a living and growing thing, a realization that was wholly lacking in early days, and to-day the "outs" are becoming less important. For one thing intelligent presidents and others charged with the responsibility of selecting teachers are coming to look to see what kind of a man is inside the scholar's gown and are not afraid to choose a good man in the bachelor's serge instead of a second- rater in the doctor's silk. Some few even ask the can- didate whether he has taken the chance to learn something of the science and art of teaching while in the university, and a very few call men to college posi- tions who have proved their competence in secondary schools, entirely regardless of pedigree. On the other hand, new means of livelihood, some of them far more lucrative, are developing for possessors of the doctor's degree — in research institutions, gov- ernment bureaus and commissions, and in business and banking houses. As a result it is to-day true in most fields of scholarship that the man who goes into teach- ing does so because he wants to, and not because he would otherwise go hungry. In most cases there is no contradiction at all between productive scholarship and good teaching; for the pro- TEACHING AND TEACHERS 307 ductive scholar is usually a good teacher, because he has mastered his subject or, rather, is mastered by it and is excited by the opportunity to present it even to beginners. A student of Carl Ludwig has said that in the forty-seventh time Ludwig offered a certain course, he never saw him enter the classroom without chang- ing color. Unfortunately, however, it came to be the thing, say twenty years ago, to base promotions and invitations to professorships on scholarly production, I think largely because it is easier to measure than teaching. As a result there was, particularly in the universities, a great outbreak of pseudo-research and an even more general neglect of teaching, but we are to-day coming to the realization of two things. There is, in the first place, a type of excellent teacher who keeps up with his subject, but who does not happen to have the particular combination of qualities that are requisite for important contributions to knowledge, just as there are great pianists and violinists who don't happen to be composers also. This type of man was formerly neglected in promotions and other forms of academic recognition, but he is now coming into his own, which is a matter of particular importance in its effect on the young men in the service. In the second place, it is becoming recognized that there is a field for productive scholarship within the college activities themselves. Faculties in their volu- 308 THE UNDERGRADUATE minous deliberations are prone to give greater atten- tion to the logical development of their arguments than to the accuracy of the premises, and there is as real scholarship in digging out and assorting the essential facts of college affairs as there is in the classifying of trilobites. One of my colleagues at Columbia has no Ph.D., but he deserves it ten times over for his ability to see the need of attacking some particular collegiate problem, to amass his material from registrars' records, etc., and finally to demonstrate the baseness of the metal in some dogma which for generations has served as coin of the educational realm. While the security of tenure lulls some professors into slumber, most of them give the best that they have. The stimulus varies. Sometimes it is a real scholarly flair. Sometimes it is an ambition to be prominent in the councils of the institution, an incen- tive which usually leads away from the student to orna- mental positions of various kinds. The newspapers are particularly prone to back the wrong horses in college faculties. I once saw in a Sunday supplement a page devoted to the portraits of six leaders of educa- tional thought, of whom three were fakers, two were men of very mediocre attainments, and only one was in any sense a leader. A strong incentive to a teacher is a desire for popu- TEACHING AND TEACHERS 309 larity with the students, particularly as compared with the other men in his particular subject or of his gener- ation. This is usually a good motive. It leads to keep- ing up with the subject, to the organization of teaching material, and often to the development of intimacies with the students. Of course the stimulus is not good when it involves playing to the gallery in pyro- technic lectures, easy tasks, and high grades. It some- times leads to an attitude of siding with the student against the administration and even to more or less veiled criticism of colleagues. But these manifesta- tions, so far as my experience goes, are rare. As a matter of fact, the students themselves are pretty good judges in their selection of teachers. The underground railway or camorra which exists in every American college is hard to describe, but its activities are readily recognized. It is easy to compare, for ex- ample, the relative weight of the official pamphlets of advice to students, or the speeches of the dean, as com- pared with the pronouncements of some Solon of the fraternity house or training-table. The college student usually selects subjects rather than teachers, but when a choice lies between two different teachers his selec- tions, when based on the counsel of these unofficial advisers, are usually intelligent. Of course the students get fooled sometimes. In particular they often fail to find out until too late who are the really great men 3io THE UNDERGRADUATE under whom they have the chance of studying. This is more particularly true of the universities than of the separate colleges. There should be some recognized way of advertising the intellectual leaders, in*the cat- alogue, along with the new swimming-pool and the tennis-courts. It would really be quite as legitimate. The students' judgments are, often, I think, shrewder than those of a teacher's colleagues. They recognize the artistic qualities of a teacher when he is fortunate enough to possess them. The Ph.D. does n't count for much. Its possession by a young instructor is some- times regarded as an asset by the "Sons of Rest," be- cause it furnishes a tip as to the specialty of the teacher, to be played up judiciously as opportunity offers. The professor who sits on the side lines to be seen of men and not because he knows or loves the game is very soon detected, as is the one who makes his fraternity membership an opportunity to make speeches rather than to know and understand the boys. A man whose grades are chronically high may be "elected" by an athlete who wants to stay eligible, but this is really done with reluctance. It is interesting to note that students in their selec- tions pay little attention to the age of their teachers. One usually regards a college faculty as an old body, not with white whiskers, like the conventional cartoon, perhaps, but at least middle-aged. As a matter of fact TEACHING AND TEACHERS 311 the average age of the teachers on permanent appoint- ment in the colleges in the list of the Carnegie Foun- dation is forty. This is an inevitable result of the tendency to split courses into sections to insure indi- vidual instruction. What is usually regarded as a choice between the lecture system and the quiz sys- tem is really a choice between big classes and older teachers or small classes and younger teachers. At the University of Illinois, for example, there are sixty sections of freshman English and naturally most of them must be met by instructors. This tendency " to expose our college boys to untried youths " is often deplored, notably in colleges which can't get good young teachers to go to them, but if I were a college student in a college where junior appointments were made with care, I should rather have the majority of my teachers below thirty-five than above. Of course there is a great variability among the younger men, and in large colleges it is the business of the dean to see that each student gets a fair assortment of "section- hands," as they are called. These younger men have their futures before them, their standards are nearly always high, and when they make mistakes, as they do, they are likely to profit by them. Of course, I am assuming the presence of older men in the group to stimulate and to steady the whole. The ideal man is one whose youth is not a matter of years, but of the 312 THE UNDERGRADUATE inner spirit. Too often the years bring a desire for recognition of service accomplished, through title and office, in place of the earlier desire for an opportunity to get things done just because they are worth doing. The men who are bites noires to the students usually deserve it, — not always, sometimes an excellent man suffers from some unfortunate trick of manner, — but the unpopular professor usually has in his composition something of the sneak or the bully, or in some way he doesn't play fair. Students don't mind hard masters. I know one highly esteemed professor who frankly tells his classes that his interest is only in the topmost tenth and that he proposes each year to set his pace according to the ability of that group. On the other hand, students will flee from dullness whenever they possibly can, which is indeed natural, in view of their helpless position on the benches when once en- rolled for the course. Sometimes as a result they miss a big man who is dull, but big men are very seldom dull. Professor Rapeer, of the Pennsylvania State Col- lege, recently questioned some of his upper-class-men as to what constitutes a good college teacher, and to show how much to the point in our present discus- sion is the student judgment, I venture to quote some of the thirty-nine points from the published summary. TEACHING AND TEACHERS 313 Each student had had experience with about forty in- structors: — He has a sense of humor and a spirit of genuine good na- ture — a spirit of joyful strenuous endeavor. His jokes, if any are used, are not stereotyped chestnuts used for each succeeding class, but they grow naturally out of his spirit of good will in class work. . . . He keeps students constantly on the alert, expecting at any moment to be called on or to be held responsible for an understanding of the subject-matter that is being taught. There is no asking of questions alphabetically or according to number in his classroom. He has a large majority of the students vigorously engaged most of the time. He gives evidence of making careful daily plans for his lessons. . . . Preparation is noticed in the command of subject-matter, in the quality of questions asked in the class, in the organization of the lessons, in the connections made with current affairs, and in the type of illustrations used. He shows pupils at the beginning of a term the impor- tance of the work which they are to do during the term. He makes them feel that in his course they have a great oppor- tunity to do something and contribute something which is fundamentally worth while. They start the term's work right. He uses his examination periods for reviewing, organizing, and helping the students to use and apply subject-matter, skill, and ideals gained in his course. Such examinations are not a waste of time. . . . Generally he hands examina- tion papers back early and goes over the questions with the students in class and frequently with individual students in private. He teaches the students how to write their an- swers distinctly and to the point. 314 THE UNDERGRADUATE The college has for some years recognized that it has its particular problems, but it is only just beginning to develop its own particular pedagogy. How far we have to go is shown by the earnest but illogical attempts at the University of Washington and elsewhere to organize college classes on "How to Study." The relative value of talking to students and talking with them is^ however, coming to be recognized, and to-day it is slaying a dead, or at least a dying, giant to cry out against the undiluted lecture system as a method of exercising what Professor Bentley alluringly calls the "rare privilege of successfully pitting an eager mind against an attractive task." A writer in "School and Society" has pointed out that since life is a series of decisions, of the solution of some problems which must be solved alone and of others to be solved in coSperation, the real test of good teaching is its success in preparing the student in this laboratory of life to be ready to solve both types of problems, the individual and the social. Interesting attempts are being made to break down the student convention that college studies are remote from everyday interests, — as, for example, Professor Slosson's scheme of teaching history backward from current events, — and these will have their influence upon the equally absurd faculty convention that the remoteness of certain subjects is in itself a desirable TEACHING AND TEACHERS 315 attribute, because in some mysterious way this adds to their value as a training for the mind. Ten years ago the question of examinations and ex- amination-passing would have deserved a chapter by itself. It is less important to-day, because much greater relative weight is given to class-work in term, to outside reading, and the preparation of essays. Even the lecture courses of eminent and often soft-hearted professors are usually supplemented by quizzing by some heartless instructor. Professors naturally make mistakes in their grades, but taking into consideration the general institutional tradition in marking, they furnish a pretty fair test on the whole. A student sometimes complains to me that "Dr. X gave me an 'F' when I really deserved a 'C " I usually ask him how he fared with Dr. Y. "Oh, I got a 'B' in his course." (It should be observed that invariably the teacher imposes the low grades and the student wins the high ones.) Such a student can usually be made to see that even though Dr. X may have under- estimated him, there is an equal chance that Dr. Y over-estimated him to an equal degree. As a matter of fact the average which a student receives in his five or six subjects is a pretty good relative indication of what he deserves. I am not pretending that the pass- ing standards all along the line are high enough in the college, as contrasted with the professional and techni- 3 i6 THE UNDERGRADUATE cal school, perhaps for the reason characteristically set forth by Dr. Slosson: — The instructor of a technical school always has in the back of his mind the thought that if he passes this doubtful student in mathematics, he is likely to be called upon some time to certify to his ability to build a bridge and will not be able to refuse, whatever his private misgivings. Conse- quently he gives himself the benefit of a doubt and gives the student a failure. If a professor of English had to cer- tify that his graduates could tell a bad book from a good one and point out its faults, he would be more strict. The most significant development of recent years is, as I have intimated, a new attitude between teacher and student. Ten years ago I collected some statistics from Dartmouth and Columbia alumni as to their selection of careers, and out of six hundred or more replies to my questions only a single man confessed that his choice had been influenced by the advice of one of his professors. To-day I am confident that a similar inquiry would show very different results. In the better colleges a real camaraderie has developed and with it a proportional increase in that particular kind of teaching that can be best done outside the classroom. As a measure of insurance the colleges have built up their systems of official advisers, deans, etc. but the work of such officers, from the very nature of the official relationship, is less effective than the spon- TEACHING AND TEACHERS 317 taneous intimacies that grow up between teacher and student. Student disorder in the classroom will still break out without delay in any college in the presence of an incompetent teacher, but where a professor can interest his students, the problem of controlling them presents no difficulties. In some colleges the specially good students are given the "privilege " of helping their comrades who have fallen behind — and they so re- gard it. The professor has always had close relations with the favorite pupil who planned to go on in his particular field, but the relation is now much wider. It is tending to display the professor in a more amiable light to the students and is, I think, tending to attract more of the most promising students, those with both ability and background, into the field of teaching, particularly since the social and political sciences are to-day touch- ing the enthusiasm of earnest boys as nothing has since the reign of the biological sciences twenty-odd years ago. In my judgment the truth is not so much that seniors of this desirable type have turned away in re- cent years from a calling with apparently slight finan- cial reward, as that they have n't appreciated the real opportunities and privileges of the profession. It is earnestly to be hoped that the general dislocation caused by the war will not permanently retard this movement. Incidentally the records made by English 318 THE UNDERGRADUATE dons, and by many of our professors here since war was declared, indicate that men in academic life are not ill-prepared to meet national emergencies. The really important thing is to get more such into our faculties. As I have said, the tradition of perma- nence of tenure means that the failures in teaching re- main and must be balanced by positive successes. We all know the professor of desultory interests who wan- ders all over the lot, but it takes a good all-round man to teach his subject properly and still seize the chances that he has to teach needed lessons outside his sub- ject. Failures are more often due to a lack of social experience and general horse sense than to deficiencies of scholarship. It is like having a color-blind pilot to have students exposed to professors who won't give a bright student the maximum mark because he does n't have to work so hard in the class as the plodder. There is even a tale of a man who, when urged by his more rigorous colleagues to "condition" at least a few of his students, carefully selected for low grades the ablest men in the class, on the ground that these could re- move the resulting condition with the least inconven- ience. A most perplexing problem to-day is as to the use in college of our mother tongue. We used to get boys who had learned its proper use unconsciously at home, but this is not so now; indeed, to many students English is TEACHING AND TEACHERS 319 not the mother tongue. Under the stimulus of this problem college instruction in English has improved enormously, but no one department can carry the whole burden and we have great need of men in all fields whose English is "contagiously good." The all-round man can also expose his students to the contagion of good manners. Sometimes, alas, the manners of our teachers are such that not only are the ignorant left in their ignorance, but the effect upon the students who happen to be weil-mannered themselves is most unfortunate. Let me give a brutal instance. I know of a case where a student gave the following "underground railway" advice regarding a course by a certain professor: "For Heaven's sake, No; he may know his subject, but he spits on the radiator." The point in the story is not as to the relative importance of knowing one's subject and knowing the proper func- tions of a radiator, but that the professor in question lost his chance with this particular student and doubt- less with many others. I am told this matter of social background has one particularly unfortunate effect in the more fashionable colleges, where the socially elect among the students are said to find ways, in the case of their more callow instructors, of substituting social recognition of a good-natured, patronizing type for attention to aca- demic duties. 320 THE UNDERGRADUATE There is no doubt that there has come to be a differ- ence in type between teachers in the separate colleges and the university colleges, just as there is among the students, and as with the latter the advantages are not all on either side. According to Professor Wolfe, of the University of Texas, the smaller colleges in their selec- tion of teachers "look first for personality and moral character, and too often, even yet, for religious ortho- doxy. Scholarship ordinarily comes second with them. The universities give scant attention to moral charac- ter — taking it for granted — and think too little of personality, so long as a candidate has a record of first- class scholarship and has shown ability at research in his special field." He goes on to say that "neither col- lege nor university bothers to inquire whether he has any human interests outside his own immediate field, or whether, especially, he has ever given serious thought to the possible diverse and contradictory aims of higher education, to the problems of departmental or- ganization, or to the larger questions of educational policy as a whole." The city mouse regards his country cousin as a solemn and rather ponderous person, unused to contra- diction, who talks about people instead of ideas; and the country cousin bewails the flippancy, cynicism, and the agnosticism of the other. Looking at it from the student's point of view, the undergraduates in the TEACHING AND TEACHERS 321 separate colleges get the full time of the best men and these men are not so likely to be overworked as in the universities. The more promising of the younger men are not tempted into other fields, with the danger of leaving a predominance of mediocre men on the under- graduate staff. Teaching, as such, is held more at a premium, although there are honorable exceptions among university colleges. There is a greater chance for intimacy with students, though the greater ap- preciation of its importance in the university college often outweighs the natural advantages of the other. Finally, the teachers have a better opportunity for open-air exercise, and there is, therefore, less excuse for the nervous irritation that plays havoc with effec- tive teaching. On the other hand, we have the more rapid intellec- tual pace of the university, the stimulating presence of great intellectual leaders, an atmosphere of productive scholarship, of intellectual humility rather than com- placency or didacticism. The men have fewer oppor- tunities for exercise, but their family life is less likely to be harassed by squabbles of the army post type. The tendency of the ambitious college teacher is rightly or wrongly to leave the small college for the university at the first opportunity. Conditions in both types of institution could be im- proved by the development of a system of exchanges 32a THE UNDERGRADUATE for a year or a term. Under present conditions the men in the universities won't leave without definite assur- ance of a return to their places. Such a plan has been started at Harvard by an exchange with four Western colleges and less formally at Columbia and elsewhere, and there is no reason why it should not be consider- ably developed. Much has already been done to en- large the horizons of professors in the separate colleges by their service in the summer sessions of the uni- versities. It ought also to be possible within the universities to provide opportunities for the undergraduates and par- ticularly the freshmen to meet the really big men, even though for only part of a term. Such men with their other opportunities for usefulness cannot be blamed for hesitating to give up an entire term to a class of youngsters, but I believe, though I have never been able to get my teaching colleagues to agree with me, that they could be inserted to good effect in an undergraduate class for four or five meetings some- where toward the end of the term. As a matter of fact the distinction