The undergraduate and his college

Contents

INTRODUCTORY

I. Introduction i

II. Present-Day Types of College .... 37

Chapter I Introduction

The people of the United States in times of peace lay aside for investment annually something over two billion dollars, and, although they are willing to take a ** flier" now and then, they usually look with considerable care into the probable chances for dividends. They make another investment of at least equal importance, the years of youth given to general study after the age of possible earning has arrived. Its importance is not in the money cost, which is more than ten million dollars annually, but in time. Money can be replaced, but never these years. Our collegiate students in any year number well over two hundred thousand. No other nation in the world makes so heavy an investment in this particular field.

And yet it may be questioned whether there is any field in which we invest so carelessly, where the ignorance of half-knowledge is more widespread. Not that there is any lack of definite views upon the subject of college education. If I, for example, were to tell my lawyer or doctor or banker friends how to conduct their affairs, with the same quiet but absolute assurance which they almost uniformly adopt in advising me about my particular business as a college dean, they would stare at me in blank amazement. Their advice is sincere enough and given with the best intentions in the world, but unfortunately it is based on the hazy and distorted memories of an undergraduate life of twenty years ago or more, — a Hf e different in unsuspected ways from that of to-day, — or upon the headlines of newspaper controversies, or possibly on distressing experiences with some of our less successful or less t3^ical academic products of recent years.

I do not mean that much criticism is not justified. Heaven knows that it is. Unfortunately people assume that education must of necessity be good education, whereas the contrary is often the case. A former dean of the Columbia Law School once told me of a talk he had with one of his students. "I know both your father and your mother,'^ he said, "and with the kind of mental equipment that they must have given you, I cannot understand how you have succeeded in failing so completely." "You forget,'' said the young man, "that I put in four years at (naming a fashionable college), and that in those four years I naturally lost any habits of industry and powers of concentration that I possessed when I entered.'^

This book will attempt neither to arraign nor to whitewash the present-day American college for men, but to bring together some information about it which may be useful to prospective investors of their own time or that of their children.

Any conclusions that I may venture to draw will be of a very general nature, and as you read I hope you will credit me with a willingness at all times to admit the virtues of your particular college and the equally conspicuous vices of its rival. Such merit as the collection of material may have will be due to the fact that most of it has come directly or indirectly from the undergraduates themselves. So far as possible I have tried to write from their point of view rather than from that of the professional educator.

Too often, both within academic walls and outside of them, the students are looked upon as the inert material of this industry, to be experimented upon, moulded, and fashioned. As a matter of fact, the students are the College, the Collegium, In the Middle Ages they often selected and paid their teachers, and although no longer having that responsibility, they must be recognized as a himian factor at least of equal importance with teachers and trustees. What they lack in experience they make up in that complex of energy and enthusiasm, of curiosity and aspiration, which is youth. Their great numbers mean a wide range in quaHty, and the group of students constituting the best quarter of the whole furnishes a most important factor in the life of any institution.

What is the American college? Where did it come from? and Whither is it bound? I shall try to answer the questions in the order of their increasing difficulty, starting with the second and ending with the third.

The pre-Revolutionary beginnings of collegiate education in this country are famihar enough to us all. Beginning with Harvard in 1636 and Yale (founded sixty-five years later as a protest against the radicalism of Harvard and to preserve the true Puritan ideals), ten colleges sprang up along the Atlantic Seaboard, built more or less closely upon the contemporary English collegiate model and usually under the direct care of some religious denomination or sect. It is significant, however, that the charter of Brown University, although requiring its trustees to be Baptists, enacted and declared that "into this Uberal and catholic Institution shall never be admitted any religious tests: But on the contrary, all the Members hereof shall forever enjoy full, free, absolute, and uninterrupted Liberty of Conscience." Local pride was, of course, a factor in the establishment and growth of these colleges, then as now. According to the published list of birthdays, nineteen new colleges came into being between 1776 and 1800. The oldest State university — that of North Carolina — was founded in 1793. The powerful influence of Yale is reflected in the fact that the first presidents of Princeton, Columbia, Dartmouth, Williams, and Middlebury were all Yale men.

