The American college : a series of papers setting forth the program, achievements, present status, and probable future of the American college

Contents

CHAPTER PAGE

Introduction v

I. The Aim and Scope of the New England

Introduction

The chapters included in this volume comprise the papers read at a Conference on the American College held on the occasion of the celebration of the One Hundredth Anniversary of the founding of Allegheny College. They were all specially prepared for this particular event. In fact, the entire programme of the conference was made out before anyone was asked to read a paper. Careful attention was given to selecting for a particular topic the man who could speak with authority on that topic. The book, therefore, is a new book, and presents the freshest and most comprehensive thought on the American college.

In making up the list of subjects not much attention was given to the early history of the American college or to the peculiar conditions which favored its early development. Much attention, however, was given to the programme of the college, its curriculum, its present status in various parts of the country, and its probable future. In short, it was aimed to include in the volume the essential things pertaining to the American college as a present-day institution and as an institution of promise for the future educational development vi INTRODUCTION

of America. Before finally deciding upon the topics to be discussed the advice of a goodly number of the foremost educators of the country was carefully sought and freely given. Furthermore, each one of the scholarly men invited to prepare a paper was asked to speak out his mind freely, and assured that what was wanted in the conference was a free, frank, and open expression of the thought of educational leaders touching the college as an institution included in the educational regime of our country.

The conference had been fairly well advertised beforehand in the public press. The unique character of the programme attracted no little attention. It was no surprise, therefore, that nearly one hundred colleges were represented at the opening session, nor was it a surprise that the spacious Ford Memorial Chapel was more than crowded to its capacity at the closing session. Not the audiences only but the interest increased from the beginning to the end. It was a matter of comment at the close of the first session that a conference of an unusually high order was on. The speakers were at their best, and some of them seemed to be better than their best. While there were some striking differences of opinion as to what the college ought to be, there was a fine spirit of toleration throughout and much more substantial agreement as to fundamentals than was antici-

INTRODUCTION vii

pated. One speaker who made a strong plea for the place of the physical and the natural sciences in the college curriculum showed his catholic spirit in saying: " No education is liberal which does not introduce one to the world's best thought and life. A purely classical education and a purely scientific one are equally illiberal. A liberal education is broad, disciplinary, and useful; it educates head, heart, and hand ; it must include literature, science, and the humanities; it must fit for contact with the world along many lines ; it must help one to find himself and to choose his work ; it must prepare for the largest usefulness and enjoyment." Another speaker whose responsibility was to plead for the humanities said : " The great defect with American college education is that it does not set the mass of students intellectually on fire. Our colleges are only in an imperfect degree intellectual institutions. The real rivalry is not between classics and sociology, between history and chemistry, but a struggle with ignorance, materialism, and superficiality for the development of the intellectual life. . . . Some of us would prefer to see students roused by literature, others by science, others by economics, but the main thing is that they be roused."

The European war was touched upon by several of the speakers. President Rhees referred to the so-called " biological defense " of the war.

viii INTRODUCTION

" The tragedy of that argument," said he, " is its false analogy, its blindness to what fitness and progress have come to mean in the unfolding of human history." Professor Conklin seized the opportunity to make stronger his case by saying: " One of the slight compensations for the world war which is now raging is that we are likely to hear less in the future of that much abused word ' culture.' For half a century it has been a word to conjure with, especially in academic circles, but it has never had any constant meaning except that of self-conscious and rather intolerant superiority. As a result every cult or social group or institution or nation has defined the word so as to include itself and to exclude the rest of the world." Dean Haskins added to the strength of his plea for the newer humanities by the suggestive statement: " The present European war has shown, by impressive and even tragic examples, that the days of our national isolation are over and that we can no longer refrain from following closely those movements of world politics to which the United States has been so long indiff'erent."

If there was doubt in the minds of any who attended the conference as to the present status and probable future of the college in the West, the doubt vanished before the striking and almost colossal array of facts presented in the reports from seven typical colleges by President Slocum.

INTRODUCTION ix

His argument would have been even stronger if the limits of his paper had permitted him to mention a dozen other institutions within the same area, all of which are included in the list of one hundred and eighteen institutions recommended to the Kultus Ministerium of Prussia by the Association of American Universities, — such institutions as Ohio Wesleyan, Kenyon, Lawrence, Lake Forest, Wabash, DePauw, Cornell, and Drake.

