Why go to College?

IV

REASONS FOR GOING TO COLLEGE

Recently I attended the commencement exercises at one of our large universities. As undergraduates and friends of the graduating class were gathered in a large church awaiting the arrival of the procession, in a seat directly in front of me sat a middle-aged woman and a man whose appearance and nervous expectation drew general attention. The man’s clothes were homely and of country cut. His face was deeply lined, and wore the tan of many summers. I noted his hard, calloused hand resting on the back of the seat as he half rose to look at the door through which the seniors were to enter. The woman by his side was a quiet, sympathetic person to whom a phrase from Barrie would be applicable: she had a “mother’s face.”

While many eyes were turned toward the old couple, the commencement procession entered the church. The two seemed scarcely to notice the dignitaries who led the procession, but their eyes were straining to catch the first glimpse of the seniors. At least half of the audience were now interested in this father and mother. The latter suddenly placed both hands upon the man’s arm. Her face beamed, and an answering light appeared in the face of a strong young man who marched near the head of the seniors. That day some persons in the audience heard only listlessly the commencement speeches. Instead, they were picturing the couple back on an upland farm of New England, dedicating their lives to the task of giving their boy the advantages which they had never received, and which they must have felt would separate him forever from their humble life and surroundings. It had been no easy path up which this pair had struggled to the attainment of that ambition. This was the day of their reward. All the gray days behind were lost in the radiance of pride and love. The father was full of joy because he had had the privilege of working for the boy, while to the mother it was enough that she had borne him.

Such scenes are still frequent in commencement time, and they are significant. Does it really pay to send boys to college in America? Is the game worth the candle? Is the contemptuous notice placed by Horace Greeley in his newspaper office still applicable: “No college graduates or other horned cattle need apply”? We can probably take for granted, as we consider the vast expenditure of money and time and men in the cause of American education, that the people of the country are believing increasingly in the value of college training; but to many persons there arises the question, To what college shall we send our young hopeful? There is even a more basic question, Why go to college at all?

Rather than theorize on this subject, I asked one hundred recent graduates of North American colleges to tell me what decided their choice of an institution, the chief values derived from their college course, and the effect of college training upon their life-work. The following is a summary of the testimony thus obtained:

GRADUATE TESTIMONY CONCERNING COLLEGE

The values of a college course are strikingly presented by the following answers: A Johns Hopkins man attributes to his university “a desire for, search after, and acceptance of the truth regardless of the consequences.” A recent alumnus of Boston University says: “I learned to have a far broader view of what teaching (my profession) really is. When I entered college I regarded it as a process of instilling a knowledge of facts in a young person’s mind; when I was graduated I knew that this was a very small part, merely a means to the great end—the development of personality.” A graduate of the University of Georgia says that his college course meant to him “a self-unfoldment, a diversity of interests in life, a growth of ideals, of purposes, and of judgment; strong convictions and friendships.” A student from the School of Mines in Colorado considers the chief value of his college training was the giving him “a vision of a life-work instead of a job”; a graduate of the University of Louisiana writes that the chief value to him was “a realization that I was worth as much as the average man”; while an alumnus of Vanderbilt University said that his course gave him “the feeling of equality and of opportunity to do things and be something along with other men. It has meant, perhaps, a greater chance to do my best.”

CHOOSING A COLLEGE

The choice of a college, according to this testimony, is largely dependent upon one of three things,—the location of the institution (involving expense), the influence of friends or relatives, and the advantages the institution may offer for special training. The selection of the college, however, is not so important as formerly. Every prosperous institution now gives sufficient opportunity for the acquirement of knowledge and training. Apart from the prestige which the name of a large and well-known university or college gives to its graduates in after life, the difference between the values imparted by scores of American institutions is not considerable. There are at least a hundred institutions in America sufficiently well equipped to give a boy the foundation of mental training that a college education is intended to supply. Their libraries are filled with books; their laboratories contain expensive and elaborate modern appliances; their gymnasiums are preëminent in equipment; their instructors are drawn from the best scholars in the country and also from the finishing schools of Europe; the spirit of athletics and undergraduate leadership are, as a rule, strongly emphasized, while the fraternity and social systems afford rare opportunities for friendship. Temptations and college evils vary comparatively little in different institutions.