for the student investor to make is not between the large or the small college, or between the separate or university college, so much as it is between the live and the dead college. It is in the dead colleges that a student comes to think that "truth is what you read in a book," and where TEACHING AND TEACHERS 323 the professors' chairs are placed with "their backs to the horses," as Ben Butler used to say of the Demo- cratic politicians, so "that they never see a thing until after it has gone by." I have been tempted to go into this question of teaching and teachers at perhaps greater length than is "in scale" in a book of this type, because I feel strongly that the path of progress for our colleges lies in conscious emphasis, not on greater administrative efficiency, nor on faculty regulations as to majors and minors and degrees, but on the fullest possible develop- ment of close and productive cooperation between the students and the right type of teachers. CHAPTER XHI CONCLUSION Some one has said that no written record can be really satisfactory, because after all a string of words is limited to one dimension, and life as we experience it is in three dimensions — or maybe more. Certainly it is a difficult task to make clear the different and interdependent aspects of the student's relations to his college while dealing with these relations as separate things, and for this reason I may be forgiven if I try to sum up in a passage or two our progress thus far. In the beginning I have tried to give some picture of the kinds of colleges we have, and how they devel- oped, the separate institution and the university col- lege, the State-supported and the privately endowed, the urban, suburban, and the rural, the progressive and the conservative, and, most important, the genu- ine and the more or less spurious. I have touched upon the effect upon the colleges of the outbreak of the Great War. Some information as to the different kinds of boys who now go to college and what they bring with them has followed, and then a description of the life which the students have organized for themselves, its CONCLUSION 325 nature and its effect upon the newcomer. Athletics, as the most conspicuous of student activities, have been given a chapter to themselves, as have the questions of the student's religion and morals, and his intellec- tual life. I then tried to show how the college itself is organized for its work, the part of the trustees, presi- dent, dean, and faculty, and how the various phases of administration and teaching touch the individual stu- dent. And, in Chapter IX, the result of all these forces, sometimes cooperating and sometimes conflicting, as we can judge them from the finished product, the alumnus. In all the mass of detail I hope that certain fundamen- tal matters have not been obscured, particularly the influence throughout of our historical background and our present environmental conditions, the growing emphasis upon the individual and his needs, the closer and more profitable relationship between teacher and student, and the growth, slow but sure, of student responsibility both individual and corporate. In order to see our own system in perspective, some comparison with ante-bellum conditions abroad is worth while. In Great Britain there are really two systems, the time-honored class organization, repre- sented by the colleges of Oxford and Cambridge, and Trinity College, Dublin (the other colleges, so-called, in England being really secondary schools), and the 326 THE UNDERGRADUATE municipal universities, which have no particular social sanction. The identification of Oxford and Cambridge with public life in England is something which has no counterpart here. For example, a single college of Ox- ford University during the nineteenth century supplied no fewer than nine prime ministers to England. They have developed farther along certain lines, most desir- able in themselves, than any institutions in the world. Their emphasis has been upon actual residence in the colleges, and on the college life that this implies. The whole thing is beautifully ordered and could teach many lessons to our rather slovenly young men. They have also solved the problem of regular exercise for every one, a problem with which we are only beginning to cope. The comment of a recent Rhodes scholar with regard to the conservatism of these institutions may be of interest: "While Oxford is essentially open-minded toward new ideas, it seldom accepts them. Though willing to hear the innovator, it decides against him." These Rhodes scholars have made Oxford and Oxford life much better known in America, but I doubt whether the extent of their direct influence has been as great as the founder had in mind when he made his princely benefaction. On the purely educational side, some of these Rhodes scholars have put their fingers on one of the weakest spots in our school and college CONCLUSION 327 system — "the tendency to superficial interest in a variety of subjects and the temptation to avoid the thorough work and hard grind necessary to know essen- tials well, from the multiplication table to the grammar of a language or the severe analysis of a science." One reason for this thoroughness may well be the practical benefits to be enjoyed by men who have made brilliant university careers. A man with a Double First at Oxford can aim as high as he pleases in any career, and usually gets what he aims for. The municipal institutions are of comparatively recent development, but their faculties include many of the best scholars and scientists in England. They make no provision for the residence of students, and, indeed, the whole emphasis until very recently has been on examination, with the result that many degrees are granted to men and women whom the authorities hardly know by sight. It is interesting, however, that London University is looking in the other direction, and is proposing to do away with degree examinations for external candidates. The Scotch universities and colleges have developed along different lines from their neighbors to the south. There is a real social democracy, but combined with a highly developed intellectual aristocracy. From the reminiscences of Robert Louis Stevenson and others, I am inclined to think that the undergraduate life in 328 THE UNDERGRADUATE these colleges has more in common with our own than that of any other country across the Atlantic. The colleges in the Commonwealths of the British Empire, particularly those in Canada, have developed under conditions so similar to our own in their rapid growth that they can hardly be called foreign. It would be well for us to study them more closely than we do, to judge from the striking number of our best professors on this side of the line who have been pre- pared in the Canadian institutions. When we compare roughly the Continental systems with our own, we find the following fundamental dif- ferences: In the first place, centralized State control is practically uniform. The debilitating competition which, with us, results in many feeble institutions in- stead of a few strong ones, is non-existent. Secondly, there is a different breaking-off point be- tween secondary and collegiate training. Our college represents really the last two, or in some cases the last three, years of the Gymnasium or Lyc6e, plus the first or the first and second years of the university. Third, there is a complete lack of personal responsi- bility for manners and morals, for idleness or industry, and for that reason the Continental institutions feel completely free from responsibilities which take much of our energy and thought. CONCLUSION 329 Fourth, the preliminary collegiate training offers the only gateway to professional careers, and for this rea- son the ambitious man is not tempted, as he is with us, to forego the long road of preparation for a profession. The French have one great lesson to teach us, though perhaps it is not so much due to the educational sys- tem of the Republic as to the genius of the people, and that lesson is one of frankly recognized pleasure in brain activity for its own sake. It is characteristic of modern France that its insti- tutions of learning are never likely to settle down into complacent routine, and just before the war broke out there had been a vigorous campaign against the Uni- versity of France in its spirit and official teaching, and in its pretension to form the mind and will of the French people. "In France the university is in politics and politics is religion, just as religion too often — and anti-religion always — is politics." The interesting thing for us is that the fight was waged, not as here by professors and mature outsiders, but largely by the students, young alumni, and young outsiders. We really ought to know more about the French educa- tional system than we do, and one of the results of the fraternizing on the battlefields of France will doubtless be that many of our college-bred men will return to spread through our land this knowledge, gained from French companions. 330 THE UNDERGRADUATE The German system is much more familiar to us; the number of our own men interested in educational mat- ters who have studied in Germany is very considerable, and our tradition runs back for fourscore years, whereas the English influence, via the Rhodes schol- ars, is just beginning to be felt, and the French type of education for Americans has been mainly confined to the study of architecture in the Ecole des Beaux- Arts. The force of German education upon the nation is seen by us to-day in a sinister light, but this must not blind us to the salutary lessons which it can teach. Besides the difference in the horizontal lines between secondary and higher training, there are other sharp elements of contrast. To quote Professor Farrington: "The German Gymnasium makes a ruthless selection. It rejects without compunction large numbers whom we in America endeavor to educate; and on the educa- tion of this picked minority it brings to bear such pres- sure as we can never hope to apply — family pressure, social pressure, official pressure." For the Gymnasium students and for a majority of the university students, there is nothing to compare with our college life. To make a comparison here, we must take the student of a university who joins some Corps or Burschenschaft. In these days of military activity it is easier for us to appreciate than it would CONCLUSION 331 have been five years ago the emphasis of these organ- izations on the identification of military with uni- versity life. Professor Swift, of the University of Minnesota, has recently published some interesting reminiscences of his experience in a German student organization. "The youth who joins himself to a stu- dent corporation cannot fail to bear its mark, for the rest of his life. He enters it at that period of life when youth is of all times most receptive to social and per- sonal ideals and for one, two, or three years he imbibes its modes of thought and attitude toward life. The range of his social activities and pastimes is exceed- ingly narrow. The great world of wholesome physical and intellectual enjoyment open to American uni- versity youths is almost unknown." While we may well doubt the value of the example as to the drinking and dueling which these institutions set, there is no doubt that we can profit by the whole- some emphasis upon group singing, "and any one," as Professor Swift concludes, "who studies the life of these organizations sympathetically will be forced to admit that the courage, frankness, truthfulness, sim- plicity, and patriotism of the youth who has been trained as a Bursch, his gracious manners and fine con- sideration of his guests, are qualities which the youth of every land would do well to emulate." One very serious indictment of the German system 33* THE UNDERGRADUATE is the waste of all or most of the first year of university residence, following the too great strictness of the