The freshman and his college

Preface

This book was prepared by one who, not many years ago, was a good-for-nothing Freshman. I much lament now, the time and opportunity which I ignorantly and idly wasted that first year in college. I do not think, though, that I was altogether to blame, for at that time I had a very vague conception of the real meaning of a college course. I think that I now know how it was that I made so many mistakes the first year. It is in the light of these useful experiences of my own that I am now prompted to make a modest attempt to aid a new generation of Freshmen during their first months in college. For a long time, in common with many other college instructors, I have been much grieved over the needless waste of Freshman life. In many of our larger institutions a considerable percentage of the Freshman class has been sent home during the year; and in every Freshman class there are a good many students who stumble and blunder painfully through the year, and if saved are saved only as by fire. I cannot but think that, as instructors and older college men, we owe it to Freshmen, in some measure at least, to show them the way to the things that are worth while, and to set the signal lights for them along a somewhat perilous route. And surely it must somehow be possible for a boy to learn without enrolling in the school of hard knocks. It seems to me that there is almost no type of wisdom so high as that which, by anticipation, can learn from the faults and follies, from the virtues and successes of others how to choose the right course of action and how to avoid the wrong one. At any rate, it is with the vi Preface

friendliest desire for the welfare of the Freshman and with the most confident belief that in the breast of the typical college youth good qualities ever predominate, that I offer my help through this book.

My own contribution to the book is small, for I have preferred to select my material mostly from the writings and the utterances of men of secure distinction. I am under obligation to these men for their generous consent to reprint what they have said or written. I therefore here record my grateful acknowledgment to President David Starr Jordan, to President William DeWitt Hyde, to President Charles William Eliot, to President Alexander Meiklejohn, and to President John Grier Hibben for the use of articles reprinted under their names. I desire, also, to express my special obligation to the various publishers who have so kindly permitted me to use material which bears their copyright, and to Mrs. Phoebe E. Johnson and Mrs. Harriet W. Thoburn for permission to reprint the addresses of their deceased husbands. I wish that I might also make due acknowledgment to the many wTiters whose articles or books I have read but whose names I have not been able to mention. In recognition of their aid, and as a partial guide to the student who may desire to read more on college subjects, I have included a list of a score or more of the most useful books and articles that have come under my eye. And finally, I must not fail to express my thanks to my esteemed colleagues. Professors W. A. Elliott and S. S. Swartley, and to Professor Lincoln R. Gibbs, for their valuable suggestions and their

painstaking reading of my manuscript.

F. C. L.

Meadville, Pennsylvania, June 20, 19 13.

Contents

PAGE

Introduction i

i. College Life Merely an Opportunity .... i

Introduction

For eager teachers seized my youth, Pruned my faith and trimmed my fire,

Showed me the high, white star of truth, There bade me gaze and there aspire.

Matthew Arnold

I

College Life Merely an Opportunity

At the cross-roads of life Hercules met the seductive form of Folly; but he chose to walk with Virtue, who at the same time invited him into her paths. The Freshman, also, stands at the parting of the ways. He will not have been in college a week before he will have to make choices that shall largely determine all his goings and comings for the future. ^^ Success consists in being ready for your opportunity.'' To be permitted to go to college is a privilege that few may claim — a privilege too high to measure. Yet the guarantees of college life are far less certain than most Freshmen suppose. Entrance upon college life is, after all, only an opportunity. The course will be strew^n with wrecks all the way along the Freshman year. Many will be sent home because of idleness or dissipation. Some will be endured, but will be so hobbled and handicapped by conditions and penalties that they might almost as well be out of the race. And even of those who persevere to the end of the four years course, not a few will at last prove failures in it. The mere fact that a man has completed a college course is no assurance of success in life. ^^For many years it has been possible in New York City to employ at from ten dollars to twelve dollars per week large numbers of lawyers of over ten years standing who were graduates of both college and law school.''

So this new world in which the youth finds himself is not the magic world that he had supposed it to be. The tropic isles and Elysian fields are still far to seek. The college world is, in reality, the nearest approach to an enchanted realm that we shall ever find on earth; but there is sore danger that a youth may wander with Caliban and drunken Stephano into the thorny places and standing pools instead of into the cave of Prospero, the master m.agician. In a sense, the student within college walls does ^^ fleet the time carelessly as they did in the Golden World." Yet there must be some hewing of wood and drawing of water; there are flocks to tend; there is grubbing to do. One must, like stout Robinson Crusoe, bring off one's goods on rafts, and build oneself a house, and set it about with stakes, and explore, and develop, and defend the heritage the shores of which one has succeeded in reaching. Success during the first year at college depends upon common sense, upon work, upon decency and sobriety. If a boy has drifted in from ^Hhe gold coast" to indulge in the luxury of a college course by special dispensation, his ship will find sure anchorage in no respectable college. The lazy, idle, vicious boy, who thinks of college life as being merely an opportunity to loaf and dissipate, to engage in athletics, and to recline in the elegant leisure of a sumptuous fraternity home, is doomed to failure, disappointment, and humiliation.

The American College Under Fire 3

II The American College Under Fire

As a matter of fact, every college president and every college professor knows that the average Freshman is not such a youth as has just been described. We know that the great majority of Freshmen are bright, candid, earnest, and lovable boys who are coming up to college with a high and pure ambition to make the most of themselves and to make life count. But the American college is under fire. Many influential people think that our colleges are not justifying themselves; that Freshmen are, for the most part, noisy, lazy, conceited, dissipated young upstarts; that the average college graduate who goes into business is unable to hold his own with the boy who has gone directly from the high school into the office or the factory. These critics question whether what stands for a college education does not do a young fellow^ more harm than good. Men of standing and ability and wide knowledge of the world variously allude to the college as ^^a club for idling classes," ^^a training school for shamming and shirking," ^Hhe most gigantic illusion of the age," a sort of '^educational vermiform appendix." These men are disposed to think that a college diploma rarely assures intellectual discipline. One great journal affirms that '^ students nowadays get from their college life httle but educational disadvantages." And, worst of all, scores of our chief educators and educational experts are sounding solemn notes of warning to college authorities as well as to undergraduates. We are told that our graduates are not as ''ripe and fit" for advanced professional study at twenty-three as the German students

A Introduction

are at twenty. It is charged that ''the college graduate is neither a trained nor a serious worker." President Garfield of Wilhams thinks that college doors should be closed promptly and effectually against ''those who loaf because they choose to, and who do not propose to change their occupation." One brilHant educator does not beUeve that the public should be put to the expense of a thousand dollars per head in order that boys may go through college merely '' to enjoy themselves in drinking and in betting on athletics." President Pritchett of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching says, "the two objections generally brought against the college today are vagueness of aim and lack of intellectual stamina;" and Mr. Flexner declares that ''a youth may win his degree on a showing that would in an office cost him his desk."

These are serious charges that are brought against us, and it is well that the student should know about them from the start. In almost every case they are made by men whose opinion is worthy of consideration. Indeed, for the past ten years, the drift of public opinion in certain quarters has been setting powerfully against the college. Of course there is much to be said in reply to all this; and much has been said sanely and forcefully. College authorities are doing all that they can to make conditions better. But just now it is especially important that the entering student — that all undergraduates, indeed — should have clear ideas of the meaning of college life and should be heedful of the honor and prestige of the college.

Why did you come to college? Have you a clear idea of what you are seeking here? Will the motive that prompted you to come bear scrutiny? Do you know what a college course really stands for? Did you just drift in? Or are

What a College Education Really Means 5

you here only because you were sent? Did you come merely to have a good time; to loaf; to enjoy the social life of the college; to join a fraternity; and to win and wear new and larger honors in athletics? The student who is actuated by no higher motives than these is not likely to be happy here. His studies will prove more or less of an annoyance to him, and the professors are sure to be a nuisance. Such a fellow will clutter things up, and get in the way of the business of the college. And even if he were allowed to ^^ply his music'' — allowed to shirk and dodge and temporize

— he could not afford it; he would be ^ Spaying too dear for his w^histle."

Ill

What a College Education Really Means

As I was reading a book by Dean Briggs of Harvard, the other day, I came across an expression that I like very much

— ^Hhe difficult and windy heights.'' That suggests to my mind the real college atmosphere.- And it calls up images that make my blood tingle. It braces me for action. Is not the supreme object of a college education the strenuous pursuit of knowledge and the severe disciplining of the moral nature? The great Thomas Jefferson gives this as the object of higher education: ^^to develop the reasoning faculties of our youth, enlarge their minds, cultivate their morals, and instill into them the precepts of virtue and order; . . . and generally to form them to habits of reflection and correct action, rendering them examples of virtue to others, and of happiness within themselves." The college is not a place for idleness and triviality, for sport and luxury, for the thousand and one absorbing side-interests that today make up the major part of college life. The college, says President Woodrow Wilson, ^^is for the training of the men who are to rise above the ranks." It is an arena for intellectual wrestling — a place where the soul is to practice its athletics. It is here that young men are to come to grips with themselves, and with the blood-red social and political problems of their own day. Here truth is to be sought and won — at whatever cost of personal comfort, or of previously cherished creed or dogma. Every old fellow who is now out in the world in the thick of the battle knows very well that it is not enough that he should carry away with him from campus and halls the memory, merely, of a ^^good time" at college. Such a memory is no doubt a luxury. But he knows that he should have gone forth from the college laden also with a store of such solid mental and spiritual wealth as should give dignity, charm, and authority to his later life.

Not that scholarship and moral training exhaust the full intention of the college! The college ideal involves much more than this. ^^ Pleasure perfects labor, even as beauty crowns youth." The college world lies perpetually bathed in a purple mist of sentiment, romance, and youthful enjoyment. '^From towers and gardens are whispered Hhe last enchantment of the Middle Age.' " '^ It is a great thing," says one who styles himself ^^a mere don," *^to be able to loaf well; it softens the manners and does not allow them to be fierce; and there is no place for it like the streams and gardens of an ancient university." And, though our American colleges have not about them so much of venerableness as have those of England, and though our campuses lack much of the opulent beauty and exquisite quiet of their gardens, there is always in the spirit of youth a gift of ideali-

What a College Education Really Means 7

zation and romance sufficient to gild and enrich the environment in which its lot is cast. So there will always be in any true college life this over-glow of sentiment, aspiration, comradeship, and pure physical enjoyment. Long before the day of ^^the tumult and the shouting" that has come to be such a distinctive part of modern college life, the sage Emerson wrote that sometimes, ^^What we do not call education is more gracious than what we do call so.'' He no doubt had reference to certain thrilling excursions that he now and then made on his own account into the unfrequented paths of literature. He loved to browse in the dim, cool, and secluded fields of poetry and philosophy that were outside the required curriculum. But, however it may have been with Emerson, we all know that, over and above the regular course of study, educative influences of the highest importance play upon us and shape our thought and our character. Through friendships, through books, through solitude and society alike, through autumn walks, and long talks by the winter fireside, and through the soft pipings of Arcadian poets from forgotten fields of romance, as well as through the sharp, urgent call of the trumpet that summons to pubhc tasks in the living present, shall be woven for every alert man the fabric that we call a liberal education. A thousand experiences and passions will intertwine to build up in him the full-rounded human soul.

Even athletics finds a normal place in a complete scheme of liberal education. It is true that in the past there have been many gross evils wrapped up with college athletics. Too often our colleges have developed a one-sided athletic interest — stressing particular forms of sport to the exclusion of other games quite as worthy. Some of the more popular sports have demanded too much time and money and attention on the part of both faculty and students. There is, too, the constant temptation to bet on games and to spend much time in idle and boastful talk about athletes and athletic events. Worse still, a strong taint of professionahsm has sometimes hung about our colleges; and not infrequently there has been undue roughness, and even gross fraud and brutality. Weak college presidents and unworthy faculties have lowered the standard of scholarship in the interest of the athlete, and sometimes have made unwarrantable concessions to brilliant players in order to induce them to enter particular colleges. Most of these evils have been corrected or are being corrected. All honorable educators will agree with President Jordan of Leland Stanford, that ^^the athletic tramp should receive no academic welcome," and that ^^the athletic parasite is no better than any other parasite.''

But setting aside the evils of athletics that have done so much of late to discredit colleges in the eyes of plain, honest, sensible people, no one can deny that physical sports have an important place in a modern college. There can be no perfectly sane and healthful life apart from a strong, sound, WTll-developed body. Nor will any one deny that youth is the best time to train the body as well as the mind. There is, too, a necessity for youth to exert its over-plus of energy in joyous physical exercise. The play impulse is natural to grown-up life as well as to child life; and it is wholesome. It is a pity that some of our sour and dyspeptic ancestors did not find this out sooner. All wise men believe it now, and we are learning better how to play — how to secure recreation for mind and body.

But it is college athletics that chiefly concerns us. All will agree with President Jordan, that ^Hhe color of life is

What a College Education Really Means g

red;" and every manly student will want to give a fair amount of time to outdoor sport, and will desire to make a place for himself in the athletic life of the college. And what are the chief benefits and values of college athletics? They are many: the spontaneous delight that any healthy boy ought to feel in competitive sports that try his skill and courage; the joy of comradeship in struggle and achievement; the high and worthy sense of losing one's self in the spirit of the whole body; the legitimate pride and satisfaction that come from well-earned victory. And the real edge of this delight in victory comes from the realization that one has striven not so much for one's own glory as for the glory of the college. A certain Princeton man, ^Svhen his leg was broken in the foot-ball field, rejoiced that it was not one of the first team that was hurt." That w^as heroism in the making It is of the essence of education to be able to work with others to a common end. College athletics exalts the spirit of fair play. It inculcates true sportsmanship. It requires one to ^^ play-up," and to play the game to the end. It teaches one to take defeat in a manly w^ay. The true college athlete despises the ^^ knocker," the ^'quitter," and the ^^ mucker." He is a good loser as well as a good winner, for he cares more for the game than he does for the victory. ^^A man may play a strenuous game, the fiercest ever seen on the gridiron," says one of our great college presidents, ^^and yet keep the speech and manners of a gentleman." Alertness, self-restraint, resolution, judgment, unselfishness, self-control under great provocation, and prompt decision in sudden emergency — these are some of the qualities that are developed by intelligent and honorable participation in college athletics. And these are physical, mental, and moral virtues well worth cultivation entirely lo Introduction

apart from the transient delight and recreation that they afford.

We could wish that more of the care and outlay that go to the training of stout Ajax, in order that he may be still stronger, and to swift Achilles, in order that he may become still fleeter, might be directed to the building up of the soft, fragile, and hollow-chested comrades of these mighty athletic heroes. ^The law of the Scriptures, that ^^ to him that hath shall be given, and from him that hath not shall be taken away even that he hath,"-^ieems to find its too literal fulfilment on our college fields. In American colleges we unduly emphasize certain forms of athletics; we cultivate the spectacular; and we make more of a business of athletics than a sport. Every student should receive physical oversight in the gymnasium; and every student should take some recreation in the open air. There are innumerable ways in which one may find congenial and relaxing exercise out-of-doors. In addition to the two or three forms of recreation that are sure to be duly stressed, there are tennis, lacrosse, rowing, swimming, skating, cross-country running; and, commonest of all, yet among all the most uncommonly good, the exercise of walking; better if it take the form of a tramp; and best of all if the tramp be taken in company with a chum or two, for then the exhilaration of vigorous physical exercise under the open sky amid a thousand entrancing sights and sounds of nature will combine with the joy of comradeship and the intellectual stimulus of congenial talk.

But, after all, the first and highest task is the making of

" mental and moral muscle. It is the function of the college to

tighten up a man's intellectual gearing. Men are in college

to learn the value of discipline; to acquire the art of study;

Freshman Difficulties and Dangers ii

to establish habits of promptness, accuracy, and thoroughness. Nothing whatever can take the place of these things, or make up for their absence. The essential thing in a college course will have been missed if the student fail to knit into the mental and moral fibre of his life something of the method, the endurance, and the resourcefulness that the army, the navy, the railroad systems, and the great business corporations demand of their men. In the world men have to bear their tests in the open. In the emergencies of life no allowances are made; we must make a passing grade unaided and on the spot. Dean West of Princeton exhorts college faculties that they 'Svill need to be resolute in teaching young men that there is no real education without welldirected effort; that it is not doing what a man likes or dislikes to do, but the constant exercise in doing what he ought to do, in matters of intellect as well as of conduct, whether he happens to like it or not, that turns the frank, careless, immature, lovable school-boy into the strong, welltrained man, capable of directing wisely himself and others."

IV Freshman Difficulties and Dangers

It is a hard strain that the Freshman must bear during the first few weeks of the college year; yet this is the crucial time in his career. There are those who are unfit for college life, either because of stupidity, or indifference, or bad character. Such ought never to have come to college. The weeding out of such students is a process painful to all concerned. Through no fault of his own, a student may have come with poor preparation. He may be handicapped because he has to make his own way; or, possibly, he comes too confident of his abihty or too dependent upon the social prestige that is back of him. He has broken home ties; he is in new and strange surroundings; he is for the first time in his life free to come and go as he pleases — master of his own purse, released from the supervision of either parent or teacher. All this gives him a sense of pride and elation; but he runs serious dangers. For this is just the period of life when one is almost as much a stranger to one's self as to one's surroundings. The transition from boyhood to manhood involves tremendous changes, both mental and physical. One is no longer quite a boy, yet he is not altogether a man. There is, therefore, more or less confusion within, more or less lack of coordination, and, possibly, a not altogether happy blending of diffidence and self-assertiveness. The youth is not entirely sure of himself; yet, for the world, he w^ould not have anybody suspect it. It is a time, too, w^hen the senses make the most urgent demands for present gratification, and when curiosity most strongly impels him to see and to know the world — to touch, to taste, and to handle. And, as likely as not, he has imbibed the foolish and terrible doctrine that in order to know the world he must wallow in it. So a boy's curiosity, his appetite, and his imm.ature conception of w^hat it means to be a man seduce him into follies that neither time nor eternity can undo.

Is it any wonder that friendly instructors are anxious about their Freshmen? They well know the difficulties and dangers that a Freshman must face as soon as he enters college. We have known scores of youth who, just at this juncture, have chosen to tread the ^^ primrose path of dalliance." Some professors are hard-hearted enough to stand

Devotion to Boyhood Ideals 13

coldly aside and ^^let Freshie try out." ^^ College/^ they say, "is a place for mistakes. Some will sink and some will swim. It is a case of the survival of the fittest, and let the devil take the hindmost." It is not to be denied that, in the last resort, every fellow must look out for himself and take what comes. Every student is given his liberty; and it is right that it should be so. The wisest educators believe that liberty is essential to sound and full development. But do not think "that to be a man is to test the things that any gentleman avoids." You have liberty to fall as wxll as to rise. You are free to choose the bad as well as the good. It stands within your choice to bind golden laurels of scholarship upon your brow, or to go straight to the devil. Bismarck is credited with saying that in the German universities "one-third of the students work themselves to death, one-third drink themselves to death, and the other third govern Europe."

V

Devotion to Boyhood Ideals

Men of the world are always sorry w^hen they see a young fellow under the stress of temptation, afraid to stand up for his ideals. The ideals that we held in our boyhood are the best that we shall ever have in this world. They are worth fighting for, and the truest and bravest men in this w^orld are the men who have carried the visions of their boyhood and their youth unsullied through the fierce battle-field of young manhood and middle life; or have stood ready gladly to die for them on some storm-swept summit at noon or evening-tide. Of course, a Freshman's horizon will expand, and he will come to see things in different perspective, and no doubt many of his ideas are crude, and his ways provincial. There is bound to come enlargement and enlightenment and readjustment. That is exactly Avhat the college life is for. He will, of course, not be a clam or a prig. He will, as a matter of course, usually go with the crowd, for the college crowd is usually going in the right direction. It is thus that he will lose his egotism, selfishness, and self-consciousness, and it is thus that he will get the rough edges knocked off his personality, and the wrinkles ironed out of his provincial training. So he should by all means go in heartily with his fellows whenever he can do so without sacrifice of moral principle and manhood. But let him not be afraid to assert himself w^hen honor is at stake, or an ideal is involved. There is a vital quality of religion that no man is above; and very low, indeed, is the man in w^hom the religious consciousness is dead. Hold stoutly to vital religion. The view^s of a college man with respect to nonessentials of theology and outward forms and habits of w^orship are likely to undergo a great change; but it will grow constantly plainer to him that the soul can find no substitute for religion. And most likely, as the years pass in college he will discover that, while his religious life has grown less dogmatic, less assertive, and more reticent, it has at the same time grown deeper and more assured, more tolerant, and natural, and helpful. Every student will need what aid he can get from the Sabbath, from the enlightened religious services that a college town always enjoys, from the meetings of the Christian ^Associations of the college, from companionship and conversation with earnest and devout men among the upper classes and the faculty, and from the reading of religious books — as, for example, the poetry of Whittier and Tennyson, the sermons

The Good Drudge Habit 15

of Robertson, Beecher, and Phillips Brooks, and the essays of Drummond, Robert Speer, Dr. Grenfell, Washington Gladden, President Hyde of Bowdoin, and President King of Oberlin. These are only a few of the many sane, manly, and modern religious writings that are available in every college library.

VI The Good Drudge Habit

The habits that a Freshman forms are likely to go with him all through life to help him or to hinder him. Already he is an organized bundle of habits, for better or for w^orse; and in many respects he will never change his ways. But he may readily do so; for he is at an age when habits are extremely easy to take on or to lay off. His sense-impressions are so vivid and his nerve-tissue so plastic that he can remake himself into what he will, as easily as a workman can mold putty into this shape or that. Most of his personal habits are fixed and will never be reshaped. If he gives scrupulous attention to the care of his person now — in matters of the toilet and affairs of dress — he will be tidy and orderly and cleanly when he is threescore and ten. If he is indifferent to these things now, he will be still more indifferent to them when he grows old. And so with table and drawing-room manners, with habits of articulation, pronunciation, spelling, and handwriting; the youth who has been correctly trained in all these things may let his will go on a vacation or set it to work at some higher employment, for the good drudge Habit will demand no holiday, but will stay right by his task. It is not too late for the college student to remedy any defects of dress or behavior that he y may grow conscious of as he meets his more fortunate fellows. He is at college for the purpose of remedying such defects. Let him mark closely the dress, the bearing, the speech of such acquaintances — students as well as instructors — as have won his approval; and, while not imitating them in any slavish way, let him note and emulate whatever in them he may find worthy of emulation in taste, ease, grace, or high-breeding.