Part 4
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:
They do not listen, however attentive or orderly they may be. The bell rings, and a troop of tired-looking boys, followed perhaps by a larger number of meek-eyed girls, file into the classroom, sit down, remove the expressions from their faces, open their note-books on the broad chair-arms, and receive. It is about as inspiring an audience as a room full of phonographs holding up their brass trumpets.
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:
For rigorous masters seized my youth, And purged its faith, and trimmed its fire, Shew’d me the high, white star of truth, There bade me gaze, and there aspire.
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.”
III
THE COLLEGE CAMPUS
Rudyard Kipling speaks of four street corners of four great cities where a man may stand and see pass everybody of note in the world. There are likewise vantage-points in our American colleges from which one may discover not only the influential undergraduate types, but also the real life of their environment. One of these places is the college campus.
Undergraduate life falls into two broad divisions: college work, pertaining to the study and the classroom; and college relaxation, centering upon the campus. The latter includes social life, amusements, athletics, and the other voluntary exercises in which students meet for fellowship and competition. The close tie between college work and college play is often shown. A change in student sentiment has instant effect on student work, while no rules of the faculty can nullify those deeply rooted principles of student life which make all college men akin.
A WEST POINT INCIDENT
This relation of student feeling to college authority was shown not long ago at West Point. The cadet corps was under arrest for having given the “silence” to an officer in the mess-hall during supper, for reasons deemed by the cadets to be vital to corps honor and dignity. The first silence occurred at supper. The whole corps of cadets, 450 men, were marched back to barracks supperless, and were placed under arrest in their rooms. Again at breakfast the cadets repeated the silence, for which they were returned to barracks, but not until they had been made to “double time” up and down the road for about twenty minutes. That morning the cadets had virtually no breakfast. At the next formation for midday dinner an incident occurred which struck a chord even deeper than discipline and authority, and broke the insubordination of the students. In the autumn one of the cadets had brought from home a graphophone, and among the comic-song cylinders was one which pictured a non-domestic husband about to slip quietly away from home for an evening at the club, when his wife confronted him with the command,
Put on your slippers; you’re in for the night.
This song was very popular with the cadets. They were drawn up in front of the barracks, every man indignant, obstinate, and determined to repeat the silence, and to continue it even at the risk of starvation and confinement. At this critical moment the graphophone, which had been set to begin its work five minutes after its humorous owner had left his room, began to sing in a high-pitched voice through the open window directly above the lines of cadets,
Put on your slippers; you’re in for the night.
The effect was irresistible. It was like the changing of a current in an electric battery. The eyes of the cadets, despite the fact that they were at attention, sought the eyes of their fellows; their faces relaxed, then broke into a smile. By the time they reached the mess-hall the whole corps was laughing, and their sense of humor had swept away the sense of anger and pride. This was the beginning of the restoration of the traditional West Point discipline. The campus had spoken to the classroom.
“GROWN-UP” COLLEGIANS
It is through an understanding of this spirit of the campus that the work of American undergraduates can be adjusted to modern demands. The work of the classroom and examination-hall makes for democracy, while the social life of the college makes for conservatism and aristocracy. Campus life is increasingly difficult to understand because of its growing complexity. The material needs of our time have created a class of undergraduates bent on becoming specialists, and these men have increasingly less time for either college work or college life; for them the undergraduate course is something to be hurried through as a short cut to professional efficiency. Even athletics and college affairs have only a slender hold upon these utilitarian specialists. They have a “grown-up” look on their faces as, eager for scientific research, they rush to and fro between their rooms and their laboratories.
Undergraduate life is now likewise influenced by the influx of students who are not the sons of college men, but who come from homes the chief ideals of which have been derived from counting-rooms and laboratories, from brokers’ and railroad offices. These students, scions of a property-getting class, in conjunction with the social and the scientific students in college, help to change the classical traditions. They emphasize the campus side of college life more than that of the lecture-room. Their eyes are upon the stadium rather than upon the library; the delights of scholarship influence them less than ambition for leadership and the importance of “making good” in student affairs. They are in college for “popular” reasons, and too often fail to learn how to think. But they are eager, versatile, adaptable, with a ready capacity for social adjustment and modern expression.
COSMOPOLITAN LIFE AT COLLEGE
Furthermore, the student world has been subdivided until it is a wholly different thing from what it was fifty or even twenty years ago. While in the seventies the college student knew every man in his class, in the large institution to-day an undergraduate will meet in the college yard scores of classmates who are perfect strangers, and to whom he has no more idea of speaking than to persons whom he has never seen before. The student who has been brought up always to dine in a dinner-coat will have for his table-companions men who have never owned a dress-coat and who see no immediate prospect of needing one.
The influx of foreign students has added to the cosmopolitan life of American institutions. So far as they are Orientals, the English departments are specially modified both in the character of the attendance and the instruction by their presence. The professor’s task of adjusting instruction to a mixed assembly of American, Indian, Mohammedan, Porto Rican, Chinese, and Japanese students may be inferred from the answer of a young East Indian student who was asked to describe in English his daily routine:
At the break of day I rises from my own bed, then I employ myself till 8 o’clock, after which I employ myself to bathe, then take for my body some sweetmeat, and just at 9½ I came to school to attend my class duty, then, at 2½ P. M. I return from school and engage myself to do my further duties then I engage for a quarter to take my tiffin, then I study till 5 P. M., after which I began to play anything which comes in my head. After 8½ half pass to eight we are began to sleep, before sleeping I told a constable just 11 o’ he came and rose us from half pass elevan we began to read still morning.
