The college course and the preparation for life

Front matter

Class Book h u~

Copyright^ .

COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT;

Contents

I. Where all the Problems begin ... 1

II. The Struggle for Personal Recognition 31

III. The Fight for Character 62

Chapter I

They begin in the Freshman year; they are, indeed, an inevitable and significant portion of its very substance. For that year is always and everywhere a high adventure. It is compounded of delightful if terrifying uncertainties. It is the exploration, big with fate, which each awakening youth makes into the real world of his fellow human beings, into the real convictions, desires, and powers of his own soul. There still comes once, to every boy, even in our safe and comfortable and commonplace world, a morning when the mystery and the thrill of the Unknown lay hold upon him; when the call of the undiscovered country is in his ears; when he knows that, at last, he is free to walk an untrodden path and to do and be what no one else has ever done or been before. That is the morning of the day when college opens, and he, once a schoolboy, now an undergraduate, stands, his own master,

at his dormitory door.

Consider a moment the background out of which the Freshman issues. Up to the day when he matriculates, his life, if it has been a normal and wholesome one, has been summed up in the terms of a mediated experience. It has been made for him by his parents, his teachers, or his friends. Religion, morals, knowledge, social standards, personal habits have been accepted on authority. They have been given and received. The keynote of all wholesome boyhood is obedience. The schoolboy does not really understand life, nor, for the most part, does he endeavor or desire to. He just accepts it, taking for granted that things are as they appear. It may well be true that, even in the early boyish days, he has moments of profound and instinctive expectation, when the slumbering inner life stirs and tries to find its own outlook upon its little, ordered world. Amid the security and acquiescence of later childhood, there come, not infrequently, to sensitive and thoughtful boys flashes of intuitive discernment into the grim world beyond childhood where elemental forces are to grapple for possession of the awakening soul. But, for the most part, it is only a surface experience which the boy perceives, and life is known to him only in its accepted and accredited expressions.

But when he comes up to college, at once a new world opens. Four years of unparalleled opportunity and extraordinary stimulus are set before him. They contain a maximum of privilege and a minimum of responsibility. Above all, they offer to the youth spiritual and intellectual freedom, the one thing which in the final days of schooling he did most passionately desire. The college deliberately releases him from the restraints and traditions of a provincial and domestic life. His comings and goings are not watched. Within certain limitations his courses are not dictated. He is given a large measure of leisure and independence to use that leisure as he sees fit. Most significant of all, ideas and convictions are no longer imposed upon him from without. In the critical and neutral atmosphere of the college classroom everything is questioned, nothing is taken for granted; it is the facts and all the facts and nothing but the facts which he pursues. , No longer, then, is his a selected and mediated experience. Nothing is received by him now except as he is able to see for himself its inherent reality and worth. Where and how he will, the boy touches life, as it is, with his own right hand. If the keynote of every good school is obedience, then the keynote of every good college is freedom, freedom to investigate everything for one's self. The boy now is not merely permitted, he is expected, to find his own soul and his own view of life. It is this abrupt and radical tradition from school to college, a transition which, in our present American system of education, is as swift and sudden and sharp as it well could be, which intoxicates the Freshman, and imparts to the first college year both its dangers and its splendor.

The first thing, then, to remember, is that Romance begins with the day of registration. The absence from home, and from any real parental or academic scrutiny; the free and intimate contact with many other newly discovered fellow human beings, all of one's own age and sex; the sense of that opportunity for self-expression which accompanies independence, and of how the future may hang on the way to opportunity is employed — all these combine to make the Freshman year the first great essay of a young man's life. The expanding and exploring passion which, away back in the morning of the world, drove Abraham out of the familiar city of his fathers to seek an unknown country and to go out not knowing whither he went; the inner urge that made Ulysses sail the wine-dark seas even beyond the baths of all the western stars; the will and lift and hope with which

Columbus paced each night his tiny vessel's poop and ever searched the dim horizon for he knew not what — something of this age-old, masculine spirit of romance and adventure every normal undergraduate consciously feels. Of course, he forgets the old. Of course, he laughs at the futile prudence of his elders, the shabby wisdom of an antique world. All his secondhand experience, the accepted saws, the imposed views drop, like the shreds of an old garment, from his naked passion for reality. For life is fresh, and he is young, and he is free, and his world is not quite like anybody else's, and he means to know it for himself. And then, too, running parallel with all the glamour and romance of the college adventure, a very element of its charm and a part of its fascination is the sense of uncertainty, of perplexity, of not being quite sure of one's environment or one's self. The hope and confidence and joy are always mingled with questionings and self-distrust and fear. So that the four undergraduate years present an extraordinary mixture of initiative and timidity, courage and cowardice, sublime confidence, profound and real despair upon the student's part. Often one mood succeeds another with such bewildering and irrational rapidity that some men's lives in college seem like rudderless ships, which, unstable as the waters upon which they ride, are equally unable to excel.