Perhaps the most striking difference of opinion was shown in the description of the original purpose of the American college. The difference centered about the words " cultural " and " vocational." Even here there seemed to be a disposition to see the other's point of view. A gentleman whose judgment is to be respected described the positions of two of the speakers on this wise : " Dr.

A. fears that any man who uses the term ' vocation ' has surrendered to utilitarianism, while Dr.

B. fears that any man who uses the term ' culture ' apart from purpose may be working in a vacuum."

One of the noticeable and significant things about the conference was the strength and virility of the utterances. There was no attempt to cover up. On the contrary there was a straightforward and open facing of the facts, with an appeal almost prophetic for the things which make for life and character. Here is a sample from the paper of President Meiklejohn: "So far as we can bring

X INTRODUCTION

it about the young people of our generation shall know themselves, shall know their fellows, shall think their way into the common life of their people, and by their thought shall illumine and direct it. If we are not pledged to that, then we have deserted the old standard; we are apostates from the faith. . , . We pledge ourselves to a study of the universal things in human life, the things that make us men as well as ministers and tradesmen. We pledge ourselves forever to a study of human living in order that living may be better done. We have not yet forgotten that fundamentally the proper study of mankind is Man." A fitting paragraph to put alongside this is from the closing part of President Finley's paper : " If this multiple college is to be merely or chiefly a place of discipline, then its tasks might better be given over to the high schools, to the gymnasia. If it is to be a place of special preparation for life, then it would better give way to the professional, the technical school, the university. If it is to be a place merely through which to attain, in an agreeable way, social position and conventional culture, to take part in contests of bodily strength and skill, or to enjoy only the companionships and friendships of living (that is, if it is to be a great college, country or city, club), it is perhaps hardly worth preserving as an American institution. But if it is to be for the many (what

INTRODUCTION xi

it has been, thank God, for the few), if it is to be for all the fit, a place of understanding, of rebirth, of entering the race mind, then is the college which I see in prospect the most precious of all our educational possessions."

The above quotations are included in this introduction with a twofold purpose : First, to indicate the general scope and spirit of the papers presented; and, second, to whet the appetite of the reader for what follows. If the atmosphere which pervaded the conference shall pervade, even in some small measure, the printed page, it is confidently believed that this volume will be regarded as a real and valuable contribution to the literature of the American college.

William H. Crawfokd.

Meadville, Pennsylvania.

August 12, 1915.

THE AIM AND SCOPE OF THE NEW ENGLAND COLLEGE

The story of the New England college is a story of heroism and loyalty unsurpassed in American life. It has an epic quality which lifts it far above any bare chronicle of events. It sings not of arms and the hero, but of heroes who, unarmed and unsupported, devoted their lives to the good fight for the education of the generation to come. It is part of the story of Plymouth Rock and Bunker Hill. To-day colleges flourish in all our commonwealths, buildings and endowments multiply. But on anniversary occasions it is good for us to remember that we of the present generation are in a land full of wells which we digged not, vineyards and olive trees which we planted not.

The original aim of the New England college is stated in a tablet on the West Gate of Harvard University : " After God had carried us safe to New England and we had builded our houses, provided necessaries for our livelihood, reared convenient places for God's worship, and settled the civil government, one of the next things we longed for and looked after was to advance learning and perpetuate it to posterity, dreading to leave an illiterate ministry to the churches, when our present ministers shall lie in the dust." In that sentence we have the historic order of the Puritan life: first, the building of houses to shelter the newcomers from the inclement sky; then the procuring of necessary food; then the provision for common worship ; then the election of magistrates to execute the laws. Next came education, as a thing not only " longed for," but " looked after " in very practical fashion. And the reason why those men desired learning was not for its consolations and delights, not because of the satisfaction it might bring to intellectual curiosity, but because of its concrete value in equipping the new colony through all the future with competent religious teachers and guides. The college was thus bom of the Christian faith, intended to serve for the maintenance of that faith, and its aim was not abstract culture, or scientific research, or the increase of human knowledge, but the equipment of men for their life work.