The familiar din of dishes at the commons of Columbia, as well as at the University of California, serves to raise the pitch of a polyglot table-talk that often represents a dozen nationalities. Last year in American colleges there were hundreds of undergraduates of alien speech, customs, ideals, temperaments, and religion. Among these were a specially important delegation of three hundred Chinese young men who were beneficiaries of the Boxer indemnity fund. These students from foreign nations still further subdivide undergraduate life through their race clubs, societies for learning English, special religious conferences, and new studies.
COLLEGE TRADITIONS
College tradition adds its distinctive and forceful factor to the campus life of the undergraduate, particularly in the older seats of learning. A good tradition makes it easy to accomplish things worth while without the spasmodic campaigns that characterize many younger institutions. Students are often more zealous to uphold the ancient customs of their college than anything else connected with it. The annual conflicts between freshmen and sophomores have become a part of the institution. Certain traditional habits, often humorous, sometimes doubtful, in character, have grown up in nearly every North American college. An old account of life at Cambridge tells of the manner in which both occupant and furniture of a freshman’s room were menaced by a missile as big as a cantaloupe that was thrown into it. It was described as a _transmittendam_ (it went with the room), and was handed down in some such forcible manner from one generation of freshmen to another. The desire to link the past with the present at Harvard is also shown in the custom of registering the name of each occupant on the doors of certain old frame buildings long used as lodging-houses by students. The old college pump has been a traditional means of grace to many freshmen, and the customary restriction to upper classmen of caps, canes, and pipes has added pugilistic zest to undergraduate life.
College tradition is not an unmixed blessing when it results in provincialism and the loss of that breadth of mind and appreciative sympathy which should characterize educated men. When any undergraduate body becomes blindly a law unto itself, refusing to learn from other institutions; when faculty and students take the position that because certain ideas have never prevailed at their college, therefore they never should and never shall prevail, they show their unfitness for leadership in an age of vast and varied opportunity.
The students of the Middle West and the Far West are more sensible of their freedom from the past than are our Eastern undergraduates. They realize that they are at least a hundred years behind Eastern colleges in the dignity of their traditions, and they therefore seek to crystallize college spirit about college customs; but their customs do not interfere with progress, as sometimes happens in the East, and a question is decided on its merits quite regardless of precedent or policies. If a proposition seems sensible and right, it is adopted, despite its novelty or its conflict with tradition. Keeping close to modern needs, those colleges have gone ahead and accomplished things while more conservative institutions have been leisurely thinking about them. It is this audacity of spirit, this dash and action, which endear to the undergraduates of the West all men of achievement. When among them one thinks of the old verse:
Oh, prudence is a right good thing And those are useful friends, Who never make beginnings Until they see the ends, But now and then give me a man And I will make him king, Just to take the consequences, Just to _do_ the thing.
THE GAIETY OF UNDERGRADUATES
Traditions are closely connected with college gaiety, and gaiety forms a real part of the comprehensive life of the American student. “Cheerfulness,” says Arnold Bennett, “is a most precious attainment.” The undergraduate cultivates it as an art, puts worry behind him, and faces the world with a laugh.
About his gaiety there is a kind of humorous bravado. He likes to defy the lightning. An old graduate of Princeton relates how, in 1857, when the paper called _The Rake_, because of its daring criticisms, had brought its editors under the ban of suspension by the faculty, the editors injected fun into the dismal situation by printing the statement, “We have authority for supposing that even the faculty do not coöperate as heartily with our undertaking as they could and should.”
At the University of Michigan a professor, lecturing on electricity, wished to show that the fur of a cat is raised by an electrical current. He asked one day, “Will some student bring a cat to-morrow, in order that we may show this experiment?” The next day every one of the forty students entered the lecture-room with a cat under his arm!
Mechanical laws seem never to baffle the collegian in search of gaiety. Indeed, when one studies some of the mysterious happenings on and about the college campus, one ceases to wonder at the mechanical triumphs of the Egyptians. At one college which I visited, the stilly night was disturbed by half a hundred students who, with riotous yells, ran a two-horse wagon back and forth on an upper story of a college dormitory, to which place they had succeeded in hoisting it. This occurred at midnight, for the delectation of three hundred students and members of the faculty who were sleeping below. Next day the college paper declared that the president of the institution had been seen at his bedside supplicating against earthquakes and thunderbolts.
I once visited a small college where the chapel exercises were abruptly ended because six or eight barn-yard fowl had been placed inside the pipe-organ. As several hundred students marched into the chapel, the old German professor, who was deaf, began to play the organ. The commingled sounds that issued from that instrument when the levers began to work were described as extraordinary.
Much of the enduring loyalty of college men clings about the memories of such events. A college president once said to me that some of the most important gifts to his institution came from men who remembered college fun and “idlesse” long after time had blotted out the serious impressions of the classroom. As one apostle of the easy-going side of student days has said: