The college course and the preparation for life; eight talks on familiar and undergraduate problems

Front matter

ee ee ae

-

Gp, "Pas, wt. f, In © a

Contents

. THE STRUGGLE FOR PERSONAL RECOGNITION 31

Tue Reuicious Instinct AND THE CHRISTIAN ae rr | | THE Excerepine Dirricutties or Beier. 118 . RELIGION AND SCHOLARSHIP . . . . . 148 , Is LeARnina Essentian . . .. . . 1%5 . Tue DistAstE FOR THE BEAUTIFUL . .. 204

.

Chapter II The Struggle For Personal Recognition

WE tried, in the preceding chapter, to outline the peculiar situation in which the undergraduate finds himself. He is in the midst of a quick transition from a mediated to an unmediated experience. He possesses, for the first time, personal and intellectual freedom. The opportunity and the responsibility for self-expression ' have been suddenly thrust upon him. He is both elevated and subdued, as he realizes that the discovery and the testing of his manhood is at hand.

Now the first test of that manhood comes in his relations with his classmates. His inevitable secret inquiry is, what will “they” think of me? The first instinct of the awakening life is the craving for the support and admiration of its comrades. Though many an undergraduate would die rather than confess it, what he most and really wants is popularity. The very intensity of the assumed indifference to undergraduate distinctions, which some men in all colleges affect, betrays its artificial character. It is the covering of boyish pride, the armor, from the crowd, of a 31 sensitive spirit, but it is rarely the sincere and spontaneous expression of the youth’s inner life. Few boys, in their dreams of coming college days and eager anticipations of their delights, include social insignificance or personal unpopularity! If we begin, then, with the frank discussion of the problem of the boy’s personal standing, it is because that problem is more or less consciously in his mind, even if never on his lips, during the four years of his college course.

Perhaps we can most easily get at the heart of the problem if we try to analyze its human factors. In most Eastern colleges, the undergraduate body may be easily divided into three distinct classes. There is, first, that group, until late years small in numbers, but now steadily increasing in both size and significance, made up of those who have come to college from one of the large and famous fitting schools. The boys in these private schools are, for the most part, drawn from one stratum of American society. They are come from homes of a fortunate social and financial inheritance. They are already accustomed to an easy and gracious life of wide human contacts and large social horizons. Most of them have known something of the delight and stimulus of foreign travel. They meet, in school days, boys like themselves, inheritors of 32 the same social point of view, and of much the same personal standards and ambitions. Now these boys, when they come up to college, tend to ally themselves with the youth of similar upbringing whom they find there, because such youth offer immediate and easily recognized points of contact. This tendency of the boys of this group to withdraw among themselves means, for the most part, merely natural selection. It seldom, indicates artificial or snobbish standards, but, rather, that social choices are being made, even in these most plastic years, along the lines of least resistance. Such choices are indeed short-sighted, but they are not usually unworthy or vulgar. Nevertheless it comes about, since these youth ally themselves with other youth who are already like themselves, and whom they enjoy just because of this similarity of tastes and inheritance, that they form a wellrecognized group of what might be called the complacent provincials of undergraduate existence.

Then one finds a second group in the American college. It is made of those boys who come out of that great middle class of American life, which forms the bone and sinew of our nation. These boys were fitted for college at day schools and academies. Most of them are the product of the 33

THE COLLEGE COURSE.

high and Latin schools of their several localities.

They have always lived at home, therefore, daily trudging to and from the school building with a strapful of books under one arm and the tin lunch-box under the other. Asa rule, they show better intellectual discipline, less personal maturity, but more scholastic conscience, than do they of the first group. This is not due, I take it, to the fact that one type of school is better than the other, nor does it indicate that less able boys are to be found in the private than in the public institutions. It is rather due to the fact that all the boys from the private school are coached and sent up to college, the feeble with the strong, while it is only the more ambitious and capable lads who survive the less sympathetic processes of the public school, or who are permitted by their parents, who, in their cases, are making financial sacrifices for them, to go on into college life. But, socially, the men of this second group are not very sophisticated. They have not had the advantages of boarding-school dormitory life, nor the opportunity, in their homes, of meeting naturally and pleasantly a large variety of people. They are, for the most part, used to thrifty, unostentatious, democratic ways of living. They often come from pious households, where they have been trained in the somewhat 34 rigid and external standards of a local religion. They are usually men of sturdy moral vigor. They look upon the youth of the first group, who live their pleasant, care-free, apparently worldly and abundant lives, with something of envy and something of disapproval. The self-consciousness, the shyness and reserve, which are characteristic of men at their period of development, tend to make the close and appreciative contact of these two groups difficult. There is between them a slight, if invisible, barrier. It is partly due, as we have been saying, to a half-unconscious exclusiveness, on the one hand,'and shyness and sensitiveness, on the other. It is more due to the fact that both groups represent very young men who are not yet used to adapting themselves to new standards and habits and points of view. If we were to continue the dangerous practice of labeling these undergraduate bodies, perhaps we might call these men of the second group the conscientious provincials of the college.