What is not so familiar is the fact that, although the early institutions have determined very largely the path which they and their successors were to follow, they were not colleges in the sense in which we use the word to-day, but elementary boarding-schools, as were the English colleges upon which they were modeled. Boys entered at a very tender age, many well-known Americans having been graduated at fourteen or fifteen years, or even younger. The curriculum was really an elementary curriculum in spite of certain high-sounding titles. In the interesting Bogart Letters, written from Rutgers College during the Revolution, it is amusing to see the references to beginner's Greek and elementary arithmetic for collegians. The youngsters were bedded and boarded, as well as taught, and were held under a set of rules of great complexity; rules evidently not followed very scrupulously, however, if one may judge from the elaborate systems of fines and other punishments which appear in the early statutes. In a word, they were secondary schools enjoying the repute of institutions of higher learning only by grace of the fact that there was nothing beyond in the educational system of the community. I do not mean to imply that there was no intellectual hf e. Considering their youthful years and the slight help from the faculty, the amount of serious reading and solid thinking which some of those youngsters performed should put many a college student of to-day to shame.

The chief significance of this background to-day lies not in its influence upon the course of study, — for the course of study has always changed as soon as environmental pressure became sufficiently strong, and always will, — but in the fundamental attitude of the college toward the student, and of the student toward his environment. College life as we have it to-day in the United States is fundamentally a secondary-school life, based upon the assumption that the student's mind is too immature for a mental load heavy enough to absorb more than a very moderate share of his time and energy. Or perhaps it would be fairer to say, that assimiption is no longer made, but the tradition has been accepted.

Later on I shall try to show how the disorderly activities directed against teachers or authorities in general have come to be transferred into the elaborate organization of the present-day college life as an outlet for superfluous youthful energy. The football hero and the manager of the college daily are the legitimate descendants of the miscreants who hoisted the cow into the college belfry a century ago. If we want to find the nearest thing to our conventional college life across the Atlantic, we must go, not to Oxford or Cambridge, but to Harrow or Rugby. That may be one reason why "Tom Brown at Rugby" interests us Americans and "Tom Brown at Oxford" is likely to bore us.

Of course it will not do to press this point of historical background too far, but it seems to me to serve more completely than anything else as an answer to the question which so often arises to our own Hps, and even oftener to those of outsiders, as to why grown mfen do these particular things, or, if the question is more carefully framed, how they can see things in these particular proportions.

It has been the fashion recently to say that the early colleges were really vocational schools, and that what may have been an appropriate vocational training for colonial clergymen we have blindly come to accept as the best liberal culture for all. The statement contains a grain or two of truth, but a study of the biographical records of even the earliest graduates fails to show that a preponderating percentage entered the ministry.

Whether it was a result of what they were taught in the colleges or because, as seems more likely, the boys theniselves were of select stock, the colonial colleges did their full share in the work of the American Revolution and in the building of the Constitution. From the graduates of WilKam and Mary came Jefferson, Monroe, and Marshall, and from Kings (Columbia), Hamilton, Morris, Livingston, and Jay.

From 1800 to the Civil War two hundred and twenty-two more colleges were established, and in 1870, when college statistics were first published by the United States Bureau of Education, there were in ail 37,346 undergraduate students. The institutions were still largely under the guidance and control of the clergy, though the proportion of graduates entering that calling was falling rapidly. Some few had developed professional schools in addition to the collegiate department, and across the Alleghanies girls had from the first been admitted to the classes upon the same terms as boys.

Such changes in curriculum and policy as developed were due to the presence of some outstanding personahty in a particular college rather than to any general intellectual ferment within or pressure from without, and such innovations as were made at particular colleges were not very generally imitated elsewhere. Reversion to type after the passing away of the dominating personality was the rule rather than the exception.

The great figures of this period were Thomas Jefferson, who made the University of Virginia the intellectual plaything of his declining years, and who embodied in its organization many of the ideas which he learned during his youthful residence in France; Eliphalet Nott, at Union, who broke away from the prevailing policy of the minute regulation of students; and Francis Wayland, at Brown, who was one of the first to look upon matters of curriculum with a discerning eye. The early presidents at Michigan were strong men, and the influence of this first of the state imiversities to come to prominence was felt in the East as well as in the West. Mark Hopkins, at Williams, is generally included in any list of major educational prophets, largely, perhaps, because of his picturesque association with the hypothetical log; but aside from the strong personal power he had over his students, he seems to have contributed relatively little to the development of the American college.

In the second quaxter of the century, a fundamental influence began to be exerted by the trickling stream of American wanderers returning from the German universities, most of whom settled down as college teachers. Between 181 5 and 1850, two hundred and twenty-five Americans studied in German universities, and lo THE UNDERGRADUATE

one hundred and thirty-seven of them became teachers in American colleges.