gym- nasium and before the social pressure for graduation with credit from the university has become imminent enough to be operative. Professor Boas, one of our most eminent scholars, has told me that he did liter- ally no work during the first year of his university career. In extolling our freedom from formality, with the rigid prescriptions of a German university, where a man has to don a dress coat and white gloves when he calls upon the professor to ask leave to enroll in a course of lectures, we must not forget that the central- ized State control means not only a high average of professional appointments, but a tremendous simplifi- cation in administration as compared with our ma- chinery. Simplification, however, has its drawbacks. In the library of the University of Leipsic, for instance, it is only very recently that a card catalogue was in- stalled, and the lack of such modern improvements entails a serious loss of time. Before the war the Ger- mans were studying rather carefully the possibility of adopting some of our administrative plans. They were also beginning to modify somewhat the content of their traditional courses, particularly along the lines of emphasizing the present as well as the past. " Twen- ty-five years ago," to quote the late Professor Tombo, CONCLUSION 333 "the average German professor would have considered it beneath his dignity to deal at all with contemporane- ous events. The American may be inclined to go too far in this direction; but he undoubtedly gains much from his invariable tendency to study those particular problems which are of immediate import." I have referred earlier in this book to the identifi- cation in Germany of the educational system with the national life. This naturally raised the question of the freedom on the part of the individual to choose his own career. Under the old system whereby the Gym- nasium was the only path which led to public life, the decision had to be made on behalf of a child by his parents at about the age of nine. The recent tendency has been toward postponing this decision by a modifi- cation of the educational system. The municipality of Frankfort was the first to adopt a plan which allowed more leeway, and by its system the choice may in effect be postponed until the age of fourteen. Today, out of about five hundred Gymnasien about a third have adopted the Frankfort plan. The Scandinavian institutions have little to teach us that Germany has not, though perhaps we could profit by their simpler and less rigid scheme of things. Not long ago I got a picture post-card from a colleague who was visiting the University of Copenhagen, with the following marginal note: "Dignified, intellectual, 334 THE UNDERGRADUATE and effective, unathletic, unshower-bathed, and un- comfortable — this place has moved along in the even tenor of its way for 437 years, and it will continue to do so." When we remember that we have only one college in America which goes back to the seventeenth cen- tury, it is interesting to recall that eleven of Italy's twenty-one universities date from the fourteenth cen- tury or earlier. A recent book on them tells us: "Uni- versity life is eaten through by lawlessness, which breaks out every spring in periodic riots. The perverse State regulations forbid the holding of examinations in any but completed courses of lectures. If the stu- dents can break up a class before the end of the term, there is one less subject to be examined in. They carry out their programme thoroughly. Any student may drop into any course whenever he likes, and on warm spring days the professor is sure to see his class in- vaded by a mob of young men determined to see it closed. 'The police cannot enter without the consent of the rector, who shrinks from anything which casts a reflection on his own power to keep order. Ministerial decree ends the lectures, and the students triumph.' " The Italian universities at the outbreak of the war were struggling with the problem of a too highly edu- cated proletariat. With us the college man is not re- garded as of different clay from his fellows, and if CONCLUSION 335 there is a place where his services are needed he turns to it. On the Continent, however, the university man must either enter an already crowded profession, or the civil service, or become an unclassified and dan- gerous element in the community. It is perhaps to early for us to know just what part the Russian universities have played in the revolu- tion, but for many years the students and many of the professors have been identified with political affairs, perhaps more closely than in any other country. The only other lands in which conditions are suffi- ciently similar to ours are the South American Repub- lics and we might profitably be more familiar with their educational organization; for one thing they have succeeded far better than have we in practical training in the modern languages. There are now many agencies encouraging a North and South move- ment of students and it is quite as important for some of us to move South as for the South American stu- dents to move North for their training. The things which seem to be typical of our organi- zation as compared with others are a college life based on sufficiently broad principles to take in all social classes and the elasticity of entrance both into college and from college into various careers. The things for us to consider, in looking for corresponding 33 6 THE UNDERGRADUATE lessons for us to learn* are the emphasis on thorough- ness in the details, and on production in the higher reaches of education, the recognition and reward of excellence in accomplishment, the acceptance of thor- ough preparation as opposed to educational short-cuts. - We have seen, so far as my powers can portray, what the college of to-day is and how it operates, and by a rapid comparison with other countries have seen the elements in our system which distinguish it from others. There is probably no part of our educational scheme that is less the result of deliberate planning than the undergraduate college. It has just "growed," and we must not forget that it is still growing. When I began this book I had some more or less definite ideas as to its direction, but we are now in the midst of a great war, and before we are through with it, and with the period of reconstruction which must follow, many of our educational processes will doubtless be found upon the scrap-heap along with obsolete engines of attack and defense. This does not mean, of course, that truth itself has changed, — a fact we are in dan- ger of overlooking in the general bouleversement, — but only man's applications of it. The mathematics used by the ordnance officer of 1913 is as true now as then, although his application of it may be wholly different. For this reason the forecast with which this CONCLUSION 337 book closes must be even more general than I had in- tended at first, and will consider mainly whether the college as a social and political institution, devised for the profitable prolongation of the period of infancy, is likely to remain a permanent element in our organized life. The time has, therefore, come to consider the seri- ous and sincere criticism of those who believe that the American people are on the wrong track, and that these irreplaceable learning years should be employed in a manner so different that whether the name per- sists or not, the American college as we know it ought before long to be a thing of the past. There is a very voluminous, and, in part, a very in- teresting, body of radical criticism of the American college in general to-day. Seven years ago President Wilson stated publicly that "the colleges of this coun- try must be reconstructed from top to bottom, and I know that America is going to demand it." And somewhat later, the President of the University of Chicago wrote in his annual report: "The American college problem as it exists in the opening decades of the twentieth century has not yet been solved, and needs a very careful and intelligent study. It would not be surprising if the result of that study should be some quite startling changes in the existing organization." It behooves those of us who do not believe that so 338 THE UNDERGRADUATE drastic a revolution is necessary at least to consider the reasons why these men and others have come to their conclusions. There is a temptation to under- estimate the value of the criticism for several reasons. In the first place, much of it — for example of that of the late Mr. Crane, which perhaps received the widest newspaper publicity of all — is based upon pretty complete ignorance of actual conditions. Others are based upon the unfair assumption that some poor col- lege, or some poor product even of a good college, is characteristic of the situation as a whole. Those of us who are brought personally into contact with our crit- ics are maddened by their refusal to learn any facts which might interfere inconveniently with their theo- ries; and also by the constant reiteration of certain catch-words which serve the critics in the place of ideas. A more fundamental difficulty in profiting by these criticisms is in that so often they are mutually con- tradictory. When two men maintain simultaneously that the only hope of progress is in greater concentra- tion, and in greater diversity, respectively, we know that we cannot satisfy them both. The critics at each end of any particular line always succeed in proving too much, and very often those in the middle do not bother to prove anything. ■ The critics also are prone to overlook the dangers CONCLUSION 339 that would come from a dislocation of the existing machinery. Impatience for immediate results, how- ever, is a very natural instinct. Herbert Spencer once said that "an amiable anxiety to undo, or neutralize an evil, often prompts to rash courses, as you may see in the hurry with which one who has fallen is snatched up by those at hand; just as though there were danger in letting him lie, which there is not, and no danger in incautiously raising him, which there is." Fundamental changes cannot be brought about by some ipse dixit, for no one can work faster than the personalities and prejudices of a going concern can be counted upon to take up the changes. The reformer wants to make his alterations too suddenly, forgetting that the change must come through agencies which he does not and cannot directly control. In general our critics are too prone to extravagance, solemnity, and petulance. We need more good-hu- mored criticism, and less of the work of what President Butler has termed the academic pathologist. It is not only in the Western country described by Owen Wis- ter that there are certain things which may profitably be said only when accompanied by a smile. The critic, who, like the author of "The Dominie's Log" in Scot- land, can laugh with you is far more effective than he who laughs at you, and infinitely more effective than the critic who can't laugh at all. 340 THE UNDERGRADUATE When all is said and done, however, it would be a still greater mistake to brush aside this criticism from our minds than to take it all at its face value. There is no doubt that the college has suffered from its extraor- dinary popularity, and a very fair likelihood that it may need not only individual and incidental changes, but a thorough house-cleaning, and we who believe in it should be ready to accept the burden of proof. We must be sufficiently patient to wade through the miles of criticism based on imperfect knowledge, or upon de- termination to see the worst in everything, or to see everything through the lens of some preconceived theory, for the sake now and then of getting some practical hint toward improvement which many prove to be worth all the trouble. Out of the mass of details, what are the basal criti- cisms of the college as it exists to-day? In Reed Col- lege, President Foster started what he believed to be, in essence, a new type of educational institution, for the reason that he found the existing college undemo- cratic, with students failing to profit by their oppor- tunities, with uncorrelated courses, and a faculty that stood aloof, an extravagant scale of living, a tendency to accept (upon a stupid system of admission) more students than could properly be dealt with, a general lack of student self-government, clumsy and unin- CONCLUSION 341 telligent systems of standards and advancement, remoteness from the community, and a system of ath- letics for a handful of students only. This college is still too young to say definitely whether all these faults can be permanently eradicated. Personally I should say that the most serious in- dictments are the following: In the first place, a gen- eral lack of thoroughness. This is the criticism of the professional school and of the businesss men, and our status is compared unfavorably with the conditions abroad. Secondly, a lack of seriousness, a feeling that in the phrase "prolongation of infancy," the word "infancy" is taken too literally. The critics of this type are likely to be internal, and if it had not been for the lesson of the war, and the way our students have entered into its responsibilities, their case would be a pretty strong one. Finally, there is the question of a lack of adjustment; in the first place, to the educa- tional system as a whole, and secondly, and even more important, to the general social system. In facing these charges, and many of them are seri- ous and sincere, we must beg the umpires, whoever they may be, to recognize not only the mutually con- tradictory nature of much of the criticism, but also that the college cannot possibly do everything, and that some things neither it nor any other institution can do at all. The college cannot be taken as an iso- 342 THE UNDERGRADUATE lated phenomenon, but must be reckoned with as part of a larger system, in which we take what we get, and where what we do is conditioned on what is to come after. The students within our walls are after all pretty young, both in years and experience. They are immersed in an uneasy environment through which great social forces are working, rather blindly on the whole. It is easy, and perhaps natural, to praise and blame the college folks for the vices of human nature and conduct; to rate a boy for carelessness when we our- selves are carrying in our pockets the letters our wives have given us to post, and for silly social standards when Americans by the thousands " fall " for all sorts of pseudo-scholarly and scientific societies, to which they pay their five dollars, and as a result feel them- selves in some mysterious way to be allied to the Forty Immortals. The college years, after all, occupy only ten per cent of a normal life, and what the boy is depends far more largely than we are likely to re- member on what he brings from his home. The change which takes place in a West Pointer is based on a day of twenty-four hours' control, instead of perhaps three, and the rough-and-ready product of a Western engineering school, with whom our boys are often un- favorably compared, is primarily the product of a pioneering environment. CONCLUSION 343 Bearing in mind these limitations as to what it is possible to perform, let us take up first the question of an over-emphasized college life, postponing for the moment the question of thoroughness. Professor Crossley, of Wesleyan, has framed the indictment as follows: "College life is a complex environment in which delusions and distractions play significant parts. Men catch its spirit as by contagion and soon become a part of it. Among the great delusions of student life, none is more damaging to the real triumph of truth than that which fosters the belief, so largely shared by students, that on matriculation one leaves the world's problems and responsibilities outside the campus gates. . . - Campus, club, and social activities present their claims for time, with accompanying assurances of rewards that are concrete and immediate. Study beckons, too, but its goal is not in sight. The student is dazed at first and is in doubt as to the proper choice, but he usually falls in line with the majority, choosing to put off study until some future time when there will not be quite so much demand for his time." Mr. Owen Johnson, in "Stover at Yale," has clothed his somewhat similar charges in the mantle of fiction, and Dr. Charles L. Dana has summed up the whole matter to the effect that the college boy is not edu- cated, he does not want to be educated, but only to 344 THE UNDERGRADUATE "make" his letter and his clubs, and in due season to graduate. In considering college life, either for the purpose of attack or defense, it is none too easy to specify just what we mean. Where, for example, should we put athletics for the men who actually play the games? Fortunately, the reader can understand better than the author can define. I have already paid my respects to the conventionalism of it all. It is preposterous, but it is true, that an expert could pick out from a group of college seniors, almost unerringly by their walks and conversation, the "Bones" man and the "Ivy" man, or the representative of the Porcellian, or the Williams Tea Company. Besides the prompt and widespread entry of these careless youths into responsible military service, there are other facts to be brought forward in rebuttal. The "'Rah 'Rah" boy is a bird of conspicuous plumage and therefore easily recognized, but, as some academic punster has pointed out, relatively he is a rara cms among the thousands and thousands of collegians of more sober hue whom the critic never observes at all. Another factor which has been unobserved or ignored by him is the growing tendency toward a closer bond between these student enterprises and the more pur- poseful activities of the institution, religious, social, CONCLUSION 345 and intellectual; the frontier barriers between life and study are gradually being obliterated. For these and other reasons, the wasting of time and energy upon trivialities has already passed its worst stage, and the charge, though still a serious one, is valid rather for the remediable faults than for fundamental ones. After all, a young animal (and an old one, for that matter) needs a reasonable time for relaxation, and the relaxation of the American undergraduate, if some- times silly, is very seldom sordid. He turns from it to his studies in a debonair spirit which his professors admit often achieves better results than the grim earn- estness of the grind. We are learning, too, that pag- eantry — and much of all this is pageantry of one kind or another — may have a very important part to play in normal human life. In the strong colleges, higher academic standards are furnishing the most effective defensive measure against a lack of realization of time values, and little by little faculties are learning how to stimulate intel- lectual interests in such a way as to develop a better sense of proportion. The whole process of rationalizing college life would move much faster if it were not for the emphasis placed upon it by parents and outsiders. It may be, and I believe it is, worth while, but not for the reasons 346 THE UNDERGRADUATE alleged. Much of the talk about social experiences and making friends, for example, is addressed to those who will have plenty of opportunity for these desirable possessions in the normal course of events, but pre- cious little likelihood of gaining intellectual experi- ences and literary intimacies unless time is made for the process to begin in college. The best justification of college life is that it approx- imates, sometimes more closely than the curriculum itself, the new ideas of what education ought to be. It has not been imposed upon college conditions, but has grown up out of them, and in its groping way it fur- nishes a training in "education by doing " — which the educational prophets of our day tell us is a far sounder process than is education by being told. It is just be- cause these things are part of education that they must be watched and checked. Education may be bad as well as good. The worst kind of habits, for example, are to be learned from slack managers' work. On the other hand, the student must not lose the sense of spontaneity and responsibility in his enterprises, or the whole thing becomes as perfunctory as the dullest hour in the classroom. One of the most useful lessons in life is how to make time for something you want to do. There is nothing like it to give a value to the thing when done, and this cannot be learned in a college where the academic standards are so low that for the CONCLUSION 347 students time is something to be killed, instead of something to be carefully saved. This is another way of saying that whether the ad- vantages to the student of college life as we know it are to outweigh the disadvantages will in the long run depend very largely on the faculty. College professors of the older generation have seen and perhaps they re- member the effect of standing aloof from athletic con- ditions as they developed. How are the faculties of to-day facing the more subtle form of corruption which comes from an over-developed and ill-organized student life, of which athletics is only one factor? In many colleges the faculty has again buried its head in the sand, or perhaps has removed it long enough to whimper at its inability to do anything. In others, the faculty and alumni between them are over-hand- ling the whole thing, and really doing the boys' play- ing for them. In some few, however, and the number is happily increasing, the boys are being guided but not exploited. This art which conceals art is exercised sometimes by some specially designated officer, as at Brown, more often as a fruit of the informal relations which are springing up between teachers and students. Wherever the faculty relation is wholesome, the right kind of alumni cooperation is fostered and the wrong kind discouraged. And finally, I shall be greatly dis- appointed if we cannot count upon the growing sense 348 THE UNDERGRADUATE of responsibility of the boys themselves (tempered by their sense of the ludicrous) to check the evils of college life and to foster its benefits. The second question is more or less allied with the foregoing, but it involves also the nature of teaching which students receive, both as to the fields covered and the fields avoided. Is the college preparing its generations of young men (and young women, though this is not so close to our problem) for the kind of a world which these people will enter after graduation? The charge is that the college, partly consciously and partly unconsciously, is looking backward or, at any rate, looking down at its feet. By its teaching and through its conventions it is preparing students for life in this world as it was, rather than looking for- ward to prepare them to meet the conditions that are to come. It is most commonly brought forward by those who feel that what the world most needs is a thorough revolution of the social order, a revolution in which they would like the college to be the acceler- ator rather than the brake that they think it now is. According to them, the college government is fet- tered by the gifts from members of the exploiting classes, and its governing bodies, trustees primarily, and faculties to a lesser degree, are deliberately (and conscientiously, which makes it all the worse) holding CONCLUSION 349 back the generous spirit of youth from the goal toward which it should be striving. They feel that the whole scheme of college life is a powerful factor in training boys to a false and dangerous standard of values, and that such attention as they give to their studies is de- voted to mamtaining the outworn standards of culture from which the world should be striving to escape. As a result, not only are the sons of the exploiting classes carefully guarded during their learning years from getting the facts and cultivating the emotions and im- pulses that they should, but the sons of the workers who make their way to college, instead of being pre- pared for the leadership of their class, are subtly shorn of their strength and turned from the ideals they should follow to the baser and more selfish aims of the exploiting classes. Doubtless some of you may be comfortably thinking as you read that this is all pretty far-fetched and rep- resents at best the vaporings of a handful of hare- brained cranks. It may be admitted that every crank on these subjects is a critic of the college, while deny- ing as I do that every such critic is a crank. Horace Greeley, it will be remembered, once denied that he had ever said that every Democrat was a horse-thief, but he took the occasion of this denial to maintain that every horse-thief was a Democrat. It should be pointed out, perhaps, that the number of leaders of 3 so THE UNDERGRADUATE radical thought, of the younger generation, at any rate, who are college graduates, shows that the col- leges, even if they were organized for such fell pur- poses as their critics assume, are not doing the job any too successfully. Perhaps it should be said, lest I have failed to make my meaning clear, that what I am trying to bring for- ward is not a plea for profound changes in the social order. So far as the college is concerned, I should not be worried if every boy were to graduate as a stand- patter, if only his views were based on study and on a personal contact with both sides of the question, and were not gained through social imitation or intellec- tual isolation. Neither Radicals nor Bourbons can be made to order in this day and generation, nor can what Professor Jastrow calls the democratic suspicion of education be justified or disproved offhand. Never- theless, the charge is not to be dismissed with a shrug of the shoulders. Many a wise observer, while recog- nizing and discounting the unvarying tendency of the enthusiast to prove too much, is nevertheless wonder- ing whether the college fully realizes what its place should be in these days of the twentieth century. Would the United States throw away a billion dollars, as it now does in an ordinary year through strikes, if the employers and their representatives — and nowa- days they are mostly college-bred men — had learned CONCLUSION 351 what a good college might have taught them about their fellow-men? Let us make "liberal discounts" for the alarm of those who do not think that the colleges are radical at all and the alarm of those who regard their influence as entirely too radical already. After doing so, those of us who believe that while no one can expect the world to stand still, evolution will serve better than revolu- tion, should still recognize the seriousness and sincer- ity of the criticisms made by the radicals, and consider whether some of them at any rate may not be met, and met without neglect of those things the radicals are prone to undervalue, but which constitute either the heritage of the ages to our generation, or the individ- ual accomplishments in science and scholarship which must serve as the leaven for the future. This matter brings us to the debatable question of what culture is after all and how the college, by in- clusions and exclusions, by emphasis and by its re- verse, should use its influence. We are doubtless in the midst of a general change from the old type of cul- ture with the individual as the center to a type in which the central idea is the community. Let me quote a few sentences from the American who, it seems to me, is looking with perhaps the clearest eye into the future just now — John Dewey: — 35* THE UNDERGRADUATE I am one of those who think that the only test and justi- fication of any form of political and economic society is its contribution to art and science — to what may roundly be called culture. That America has not yet so justified itself is too obvious for even lament. . . . The old culture is doomed for us because it was built upon an alliance of polit- ical and spiritual powers, an equilibrium of governing and leisure classes, which no longer exists. Those who deplore the crudities and superficialities of thought and sensation which mark our day are rarely inhuman enough to wish the old regime back. They are merely unintelligent enough to want a result without the conditions which produced it, and in the face of conditions making the result no longer possible. In short, our culture must be consonant with realistic science and with machine industry, instead of a refuge from them. And while there is no guaranty that an education which uses science and employs the controlled processes of industry as a regular part of its equipment will succeed, there is every assurance that an educational practice which sets science and industry in opposition to its ideal of cul- ture will fail. Natural science has in its applications to economic production and exchange brought an industry and a society where quantity alone seems to count. It is for education to bring the light of science and the power of work to the aid of every soul that it may discover its qual- ity. For in a spiritually democratic society every individ- ual would realize distinction. Culture would then be for the first time in human history an individual achievement and not a class possession. An education fit for our ideal uses is a matter of actual forces not of opinions. It seems to me worthy of most serious attention that so few of our guides of youth are endeavoring to CONCLUSION 3S3 think these questions through. For too many com- placency and self-sufficiency prevent a realization of their bearing upon routine decisions as to what the college programme should contain, who should give the instruction, and what the individual student should be directed or urged to study. Colleges should consider whether their students as a group are iso- lated, or whether groups within the whole are per- mitted to isolate themselves intellectually and socially even from their fellow-undergraduates. The problem as it affects the individual is not only what the boy does and feels, but what his environment keeps him from doing and feeling. This brings us back, after a somewhat lengthy departure, to the student himself and his part in the whole problem. He needs to realize, for example, that democracy may be helped but is not achieved when one calls a self-supporting boy by his first name, regardless of whether he plays on any team. It is, I am sure, the rare exception for an American undergraduate to be other than firmly resolved to be democratic so far as economic status is concerned. The New York " Sun " has felt it necessary to plead for the right even of the deserving rich to get an education. The boys have more to learn regarding democracy between men of different social backgrounds. It is not 354 THE UNDERGRADUATE enough to be cordial and even intimate with your guide in the woods or the Dayman at the shore. How about the man in your class who wears the wrong kind of collars and shoes, or who uses the wrong kind of slang? Good form is an excellent thing to possess, but a very poor thing to worship. Some of the colleges where "nice" boys go might apply to themselves a recent criticism of Eton and Oxford: — In almost all who have been through them, they produce a worship of "good form," which is as destructive to life and thought as the mediaeval Church. "Good form" is quite compatible with superficial openmindedness, with readiness to hear aU sides, with a certain urbanity toward opponents. But it is not compatible with fundamental open- mindedness, or with any inward readiness to give weight to the other side. Its essence is the assumption that what is most important is a certain kind of behavior: a behavior which minimizes friction between equals, and delicately impresses inferiors with a conviction of their own crudity. Finally, and this is most important of all for the future, the American student must appreciate the need of democracy in ideas. Let him work out his own con- victions for himself, but let him grant an equal right to his fellows. Tolerance" after all is based upon "the recognition of the other man's right to be wrong." Having, with such success as the reader may accord, discouraged other critics, I shall now proceed to join CONCLUSION 355 their ranis. My excuse is that most of them accuse all colleges impartially, while what I shall try to do is to point out to the majority what is already being ac- complished in the best institutions. Such matters as the closer relations between school below and the pro- fessions and industries above I have already dealt with, and also with the relative unimportance of rules and regulations as contrasted with personal knowledge of the boy, the relative importance of the ablest boys as contrasted with the mass, and the need of reform in grading systems and other machinery which at pres- ent tends to shake the student's confidence in the in- telligence of his guides. In considering admissions, I have tried to show the need to test plasticity in order to judge the possibility of growth as well as the pre- sent contents of the applicant's brain, and the need of asking of a given lad whether college training is the best training for him, and if so, whether our particular college is the one to which he should go. In considering the general administrative point of view, what the students and the public call the Fac- ulty, we must admit a tendency toward the conserva- tism that is born of isolation. Perhaps it is a relic of the old guild resentment of any pressure from outside, but at present it is shown in a lack of appreciation of what other educational agencies and even other col- leges are doing. How many professors, for example, 356 THE UNDERGRADUATE have read the recent very careful report of und graduate conditions at the University of Illinois a at how many places is the modern plan of worki back from the product put into effect? How many c leges have "studied their waste heaps"? They poi with pride to distinguished alumni, but do they try find why so many of their boys leave without gradt tion? There is in general a lack of courage in testi things out. If we are so sure we are right, why not the facts prove it? The impersonal tests of the woi ableness of our knowledge which are being develop by Thorndike and others are bringing this new point view rapidly up through the elementary schools, to faced in the colleges and professional institutioi There are lots of things which we don't know about c affairs which we could readily find out instead of wa ing for the Carnegie or the Rockefeller Board to do and 1 then resenting its intrusion. It is the college, : example, which is the last institution to recognize 1 educational advantage of the moving picture, wfc shop operatives and even the soldiers in the traini camp are having the benefits of it. College legislation is likely to show not only ov conservatism, but a strange inelasticity. For examr. a plan of organization whereby a city and a coum college might coSperate in order to give the boys each an experience both of city and country life woi CONCLUSION 357 seem to be reasonable enough, but is now quite im- possible of accomplishment. From the way in which the faculties met the emer- gency which was suddenly created by the war condi- tions of last spring, however, we may reasonably hope that in no respectable college will things go back to the conditions described, with a good deal of truth, it must be admitted, in the "New Republic" recently: — Fussy exactness is accepted for scholarship and lugubri- ous obscurity for erudition. Only the difference between the tweedledum and the tweedledee of curricula will stir up any rancor or heat. For although much of the prog- ress of educational theory and practice is due to college men, it is safe to say that discarded theories and practices hold sway longest in faculty gatherings. . . . The majority vote is almost always