One best understands the Freshman nature, then, and can most intelligently predict and interpret its inchoate and whimsical expressions, if one remembers into what a vivid and transfigured world it introduces the boy, a world in which every value is re-made, distorted, or enhanced as the case may be, by being bathed in the light that never was on sea or land. The stimulating of the imagination, the heightening of self-consciousness, the swift enlargement of the perceptions and ideas which academic life brings to an alert and sensitive youth — all these combine to change the very face of nature before his eyes. For the first time the Universe takes on significance and reality; he personalizes it, it becomes a veritable and observant Presence; and sometimes he feels with it a mystic touch. That eager and uplifted look which dwellers in university towns so often see in the eyes of the incoming men, a look made up partly of confidence and unconscious pride, partly of startled questioning and doubt — that dawning conqueror's look often seen on the fresh and unworn faces of those who themselves have made no conquests yet — that is the sign that they are coming to themselves, that they are finding life not forbidding and remote, but warm, ready, and expectant, and that they are gathering themselves together for the first plunge beneath its depths!

So, as the background for all our discussions, we assume that the undergraduate's life is, for the most part, cast into the romantic aspect, and that it is with intense absorption and idealizing passion that he lives his four college years. The whole round world expresses itself for him in that particular assemblage of other young male creatures, just like, yet unlike himself, into which he has been cast. Into the vortex of their eager, springing lives he expects to be drawn. There reside for him the supreme values. In that world he means to find all the poetry and the friendship which the gray-haired graduates, as they sit about the fire, recount; all the vision and aspiration which college hymns and college songs suggest. How vital is his first plunge into this communal, undirected life! How instantly the inner man awakens to it! Then his soul, that which is, he, himself, begins to ask, Who am I, and for what came I into the world? And while it thus questions, it hears the world calling, inviting it to furthest discovery and to utmost conquest, saying, Come out to me, O youth!

You and your comrades come together, and as, in me, you see and feel and do, so shall you know! Thus there re-begins, each autumn, in every college town, that search, the most necessary yet dangerous search the world has knowledge of — the quest of half-awakened youth for its own realities. This is what makes the untellable romance, the apparent recklessness, the poignant, perilous delights of undergraduate days.

It is, then, out of this situation which we have thus been trying to describe that all the characteristic problems of youth arise. And the first problem is the social one. For in college, being free, the boy has his initial opportunity to find out whether he can make a man of himself. And the first test of manhood is always in connection with one's contemporaries. What standing can he win with them? The first adventure is the search for the approbation of one's peers; the first problem is the problem of personal recognition. What veritable, if temporary, tragedies that phrase may cover! How many shy and conscious lads have lived their college years in acutest misery, feeling that, because they had not attained the coveted undergraduate standing, they were self-confessed failures, already consigned to mediocrity. The primary instinct of the awakening life, born of its mixture of confidence and hesitancy, is the craving for the support and recognition of its comrades. Their sanction is the first thing the average undergraduate desires, and, without it, no other sanction is sufficient. For of course his parents believe in him, — in a sense they must, — and he feels they do not see him as he is, affection has made them blind. Of course the college authorities accept him. But theirs is the general and official approval, which, at the beginning, they give to all. His real judges, therefore, must be his peers. There is some justice in this feeling, so intense in youth, that the preliminary condition of larger and more substantial achievements is the winning of the confidence and admiration of the men of one's own generation.

Yet how handicapped is many a youth as he approaches his social problem! For he is an American, his life, most probably, issuing from a thin background. He comes up to college often acutely conscious of a crudity and ignorance which are neither supported nor concealed by those inherited traditions and usages which, in an older society, give assurance to youth and help it to make its start. Hence how few undergraduates, especially when under-classmen, really dare to be themselves. How often, at alumni reunions, one hears the remark: "Why, what a fine fellow Smith is ! I don't seem to have known him in college. How much he has developed since." Of course, Smith was n't known in college. He did n't know himself in those undergraduate days; he did n't dare to. The under-classman, such is the irony of his situation, tends to use his new-found freedom to become, of all men in the world, the expert imitator, the very slave of the public opinion of his peers. Independence of judgment, of action, even of dress is foreign to him. But before railing at him for this negative plasticity, we must remember how naturally it grows out of the circumstances of his position. We older men can remember the envy with which we. looked upon the debonair and sophisticated youth of our class, gay, polished, and adaptable, and how dumb we were in his presence. We could not possibly have taken toward him, in those days, the attitude commended in the terse advice I once heard the president of a great university give to his incoming Freshmen: "Avoid the so-called magnetic men in your class," he said, "I have observed that they seldom amount to anything." No! To us such men appeared to be the very darlings of the gods. So there are many tragedies in college, growing out of the social situation and a part of the finding experience of youth, which are real enough at the time, although they are pathetically overestimated by the victim. And, before we come to discuss this whole matter at length, let me say just this word, in advance, to any boy who may read these lines. I believe that situation should be studied in all seriousness and sympathy, with as clear an apprehension of its present importance as of its relative insignificance.

Again, how intimately connected with these swift and radical transitions are the moral issues, the fights and despairs of gallant youth who strive to keep the body under. How utterly impossible it is to judge these struggles fairly or to approach them wisely, unless they are seen against the background of the tumultuous, expanding, and discovering period of life in which they take their rise. It is not merely that the recognition of selfhood precipitates these struggles; they are an essential part of that recognition itself. Here is this overwhelming impact of life that beats in upon a sensitive, startled, suddenly self-conscious boy. Its stimulus is beyond all computation. The unsated emotions, the unspent energies, are aroused to their utmost capacities by it. The restlessness of unexpressed and unintelligible powers continually besets him. Sometimes these primitive instincts tempt him to deeds whose entire significance he cannot know. Sometimes they fasten upon him abnormal or indulgent habits of body or mind when he is scarcely aware of what a habit is. Who, then, seeing a youth's mistakes, even his darker and more inexcusable ones, in the light of his age and his environment, can wholly condemn them? Who would marvel at the brutal, heroic, ludicrous, pathetic, irrational, exasperating things that a hard-pressed youth will do. With what prodigality, sometimes, will he dull the keenest edge of unused sense! How he will hasten to bruise his feet in the ways of dark desire! He can do the most dreadful things at times, and for a time, appears to be unscathed by them.

But we, watching each moral struggle, and clearly perceiving its antecedents, can scarcely condemn or despise him. Indeed, it may be questioned whether any man, until he has ceased to be shocked, and ceased to be scornful, over any expression of the life of his fellow human beings, has much reason to suppose that he can interpret them justly or influence them sincerely. At all events, to merely preach, here, would be entirely futile, and to condemn, quite despicable. For when we consider the reserves of unexhausted emotion, the capacity for vivid imagination, the imperious instincts of abounding youth; and, when we remember that, here, ignorance of self and life and liberty of choice for a time go hand in hand, then we must surely acknowledge that multitudes of young men never quite understand their errors, and need, not so much the preacher or the mentor as the friend. One should never forget, in dealing with the moral problems of the undergraduate, that they are the problems of one who still moves about in worlds not realized. The one thing, therefore, which he has a right to expect of us, when we approach him in this field of his experience, is sympathy, faith, and comradeship, and not so much the imposing of sententious wisdom as the imparting of moral power. Nor should one ever forget, either, that the very conditions of academic life, which conditions we older men determine and perpetuate, and to which we invite and introduce the youth, are not entirely favorable to the best self -development.

For all the indubitable ethical idealism of every college community, it nevertheless remains true that there is a terribly inhuman side to scholastic life. Many brilliant scholars and teachers appear to youth to be compounds of fire and ice, glowing minds, but frigid souls! There is a sort of pagan and unmoral sense which sometimes accompanies, and appears to be fostered by, large intellectual powers and achievements. The brutal selfishness of the pupil is, not infrequently, quite equaled by the frank indifference and selfabsorption of his instructor. Who that lives in academic communities is not often moved to amazement at the sublime disregard which, with no offer of friendly hospitality and no provision of more decent social opportunity, permits youth, night after night, to frequent the cheap musical shows, with their open incitement to vulgarity and lust. It is true that a boy must fight his own battles and that only a sentimentalist would desire to fight them for him. It is true that no one can carry boys through adolescence to manhood in perambulators and that no decent boy would endure the experiment. But it is also true that when older men, who have come through the struggle and won their place, proceed to ignore the ever-continuing battle, and to declare its present issues no concern of theirs, they thereby show themselves something less than normal human beings. Youth is quick to perceive that such an irresponsible attitude toward the moral issues of life argues a certain human skepticism in him who holds it. They often, if unjustly, attribute it to failure in the past and cynical indifference as to the future.

It is, then, demanded of us also, by our very humanity, that we live close to these ethical struggles of our younger brothers of the race. For in this moral world of youth, with what immeasureable human values, with what capacity for effort and suffering, do we deal ! Does it not make one's very heart stand still to reflect that within reach of us and all about us, in each day of the long college year, there must be young men who are putting forth their desperate, somber, half-mechanical efforts to hold these mounting, leaping passions until the darkness and the helplessness shall lessen, and something or some one shall give them peace. Truly, George Eliot was right, and expresses the natural attitude honest men take toward the ethical problems of their younger brothers, when she said: "Surely, surely, the only true knowledge of our fellow men is that which enables us to feel with them. Our subtlest analysis must miss the essential truth unless it be lit up by that love which sees in all forms of human thought and work the life and death struggles of separate human beings." *l And so, too, the religious problem of the undergraduate is only clearly or sanely seen when conceived of as largely the product of his passion to be free and his bewilderment in the new world of realities to which freedom introduces him. There are three quite distinct types of conventionallyreligious youth who come up to college. There is, first^ the boy who identifies religion with subscription to creed, allegiance to formula? handed down by an elder generation* There are certain classic statements of the Christian faith. They are majestic with the prestige of their antiquity. By them the fathers and the fathers' fathers have, for the most part, lived and died. The boy does not relate these creeds to the remainder of his field of thought. He does not understand them. He has no world-view into which they fit. He just accepts them, often with a superior and complacent manner which is as ludicrous as it is exasperating to his elders. He is a Churchman, a Liberal, a Conservative; and that largely sums up his religion.

Then there is the boy who identifies his faith with pious practices, i He has been taught to read the Scriptures, to make his devotions, to keep the Sabbath, to attend church. He has been told there are certain things he must not do, and certain other things he may do. He conceives of wrong and right as mutually exclusive territories, localities separated by sharp boundary lines. Faith and righteousness, to him, are easily achieved by remaining in the right territory. So he becomes the youthful conformist, and though most often of sterling

stuff, sometimes appears a most outrageous prig.

And, finally, there is a third, brand-new type

of youthful godliness, and a most amazing one

3 it is to the returning graduates of two decades ago! The ardent if superficial humanism of our time has produced the youth who identifies religion with ethical idealism, social service, and administrative efficiency. He is both pious and popular, altruistic and athletic; he has wedded and made one the secular and the spiritual! He is a past-master at planning a missionary campaign, organizing a "student conference," or making up an attractive programme. He will be found teaching in the settlement house, or acting as scout-master for East Side gamins, or installed as the college Christian Association's secretary. Personally, he is wholly delightful; a most friendly and approachable chap; in all ways of practical usefulness and helpfulness amazingly able and resourceful, r But his chief interest, like that of many of his peers, is in executive tasks, "doing things"; in trying out his new social and economic theories; and in being a sort of deus ex machina for his various proteges. / He has character but knows little of religious passion, has no clear spiritual insight, nor is he always too well acquainted with his soul.

These, then, are the sorts of boys, in the religious realm, whom the forces of freedom and reality are to mould in the plastic college years. Of course, therefore, all three types, if they grow and amount to anything in college, have their spiritual problems, and it is almost to be expected that a first-rate Sophomore will be fiercely contemptuous of the faith! For when the awakening mind perceives that most of the inherited formulations of religion are antique in language and obsolete in their world-view, then, wherever experience has been identified with creed and faith with its expressions, the youth begins to be in trouble. If he loses the inherited philosophy of his religion, as he is almost sure to, he appears to have lost his spiritual experience with it. Again, | one of the first things that an observant youth discovers is that the better men are, the more widely they are apt to differ in acceptance or rejection of pious practices; and that such practices themselves change and disappear from generation to generation; and that saying "Lord, Lord," and keeping the Sabbath holy, and paying every tithe, is n't necessarily religion, and, often, does not proceed from religious motives. | Sometimes, as the youth perceives, the men who indulge in these things are far from doing justly and loving mercy and walking humbly with their God. It is, therefore, inevitable that the life which has confused religion with respectability and confounded character with conformity, when it experiences its first disillusionment should naturally repudiate all traditional forms of piety and every venerable religious practice, and even conceive of all the organized expressions of Christianity as largely hypocrisies. Nor is it hard to deal with this situation when one sees it as merely incident to the whole difficult but precious transition which the youth is going through in every department of his life. That process, here, should carry him out of an unvital faith which he has merely inherited into the power of the spiritual experience which he may personally acquire.

But, perhaps, the problem is not so simple when we come to deal with our third type, the lad who confuses spiritual forces with their beneficient social expressions and identifies personal religion with clean and amiable living. This new figure in the college world is hailed as the very champion of godliness upon the campus. He is the defender of the faith, drawn from the ranks of the indifferent, the impressive witness to the true revival of religion in our day. He is, in short, one of the overestimated, overemphasized figures in the undergraduate world of the moment. It is one of the serious, and not altogether easy, tasks of the college teacher and preacher to arouse this life to realities, to make it acquainted with the exceeding difficulties of belief, to vex it with the problems of the origin and destiny of the human spirit, to reveal to its own helplessness, ignorance, and sin. This is the life that is in most danger of passing through the college years without being stirred to its depths. Certainly here the revelation of selfhood, and the awakening of personality, must mean the shaking of many amiable assurances, and the shattering of an unconscious complacency and a too-easy strength. Certainly here it is most needed, if the best in the life is ever to fulfil itself, that the revelation of self should lead to a veritable and subduing contact with that Spirit from whom all selfhood issues.

But as we thus approach the inner life of the college, how unworthy appear the current misapprehensions of undergraduate religion. One now perceives that it is not true that the college is a godless place where men are encouraged to lose their faith. On the contrary, the college is fundamentally religious because it insists on the substance rather than the expression of spiritual living, and one of its most precious offices is to force young men to distinguish between the two. The influence of the American college, far from being unspiritual or unethical, is just the contrary. There are few other places in the community where the conditions for getting at a real religion are more favorable, or where, on the whole, it is so easy to do right and so hard to do wrong. And, again, it obviously is not true that men, in the college period of life, are naturally unbelievers, although often they themselves believe this to be true. It is really the passion for sincerity, the grim determination to get at reality, the sense of the surpassing importance of the spirit, which it is now perceived must lie behind the form, which induces the flippant or the brutal repudiations by youth of outworn rites and discredited conceptions. There is a capacity for moral indignation in the youthful protestant, a genuine social passion, which might well put his elders to the blush. Only when we see the religious situation in college, in the light of its origins, do we realize how noble is much of the apparently irreligious expression. Only then do we realize how far from being insoluble are the difficulties which, for thinking but inexperienced youth, must surround the religious hypothesis. Most of the spiritual struggles of under-graduates, therefore, should be dealt with as evidences of ethical sincerity, intellectual integrity, and religious capacity.

And if anything further were needed to prove the depth and reality of the spiritual influence of the college, it would be found in that mystical experience of God which comes, ever to the shaming and subduing of their elders, to many boys in their undergraduate days. For it sometimes happens, to pure-hearted and high-minded youth, that the awakening of the soul is not to temporary disillusionment nor to racking doubts, but to its own self-certified vision of the Eternal. There are always, let us humbly and gratefully acknowledge, in every college class youth who walk softly through their free and joyous days, because they are conscious that God is near. There has been revealed to them, from within, what lies behind creed and rite, personal piety and unselfish endeavor. They have had those days, of which Stopford Brooke speaks somewhere, the precious, prophetic days of youth, when, suddenly, without visible cause or reason, the life is lifted high above the Babel of existence and sees as from some watch-tower of the soul; days when youth sincerely wearies of the world, and work seems futile, and pleasure infinitely vain; days when life passes before them like the swift and insubstantial pageant of a dream, and human intercourse is far removed, and new voices are heard in the soul, and the eternal Father calls to his awakened child.

But when we come to the intellectual problem, to the apparently hopeless task of making young scholars out of American schoolboys, we might appear to be upon more debatable ground. Yet I think the conspicuous lack of interest in intellectual matters, the failure to appreciate the value of pure learning, or to understand the ends to which it may be applied, which is so tragically or so ludicrously apparent, according as you happen to view it, in the American college, is also chiefly to be traced to the peculiar circumstances of the undergraduate's lot. Three factors, directly and powerfully influencing him, have contributed to the anomalous place of learning among us.

First, the boy usually comes from a home of slight intellectual traditions. He heard politics and business and church and neighborhood gossip and the family's material progress discussed there, but almost never art or learning. The value of ideas, the passion for knowledge, the reverence for truth in the abstract, did not enter into that circle. When, as a schoolboy, he withdrew "after supper" to his Latin and mathematics, he also withdrew from the area of sympathetic understanding or interest on the part of his elders. There was little encouragement given to him at home to consider scholarship as an essential or practical part of the life of a human being. It is only fair to remember, when dealing with a lazy Freshman, that probably it was for social and economic reasons that his father sent him to college. He arrives on the campus with very little in the way of an intellectual inheritance.