Finally, there is a third group in the academic community, and’ the one which, on the whole, interests me most of all. It is made up of those boys who have had no desirable social or financial inheritance. They have come, unaided and alone, right from mills and factories, machine shops, farms, homes of day laborers, to the col- 35 lege. They have had to earn every penny which they have ever possessed. ‘They have enjoyed their summer vacation by means of peddling books — dreadful, useless books, whose extortionate prices are in inverse ratio to their actual value! Or they have sold aluminum kitchen utensils, or sweated in a hay-field, or rung in fares on trolley-cars, or superintended the digging of a city ditch! They have, indeed, done any and every task which chance or inquiry might offer to their grim energy and hot ambition. Thus they have got together enough money to present themselves at the college in the fall. To their untutored eyes it appears to offer the very bread and wine of life for their eager and famished spirits. But these boys have no easy, gracious manners. They have no savoir faire. They do not know the accepted social patter of their college time or class. Usually their clothes don’t fit, and their hair is either too short or too long, and their hands and feet are preternaturally big. They are awkward and self-conscious, and either tongue-tied, on the one hand, or overloquacious, on the other. But they are, for the most part, able and determined youth, richly endowed with the fundamental things of masculinity, will, energy, resource, mental keenness, daring, and perseverance. These are the men 36 who form the third characteristic group of the college, and they might, sometimes, be called the conscious and bitter provincials of the institution. They know what hours of anxiety and lonely uncertainty mean. Whether or not the college education is worth what they have to pay for it is a serious question with them, for they pay high. They are come up for business. Frankly and naturally, they try to get the best, and as much of the best, as possible. Nor do they infrequently carry off the severer and more excellent prizes of undergraduate life.

Up to the college, then, autumn by autumn, come these three groups. They all feel, to some degree, the elements of uncertainty, self-distrust, secret ambition. All of them, in the beginning, move about in worlds not realized. But there is a general and vague opinion among them that the college is a democratic place. They have a sort of secret hope that there each of them will gain automatically, just by being enrolled on the books of the institution, the coveted measure of recognition. Every man who is a classmate will, in some way, be a friend and a brother. Yet they are not perfectly sure of this, and there is something of challenge, and something of distrust, in the way in which the incoming Freshmen furtively eye one another. Nor is it altogether sur- 37 prising that they are not sure of it. We have pretty well given up using cant in the world of religion, but it is still extensively employed in most ‘other places, and, when we all so assiduously cultivate this idea of the democracy of the American college, it may be questioned as to how much we really believe in it ourselves. And perhaps, then, the first question which the incoming Freshman has a right to ask is what we mean when we talk about student-democracy, and how far the undergraduate body does really exemplify it.

The first thing which the youth should understand is, that we do not mean, by democracy in — college, a mechanical equality of recognition, granted to every youth merely by virtue of his — matriculation, irrespective of his character and his ability. This is an impossible and sentimental ideal of democracy, of which there is a hint in the famous phrase which eighteenthcentury French philosophy wrote into the Declaration of Independence — that “All men are created equal.’ That phrase is untrue, on the face of it, in a world whose chief factor of progress is its inequality. It is, I think, of considerable importance, in these present days, for the boy in college to understand that the desire for such mechanical equality is now, and ever has been, a form of the essential vice of aristocracy, 38 and that it offers no basis for real and lasting brotherhood. For an aristocracy means a group of men who are arbitrarily given fictitious standing in the community without regard to their personal endowment or their social services. There are certain organized movements, of widespread influence to-day, which are endeavoring to keep the capable man down, that they may level the incapable man up. These movements are proceeding, almost exclusively, from the bottom of society, and are generally regarded as successful expressions of democracy and brotherhood. As a matter of fact, they are just the reverse. They are a new working of the aristocratic principle in its worst form. It is just as vicious to set up artificial equalities in the place of natural inequalities as it is to create artificial inequalities in the place of natural equalities. Democracy, then, either inside or outside the college, does not mean any arbitrary equality of personal standing. Here, as elsewhere, a man must strive for mastery! i

But what democracy does mean is equality of opportunity. Hence it tends to intensify rather than diminish human differences, just because it gives to each man his full opportunity of self-expression. Whatever place, therefore, you hold in college will depend on yourself! The 39 motto of democracy is, “A fair field and no favors and may the best man win.” Now it would, I think, be untrue to assert that a college community, even imperfectly fulfills the democratic ideal. But it is probably true that there is more of such democracy in our colleges than anywhere else. This, indeed, we should naturally expect for several reasons. To begin with, during the first three quarters of the nineteenth century the colleges were almost entirely recruited from the American public schools, where all the boys and girls of a community grew up in natural and simple association from their childhood. The influence of these early homogeneous and democratic groups is still operative through various institutions and traditions in college life. Then, admission to our colleges is quite independent of any conditions other than those of moral and intellectual fitness. In a sense it may be said that the college is as democratic as the civil service; since any man may enter who has the minimum of character and can pass the examinations and can pay his bills. But most of all, the college tends to be a place of fairly even-handed social justice, because the principle of democracy is native and grateful to youth. It is well for all men, as they enter college, to remember that no normal boy, who means to keep his own self- 40 respect, desires anything further from his classmates than a fair chance to test out his own person and to display his own mettle. To a real but limited extent, then, the college may be considered a democratic community.

But the moment one is really inside the gates, this democracy seems, at least, to be more theoretical than real. For when the boy, coming from any one of these three groups which we have described, begins his Freshman year, he finds the college to be a microcosm, a miniature world within the greater one, and very like unto it. There is, indeed, a generous recognition of worth among most college men, and an instinctive willingness to take a man on his merits and to ignore or despise superficial or accidental handicaps. Nevertheless, social politics are not unknown in this young men’s world, special privileges have their place, personal ambitions are intense, pride of person and place runs high. What, then, is the boy to do? He knows that now he is not preparing for life, but, rather, that he is beginning life itself. He knows that the struggle for self-mastery, and mastery of the respect and allegiance of others, is not to come by and by, but is now upon him. He knows that the first test of his personal power is not academic and intellectual, but social. Where is he going 41 to stand? Upon what plane in the college world is he to be found? Like every normal boy, he wants to get to the top. What is the fair and the successful way to do it?

Well, speaking generally, tes are two ways of winning this personal distinction in college, even as there are two ways outside of college. First, you can make social standing and personal popularity an end in themselves. Thus you can join the great army of “climbers,” to use Clyde Fitch’s expressive and repellent phrase. You can buy or induce a coveted place by directly utilizing your family’s social prestige, or your father’s cash-box, or by moulding yourself servilely on the undergraduate opinion of the moment. Thus, of course, you repudiate that democracy which you had hoped to find and on which you had meant to lean. Thus you reveal that it is not the principle of brotherhood and equal comradeship which you really desire, but, rather, what you may perhaps gain for yourself through the operation of that principle. Many men in college, it must be frankly admitted, expect to win their social standing by directly bidding for it. For this reason they run with the crowd, adapt their ideals and habits to the trend of the day, and make a sort of weather-vane of themselves, being always true to the current of the moment, and AQ hence never true long to anything. That this is a real and widespread undergraduate practice is evidenced by the vocabulary which it has created. In one university such socially ambitious men are called “heelers’’; in another ““swipers’’; in another, “followers.” One is inclined to believe that this ignoble, climbing passion is indigenous to all middle-class life. That is one great reason why educated youth, who are elected to be leaders in our national existence, should set their faces against it. It is rather striking to recall that the two benefactors of this Republic, its chief stay in the beginning days of ’76 and its savior in the worst days of ’61, came from the two extremes of the social scale. One was an English gentleman, in the best sense an aristocrat to his finger-tips, George Washington. The other was a son of the soil, the gaunt and awkward rail-splitter, Abraham Lincoln. Both were possessed of the sacrificial spirit. Both had insight, patience, courage, publicmindedness. Both won their place of power by their intrinsic worth and by the unquestioned value of freely rendered service. But most of us are members of those classes in the community which have left the bottom, where the stark realities, the immediate needs and elemental struggles of life, keep men kind and human, and 43 have not yet reached the top, where self-interest no longer obscures the vision, and where inherited social experience teaches men to distinguish between real and fictitious values. Therefore, we tend to think more of personal advancement than it is worth. Is it not worth while to remember, at the very beginning of one’s college course, that there are many men and women to whom immediate social recognition means more than independence, generosity, conscience, even honor?

We should not, therefore, be surprised that not a few men, perhaps without confessing it to themselves, make social standing in college an end in itself. They attempt to reach it by ignoble and futile ways, upon which we must touch now foramoment. I spoke, in the preceding chapter, of the inextinguishable romance, the unconquerable idealism, of college life. These things are its essential characteristics, but there is a sordid side to all this young, communal life, which we must acknowledge if we are to be rid of it. The unpleasant immaturity of the undergraduate nowhere more glaringly shows itself than in his eagerness to be known and esteemed by the prominent men in his class, his naive pleasure, when they think sufficiently of him to call him by some familiar name. The assiduous cultiva- AA tion of the popular and the socially successful is always a hateful trait, but it is doubly hateful in young men. The ardent, generous comradeships of youth, which are among the holiest and loveliest things in mortal experience, are all degraded when this instinct for self-advancement is allowed to make you disingenuous in your personal relationships. It is enough, to quote John Donne’s phrase, “'To make one’s mind to chuckle, while one’s heart doth ache,” to observe some of the lads in the graduating classes of our preparatory schools making ready for entrance into the college in the ensuing autumn. One remembers the Scotch boys and their worship of the university, the austere intellectual ideals which it inspires, the awe with which they regard it, the respect which they feel for themselves as members of it.

Then we turn to some of our American youth, who think of their colleges chiefly in the terms of the social and commercial opportunities which they offer. Is the college glorified in their minds, as the place where they shall know the truth and dream dreams and see visions and have the fountains of the great deep broken up within them? No, there is no such admixture of romance and intellectual idealism in their calculations. On the contrary, these prudential striplings debate chiefly the location 45 of their academic residence, and the relative merit, meaning largely the amount of social prestige, of various fraternities. They choose their allegiances and activities with a view to desirable social propinquities and useful friendships — a rather damning word that, “useful” friendships! The chief office of the college would appear to be to start them wisely and well on a social career, to be a sort of male finishing school, where they may get to know the right kinds of people! Is it likely, if you are such a lad, that you will ever touch the heart of your college, or find your own heart in it? Do you suppose that thus you can contribute anything precious or distinctive to its spirit? Is it likely that you, so influenced, will become a man there? Snobbishness and subserviency, to the real, though limited, extent in which they exist in undergraduate bodies, are as futile as they are unnatural and repellent. We shall never make poets and heroes, prophets, scholars, scientists, and leaders, by any such processes.

Wherever, therefore, the natural and innocent desire for social recognition assumes such abnormal proportions that it is permitted to obscure the sense of justice and to lessen the moral and personal independence of the individual, there results a tragic waste of human material. When- 46

‘ever personal advancement is made an end in itself, it destroys the native idealism of youth. You who are moved by selfish and prudential motives thereby lose that power of insight into the heights and depths of life which is the natural inheritance of your years. You will go through college never knowing or developing your own genius, slight in your achievement, commonplace and obvious in your impulses, never getting beneath the surface, contented with a sort of sordid playing upon the crust of life. The comradeships to be prized are all born of that deeper awakening life which lies beneath comradeship. If your college friendships are shrewdly and skillfully manufactured; if their bonds are vulgar and immediate self-interest, a lively sense of - benefits to accrue — then they will be as superficial and impermanent as the tie which creates them. We all know how the world glorifies and surrounds with inexhaustible romance the Davids and Jonathans of life, the poetic friendships of youth with youth. We all have had our own secret, wistful dreams of the Emersonian friend. What lad, in the morning of life, has not hoped to gain for himself a comradeship so complete and intimate that for him Aristotle’s definition should be true, and one soul should appear to inhabit the two bodies. Well, such friendships AT are real. They are among the supreme gifts of the gods. They may be had. They are the great and abiding relationships, surviving all those chances and changes of this mortal world which will begin the very day your college course shall end. But they are only possible because of the generous idealism, the faith, and the honor of youth. They are born of the absence in you of sordid, prudential, ungenerous calculations. When, while in college, you are living your best life for all it is worth, living it perhaps foolishly and recklessly, but with intensity and sincerity and freedom, then, in the liberation of personality which that kind of life implies, your whole nature is opened up. Then deep calleth unto deep, and there leap from man to man the new fires of aroused and eager spirits, and in those unquenchable fires of spiritual intensity the lives are welded into one.

Some one has acutely remarked that one of the depressing things about the social situation, in many undergraduate communities, is that it shows an immense sociability which rests back upon such commonplace bases. There is, among you all, a widespread absorption in boyish and trivial interests, a sort of irresponsible and unintelligent levity, a restless and unreflective activity, without depth or steadiness, not directed 48 to large and inclusive ends. Is not this impoverished social life partly the product of the motives which govern your social choices and of personal ambitions which are not always worthy of youth? At all events, let us be sure of this: the man who makes social standing in college an end in itself may sometimes get what he wants, but it is never worth the getting. For the permanent and adequate satisfaction of the social needs and aspirations of an awakening life can never be found in exclusive, ungenerous, artificial standards and ambitions.

But there is another way to win personal recognition and that confession of your value to the group whose natural and legitimate reward is social preferment. If you want personal success in college, and the rewards which follow from it, — and you have a perfect right to want them, — then remember this: those rewards are real, and honestly won, when they come as byproducts. They are permanent and satisfying only when they are the accompaniment of an efficient, developed undergraduate life. Standing is incident to worth. Place is the reward of value. If you succeed in being valuable, you will not find yourself in a corner. The trouble with the “climber,” with the merely socially ambitious boy, is that he wants a place in the 49 community for which he appears to have no solid qualifications, and that is why his position is precarious and his person despicable. But if you aim at the fullest development of the highest and best life that a college community might naturally produce, then, in so far as you attain that, you automatically attain honor and place and power. Now, that characteristic undergraduate development and achievement should be sought along two lines, the human and the academic. Every good college exists for the express purpose of developing the humanity of its students and of making them into clearthinking, mentally efficient persons. If you are wise, therefore, you will expect to command the respect and admiration of your fellows, not by doing what they want, but by being to the fullest extent of your power what, in the long run, they all want to be.

Let me explain what I mean. I have said that the characteristic development of life in college is found along two lines, the human and the academic. Let us take the first of these, the human. When the college world is regarded not as an arena, where one fights or schemes for immediate personal advancement, but as a frank and vigorous society to which one is eager to be a contributor in whose willing service 50 one may hope to find one’s self and place, then the road to the fullest and happiest development is clear. For then, as you face these three groups of men of whom we have been speaking, you do not value one of them at the expense of the others, nor try to decide into which of the three you will endeavor to enter, but you are eager to know the best that inheres in them all, and get your fullest development under the varied stimuli of each. Hence you try to be broad and universal in your friendships, not in order to win place, but in order to develop and satisfy the wide and varied needs of your own and your comrades’ life.

Never permit yourself then to draw your friends largely from any one group in your versatile and fascinating community. If you want the best self-development, make friends among all sorts and kinds of men. Choose representatives of every variety of youthful excellence, especially of those kinds of excellence in which you yourself are deficient. One of the chief opportunities of undergraduate life is the chance which it offers you to acquaint yourselves more or less intimately with a cross-section of the American life of your generation. And what great gifts the lad struggling up from the bottom, lifting himself by sheer self-initiative and ambition, has to offer the rich 51 man’s son, who, unfortunately, has never been obliged, in all his life, to drink the cup of effort to its dregs.

I remember a characteristic passage touching on this point, in the autobiography of Nathaniel Southgate Shaler, long the beloved and _ picturesque dean of the Lawrence Scientific School in Harvard University. He says: “Here let me turn aside for a word concerning the grim aspect of our so-called education, which makes it wellnigh impossible for our youth of the higher classes to have any intimate contacts with men who may teach him what is the real nature of his — kind. He sees those only who are so formalized by training and the uses of society that they show him a work of art in human shape. He thus has to deal with his fellows in terms which are not those of real human nature, and thereby much of his own is never awakened. He may live through long, fair-appearing years, yet fail to have the experience necessary to humanize him fully. I have known many an ignorant sailor or backwoodsman who, because he had been brought into sympathetic contact with the primitive qualities of his kind, was humanely a better educated man than those who pride themselves on their culture. The gravest problem of civilization is, in my opinion, how to teach human 52 quality in a system which tends ever more and more to hide it.”

Now human quality is just what you may learn, if you will, in the varied society and the relative democracy of the college life. Choose your friends, then, no matter in what group accident has placed you, among the men who in inheritance and environment and equipment are unlike yourselves. Let them be not your counter parts, but your complements. The gilded youth has no idea of the delight and satisfaction to be found in close association with the boy in whom poverty and struggle have braced the will, sharpened the senses, made vivid the imagination; and, is it not also beautiful to contemplate, the son of fortune who thus admires the elemental virility of his simpler comrade, has no idea of how much he has to contribute to him.