The age of students was generally rising, probably because of the poorer equipment of the schools in the newer districts, and of the older students coming back to college after emplojrment (usually as district-school teachers), and with this increase in age the disciplinary problems must have changed in character. The schoolboy attitude, however, persisted, and the statutes still were made up mainly of rules of order, with minute prescriptions as to reward and punishment. Edward Everett Hale's diary, kept when he was a student at Harvard in the thirties, is a very interesting document, and in nothing more interesting than as revealing the entire lack of sympathy and confidence between the college administration and the students. Athletics of a more or less orderly kind were emerging, but they were spontaneous activities of the boys themselves, without any of the present-day stimulation from alumni and the public at large.

It is common to hear old men bewail the falling-off in intellectual interests from these ante-bellum days, but as a matter of fact the amount and the quality of academic work have been probably greatly over-estimated; for the common experiences of the students in those days were largely those of the classroom, and the recollections of alumni are likely to be similarly limited/

INTRODUCTION ii

The general national shake-up which resulted from the Civil War doubtless extended its influence even to the sequestered college campus. At any rate, the modern period began shortly thereafter, with all its developments for good and ill. Up to then the colleges had been fed in general from families of the conforming type, from the more or less established classes, with some background, at any rate, of culture. From now on an influx of more radical stock had to be reckoned with.

The new demands caused by the growing needs of the country effected a revolution in its educational system. This movement meant, temporarily at least, the loss to the colleges, in large numbers, of boys of ambition and energy, who did not seek or who failed to find what they wanted in the old-fashioned college curriculum. The first engineering school — Rensselaer — had been founded in 1824, but it found few imitators until after the Civil War, when these schools increased very rapidly. Schoolboys were hurried directly into these and also into institutions of law, medicine, and the like, which were professional at least in name, and in which the work and atmosphere were wholly different from those of the college. The engineering schools, on the other hand, "were not founded by engineers as the outgrowth of an apprenticeship system, but by college professors who sought to satisfy industrial needs by the methods to which they were accustomed in the colleges.'* For this reason no sharp line was drawn, many of the subjects of study were identical, and the students to this day make no distinction in their social relations. Indeed, the United States Commissioner of Education does not attempt to separate the two classes of students in his reports. President Hopkins, of Dartmouth, has recently pointed out that the "Kberal colleges, with all other types of educational institution, owe the technical schools a great debt of gratitude for their insistence upon the scientific method in the approach to scholarship."

The combined crudity and virility of the state universities of the period was affecting in larger and larger measure the academic community as a whole, not only in academic matters, — particularly the admission of new subjects of study, — but the students and their attitude.

Largely under the leadership of Barnard at Columbia and of Eliot at Harvard, there began a general breakdown in the minute oversight of students, with its accompaniment of disciplinary legislation and administration, but as yet there was little attempt to substitute anything else as a controlling factor in the lives of the students. It was only after much labor on the part of these two leaders and a few others like them, including the group which President Gihnan gathered around him at the foundation of Johns Hopkins in 1876, that there came to be any glimmering in the academic mind of the possible vitalizing influence of modern scholarship upon the student body. Concurrently with this dawning Ught on the part of the teachers came a new type of student, better prepared to appreciate his opportunities than were many of the old American stock. These newcomers were the sons of European immigrants who came to America after the revolutions of '48 to seek intellectual and moral freedom. There were also immigrants of the first generation, of whom there were only a handful at first, but who came and were still coming in constantly increasing numbers till the outbreak of the great war.

As a counterbalancing factor to this highly desirable type of college student came the sons of our own idle rich, for little by little it was becoming the fashion to go to college. Professor John W. Burgess was called to Columbia College from Amherst in 1876, and in a reminiscent article, recently published, he gives an interesting picture of the contrast between the old New England college, where these fashionable influences had not begun to operate, and the city institution : —

I came to the old institution within the great city from a New England Puritan country college, where nothing was considered worth while except scholarship and character;

where work began at 7 a.m. and ended at 10 p.m.; where academic rank was the one thing above all else which was coveted; where the Thursday evening prayer meeting was the chief recreation; where teachers and students were intimately acquainted; where the students, coming from all parts of the country, lived together in the community of the dormitory; where dress was simple, meals were frugal, society was natural, and sport was unknown; where physical and mental vigor in the bracing air of the country made for work and clean character, and the premium was placed upon the man who won the valedictory and yet worked his way through, as the phrase went.