The advantages of contact and the acquirement of experience through the laboratory of a big city institution are frequently more than counterbalanced by the close fellowship and the lack of distractions in a small country college. It is true that the investigators of the Carnegie Foundation found a large variation in the amount of money expended by different institutions to educate a student. It is my belief, after visiting more than five hundred institutions in North America, that the quality of instruction in any one of these institutions of the first grade does not vary sufficiently to render the choice of a college on the ground of educational advantages a matter of great moment. The values which the small college loses from inferior equipment are usually offset by the more direct access of the student to the personality of the teacher, and often by closer friendships with fellow-students.

Indeed, educational results are not always commensurate with material advantages. As President Garfield said, a man like Mark Hopkins on one end of a bench and a student on the other end is still the main essential of a college. Many years ago Henry Clay visited Princeton, and was asked by President McLean (Johnnie, as he was familiarly and popularly called) to sit down in the president’s study. The furniture was not elaborate in those days, nor did it consist of the most solid material. Mr. Clay sat down, and the rickety old chair which was proffered him sank beneath his weight. The statesman, rising from the floor, said solemnly, “Dr. McLean, I hope that the other chairs of this institution are on a more permanent foundation.” Indeed, the foundation of learning in those days was laid upon the personality of great teachers who, like Dr. McLean, had personal contact with the students, making up in individual interest what was lacking in material equipment.

It is important that the student should choose instructors quite as carefully as institutions. What a man selects when he gets to college—his studies, his teachers, and his friends—will prove far more vital to him than the institution he happens to choose.

IDEALS JOINED TO ACTION

Whether in college or out in the world, the important thing is that college gives an opportunity not only for the acquirement of knowledge, but also for the matching of that knowledge against real problems. Something definitely good is derived from new adjustments. Education can never be completed at home. The college boy returns to his old home with new reverence, with a new conception of its meaning. He has secured a vision that enriches and liberates by getting in touch with universal interests. He has gotten out of himself into the life of others.

College brings together ideas and action. It is the practice-ground for honor and square-dealing. A championship base-ball game was played recently between Wesleyan and Williams at Williamstown. This game was the last one of a series, and it was to decide which college should hold the championship for the coming year. The tension was naturally great. At the end of the seventh inning the score stood 1 to 0 in favor of Wesleyan. The last Williams man at the bat knocked a slow “grounder” to the short-stop. In throwing it to first base, he drove it so high that the first baseman, in attempting to get it, stepped about an inch off the base. The umpire called the man out, but the Wesleyan first baseman, going up to the umpire, said, “That man was not out.” Williams finally won that day, but Wesleyan had the satisfaction of knowing that their man had “played the game.”

TRAINING OF THE INDIVIDUAL

One of the chief functions of the American college is to discover the man in the student, and to train him for citizenship and public service. President Hadley of Yale points out the fact that of the twenty-six presidents of the United States, seventeen were college men, and of these seventeen, fourteen were graduates of the old-fashioned classical colleges. Grant was a West Point man, Monroe and McKinley left college before the end of their junior year, one to go to the army, and one to teach school. This contribution of individual leadership to a nation seems to be proper and fitting, as Dr. Hadley says:

This power of the American college to develop individual initiative and leadership has been decidedly enhanced in recent years. The college in the United States has gradually developed from a quasi-family institution for growing school-boys to a small world of wide, voluntary opportunity for young men. There is a decided difference between American undergraduate life to-day and that of a century ago, or even of fifty years ago. Then boys were graduated at eighteen or nineteen years of age, and they were under the watchful eye of presidents, professors, and tutors, who were in loco parentis. The earlier period was a period of flogging and fagging and “freshmen servitude rules.” Indeed, the age was one of black-and-blue memories derived from those educational lictors who with their rods made deeper impressions than all the Roman Cæsars. Freshmen were forbidden to wear hats in the president’s or professors’ dooryards or within ten yards of a president, eight rods of a professor, or five of a tutor. These young men were forbidden to run in the college yard or up or down stairs or to call to any one through a college window. Seniors had the power to regulate the dress and the play of underclass members. In those early days fines and penalties for misdemeanors ran from half a penny up to three shillings, while sophomores had their ears boxed before the assembled college by the president or a member of the faculty. The conclusion of the college prayer indicated the enforced humility of students in those days: “May we perform faithfully our duties to our superiors, our equals, and our inferiors.”

American college life had its rise in New England institutions presided over by rigorous Puritans whose hands were as hard as their heads, who believed in total depravity and original sin, and who held the young sternly to account for any remissness. In those early days student community life differed little from student home life; both failed dismally to develop initiative or individual responsibility. They were characterized by strict authority on the part of the parent and teacher, and ingenious attempts to outwit this authority on the part of the young. It was this conception of the college which led the Massachusetts legislature to give the Harvard faculty authority to inflict corporal punishment upon Harvard students. At that time it was easy for a student to determine his life-work, for the great majority of boys either entered the ministry, or studied law or medicine. The whole college living was simple and homogeneous.

GOVERNMENT BY UNDERGRADUATES

Existence in the modern American college is quite another thing. In the college itself there has arisen an interminable round of activities which make demands on the talents and abilities of students. Managerial, civic, social, religious, athletic, and financial leadership is exemplified in almost all colleges. Undergraduate leadership is the most impressive thing in college life. One reason for the sway of athletics over students exists in the fact that through these exercises the student body recognizes real leadership. Loyalty to it is repeatedly seen. At a small college the students may elect their best pitcher as the president of the senior class; their best jumper for the secretary; and, regardless of the subtlety of the humor, may choose their best runner for the treasurer of the class. The president of another college has estimated that in his institution the regular college activities outside of the curriculum reached a grand total of twenty-seven, and included everything from the glee-club leader to the chairman of an old-clothes committee. The dean of another institution who felt this overwhelming change in student affairs is quoted as recommending “a lightening of non-academic demands upon the students.”

A college man is surrounded, therefore, with ample opportunity for individual development. His habits and his executive abilities are considered quite as important as his “marks” when the final honors are awarded. In short, the real government of our large North American institutions is to-day in the hands of the students, however much the faculty may think that they wield the scepter. Honor systems, athletics, college journalism, fraternity life, self-support, curriculum, seminars, unrestrained electives, student researches, and laboratory methods—all these are signs of the new day of student individualism. The parental form of government is less popular; the self-government idea is now the slogan in student life. The dogmatic college president whom I met recently in a Western State who insisted that in his college there shall be no fraternities or no athletics is marching among the belated leaders of modern education. Meanwhile embryonic statesmen and railroad managers are discovering themselves and their life-work in the society and politics of undergraduate days. In the ninety per cent. of his time which it is estimated the American undergraduate spends outside of his recitations, there is increasingly the tendency to make the college a practice-ground for the development of personal enterprise, individuality, and efficiency.

LEARNING TO THINK

At least twelve college presidents have said to me during the last year that in their judgment the chief advantage of a college course is learning to think. It has been stated by Dr. Hamilton Wright Mabie that to Americans no conquests are possible save those which are won by superiority of ideas. Professor George H. Palmer tells an anecdote of a Harvard graduate who came back to Cambridge and called upon him to express his gratitude for certain help which had come to him in Professor Palmer’s classroom, and which had directly influenced his life. The professor, naturally elated, hastened to inquire what particular remark had so influenced the young man’s career. The graduate replied: “You told us one day that John Locke insisted on clear ideas. These two words have been transforming elements in my life and work.”

The colleges liberate every year a tremendous vital force, which is a prodigious energy. It may drive men aimlessly into all kinds of trifling, display, and doubtfully acquired possessions, or it may be harnessed to clear ideas and sturdy convictions on the great subjects of nationalism, industrialism, and enlightenment through schools and art and literature and religion. Education in the fullest meaning of the term is the source and secret of American success. Some of our colleges are older than the nation. Harvard was founded in 1636, William and Mary in 1693, Yale in 1701, Princeton in 1746, all before our distinctively national life began. The colleges are the training centers of the nation’s life, and to the trained men of any nation belong increasingly the opportunities and the prizes of public life. Bismarck was sagaciously prophetic when he said that one-third of the students of Germany died because of overwork, one-third were incapacitated for leadership through dissipation, and the other third ruled Germany. The future welfare of the peoples of the earth is in the hands of the men who are being trained by the schools for service and public leadership. The power of leadership is developed in part at least by the expression of ideas in writing and speaking. President Eliot is quoted as saying that the superior effectiveness of some men lies not in their larger stock of ideas, but in their greater power of expression. Many a student has learned to give expression to his ideas and convictions, and many an editor has found his vocation, by writing for the college journals.

