Part 5
“There is some chill and arid knowledge to be found upon the summits of formal and laborious science; but it is all around about you, and for the trouble of looking that you will acquire the warm and palpitating facts of life.”
Still, there is the duty of drawing a distinct line between college fun and fundamental decency and good order. When this line is crossed, all the authority of the faculty and, if necessary, the laws of the land should be brought to bear upon the offenders. There should be no dallying with undergraduate law-breakers, no special exemptions for students. Reprehensible and even criminal acts have been committed by college men in the last few years which called for severer punishment than seemingly they received. It is no kindness to the undergraduate to overlook acts of dishonesty, ruthless destruction of property, or dissipated license. Respect for property and conventions should be impressed upon a boy before he reaches college age. It is because lawlessness has been tolerated by parents in the home, as well as by over-lenient masters at boarding-school, that we read continually of offenses against common sense and respectability, committed by persons of supposed cultivation. Few things are more needed in American life to-day than strengthening the respect for discipline and lawful authority.
COLLEGE MEN’S HONOR
Such abuses of liberty, as well as nearly all other college delinquencies, can be largely prevented by a consistent appeal to the undergraduate’s sense of honor. Recently I asked the president of a North Carolina college what he regarded as the chief characteristic of American students. He replied promptly, “College honor.” At Princeton, at the University of Virginia, at Amherst, and at many other institutions, the honor system in examinations arranged and managed by students, represents the deliberate intention of the undergraduates to do the square thing. These laws, which the students voluntarily impose upon themselves, are enforced more vigorously than the rules of the faculty.
A few years ago I visited a university at a time when the entire undergraduate body was deeply stirred over a matter that involved college honor. A senior of high standing socially and intellectually, the son of a prominent family, high in popular favor, was overheard to use disrespectful language to his landlady. The senior was summoned before the student committee having charge of undergraduate affairs, confronted with the charges, allowed to make answer, and, being found guilty, was asked to leave the institution. His family and friends, incensed by this demand, which seemed to them both harsh and unjust, appealed to the faculty for redress. The chairman of the faculty replied that the matter was entirely in the hands of the students. Application was then made to the student committee to present the young man’s side of the question to the whole college. The student council readily acceded to this request, saying that they were perfectly willing to consider the charges more at length, as their only desire was to be absolutely just. When he went up for a new trial the young man’s family engaged a lawyer. The student body also engaged counsel. The trial was held in one of the largest halls in the university town, and virtually the whole student body sat through the evening and far into the morning listening to the presentations of both sides. A judge who told me of the incident said that during those hours, looking into those student faces, he did not remember seeing any man change his expression, but that every one sat in the attitude of seeking only the truth. The jury, which was chosen from the faculty and from impartial men in the town, found that the young man had actually used the words attributed to him, and therefore pronounced him guilty of the charge.
A few months ago an incident occurred at a Southern college that impressed me deeply. At one of a series of meetings which I was holding, a student rose and said that he wished to make confession to the student body. He had recently won the sophomore-junior debate, but wished to confess that he had gained it unfairly. He had overheard his opponent rehearsing his debate in an adjoining room, and although he stopped his ears and refused to listen, his room-mate took down the points. Afterward, the debater said, the temptation was so subtle that he took the notes, arranged his own debate accordingly, and won. “But,” he said with deep feeling, “I stole it, and I have come to plead the forgiveness of the student body.”
Very early the next morning a young man called at the house where I was being entertained, to tell me that he was the room-mate who had taken the notes mentioned in the confession. He, too, wished an opportunity to speak to the students. At the public meeting that evening, before three hundred college men, he rose and told of his all-night fight for character on the college campus. He described the humiliation which he saw confronting him if he should tell of his part in the dishonorable proceeding, and said:
“I was helped by a power beyond myself to make a clean breast of it. I am here to tell the students that I, rather than the man who spoke last night, should take the blame for stealing that debate.”
I do not remember ever having witnessed such deep feeling, or heard such applause in any assembly, as greeted that sturdy confession. It was a triumph of college honor and integrity, rooted in manhood, conscience, and religion.
SOCIETY LIFE AMONG UNDERGRADUATES
But the supreme opportunity for the inculcation and employment of honesty is not reserved for examinations and public presentations; it also belongs to the complex social life of the colleges, which has become important. The club-book of an Eastern university, for example, records the existence at that institution of ninety different social organizations, the object of most of them being to bring men together sociably. Such intermingling is vital for college friendship. It is true, as former Dean Henry P. Wright of Yale has said, that, to a student, a friend is a “fellow whom you know all about, and still like,” and for that reason the social organizations which bring men together in an intimacy closer than is found anywhere else are indispensable aids in the formation of lasting friendships.
The social groupings of college life are also important because they give an opportunity for concrete and tangible success through student leadership. College society, in fact, has brought into being a restricted, but very real, world, with special laws and a kind of public opinion founded on student initiative and sentiment. Responsibility and leadership in college affairs have given many an undergraduate the initial stir to the qualities which make him successful in after life. These fraternal bodies, democratic, discriminatingly alert for the best men, and usually emphasizing worth rather than birth, are vital not only in the discovery of individuality, but also in their unique contribution to the corporate strength and unity of college life.
COLLEGE FRATERNITY LIFE
The Greek-letter society is found at the heart of these undergraduate social activities. Indeed, fraternities have become in many institutions as much the center of the college itself as of college society. So far as social and moral influences go, the character of the fraternity which a young man joins is quite as important as the college or university he selects. The fraternity students represent the “system” in college: they choose athletic managers, they exert the “pull” which controls editorship upon the college papers, they determine largely the presidents of classes, and in some cases the elections to senior societies.
The membership of the thirty-five national Greek-letter fraternities (not to mention a hundred or more local fraternities or the fifty fraternities of the professional schools) now comprises 200,000 undergraduates and graduates. These figures do not include the twenty intercollegiate sororities that claim 250 chapters and 25,000 members. Three hundred and seventy colleges and universities at present contain chapters of national Greek-letter fraternities, and millions are invested in the buildings of these societies. An almanac for 1911 ascribes 1013 fraternity-houses to American colleges. Half a million dollars is invested in chapter-houses at the University of Michigan alone. The property of the eleven fraternities at Amherst had twenty times greater money value than Yale’s available funds in 1830; and the property of the fraternities at Columbia, valued at a million dollars, are as great as the total productive funds of all the colleges at the beginning of the last century.
The college fraternity or the college club becomes responsible for a large and representative part of the undergraduate life in America. It is usually responsible for the histrionics in university life, and there is perhaps no literary tendency more pronounced in our colleges to-day than that toward the making of the drama. Several important plays of recent years may be traced to graduates who were members of such clubs as “The Hasty Pudding” of Harvard and “The Mask and Wig” of Pennsylvania. At a time when confessedly there is a crying demand for good, strong plays at the theater, it is agreeable to hear that the classes of professors of dramatic literature are crowded.
Furthermore, the fraternity is no longer simply a debating society; it is also a student-home. There is an increasing tendency, especially on the part of state institutions, to make it possible for college fraternities to erect their buildings on the campus. Every fraternity-house is the product of much thought, liberal support, and often sacrifice, on the part of influential alumni. College authorities are seriously considering the many problems connected with these organizations, for thousands of undergraduates find their homes in them for four very impressionable years. The general attitude of the faculties is wisely not one of repression or of drastic regulation by rules, but, as President Faunce of Brown has expressed it, of “sympathetic understanding, constant consultation, and the endeavor to enlist fraternities in the best movements in college life.”
There is, moreover, a plain tendency on the part of members of college fraternities to face the dangers as well as to enjoy the advantages connected with such societies. They realize that these organizations can be effectively influenced only by a leavening process within the fraternity itself, for external pressure and rules have never yet succeeded in forming or changing student sentiment. The fraternity can establish manliness and decency, or sportiness and laziness, as its ideals, and these ideals are clearly reflected in the membership. The inclination of these bodies to assume definite responsibility for the moral welfare of their members is indicated by the action of some of the old national fraternities, which have chosen efficient field-secretaries to travel among the chapters in order to study conditions and to assist in the direction, control, and general betterment of fraternity activities. The type of men selected for membership is being more carefully scrutinized. In a considerable and growing number of institutions, students are not chosen for membership until the end of the freshman year; there is thus needful opportunity on both sides for more intelligent choice.
More and more the coöperation of fraternity alumni is being sought by the authorities. These graduates, who are often largely responsible for the fine houses of the fraternities, are justly called upon by the college to assist in maintaining proper regulations within them. Moreover, assurance is given that the fraternity itself wishes to coöperate with the faculty in securing a higher grade of scholarship, which fraternity life too frequently menaces, and in demanding the reform of conditions leading to delinquency of all kinds. There is no police force really effective for a college community but a student police force, and this operates not by external pressure, but by internal persuasion.