The Columbia School of Arts made the decided impression upon me of a day school for the sons of residents of New York, who came rather irregularly to the exercises of the school at about ten o'clock in the morning, attended recitations until one, and then went home again. What they did in the way of study during the afternoons was not very apparent in the recitations of the following day, and, as most of them lived with their parents, it would probably have been regarded as an impertinence on the part of their teachers to have inquired more nearly into this subject.

The Amherst College of that day, it may be said, was destined to exert a nation-wide influence through the able men which it was turning out as college teachers. The list of Columbia faculties alone contains the names of nearly a score of professors who were graduated from Amherst in the fifteen years from 1867 to 1882.

Although one can trace the beginnings of a conventionalized student type, due probably to interminglings at fraternity conventions and regattas, there was a much sharper line of distinction as to manners and customs than at present. The picture of the "Harvard Man'' was already drawn in the mind of the outsider (and persists there unchanged to the present day). The Columbia dandy looked down upon the rural Princetonian, and the Cornellian was regarded by both as a wild- Western product accidentally deposited on the hither side of the Alleghany Mountains.

The smaller colleges were still mainly under the evangelistic influence of their founders, but in all these institutions there was a growing complexity in the social life, due to a greater plentifulness of spending money, and also probably to our American instinct for the organization of everything.

The r61e of the faculty in the days of rapid development along all of these lines in the eighties is a little hard to understand. It is, perhaps, the fairest thing to assume that the professors simply did not see the essential point in what was happening about them. For a number of reasons they were glad enough to give up the old disciplinary control. In the case of the best men, the primary interest was in productive scholarship. It must be remembered that at that time practically the only career open to the productive scholar was that of the undergraduate teacher. With many men the hours of teaching were regarded as a necessary but uninspiring chore, and there was little or no desire to supplement them by individual relations with students. Outside of the classroom they were also influenced, I think, by the German tradition of student freedom, forgetting, among other things, that the German university drew its students only from the very rigorous selection of the G3minasium course instead of from our helter-skelter secondary-school system. There were notable exceptions, of course, but, by and large, the whole complicated system of organized college life as we have it to-day developed without any competent or sympathetic oversight. At any rate, the professors of the eighties failed to supply either a temporary type of control to tide over the changing conditions in the student body, or, what would have been easier, and, I think, really more effective, to recognize the latent intellectual possibilities of these undergraduates to let the pleasure of brain activity supply the correcting and regulating influence, Amherst and Bowdoin, and one or two other colleges, did do this for a while, but instead of setting an example for others to follow, they generally slipped back into the prevailing policy of laissez-faire.

Individual alumni exerted some influence during this period, not always, it must be said, for the best, but in general the students were left to themselves during the late eighties and early nineties more than at any period before or since.

The general results, as manifested in the nineties, and the need of college reform, were first brought to the attention of the American public by Mr. Clarence F. Birdseye, not a wholly safe and sane critic, but one whose service at this time should not be overlooked. His picture of the period is doubtless overdrawn. My personal memories, and the impressions which I can get from talking with thoughtful alumni, are certainly to that effect, but, none the less, there was during these days a shameful waste of good material. Men who should have been retained in college until graduation were permitted to drift away, while others, who now hold their diplomas, should indubitably have been shown the door; and the faculties were apparently oblivious to much that was going on about them. The sense of individual responsibility for conduct, which had been powerful in the evangelistic days, had greatly decreased, and the sense of social responsibility, which is coming to be, perhaps, the most striking factor in the life of to-day, had hardly been born.

The fraternity influences, which had been growing daily stronger as these societies took up the problems of boarding and lodging, so largely neglected by the colleges, were not as a rule on the side of good standards in morals or manners. There was far more drinking than there should have been, very much more than there is to-day, and apparently it was not even necessary to know how to **hold one's Kquor like a gentleman." The athletic standards were very bad. The historic cases of brutality in football are nearly all of this period, and there was almost no oversight of either the academic or amateur standing of college athletics. The miscellaneous outbursts of student enthusiasm often degenerated into vandalism. These were the days of "Med. Fac." activities at Harvard, one of which was to embellish the statue of the honored founder by painting on a pair of crimson stockings. The colleges are still paying for these dark days in various ways, some of which are obvious and others more obscure but none the less real.