On the records of the ancient church in Providence, in whose meeting-house Brown University holds its annual commencements, is this suggestive entry of 1774 : " Voted, to build a meeting-house for the public worship of Almighty God, and also to hold Commencement in." Again the same purpose appears in the linking of education and religion. The delight in learning for its own sake, which marked the Renaissance in Europe, played small part in our colonial history. The solving of physical or metaphysical problems, which was the goal of the schoolmen, was not the aim of our fathers. To them learning was not, in Bacon's phrase, " a terrace for a wandering and variable mind to walk up and down with a fair prospect " ; it was equipment for a religious vocation, it was the development of men fitted for leadership in times of stress and danger. The General Assembly of Connecticut in 1753 declared " that one principal and proposed end in erecting the college was to supply the churches in this country with a learned, pious, and orthodox ministry."

The founding of the University of Pennsylvania, under the influence of Benjamin Franklin, had, of course, a very different motive. The later establishment of the University of Virginia reflected the ideals of Thomas Jefferson, which were hardly those of the founders of the Puritan theocracy. But in New England all the earlier colleges were the offspring of religious faith. The motto of Harvard, — Christo et ecclesice, — and of Yale, — Lux ac Veritas, — and of Brown, — In Deo speramus, — all affinn the religious motive behind the New England enterprise.

Our oldest colleges were thus both religious in motive and vocational in aim. But the vocation for which they prepared men was one of the broadest and most fundamental character. The Puritan preacher was conceived to be an authority on the deepest problems of this world and that which is to come. He was the chief expounder of a long sacred history, embodied in a varied literature, and of an elaborate religious philosophy buttressed by that literature. He was also the chief orator on all public occasions, he was social arbiter, political adviser, leader of civic life, and in Massachusetts and Connecticut he was an officer of the state. Such a man must have no mere technical training. He must be made to grapple with philosophical problems, be versed in the languages in which such problems were discussed, and must possess such power of reasoning, of judgment, of expression, as should equip him for his broad and varied task. Mere "bread-and-butter studies" were no preparation for such a life. Mere technical training, narrow in horizon and illiberal in spirit, was beside the mark. The founders of our early colleges certainly did not conceive of them as " divinity schools," in which men, already educated, might acquire the technique of a profession. Probably seventy-five per cent, of the studies pursued in those colleges had no direct bearing on the clerical calling — just as seventy-five per cent, of the studies pursued at West Point to-day have no exclusive bearing on the soldier's profession. But the founders of our New England colleges, while broad In their horizon, were definite In their aim. To them a " vocation " was something divine, and to prepare men for the high calling — the highest on earth they conceived it to be — was a noble and heroic enterprise. If the word " vocational " has In our day acquired a narrower meaning, it is time to rescue it from degradation. Vocational training for the broadest and finest of human vocations — such was the ideal of the early New England college.

But such training, it was held from the very beginning, might be useful for many other men whose task was of broad or general character. Thus the charter of Yale speaks of " fitting youth for public employment both in church and civil state." It was early held that what was good for the minister was good also for the prospective lawyer or teacher or even physician. Gradually the constituency of the college widened, and then the curriculum widened necessarily to meet the needs of the new constituency. Gradually there grew up the ideal of general culture, apart from any vocational aim, as the true end and purpose of the college. Latin, no longer essential to success in life, was retained in the nineteenth century on grounds of disciplinary and cultural value. Greek, no longer necessary for professional equipment, was retained for its linguistic and literary value; while mathematics, almost ignored at first, acquired large place as a training in exactness and in reasoning power, which could not fail to deepen and strengthen the mind. Gradually thus the vocational aim was merged in the disciplinary aim, and that " culture " which to the first founders was only a by-product of comprehensive preparation for life was exalted as the be-all and end-all of the college course. At the same time the theological element in the old curriculum was abbreviated, and more of the humanities, — history and " polite literature," — was introduced. Thus it came about that for the last hundred years the New England college has been the citadel, not of a definite training, but of a humane culture which has exalted " useless studies " and sought simply to make every student a citizen of the intellectual world. It has sought, in President Stryker's phrase, " not to turn steel into tools, but to turn iron into steel."

Our early founders reproduced the ideal and method of Oxford and Cambridge Universities, which have for centuries aimed to " man the British Empire." They also brought from England the idea of a college as a place of residence, where boys might eat and worship and learn and live together under the strict and constant supervision of their teachers. In sharp distinction from the medieval universities of the continent, where students migrated from place to place and teacher to teacher, was the common residence required in the New England college, accompanied by long lists of rules, enforced by tutorial vigilance and sometimes by corporal punishment. A common eatingplace was deemed essential. Daily chapel, usually held twice a day, brought the entire family together, and offered opportunity for paternal counsel and for the practice of the students in public speech. At night the long corridors of the dormitory were often patrolled by professors, and some New England colleges adopted the rule in force at Princeton, whereby a professor might announce his presence outside a student's door by a peculiar stamp of his foot, which all students were forbidden, under severe penalties, to counterfeit.