A real danger of the modern college fraternity lies in its distraction from the real work of the college--study and the intellectual life--through habits of indifference, laziness, or immorality. The chapter-house tends to suggest that college work is optional, not imperative. “Thou shalt not loaf!” as an eleventh commandment, written across the doorposts of a fraternity club-house in the Middle West, is no inappropriate injunction. The undue and distressing waste of time in inconsequent and foolish play, the inevitable interruptions, the dissipations of social events, the inane profligacy, the autocracy of athletics, the feeble conversations that “skim like a swallow over the surface of reality”--all these are too often the doubtful compensations received by the college man as fraternity privileges.
“The modern world is an exacting one,” says ex-President Woodrow Wilson, “and the things that it exacts are mostly intellectual.” One often wonders, in visiting the fraternities of America, how large a place this intellectual work holds in college life. Was that Eastern college professor justified in saying that some fraternity men are not unlike the old farmer down East who was usually to be found in a comfortable arm-chair in the post-office, and when asked what he did, replied, “I just set and think, and set and think, and sometimes I just _set_.” The fraternity-house that becomes a place to “set” rather than a place to work is hardly a credit to a college campus. As President Northrop said to some society men at the University of Minnesota, “If your fraternity is not a place for intellectual and moral incitements, it is a failure, and it must go the way of all failures.”
Among other gifts, the American college fraternity may justly be expected to bestow upon its members devoted friendship, the ability to live successfully with other men, and such habits of application, industry and sobriety as develop ideas and character.
THE UNDERGRADUATE’S PHILOSOPHY OF LIFE
But this hint at the somewhat free-and-easy life of the fraternity chapter-house should not leave the impression that the American undergraduate is, as a rule, a thoughtless creature or that he fails to formulate a philosophy of life. Gilbert K. Chesterton remarks, “There are some people, and I am one of them, who think that the most practical and important thing about a man is still his view of the universe.” Certain beholders of collegiate conditions have evidently become acquainted with only those students who have thoughtlessly taken their serious views, in second-hand fashion, from their ancestors or from current opinion. These spectators have perhaps justly concluded that the undergraduate has no view of life--no view, at least, which is complimentary to him.
Such an impression is not general among those who are familiar with the inner working of the undergraduate mind and have watched the result of his philosophy in practical works. Many of the vital movements of the time have originated among these seemingly thoughtless college men. It was in a small room at Princeton, in the year 1876, that Cleveland H. Dodge, W. Earl Dodge, and Luther D. Wishard, after earnest conversation regarding the moral and religious life of the institution, decided to send delegates to the next year’s Convention of the International Committee of Young Men’s Christian Associations, held in Louisville, Kentucky. This delegation presented to the International Committee plans for the Student Young Men’s Christian Association at Princeton. Other groups of undergraduates took similar action both in America and in other countries, until at present the World’s Student Christian Federation includes 148,300 students and professors in its membership. These federated movements represent twenty-one nations. In connection with these societies during the last college season 66,000 students met regularly for Bible study.
These associations at the colleges have given rise to many other organizations which have stimulated the educated life of the world. The Student Volunteer Movement for Foreign Missions, which originated in connection with a student conference at Mount Hermon, Massachusetts, in the year 1886, has been responsible for enlisting thousands of collegians who have been sent by churches and Christian organizations to serve in foreign lands. This student missionary organization is also accomplishing an educational work in familiarizing undergraduates with the social, political, and religious conditions of foreign nations. The college Christian associations now have 163 graduates among their employed officers in the institutions of higher learning in North America.
Undergraduate philosophy of life is an evolution. It consists of three stages: the first is characterized by a sense of calamity or fear as the student leaves behind the observances and conventional creeds of childhood, held with unquestioning and often unthinking assent. He begins to think for himself. He enters an atmosphere of thoughtfulness and scientific discovery, an environment in which facts come before opinions. His first alarm is because he thinks he is losing his religion. He says, like the prophet Micah, when the hostile Danites took away his images, “Ye have taken away my gods ... what have I more?”
In the second period of his thinking he changes his early ceremonial god for breadth of mind. He revels in his impartial view of men and the universe. By turns he calls himself a pantheist, a pragmatist, or an agnostic. His religious position is at times summed up in the description of a young college curate by a bishop who said the young man arose in his pulpit with a self-confidence begotten of fancied wisdom, saying to his expectant hearers: “Dearly beloved, you must repent--as it were; and be converted--in a measure; or be damned--to a certain extent!”