Even before the publication of Mr. Birdseye's indictment, however, the tide had begun to turn. Not a few alumni were exerting a more wholesome influence through the fraternities and other social organizations. The American people, by the way, are often criticized by Europeans as lacking the art of natural social intercourse. They seem to need some dinner, convention, or other external excuse for coming together, and perhaps the loyalty of our college alumni to fraternal and class gatherings may be a symptom of this national weakness. At any rate, we may thank the tendency for a supply of devoted alumni to influence undergraduate conditions as they had the chance in their own colleges, and to plan for better control and oversight at national gatherings of various organizations. Much credit should also be given to the Young Men's Christian Association for the earnest and intelligent work of its college branches.

Often as the result of flagrant athletic scandals, greater administrative care began to be exercised by the colleges themselves, largely under the influence of the younger men on the teaching and administrative staff. Perhaps the most important factor of all, however, was a raising of the standards for admission and promotion, not only in the colleges themselves, but in the professional schools of the country. This meant the incoming of a better type of student intellectually, boys to whom the joys of disorder and dissipation were relatively less attractive. The placing of the great professional schools of the country upon a basis of preliminary college training restored, furthermore, to the college many serious and ambitious youths of the type which, as we have seen, had during the previous generation been drawn directly from the secondary schoolinto professional study.

One must remember that these changes from the historic type of fifty years ago have not come about uniformly. Some colleges have been really revolutionized by them, others affected only in part, and still ao THE UNDERGRADUATE

others very little if at all. Some are still under the old-fashioned faculty discipline, and others represent in their standards to-day the worst traditions of the interregnum. There are, for example, not a few colleges, with names well known to those who study the sporting pages of the newspapers, which will gladly admit boys two years short of graduation from any standard secondary school, particularly if the boy in question has devoted his school years to the development of athletic proficiency rather than to intellectual progress, and with the public the good colleges share in the bad repute of the others. Nor have the changes in curriculum and manner of teaching, the requirements for degrees, and the like, during the same period, been more uniform. Taking the country as a whole, however, we may observe the following five lines of general development in the last quarter-century.

In the first place, the programme of studies has been greatly widened in range. Subjects then only timidly knocking at the door now find themselves firmly estabhshed and in a position to protest against the in^ trusion of the present generation of newcomers.

Secondly, there has been a very definite swing of the pendulum back from the unrestricted election of the studies which, under Eliot's powerful influence at Harvard, had spread pretty rapidly. The new schemes bear various devices, *'core of fundamentals^" "majors/* "sequences," "concentration and distribution," and the like, but the main purpose is always to see that the student has not everything his own way. On the other hand, the insistence on particular studies has nowhere been fully restored.

Thirdly, the time element has come to be regarded as much more important and the old idea of a four-year course for everybody is doomed. The acceptance of some professional work toward the bachelor's degree is well-nigh universal, and summer-session work and credit for high grades or for additional subjects offered at entrance all tend to release from artificial trammels the student who is willing and able to move more rapidly than his fellows.

Fourthly, much more attention is given on the part of college faculties to eificiency in teaching. The old idea that the possession of a Ph.D. degree can cover a multitude of sins, both of commission and omission, has not fully departed, but we hope it is on its way.

In the fifth place, the administrative ofl&ces of the colleges are devoting far more attention to the individual care of students and are endeavoring to interest themselves primarily in the most promising rather than in the least promising members of the student body. They are endeavoring to estabhsh closer relations with the parents of students and in general are improving the machinery of supervision in many ways.

To appreciate the degree of our paternalism we must contrast it with conditions abroad. In Germany, to quote Professor Swift (and the same thing is true elsewhere on the Continent) : —

It is expected that the student entering upon a university career will spend one, two, or three years, wandering from one university to another, attending such lectures as he chooses, but on the whole living a care-free life. The faculty is not concerned with his private morals, his attendance upon classes, nor the quaUty of his work, in case he chooses to study. If the youth acquires, during these free years, freie Jahre, morals and habits which prove his undoing, he has simply shown that he was not of the stuff that men are made of, and society and his profession are saved from an undesirable weakling.

There is one change, more fundamental than any of these, which is still in the making. It is not limited to the colleges, but is slowly modifying our attitude to all branches of education. Eliot, after fifty years of study, writes that two fundamental desires have developed within his experience — for a knowledge of facts, and for a chance to be of service. It is with the second that this change has to do. Its nature can best be expressed by contrasting the two words "rights" and "duties." Our fathers heard much of the rights of each young American to an education. We are only just beginning to hear of the duties of the educated man in a community; a careful search of our educational literature will reveal very few references to duty at all. Germany was the first nation to develop the social object of education as contrasted with the individual, and it behooves us, now that we are on the same path, neither to drift into her errors nor to resist all progress along these lines because of them.