Why go to College?

II

EDUCATION À LA CARTE

“If I were to return to college, I should take nothing that was practical,” remarked a recent college graduate. This attitude reveals by contrast a somewhat wide-spread tendency of opinion toward practical and progressive studies.

At a public gathering not long since, the president of a great State institution in the Middle West said that he believed within another decade every course in the institution of which he was the head would be intended simply to fit men to earn a livelihood. A cultivated disciple of quiet and delightful studies who overheard this remark was heard to say almost in a groan, “If I thought that was true of American education generally, I should want to die.”

An even more significant note of warning against merely bread-and-butter studies comes from Amherst College, where the class of 1885 recently presented to the governing board the radical plan of abolishing entirely the degree of bachelor of science, with the purpose of building up a strictly classical course for a limited number of students admitted to college only by competitive examinations. The plan provides for the raising of a fund to meet any deficiency caused by the temporary loss of students and also for the increase of teachers’ salaries. The general idea in the mind of the Amherst committee is expressed as follows:

These opinions are impressive. No one can visit widely our American colleges without feeling the appropriateness of such warnings and demands. A story is told of the president of a college praying in chapel for the prosperity of his school and all new and “inferior” institutions. The prayer would seem to have been answered in the last decade, which marks the marvelous growth of modern technical institutions in America. This growth has been specially pronounced in the great State universities and in the institutions fitted to train men in practical education.

GROWTH OF PRACTICAL EDUCATION

Dr. William R. Harper is quoted as saying shortly before his death that “no matter how liberally the private institution might be endowed, the heritage of the future, at least in the West, is to be the State university.” An ex-president of a State university has given the following indication of ten years of advance in attendance of students at fifteen State universities in comparison with attendance at fifteen representative Eastern colleges and universities:

Almost any one of our great universities at present has many times the wealth, equipment, and students of all of our colleges fifty years ago. Our American agricultural and mechanical colleges, the greater number of which have arisen within ten years, now enroll more than 25,000 students. In 1850 there were only eight non-professional graduate students in the United States. In 1876, when Johns Hopkins opened, there were 400 such students. There are now at least 10,000 students of this class, and every year finds an additional number of our larger institutions including graduate courses preparing for practical vocations, with many of them adding facilities for graduate study during the summer.

The following more concrete comparison by Professor E. E. Slosson reveals the manner in which the new State institutions are rapidly meeting the demands of modern times for technical and professional education; for the chief progress in these institutions has been not in the old-fashioned culture studies, but in special departments, including well-nigh everything from engineering and dairying to music and ceramics:

WHAT IS THE CHIEF END OF AN AMERICAN COLLEGE?

This sudden and enormous advance in the pursuit of technical studies, which have made the State universities formidable rivals to our older, privately endowed institutions, has aroused uncertainty as to the real object of collegiate training. Modern commercialism, which has said that you must touch liberal studies, if at all, in a utilitarian way, has swept in a mighty current through our American universities. The undergraduate is feeling increasingly the pressure of the outside modern world—the world not of values, but of dollars. The sense of strain, of rush, and of anxiety which generally pervades our business, our public and our professional life, has pervaded the atmosphere in which men should be taught first of all to think and to grow.

The present tendency of students is to feel that any form of education that does not associate itself directly with some form of practical and significant action is artificial, unreal, and undesirable. Last winter I visited an institution on the Pacific coast where literary studies were considered, among certain classes of students, as not only unpractical, but almost unmanly. As a result of such drift in educational sentiment, the American undergraduate is in danger of getting prepared for an emergency rather than for life. He is losing,

The student leads his life noisily and hurriedly. He scarcely takes time to see it all plainly without dust and confusion. There is all about him a blurred sense of motion and duties. His culture lies upon him in lumps. He does not allow it time to impress him. College is a bewildering episode rather than a place of clear vision.