COLLEGE JOURNALISM

But the condition of college journalism at present does not confer high honor on the American undergraduate or on American colleges. When we look beyond the college daily, we find literary periodicals nearly at a standstill as to funds and ideas. In the Middle West especially, the editors of literary journals spend a good part of their time in drumming up delinquent subscribers. The principal activity manifested by many a college literary magazine is to start and to stop. They resemble the ephemeral Edinburgh university magazine, described by Robert Louis Stevenson: “It ran four months in undisturbed obscurity and died without a gasp.” To the modern era of literary productiveness the college man, at least while in college, seems to be a comparatively small contributor. The best men are needed to make college journalism popular, for deep within most students’ hearts is a love for real literature; as one student said recently, “Many a man is found reading classic literature on the sly.” It may seem to an outsider that the student usually prefers his heroes to be visible and practical, jumping and fighting about on the athletic field, much as certain persons prefer to hear a big orchestra, the players in which can be seen sawing and blowing and perspiring, rather than to listen to mysterious, sweet, but unseen music. Some day strong college leaders will rise up to champion college journalism and college reading as to-day they fight for athletics. Then college sentiment will make popular the pen and the book.

When book-life is as popular as play-life, college conversation will have new point; the fraternity man will be able to spend an hour away from the “fellows” and the rag-time piano, and the docile professor, starting out reluctantly to visit his students, will not need to pray “Make me a child again just for to-night!” as he immolates himself for a long, dreary evening trying to smile and talk wisely of college politics and base-ball averages.

A NEW REALISM IN LITERATURE

How is the undergraduate to be interested in writing? How can college journalism be made to take a real hold on the undergraduate’s life? One might answer, present literature and writing in an interesting manner, bring out the humanity in it; for, above all, the undergraduate is intensely human. New college ideals and interests have been born, and have grown up in a new age of literary aspiration and method. The times demand literature instinct with human interest, vital with reality. We may quarrel with the type; we may call it vulgar and yellow and thin and realistic, but the fact remains that it is the literary temper of the day; and there are those whose opinions are worthy of consideration who believe that this new realism in literature is by no means to be treated lightly, even in comparison with the poetic and stately form of Elizabethan letters.

BOOKS AND THE UNDERGRADUATE

The opportunity offered for cultivating acquaintance with good books is not the least reason for spending four years in a college atmosphere. In the year 1700, when William and Mary were on the throne of England, James Pierpont selected eleven trustees, nine of whom were graduates of Harvard, who, it is recorded, met at Branford, Connecticut. Each of the eleven brought a number of books, and, laying them on the table, said, “I give these books for the foundation of a college in this colony.” This was the early foundation of Yale. The influence of such foundations upon the ideals of American students has been considerable. Many a man has discovered in college what Thackeray meant when he wrote to his mother in 1852, “I used, you know, to hanker after Parliament, police magistracies, and so forth; but no occupation I can devise is so profitable as that which I have at my hand in that old inkstand.” Robert Louis Stevenson—and who can forget him in thinking of books?—said twenty years after his school-days, “I have really enjoyed this book as I—almost as I used to enjoy books when I was going twenty to twenty-three; and these are the years for reading. Books,” he continued, “were the proper remedy: books of vivid human import, forcing upon the minds of young men the issues, pleasures, business, importance, and immediacy of that life in which they stand; books of smiling, or heroic temper, to excite or to console; books of a large design, shadowing the complexity of that game of consequences to which we all sit down, the hanger-back not least.”

HOW TO INTEREST STUDENTS IN GOOD READING

Some critics tell us that the undergraduate of to-day reads only his required books, and talks nothing but athletics. One gets the impression that the average college man feels about his prescribed work in literature much as D. G. Rossetti felt about his father’s heavy volumes. “No good for reading.” The fault is not wholly with the undergraduate. There is need for a change of method in interesting students in books. Too early specialization has frustrated the student’s literary tendencies. College men are forced into “original research” before they know the meaning of the word bibliography. They rarely read enough of any one great author to enter into real friendship with him. Classroom study is often microscopic. Literature is made easy for the student by the innumerable sets of books giving dashes of the world’s best literature, and chosen from an utterly different point of view than the student would take were he to make his own choice, thus often prejudicing him against an author whom he might otherwise have loved.

Grammatical and syntactical details too often obstruct the path to the heart of classical education. A student in one of our colleges had read the first six books of Vergil’s Æneid in a preparatory school, and when his father asked him what it was about, answered, “I hadn’t thought about that.” The real charm and interest of this classic had entirely escaped him. It had been buried beneath a mountain of philology. When we fail to make the student realize that the best literature of the world is interesting, why should we wonder that the student’s literary realm is invaded by the pseudo-psychological novel, the humanly human though indelicate memoirs which tend frequently to keep the mind in the low and morbid levels?