reactionary. "Formal discipline" is still worshiped idolatrously. . . . Freshmen are still re- garded as perverse youths who must on no account be allowed to study anything that is of vital interest to them, else they be "spoiled" for the hard restraint of pure scholarship. The conventional ending to these discussions is the expression of intense pessimism over our degenerate day. Faculties still dream of an academic golden age, in the past. In their deliberations there seem to me to be five fundamental questions which up to the present the colleges have dodged, generally with skill and success. First comes the relation of the college to student life. The present test has shown, if the lessons were needed, 358 THE UNDERGRADUATE what part this life plays in the total product. Part of the formal record of a candidate for the flying corps, for example, has to do with his achievements in under- graduate life. It has shown also that the spirit of serv- ice which urges the boys into the trivial tasks of col- lege life can be turned to bigger things, and that the entrepreneur qualities which it often develops may be used for other than money-making callings. An in- telligent study of this question would have to recog- nize a definite conflict of interests, to avoid either the attitude of opposition of too many faculties, or the complaisance of too many deans, and should take ad- vantage of the passionate interests of students in social questions as the logical joint between the cur- riculum and the student life. Secondly, the faculties fail to consider their college programme as a whole. "There has been too little of the generous cooperation in a common cause which might be looked for. Each specialty has taken part in an ignoble scramble for a place at the overcrowded board. Teachers of literature have decried science, scientists have discouraged 'mere literature'; lan- guage and mathematics have been at odds, and even the classics and the modern languages have fallen out." If the colleges studied the courses and their correla- tion, there would be far less of the wasteful duplication CONCLUSION 359 which is now almost the rule. They fail to take ad- vantage of the natural groupings of students to tie the work together and the chances offered thereby to de- velop intellectual team play. This would seem to be an obvious plan, but such a proposal in the English classes at Harvard was deemed worthy of a special newspaper story not long ago. We see hopeful signs of a progressive development throughout the four years in the recent recommendations of President Meikle- john, for example, and in the honor courses being es- tablished here and there, but in general the student whose courses grow as his mind grows is a fortunate one. So far as the actual content of the curriculum is concerned, the college too often feels that its duty is done when it resists, as far as possible, professional and vocational subjects, and makes the boys work or seem to work reasonably hard at what is left. Should it not face the fact that there are certain things not now satisfactorily taught which will come, if at all, only upon its own initiative? For example, as a nation we are notoriously lacking in knowledge and apprecia- tion of the fine arts. Some colleges give courses in a half-hearted way in the history of music and painting — carefully repressing any production or performance on the part of the students, lest that would be lower- ing the college to the level of the conservatory or art 360 THE UNDERGRADUATE school. Except at Harvard and a very few oti places, we neglect the available opportunities to vit ize these courses by the hearing of music or the seei of pictures. The drama fares somewhat better becai it happens also to be "literature"; but in gene: the whole field is waiting for an intelligent and res lute development by the colleges. Within the past twenty years the English depa ments have made a great advance in written Engli (except the spelling of it), but how much has been do for carrying over the knowledge which the studei possess into their written work in other fields — a how much in the decent speaking of the mot! tongue? In foreign languages we are only just beginning realize that we don't really know what we want teach, that for the student who can spend only a y< or so, it is better to teach him to read intelligen than to read, write, and speak atrociously. For th< who can go farther, we are miles behind the Soi Americans in using the programme as a whole to ( tain the requisite laboratory practice. There the s: dent may study his physics or chemistry, for examp in French, English, or German, but so far as I kn this has been tried here only at the University Michigan. Education, which in its history and princip CONCLUSION 361 forms one of the really great disciplines, and is just now one of the most dynamic of subjects, is too often regarded as something fit only for boys who want teachers' licenses to help them through the law school. Science has done more than perhaps anything else for the vitality and modernizing of our college course, but, like many another reformer in power, its sway is now too autocratic. Survey courses, without labora- tory training and designed to provide culture and in- formation as contrasted with preparation for the next higher course, are taboo. The honest fear of flabbiness blinds its votaries to the dangers of narrowness. No one will trust his neighbor to teach the history of sci- ence, or even to prepare to teach it, and the professors in the different fields join in pooh-poohing the right of their colleagues to seek out the relations between the teaching of scientific method and the teaching of the facts of science. I have no panacea to offer, but I do think that in this fiekf again there is something for the college faculties to think through. Considering that the most popular distinction be- tween the college and the university is that the former is a teaching institution, mighty little interest or in- telligence is being devoted to securing good teaching. Even when interest is shown in unsatisfactory condi- tions, it is an interest in symptoms rather than in un- derlying causes. The whole problem is an intensely 362 THE UNDERGRADUATE difficult one, but all the more reason for attacking it vigorously. It involves questions such as an atmos- phere of intellectual honesty, a broad versus a nar- row departmental organization, good library facilities, etc., more than it does salaries and other economic conditions. The very efforts to improve conditions — as, for example, the unyielding requirement of formal preparation — are sometimes absurd in the face of obvious facts. The hanging committee does not ask an artist where he has studied before accepting his picture, but many a college fails to recognize first-class teaching because the teacher has no Ph.D. There is a lack of the realization that a oollege must have not only a good average of teachers, but some "head- liners," even though these latter are likely to have rough edges and angles, and sometimes to forget the need of young blood in the faculty, if only to give radi- cal opinion a chance. My fourth general criticism is that, under present conditions, a degree is too often what Dr. Bradley has called it — "an obstacle to educational progress." There is a notable lack of courage in withholding de- grees from men who patently don't deserve them, as if when a man had been permitted to remain in college during the allotted time, the institution owed him a degree. The burden of proof should, up to the last day, be on the student, and then the degree might be made CONCLUSION 3 6 3 to mean something. There is, perhaps, some excuse for admitting mediocrity in the hope that it may turn out to be something better, but there is none for stamping it after four years of experience with official approval. As a matter of fact, we don't really know and we have n't thought out what we want the degree to stand for. For every student, the college should face the question of whether that particular boy should get its degree. This should be the final step in the individual treatment of the student, whereas at present it is a matter usually settled automatically by the accumulation of a certain number of records on the registration books. There is a corresponding ad- vantage on the other side. If the degree were not ex- pected as a matter of course, we could do more than we now do with the special student. I am inclined to think that experience would show that it is much eas- ier to maintain standards and what may be called the "personality" of a college by limiting its degrees than by elaborate policies of admission or removal. This has certainly been the experience abroad and in some of the best of our own technical schools. My fifth and final criticism of the college is as to the pace in intellectual matters which is usually main- tained, as compared to the pace which might safely be demanded. With a vigorous pace will come thorough- ness in the work done. Only in rare cases does this 364 THE UNDERGRADUATE mean a change from idleness to industry. We hear of the drowsy college atmosphere, but I challenge my readers to find it. Our trouble is not drowsing but frittering. College students are notoriously lacking in the ordering of their time, and the colleges do very lit- tle to help them. Often, indeed, they set the boys a very bad example. One of the places where time is most wasted, and boredom creeps in both for teacher and student, is in the cumbersome and wasteful method of testing what the student has done. In the law schools this has reached a point where a student frequently does not know three months after the term has closed whether he has passed his courses. Some study of the Ebbinghaus tests and their recent devel- opments would be in order here. Too many teach- ers still dictate long tables of figures which should be multigraphed and handed about. Every adviser should be required to make a report as to how each of his boys plans his day for study, and the freshman year, instead of being the special possession of the protected interests, should be primarily a period of ad- justment. There is a temptation to take the whole thing as a matter of course, particularly dangerous in the freshman year, when it is far from being a matter of course. The question of proper adjustment in this year is not alone important to the boy. It is equally important for the welfare of the college. Any one who CONCLUSION 365 has suffered the harassing delays during which an Adirondack guide is adjusting the weight and bearing of his pack, and who then has marveled to see the man carry it without a rest for five miles, may well ponder whether there is not some lesson to be learned in this connection. Each boy should be studied as a case by himself and his load lightened by reducing the number of courses rather than by lowering the requirements of those he takes. It is often the most ambitious boy whose pro- gramme needs pruning, who does not realize the strain of the hard struggle upward, of inefficient nourish- ment and ever-present financial worry, and the brutal shock of constant readjustment between home and college conditions. If the conditions are right and the pack is properly adjusted, the conventional student attitude toward work is absurd. As a matter of fact, our work periods are probably the happiest of our lives. Leisure time poorly spent gives no rest. The testimony of men who have moved from one college to another goes to prove that there is more fun in the college of higher standards, and surely the busy man on a holiday always has a better time than the idler fn search of a new sensation. But the college administration cannot do these things alone: it needs help from the public, and par- 366 THE UNDERGRADUATE ticularly that special group of the public constituting the alumni; also from the parents, and, finally, from the boys themselves. The family responsibility, of course, goes back