THE NEED OF LEADERS RATHER THAN MONEY-MAKERS

It is far easier to turn out of our colleges mechanical experts than it is to create men who are thoughtful, men who know themselves and the world. The value of the modern man to society does not depend upon his ability to do always the same thing that everybody else is doing. College men should be fitted to make public sentiment as well as to follow it. The educated leader should be in advance of his period. Independence born of thoughtfulness and self-control should mark his thought and decision. The world looks to him for assistance in vigorously resisting those deteriorating influences which would commercialize intellect, coarsen ideas, and dilute true culture. His hours of insight and vision in the world of art, ideas, letters, and moral discipline should assist him to will aright when high vision is blurred by the duties of the common day. His clearer conception of highest truth should lead him to hope when other men despair. Our colleges should train men who will be “trumpets that sing to battle” against all complacency, indifference, and social wrong.

When a student, however, puts his profession of medicine or engineering before that of responsible leadership in social, political, moral, and industrial life, he ceases to be a real factor in the modern world. We already have a thousand men who can make money to one man who can think and make other men think. We have a thousand followers to one genuine leader who incorporates in his own mind and heart a high point of view and the ability to present it in an attractive way. It is one thing for an undergraduate to go out from his institution expert in electrical science; it is quite another thing for him to so truly discover the spirit of life itself, as to be able to harmonize his expert ability with the broader and deeper life of the age in which he lives.

The present undergraduate often fails lamentably at this very point. He frequently reminds one of the remark of an old gentleman to an old lady whom I saw at a backwoods railway-station in Oregon watching a small white dog chasing with great zeal an express-train which had surged past the station. The old lady, turning to her companion, said eagerly, “Do you think he will catch it?” The old man answered, “I am wondering what he will do with the blamed thing if he does catch it.” The college undergraduate likewise is often uncertain about what he is to do with his profession beyond making a living with it. Our colleges, with their technical training, should give the conviction that a physician in a community is more than a medical practitioner. His success as a physician brings with it an obligation of interest and leadership in all of the social, civic, and philanthropic movements of the town or city in which he works. He should discover in college that he is to be more than a doctor; that he is to be also a man and a citizen. In the last analysis, for real success it is not a question whether a man is a great engineer or a great electrician or a great surgeon; it is the question of individual character.

The pressing inquiry, then, for all undergraduate training is, Are we giving to our boys the kind of education which will fill their future life with meaning? A man must live with himself. He must be a good companion for himself. A college graduate, whatever his specialty, should be able to spend an evening apart from the crowd. The theater, the automobile, the lobster-palace, were never intended to be the chief end of collegiate education. A college course should give the undergraduate tastes, temperament, and habits of reading. A graduate who studies to be a specialist in any line needs also the education which will give him depth, background, and the historical significance of civilization and life in general.

A lady at a dinner-party was making desperate attempts to interest in her conversation a certain business man who had been introduced to her as a graduate of a prominent university. She talked to him of books, education, theater, races, pictures, society, and out-of-door life. All of her efforts were futile. Finally he said, “Try me on leather; that’s my line.” This college graduate lost something important in his incompetency for general and intelligent conversation. His loss was more tragic, however, as a representative of the so-called college-educated classes, exponents of specialistic training, who have become materially successful, but who are without those personal resources necessary for their own enjoyment and profit, and who find themselves utterly inadequate for guidance or incentive to their fellowmen.

ELECTIVE STUDIES

The system of elective studies which now widely characterizes the training in our higher educational institutions has made it increasingly difficult for the college man to secure a clear idea of a college course and the comprehensive training which is his due. In many institutions the whole curriculum is in a state of unstable equilibrium. The endeavor to follow the demands of the times and the desire to secure patrons and students, have often brought to both the faculty and the undergraduate an uncertainty as to the true meaning of the college. Even in freshman and sophomore years the arrangement of studies is often left to the choice of the immature student. In one of our oldest universities there is at present only one prescribed course of study. For the rest, the students are allowed to choose at their own sweet will, and their choice, while dictated by a variety of motives, is influenced in no small degree by the preponderance of emphasis, both in buildings and faculty, upon technical education. Students are left to flounder about in their selection of courses, guided neither by curriculum nor life purpose. Recently I asked twenty-six students why they chose their studies. Sixteen of them gave monetary or practical reasons; six answered that the studies chosen furnished the line of least resistance as far as preparation was concerned; and only four had in mind comprehensive culture and preparation for life.