Emphasis is needed on a few great books, not upon everything. The student is often discouraged by long lists of books, and it frequently happens that he reads without assimilating. A college friend of mine became an example of devotion to Bacon’s injunction about reading until one becomes a “full man.” He was literally full to the brim and running over with reading. He rarely laid down his books long enough to prepare for his course lectures; he certainly never stopped long enough to think about what he had read. His chief delight was in recounting the titles of the books he had consumed in a given period. He was something like Kipling’s traveler in India, who spent his time gazing intently at the names of the railway stations in his Baedeker. When the train rushed through the station he would draw a line through the name, saying in a satisfied manner, “I’ve done that.”

The undergraduate’s reading may be made pleasurable instead of being a painful duty. Books ought to open new rooms in his house of thought, start new trains of ideas and action, help him to find his own line, give just views of the nation’s history and destinies, impart a mental tone, and give a real taste for literature, inspired by intellectual curiosity. College reading should also awaken the soul of the student and attach his faith to the loyalties of life. A foot-ball coach said to me recently that his team was defeated in the last half of the game because of a lack of physical reserve. His men were equal, if not superior, to the other team in their technic, they followed the signals, but they had not trained long enough to secure the physical stamina which is always an element of success in the last half of the game. Good reading is good training. Good books give mental and spiritual reserve. They fill the reservoirs of the mind and heart with the kind of knowledge that arouses, sustains, and steadies a man in a crisis. The best books assure power in the right direction. A student whose mind is filled with the best will have neither time nor inclination for the literature that appeals only to a liking for the commonplace and the sensational. It will be unfortunate if Tennyson’s indictment against an English university become true of our American teachers:

To find not simply the laws of chemical and electrical action, but also the laws of the mind and the spirit, the nature of life and death, and the character of “that power not ourselves that makes for righteousness”—all this should determine the lines of reading for students outside of their specialty. Such reading is not for acquisition, for attainment, or for facts alone; it is for inspiration and ideals, and a realizing sense of that passionate joy derived from all things real and beautiful.

THE PIONEER SPIRIT

College training brings with it responsibility and reward. The responsibility is that of leadership—the kind of leadership which comes to the man of advanced knowledge and unusual advantages, who sees the needs of his time and does not flinch from the hardest kind of sacrifice in view of those needs. The reward is not always apparent to the world, but it is more than sufficient for the worker. Indeed, the American undergraduate is becoming more and more aware that his pay is not his reward. He is learning that the world is not keen to pay the cost of new ideas or to reward professional leadership with material values. Furthermore, his half-paid service does not tell the whole story of his sacrifice. His work is often lost in the successes of some other man who follows him. But the college-trained man who has weighed well these needs, and has deliberately chosen, is not to be pitied. Indeed, it is doubtful whether any one is more to be envied. He is under the impulsion of an inner sense of mission. The college has given him faith in himself and his mission. Many a graduate, going out from American halls of learning, feels somewhat as Carlyle felt when he said: “I have a book in me; it must come out,” or as Disraeli intimated in his answer when he was hissed down in the House of Commons, “You will not hear me now, but there will come a time when you will hear me.”

The undergraduate, spending laborious days upon the invention which shall make industrial progress possible in lands his eyes will never see, is carried along by an impulse not easily expressed. He realizes the feeling that Robert Louis Stevenson expressed when he said about his writing that he felt like thanking God that he had a chance to earn his bread upon such joyful terms. He has deliberately turned his back upon certain temporalities in order to face the sunrise of some new ideal for social betterment or national progress. He has heard the gods calling him to some far-reaching profession that is more than a position. There is stirring in him always the sense of message. He has caught the clear, captivating voice of a unique life-work. It urges him on to the occupation of his new land of dreams. Is this leader worried because some one misunderstands him? Does he envy the man who, following another ideal, sweeps by in an automobile which perhaps his own particular genius has made possible? The pioneer of letters who has known the sweetness and light of literary satisfaction, the fine frenzy of that creative, imaginative activity in which ideas are caught and crystallized in words, does not despair when his earthly rewards seem to linger.

The college, then, is a means only to the larger life of spirit and service. It exists to point out the goal the attainment of which lies inherent in the student. The college is like the tug-boat that pulls the ship from the harbor to the clear water of the free, open sea. The curriculum, the play-life, the laboratory, the patriotism of the college spirit, the buildings, and the men, are only torches gleaming through the morning shadows of the student’s coming day.