Under such a regime the college was strictly in loco parentis in an age when parents were seldom accused of laxity in discipline. Hence the inner story of the colleges is one of " autocracy tempered by rebellion." The teachers were not specialists, but men of breadth of view, of demonstrated success in some calling, and of dominant personality. The one great gift of the early colleges was the opportunity for the daily association of callow youth with some of the leading minds of their generation. When Bowdoin College had no laboratories, she had on her teaching

10 WILLIAM e. P. FAUNCE

staif Henry W. Longfellow. When Longfellow in his turn was a student at Harvard he wrote in his diary that after dining on boiled rice he " went to walk with Professor Felton." Truly a dinner of herbs was tolerable when followed by such a walk. When Brown University's total funds had reached thirty-one thousand dollars, Francis Wayland was molding her structure, and the real endowment of the university was thirty-one thousand dollars plus Francis Wayland. Mark Hopkins could make the " old log " a real substitute for library, laboratory, and apparatus, and the student whom he touched was awed and thrilled and inspired.

Not only were the teachers of that early day often more dominant personalities than those of our own time, but they had far greater opportunity to enter into the student mind. Under the old uniform curriculum all the students were together in every class, and the professor met them all, and usually every day. Sometimes one professor taught the class in several subjects, and President Hopkins at Williams instructed the senior class in all subjects throughout the year. Under such circumstances there was an intimacy of intellectual acquaintance which has never been equaled elsewhere. The total weight of all a teacher's experience, knowledge, conviction, was brought to bear on the student who, in significant phrase, " sat under him." Never, except possibly in the case of

English headmasters, like Arnold of Rugby, has the world seen greater opportunities for education by sheer contagion than in the early New England college. The enforced intimacy surely had its defects. The foibles of the teacher were obvious to all. The natural impulse of youth to rebel was encouraged by artificial and elaborate rules, with fines and penalties attached. But education by contagion, by persistent association of persons, has seldom had so fine a chance as it had among the New England hills.

If architecture is, as it has been called, " frozen music," certainly college architecture may be called congealed philosophy of life. The beautiful quadrangles of Oxford, surrounded by closely articulated buildings of the Gothic order, speak clearly of the compactness and unity of a life in which state and church are indissolubly bound together and both are exponents of order and beauty. No such quadrangles were built in New England. The only one ever projected was never completed. In the Puritan college each building, independent, isolated, seems to recognize no other structure on the horizon. Each one delights to express the independent action of some donor, the independent taste of some period, or the autocratic choice of some administrator. The " muses' factories," as Lowell called the old-time dormitories, were not the abodes of art or music or aesthetic taste. They sometimes became mere barracks, with no refining or softening influence on their inmates. In 1878 I lived in such barracks, bringing all water from the college pump up three flights of stairs to my room, and each morning depositing hot coals and ashes from my little stove upon the wooden floor in a corner of the hallway outside my door. Life was bare and chill and unadorned amid such surroundings, but it furnished daily opportunity for the constant impact of strong, mature personalities on the unformed lives around them. Over each New England college might have been written the ancient sentence : " Let us make man." The aim was not to push out the bounds of knowledge in any line, but so to associate the strong with the weak that the strength might be infused and imparted.

What now shall we say of the more recent development of the New England college? How far is it true to its primal impulse, and how far is it being modified by the new occasions which teach new duties.'*

The relation of the college to the Christian faith is still vital, but is expressed in entirely new ways. Most of our colleges are now free from denominational control, and the relations of church and college are simply those of vital sympathy and co-operation. There is nothing in the charters of Yale,Amherst^ Williams, Bowdoin, or Dartmouth to anchor those institutions to the Congregationalist churches that gave them birth. If those churches should lose their interest in education or should become numerically feeble, undoubtedly those colleges would drift into vital relations with other denominations. They exist not for the aggrandizement of the Congregationalist churches, not for propagating a doctrinal viewpoint, but as the freewill offering of the churches to the cause of Christian education. The old days when every teacher at Yale must sign the Westminster Confession and look carefully after the orthodoxy of the students have gone forever. But has Christianity lessened its hold in consequence? On the contrary, those days of creed subscription on the part of every teacher were the days when French infidelity was rampant in American colleges and students called one another by the names of Voltaire and Paine and Bolingbroke. At the beginning of the nineteenth century only two students could be found in one New England college who could call themselves Christians. The orthodoxy enforced from above had produced by natural reaction complete skepticism below.