to the boy's choice of parents and grandparents and concerns more directly the nursery, where many a college career has been foredoomed to failure. The influence of the parents on a boy's get- ting a good general preparation is not strong enough as a rule. A round-up scolding when bad reports come * in is not the whole duty of a father. The parents should also pay more attention to the question of environment for their boys. By the time the son is ready to go to college, they should really know the boy — how he works best, whether in a small and more intimate, or in a larger and less intimate group. If possible they should guide the boy's own decision, rather than make it for him. Too many boys drift to college, and to some particular college. After careful consideration the decision might be the same, but the boy would go with a wholly different spirit. When once the decision is reached, the parents should really go into partnership in the enterprise. This cannot be done if the father expects the boy to come to the same conclusions as he himself has reached upon many questions; for he is not going to. Nor do I mean that they should take away from the boy the fun of find- ing things out for himself; but much of the lack of CONCLUSION 367 proportion from which undergraduates suffer could be checked by a father who shows himself not hostile to, but interested in, student activities, as well as in scholarship. Finally, we must call in, more than has ever been the case in the past, one final factor — the student himself. It is not necessary to presuppose old heads upon young shoulders to get a good deal more help than we do at present. If the boys can once realize that their time in college is primarily an investment, and an expensive one, they can be made to see the rea- sonableness in doing their best work. The speed with which the young fellows who went into the training camps last spring mastered the complicated drill and military technique in order to obtain a commission shows what youth can do if it has a definite goal viv- idly in sight. On the whole, the American college, if not all that the enthusiasts claim, may properly ask for the Scotch verdict of "not proven," in the face of the charges brought against it. But this is not enough. In our in- stitutional life its tactical position is none too secure, and if it is to be a permanent part of our scheme of things, it must justify something stronger than a nega- tive verdict. No other great nation includes this par- ticular item in its educational investment. The college 368 THE UNDERGRADUATE does not exist on the Continent of Europe, and in England it is still a class investment rather than a na- tional one. Neither Japan nor the South American Republics have imitated it. Here at home the secondary schools are reaching up and the professional schools pressing down. Other enterprises, correspondence schools, charitable and social associations, business houses, the Army and Navy — all are entering the field of instruction which the college formerly held for its own. The establish- ment of professional schools of business, journalism, and social service is breaking down the distinction between liberal and vocational study, which, if illogi- cal, was at any rate a convenient way of indicating a field in which there were no academic trespassers. Under all these circumstances the college cannot expect permanently to play so large a part in our na- tional life as even its enemies admit that it now does, unless it really deserves to do so; if it fails, it will not be because the most generous financial support is no longer forthcoming. The war and the taxation inci- dent upon it may tighten the purse-strings tempora- rily, both as to public and private expenditure, but when the expenses due to our social mistakes — the asylums and institutions for the feeble-minded, for example — are reduced as they are sure to be, the provisions for normal humanity, colleges included, CONCLUSION 369 will be correspondingly greater. If the verdict should be unfavorable, it will be because the college is no longer regarded as necessary, and its disappearance will not be a matter of the dim future. The war and its sequalae are sure to hasten all processes of change, and the recent history of Japan has shown us how profoundly every element of a civilization may be changed, without revolution, within the span of a man's life. Or, if we want an example at home, we have only to take the interests and occupations of our grandmothers, with their wax flowers and back- boards, and compare them with the activities of the girls of to-day. In these fast-moving days it would imply no social miracle if our colleges should disap- pear in a quarter of a century. It is good for us to real- ize this fact, not because we want it to happen, or be- cause we believe it will, but because the recognition of a real responsibility is useful as a deterrent against the sloth and complacency which attach themselves to all supposedly divinely ordained institutions. We must face the truth that there is, after all, no such thing as the American college. There are five or six hundred different American colleges, and the ma- jority of them do not deserve to be permanent. Per- haps half of this group might profitably become junior colleges. Of the stronger institutions there is not a single one which could not consider to advantage how 370 THE UNDERGRADUATE its vigor and usefulness might not be strengthened by pruning here and developing there — by constant watchfulness against waste of time and effort, and by a clearer realization of the difference between its aims and those of the university and the vocational school. The colleges need more intelligent cooperation, not only with other agencies, but with one another. The public must be educated to regard the support of a bad college in money or sons as an anti-social act, and the public at large — not merely the college-bred pub- lic — must prepare its sons more thoroughly than is the case to-day to recognize the seriousness of the in- vestment which is involved in giving over these price- less years of youth. What, after all, is the peculiar offering which justi- fies the good college in demanding its place in our complex and overcrowded scheme of things? Cer- tainly it is not the plan of organization nor the course as a thing in itself. It is, I think, the basic concep- tion of a group of young men living and working and thinking and dreaming together, free to let their thoughts and dreams determine the future for them. These young men, hourly learning much from one an- other, are brought into touch with the wisdom of the past, the circumstances of the present, and the visions of the future, by a group of older students, striving to CONCLUSION 371 provide them with ideas rather than beliefs, and guid- ing them in observing for themselves nature's laws and human relationships. They are given in many fields, largely of their own choosing, opportunities — to quote President Eliot — "for exact observation, correct record, and just inference." As in a well-ordered laboratory course (which is really what the college is), the boys are spared from sterile or time-wasting experiments within their little world, with its trials, its triumphs, and its failures, so far as is possible; but they are no longer shielded from the world outside, though guided as to what is most worth while to learn from it. They have opportunities, in their own affairs, to learn team play, to take respon- sibility, and to develop leadership. The whole is conducted in that spirit of enthusiasm and gayety which alone can call out at their best the generous sympathies of youth. The dominant note of the little city is one of confidence and hope. "Hope," says Bertrand Russell, "not fear, is the creative prin- ciple in human affairs. All that has made men great has sprung from the attempt to secure what is good, not from the struggle to avert what was thought evil. . . . Those who are taught in this spirit will be filled with life and hope and joy, able to bear their part in bringing to mankind a future less sombre than the past, with faith in the glory that human effort can create." 372 THE UNDERGRADUATE The college, in short, gives an opportunity for youth to have a "preliminary canter," before entering the hard race of life, by which the whole group will be better prepared, not only for gaining a livelihood, but for usefulness to the community, and for the enjoy- ment and appreciation of the things of the mind and the spirit. Perhaps even more important, the excep- tional individual will almost certainly be recognized and be given the special grooming for his unique duty of pressing forward beyond our present confines. The pessimist may see little resemblance, even in the better colleges, between the picture I have tried to paint and the actual conditions as he observes them, but those who know them best and love them most will, I think, join me in believing that the picture has in itself a very considerable basis of actual reality and accomplishment. Far as the colleges have fallen short of their highest possibilities, we can nevertheless fairly ask ourselves whether, if the same proportion of the young men of Germany had received the training given in our col- leges, the German people would now be enduring a form of government which has made them to be out- casts on the face of the earth. And the college has a peculiarly vital place just now, for our own people. More than any other nation we have the problem of bringing unity and strength out of the most diverse of CONCLUSION 373 human materials. The Great War has shown, indeed, that the problem has been solved thus far, but has also shown how near, for large groups, it was to failure, so strong are the old ties of race and culture. The fu- ture will bring new difficulties. In the pioneering stage of any nation, the process of absorption is relatively easy; but we have passed that stage, and if the war closes before our economic resources have been drained, as have the resources of Europe, we may ex- pect a flood of i mmigration which will stretch even our elastic capacity to the utmost. This will come, fur- thermore, at a time when the human race, as Josiah Royce wrote but shortly before his death, "will still be passing through one of its great crises, with new ideas, new issues — a new call for men to carry on the work of righteousness, of charity, of courage, of patience and of loyalty." We are, it should be said, in better shape to face the future and the sudden readjustments which the war will bring than would have been the case a few years ago. The waste of time is less, both within the classroom and throughout the year. There is closer supervision and better emphasis on the individual. The students are receiving training in responsibility, and a beginning is being made in the public mind in drawing a line between good and feeble institutions. The college, though purged of its excrescences, and strengthened as we hope to see it strengthened, can be 374 THE UNDERGRADUATE only one of many agencies to play a part in this great work, but its part will be not the least important. It can maintain and develop those qualities upon which we have built in the past, our essential democracy, our ingenuity and adaptability, our generosity and our hopefulness. With all its imperfections the American college has the great quality of vitality. It is plastic and dynamic. It provides, and can provide better as time goes on, an environment which will foster but not force the pushing and budding of the spirit of youth, a process blind at first, but growing in vision through the college years. To each individual, — your boy and mine, — as he comes to take his place in the company of undergradu- ates, the good American college can give the chance to gain his own view of the great enterprise of life, and the part he is to play therein. THE END (Site Wtaafibt preft CAMBRIDGE . MASSACHUSETTS U . S . A