The third stage of the undergraduate’s philosophy is usually in line with constructive action. He begins to be interested in doing something, and practice for him, as for men generally, helps to solve the riddle of the universe. The best test of college theology or college philosophy is its serviceableness, its power to attach the student to something which needs to be done, and which he can do. Many an undergraduate whose college course has seemed an intellectually unsettling period has found himself upon solid ground as soon as he has begun seriously to engage in the world’s work.
Indeed a strikingly aggressive social propaganda is now in operation in the North American colleges. The college student, like the modern American, is a practical being and is interested in securing practical results. His first question regarding any movement usually is, “What is it doing that is really worth while?” Recently a graduate of an Eastern university was secured to give his entire time to the study and promotion of social service in the colleges of the United States and Canada.
An example of such service is demonstrated by the social work that the University of Pennsylvania is doing in connection with its settlement house in Philadelphia, which is owned and conducted by the Christian Association of the university. The settlement, erected in the river-front district, immediately opposite the university, at Lombard and Twenty-sixth streets, consists of a group of buildings built at a cost of $60,000; a children’s playground adjoining the house; an athletic field across the river; and, forty miles from Philadelphia, a beautifully situated farm of sixty-four acres, used for a camp for boys and girls, for mothers and children, in the summer months. Every year one hundred students and members of the faculty take part in the active service and support of the settlement. Among the activities are the following: Boys’ and girls’ and adults’ clubs; industrial classes; athletics; dispensary; modified milk station; visiting physician; resident nurse; public lectures; entertainments; religious meetings; social investigation; political work; and the usual activities of a playground, athletic field, and summer camp. Former residents and volunteer workers of the settlement are scattered throughout the world engaging in social and religious work. Four are medical missionaries in China, one is a missionary in Persia, another in Honolulu, another in South America, while three are holding prominent positions in social work in this country.
PHILOSOPHY OF SERVICEABLENESS
Such works, with numerous other tendencies which might be mentioned in the line of unpaid and voluntary service for college publications, musical organizations, debating organizations, and athletics, lead one to define the American undergraduate’s philosophy of life as one of service. Unlike the German or Indian, his seriousness is not associated with metaphysical or theological discussion or expression. He asks not so much _What?_ as _What for?_ His aims belong to “a kingdom of ends.” Student theory operates in a real world--a world where contact is not so marked with creeds and laws as with virile movements and living men. The undergraduate is enamoured of a gospel of action. To him “deeds are mightier things than words” are. His spirit slumbers under sermons and lectures upon dogma and description, but rises with an heroic call to give money, time, and life for vital college or world enterprises. Difficulties stir him as they always stir true men. He admires the power that is “caught in the cylinder and does not escape in the whistle.” More and more plainly in all his undergraduate and graduate work the American student is revealing his love and ability for that serviceableness to the state, to the church, and to industrial life which, though often unpaid and unappreciated, brings to the servant a satisfying reward in the doing.
A few years ago a Harvard athlete played in a hard and exciting foot-ball game against Yale. Toward the end of the game, when it was nearly dark, this man was fairly hurled through the Yale line in a play that shortly afterward resulted in giving the game to the Cambridge men. It seemed a strange irony of circumstance that just before time was called the heroic player was disqualified. When the game was over and the crimson men were marching wildly about the field, yelling for Harvard and carrying the foot-ball players on their shoulders, the man whose playing was largely contributory to this triumph was down in the training-quarters, almost alone, but with the satisfaction that, although forgotten by the crowd, he had “played the game.” Certain alumni, who had seen this man’s plucky but unpraised fight for his Alma Mater, sent to him these words of Kipling:
And only the Master shall praise us, and only the Master shall blame; And no one shall work for money, and no one shall work for fame, But _each for the joy of the working_....
We must admit that the undergraduate’s philosophy of life may be obscure at times, even to himself; that it is as subtle and evasive as the moods of youth; and that its expression is as cosmopolitan as nationality, and as varied as human nature. For some students, too, we must conclude that trivialities and immoralities bury far out of sight the true meaning of college training and life-work; but in other students, and these are the majority, underneath his curriculum and his customs, his light-heartedness, his loves, and his seeming listlessness, one may discern the real American undergraduate, energetic, earnest, expectant, and strenuously eager for those great campaigns of his day and generation in which the priceless guerdon is the “joy of the working.”
IV