To-day at Wesleyan, Colby, and Brown there are still some denominational restrictions that survive, but they grow more attenuated year by year and by natural evolution will disappear. Yet the Christian forces in these institutions are not lessened but rather are growing. Skepticism is no

longer the badge of culture among undergraduates. In almost all our colleges the majority of the students are church members and are not ashamed of their faith. The foremost preachers of the country visit these colleges for a single service or for a residence of from one to three weeks. Christian associations, supported by alumni contributions, exist in all of them, and the secretaries are often able leaders of student opinion. The students are organized into committees for philanthropic, educational, and religious work in the communities around them. If the devotional meetings have dwindled within the college, as they have without, the expression of Christian faith in practical human helpfulness has grown more pronounced.

At several New England colleges this last winter a series of special meetings has been held, intended to move the students to personal decision, and has been attended by unusually large result. All pressure on the part of the Faculty has ceased. Required church attendance has vanished from most of our colleges. Creed subscription by members of the teaching staff is not thought of. Religion is no longer official, imposed from above ; it is the natural expression of the aspiration of students and alumni. And this unofficial relation of church and college is proving vastly more fruitful in the maintenance of a Christian atmosphere than all the old charter provisions for ecclesiastical control. The experience of the New England colleges is that the oversight and ownership of a college by a denomination is often wise and absolutely necessary in the earlier years of college history. But as the college approximates to the university, if not in name, at least in standards and ideals, the control of the church becomes less helpful. Denominational control of a medical school or a law school is an advantage to neither school nor church.

In America the function of the church has been to initiate, to start things. Its spiritual energy has impelled the church to establish charities which are later handed over to the state; to preach the duty of caring for the sick, and then to hand over that duty to the public hospital ; to lay educational foundations and without complaint see that another buildeth thereupon. The voluntary principle, in education as in worship, has in New England been found to vindicate itself in the course of the years. If the churches weaken in numbers or influence, then their influence in the colleges will decay. But if they increase their powers in the community, if they send their ministers into college pulpits, and their laymen into the ranks of college officers and helpers, the non-official relation of church and college may prove to be more helpful to both than any official control could be.

Whatever may be true of new sections of our country, this is the lesson to be drawn from the educational experience of New England. Indeed, each denomination should allow those ministers who speak in the college vocabulary to spend a considerable portion of their time in addressing college assemblies. Their message is effective precisely because it is non-official. They have access to the student mind just because they are not examiners but inspirers. Such preachers find in the American college an audience more responsive than that which assembles in any church, and a task worthy of the highest human powers. In the words of President Fitch of Andover Theological Seminary : " One of the significant happenings of our day is the passing of the spiritual and ethical control of the educated youth of America out of the hands of the churches, and its centering in the schools and colleges. It is largely true that the surest and most effective method of reaching the noblest instincts of the choicest men of the coming generation is through college rather than parochial preaching." *

As regards the vocational element in education our colleges are now returning to their fundamental principle. They are perceiving that while they can never become professional schools, much less trade schools, they cannot permanently separate * Harvard Graduate Magazine, December, 1914.

culture from purpose. A purely abstract culture having no goal in real life, unrelated to the life that throbs and surges outside the college fence, is really an ignis fatuus, and, if attained, a positive disqualification for public service. Scholasticism in college has hindered thousands of young men from real achievement, and left them critical, introspective, hesitant, incapable of swift decision and whole-hearted action. The problem before our colleges is to return to the original idea of education as fundamental equipment for vocation, but so to interpret vocation as to preserve for the college broad horizons, generous sympathies, insight into the best that the world has said or done, and profound religious faith.

No longer do we prepare men for the learned professions only, but it is our task to give the broadest training for highly specialized tasks. We must equip men not only for pulpit and bar, but for mill and store and farm ; men who can earn their living without losing their life. Our colleges must see to it that the mechanician is trained in exact science, and that the man who plants corn shall understand the laws of heredity. We want the architect to be familiar with the bequest of Greece and Rome, the engineer to construct highways for human progress, the mill-owner to care not only for his products but for the producers. We want the storekeeper to know something of the great