I sympathize with the educator who said recently:

While these tendencies threaten, instead of criticizing too severely our universities and our undergraduates, we should strive first to find the reason for these modern scientific and practical lines of work; and second, to suggest, if possible, definite ways by which a truer harmony in educational studies may be brought about.

EDUCATION TO MEET POPULAR DEMANDS

The rapid extension of natural-physical science in the last fifty years has had much to do with the change of accent in American education. This change of emphasis has effected a distinct transformation in the curriculum, in the college teacher and in the student ideal.

Should one care to get one’s fingers dusty with ancient documents, one might turn to an old leaflet in the files of the library at Columbia, dated November 2, 1853. It is the report of the trustees of Columbia College upon the establishment of a university system. Among other things this report outlines, in accordance with the ideas of the trustees, “the mission of the college.”

This mission is, “to direct and superintend the mental and moral culture. The design of a college is to make perfect the human intellect in all its parts and functions; by means of a thorough training of all the intellectual faculties, to obtain their full development; and by the proper guidance of the moral functions, to direct them to a proper exertion. To form the mind, in short, is the high design of education as sought in a College Course.” The report hereupon proceeds to note that unfortunately this sentiment, “manifest and just” though it be, “does not meet with universal sympathy or acquiescence.” On the contrary, the demand for what is termed progressive knowledge ... and for fuller instruction in what are called the useful and practical sciences, is at variance with this fundamental idea. The public generally, unaccustomed to look upon the mind except in connection with the body, and to regard it as a machine for promoting the pleasures, the conveniences, or the comforts of the latter, will not be satisfied with a system of education in which they are unable to perceive the direct connection between the knowledge imparted and the bodily advantages to be gained. The committee therefore “think that while they would retain the system having in view the most perfect intellectual training, they might devise parallel courses, having this design at the foundation, but still adapted to meet the popular demand.”

We have here one of the early indications of “parallel courses” in one of our institutions of higher learning as a concession to popular demands. But this concession at Columbia was made before the immense extension and development of modern natural, physical, and industrial science. Education or culture in the early fifties was something easy to define. It included logic, literature, oratory, conic sections, and religion. Since that date, however, the American undergraduate has discovered modern research work at the German university. Cecil Rhodes has opened Oxford for American students with his “golden key.” The American student has been called upon to match with his technical ability the enormous and rapid development of a new material civilization, and educational institutions take color from the social and political media in which they exist. In fact, it cannot be easily estimated how real or how comprehensive a factor the college graduate has been in guiding and shaping this practical and progressive awakening.

The American undergraduate is more than ever before contemporaneous with all that is real and important in modern existence. He is filled with enthusiasm for civic and social and religious investigation and improvement. With self-reliant courage he works his way through college, tutoring, waiting on table, and performing other real services. He debates with zeal economics, immigration, and labor questions. Indeed, the modern American university is taking increasingly firmer hold upon the life of the nation. The college graduate of fifty years ago was more or less a thing apart. If he was strong in his literary studies, he was also weak in his attachment to life itself, where education really has its working arena. In comparison with him, the student to-day spends a greater proportion of his time in the study of political science. One feels the limitation of the modern undergraduate especially in the sweep of his literary knowledge, and in his acquaintance with abstract thought, art, and poetry. But when we see student and professor working together on our American farms, bringing about a new and higher type of rural life; when we find our mechanical engineers not only in the mountains and on the Western prairies, but in the heart of India or inland China or South Africa, building there their bridges and railroad tunnels according to the ideas seen in the vision of their new practical educational training, we are bound to ask whether the modern undergraduate is not truly interested in the deep aim of all true scholarship, namely, the spiritual and concrete construction of life by means of ideas made real. Ambassador Bryce’s opinion of the American universities carries weight, and of them he has said:

But since undergraduate training must deal not simply with the theory of education, but also with the imperative demands and conditions of a new time, there must be discovered practical ways by which our undergraduates may save their literary ideals at the same time that they enlarge their practical and progressive knowledge; means by which they may discover literary, historical, linguistic, and philosophical values without losing their mathematics and their physical and material sciences.

To the end, therefore, of making cultural studies as strong, attractive, and profitable to our undergraduates as practical and scientific training, our institutions should train men of large caliber to teach English and belles-lettres. They should discover great teachers and inspiring personalities.

PERSONALITY OF GREAT TEACHERS

President Gilman of Johns Hopkins University took as his motto, “Men before buildings.” The subject of securing great teachers for students is perhaps the most vital topic which can be considered, since from the point of view of undergraduates a professor, whether teaching civil engineering or Greek, is invariably influential because of what he is personally.

In a large university which I recently visited I was told that there were three thousand students and five hundred instructors and professors, an average of a professor to every six students. Upon asking several of the undergraduates how many professors they knew personally, I was somewhat astounded to find that less than a dozen of these six hundred teachers came into personal contact with the students outside of the classes. One graduate told me that he had not been in the home of more than three professors during his college course.

There are undoubtedly reasons for this lack of association between the professors and the undergraduates. In a large university, the demand upon the teacher for more work than he should rightfully undertake, the ever-increasing interest of the student in college affairs, with many other influences, are constantly presented as difficulties in the way of the teacher’s close relationship with the student. But the important point in this association between student and professor is that in many cases the professor has nothing vital and individual to give the undergraduate when he meets him. In too many cases he is a dry and weary man, living his life in books rather than in men. A. C. Benson has described a Cambridge don in terms that at times we fear fit some college professors of our own land. He sits “like a moulting condor in a corner, or wanders seeking a receptacle for his information.” The American college teacher has too often been chosen simply because of his scholarship. Our institutions of learning have been obsessed with the mere value of the degree of doctor of philosophy. As a consequence, many a young professor is scholarly and expert in his knowledge of his subject, but utterly without ability to impart it with interest. He lacks driving force as well as guiding and regulating force. He seems at times without the capacity for real feeling. He is not alive to the issues of the time in which he lives. He starts his subject a century behind the point of view in which his scholars are interested. Too often, alas! he misses the chief opportunity of a college teacher in not becoming friendly with his undergraduates; for there is no comradeship like the comradeship of letters, the comradeship of knowledge, the comradeship of those whose lives are united in the higher aims of serious education.

Letters have never lacked their fascination when they have been embodied in the thought and personalities of great teachers. Albert Harkness, with his face aglow with literary enthusiasm, reading “Prometheus Bound,” in his lecture-room in the old University Hall at Providence, is one of the unfading memories of my undergraduate days. When Tennyson said, “I am sending my son not to Marlborough, but to Bradley, the great teacher,” it was not a subject he had in mind, but a personality. In one institution which I visit, virtually the entire undergraduate body elects botany. A student said to me one day, “We do not care especially for botany, but we would elect anything to be under Dr. ——.” Not long ago, attending a college dinner at the University of Minnesota, I heard a professor at my side lamenting the tendency to irreverence on the part of American college men. While we were speaking, ex-President Northrop came into the room, and the entire crowd of students were on their feet in an instant, cheering their beloved president. One of the undergraduates closed his remarks by saying that the deepest impression of his college days had occurred in the chapel when their honored president prayed; and he quoted the following verse:

THE PROFESSOR IN THE LECTURE-ROOM

The classroom presentation of the college professor is also highly important. Many a subject is spoiled for a student because of the pedantic, priggish, or solemn manner of the teacher. Many a teacher is devoted to his subject and painstaking, but his lack of knowledge as to the use of incident, epigram, and enticing speech in presenting his subject, prevents his popularity and power as a teacher. Woodrow Wilson says that he had been teaching for twenty years before he discovered that the students forgot his facts, but remembered his stories. We realize that tables of population, weights, and measures, temperatures, birth-rates, and dimensions, are at times necessary, but these should be used in the classroom with moderation.

Too often a teacher takes for granted that he has an uninteresting subject, and therefore gives up the task of making it attractive. A professor of mathematics, endeavoring to evade the obligation for good teaching, gave to a professor of chemistry, whose lecture-room was always crowded with interested students, the following reason for the unpopularity of his subject: “The trouble with mathematics is that nothing ever happens. If, when an equation is solved, it would blow up or give off a bad odor, I should get as many students as you.” The real reason, however, was deeper than the nature of his subject. It lay in the nature of the man. He did not have the power to bring his subject into vital contact with reality and with the life of his students.

The lecture plan also handicaps many a teacher in this important task of getting near the student and drawing him out. The seminar of our larger universities and graduate schools help much in individualizing the students. Students may be talked to death. They themselves often want to talk. An undergraduate in the South, after hearing a professor who was without terminal facilities, told me the old story of Josh Billings, who defined a bore as a man who talked so much about himself that you couldn’t talk about yourself.

In many institutions the students also are forced to take too many lectures. Their minds become jaded. Thinking is the last thing they have power to do in the lecture-room. There is little desire or opportunity for intellectual reaction; as one professor of a Western university humorously remarked:

TWO WAYS OF TEACHING HISTORY

The most discouraging moments of my college days occurred during the lecture hours of history, not because I did not have a natural bent for history, but because the professor made the topic, for me, uninteresting. My mind became a blank almost as soon as I entered the classroom. Lecture days in history covered me with a darkness beyond that which I had ever imagined could emanate from the world of fallen spirits. My powers went into eclipse. There seemed to be a kind of automatic cut-off between my brains and my note-book. My only source of comfort consisted in the fact that my miseries had companionship. In some examinations, I remember, only a small remnant of the class succeeded in satisfying the demands of our scholarly teacher.

I can only remember flashes and hints of a long, solemn, student face, shrouded with whiskers, bending with piercing eye over books which seemed only slightly less dry than a remainder biscuit, droning, in “hark-from-the-tombs-a-doleful-sound” incantation, words, which to our vagrant attention were just words, belonging to remote centuries, while about me my companions shivered audibly, waiting to be called up. The professor was called a great student of history. He might have been. We gladly admitted this: it was the chief compliment we could pay him. As a teacher and inspirer of boys, however, he was a good example of the way to make history impregnable.

I hold in memory, also, another professor who taught history. He was seldom called a professor. The students called him “Benny.” There was a kind of lingering affection in our voices as we spoke his name. His lecture-room was always crowded. No student ever went to sleep, no student became so frightened that he lost his wits, no student ever took himself too seriously. There was an element of humor and humanness which was constantly kindled by this great, manly teacher and which fired at frequent intervals every student heart. His illustrations were not confined to Horatius on the bridge, Garibaldi promising his soldiers disaster and death, or Luther at Worms. He attached history to modern themes. His historical situations were described not in the terms of tedious systems, but in the personalities of great men. We somehow felt that he himself was greater than anything he said; that he himself was a great man. He found interest in the life of college as well as in the work of college. He talked about the last foot-ball game and the reason why the college was defeated and the lessons that men should draw from their failure. The value of his remarks was enhanced by the fact that most of the men had seen him on the running-track in the gymnasium, or on the front row of the grand stand, cheering patriotically with both voice and arms. I remember how he used to add driving power to our awakening resolves and ambitions. We were quite likely to forget that we were learning history. To-day at alumni dinners the mere mention of the name “Benny” brings an enthusiasm which the most eloquent speech of any other man seems incapable of invoking. Here was a man who also taught history; but the man was more than his book, he was more than his subject: he was the light and the blood of it, and the glory of that theme still brightens the path of every one of those hundreds of students who caught a new and radiant vision of the march of events in the light of a great man’s eyes. It was of such teachers that Emerson must have been thinking when he said, “There is no history, only biography,” and again, “An institution is but the lengthened shadow of a man.”

It is of such men that other college graduates think to-day, even as Matthew Arnold thought of Jowett at Balliol:

WANTED: THE GREAT TEACHER

But how are we to train such teachers for our undergraduates? This is no child’s task. It is the matchless opportunity of the college; it is the crying need of our times. A large proportion of undergraduates in college lecture-rooms are virtually untouched in either their feelings or their intellects by the ministry of the church. Whatever the ministry may have been in our father’s times, it is not to-day significant or effective in imparting its message to students. The fact is periodically demonstrated by test questions of teachers to their students concerning the Bible, English literature, and church history. I have recently visited a dozen of the leading preparatory schools whose headmasters and teachers quite invariably unite in lamenting the inadequacy of the Sunday-schools and of religious training in the home. Indeed, many students go up to our best preparatory schools in almost a heathenish condition as regards religion and Christian knowledge. It is the day and time of the teacher’s ministry in both secondary schools and in colleges. No pulpit in our day is more far-reaching and decisive than the desk of the college teacher. The college professor who does not forget that he is first a man, then a professor, and who can get past the friendship of books and knowledge to a genuine friendship with students, can be the highest force in our present day civilization. But the teacher says: “I am only a teacher of literature, or of chemistry, or of engineering, or of bridge-building. I am not an evangelist or a moral reformer, or a promoter of polite accomplishments or of social service.” Much of this is true also of the great teachers of history. Yet somehow these men found in their specialty the door through which they entered into the very hearts and lives of their school-boys.

A short time ago at the University of Iowa I had the opportunity of meeting at luncheon thirty members of the faculty. The subject for discussion was: “What can the professor do really to assist students at the University of Iowa in discovering the values worth while in college life?” Approximately one-half of the teachers for various reasons prayed to be excused from the discussion. I was specially interested in the answers of the other men—among whom were the men, according to student testimony, who had a real hold upon the university life. One man was of the department of chemistry. He was prominent in student activities. When he was introduced, a student said, “There is no man more truly liked in the university than Professor ——.” As he talked, we felt that, while he might be a good teacher of chemistry, his department was chiefly important in giving him a point of departure from which he could go forth to interest himself in the life of young men. After the conference he said to me: “If professors want influence with students, let them appear at debates, at athletic games, and at student mass-meetings; let them show real interest in undergraduate activities of all sorts, even at personal sacrifice.”

Another professor was a teacher of English. He was not interested in athletics or in the religious life of the students so much as in revealing to students in the classroom as well as outside the classroom the charm of literary things. That was his message—his individual message to his college. His life-work was more than presenting the evolution of the English novel: it was a mission to students to secure on their part habits of reading and a taste for genuine literature which in after years would be to many the most priceless reward of their college days. It is not necessary that two college teachers should present the same truth in the same way, but when college professors and instructors, presidents, deans, and tutors, realize that teaching to-day as in former days is a calling, not simply a means of livelihood, and that every man who holds any such position must somehow discover how to reach personally at least a small circle of students, then our colleges will not longer be defined as “knowledge shops,” but as the homes of those inspirations and friendships, those ideals and incitements, which make life more than meat and the body than raiment.

While the drift of our modern life in the outside world may be toward technical and scientific education, the drift in college is still toward the great teacher—the man of thought-provoking power and of spiritual capacity; sincere and genuine both in scholarship and manhood, of whom one can speak, as Carlyle spoke of Schiller, “a high ministering servant at Truth’s altar, and bore him worthily of the office he held.”