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I GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS 3

II EDUCATION ? LA CARTE 51

V THE COLLEGE MAN AND THE WORLD 173

INDEX 203

PAGE

Old South Middle, Yale University 8

A Protest against Prosiness 21

University Hall, University of Michigan 37

The Serpentine Dance after a Foot-ball Game 45

Johnston Gate from the Yard, Harvard University 55

The Library, Columbia University 66

A Popular Professor of Chemistry and his Crowded Lecture-Room 80

Student Waiters in the Dining-Hall of an American College 97

Amateur College Theatricals 112

The Main Hall, University of Wisconsin 122

Blair Arch, Princeton University 143

The Library and the Thomas Jefferson Statue, University of Virginia 164

Harper Memorial Building and the Law Building, University of Chicago 178

The Arch between the Dormitory Quadrangle and the Triangle, University of Pennsylvania 192

PREFACE The characteristics of a college course demanded by our American undergraduates is determined by two things; first, by the character of the man who is to be educated, and second, by the kind of world in which the man is to live and work. Without these two factors vividly and practically in mind, all plans for courses of study, recreation, teaching, or methods of social and religious betterment are theoretical and uncertain.

After ten years of travel among American college men, studying educational tendencies in not less than seven hundred diverse institutions in various parts of the United States and Canada, it is my deep conviction that the chief need of our North American Educational system is to focus attention upon the individual student rather than upon his environment, either in the curriculum or in the college buildings.

A few great teachers in every worthy North American institution who know and love the boys, have always been and doubtless will continue to be the secret of the power of our schools and colleges. There are indications that our present educational system involving vast endowments will be increasingly directed to the end of engaging as teachers the greatest men of the time, men of great heart as well as of great brain who will live with students, truly caring for them as well as teaching them. We shall thus come nearer to solving the problem of preparing young men for leadership and useful citizenship.

That this is the sensible and general demand of graduates is easily discovered by asking any college alumnus to state the strongest and most abiding impression left by his college training. Of one hundred graduates whom I asked the concrete question, "What do you consider to be the most valuable thing in your college course?"--eighty-six said, substantially: "Personal contact with a great teacher."

CLAYTON SEDGWICK COOPER.

March 12th, 1912.

GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS

Colleges, in like manner, have their indispensable office,--to teach elements. But they can only highly serve us when they aim not to drill, but to create; when they gather from far every ray of various genius to their hospitable halls, and by the concentrated fires, set the hearts of their youth on flame. Thought and knowledge are natures in which apparatus and pretension avail nothing. Gowns and pecuniary foundations, though of towns of gold, can never countervail the least sentence or syllable of wit. Forget this, and our American colleges will recede in their public importance, whilst they grow richer every year.

EMERSON.

GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS

The American college was recently defined by one of our public men as a "place where an extra clever boy may go and still amount to something."

This is indeed faint praise both for our institutions of higher learning and for our undergraduates; but judging from certain presentations of student life, we may infer that it represents a sentiment more or less common and wide-spread. Our institutions are criticized for their tendency toward practical and progressive education; for the views of their professors; for their success in securing gifts of wealth, which some people think ought to go in other directions; and for the lack of seriousness or the dissipation of the students themselves. Even with many persons who have not developed any definite or extreme opinions concerning American undergraduate life, the college is often viewed in the light in which Matthew Arnold said certain people regarded Oxford:

Beautiful city! so venerable, so lovely, so unravaged by the fierce intellectual life of our century, so serene! There are our young barbarians, all at play!

Indeed, to people of the outside world, the American undergraduate presents an enigma. He appears to be not exactly a boy, certainly not a man, an interesting species, a kind of "Exhibit X," permitted because he is customary; as Carlyle might say, a creature "run by galvanism and possessed by the devil."

The mystifying part of this lies in the fact that the college man seems determined to keep up this illusion of his partial or total depravity. He reveals no unchastened eagerness to be thought good. Indeed, he usually "plays up" his desperate wickedness. He revels in his unmitigated lawlessness, he basks in the glory of fooling folks. As Owen Johnson describes Dink Stover, he seems to possess a "diabolical imagination." He chuckles exuberantly as he reads in the papers of his picturesque public appearances: of the janitor's cow hoisted into the chapel belfry; of the statue of the sedate founder of the college painted red on the campus; of the good townspeople selecting their gates from a pile of property erected on the college green; or as in graphic cartoons he sees himself returning from foot-ball victories, accompanied by a few hundred other young hooligans, marching wildly through the streets and cars to the martial strain,

There'll be a hot time in the old town to-night!

In other words, the American student is partly responsible for the attitude of town toward gown. He endeavors in every possible way to conceal his real identity. He positively refuses to be accurately photographed or to reveal real seriousness about anything. He is the last person to be held up and examined as to his interior moral decorations. He would appear to take no thought for the morrow, but to be drifting along upon a glorious tide of indolence or exuberant play. He would make you believe that to him life is just a great frolic, a long, huge joke, an unconditioned holiday. The wild young heart of him enjoys the shock, the offense, the startled pang, which his restless escapades engender in the stunned and unsympathetic multitude.

We must find out what the undergraduate really means by his whimsicalities and picturesque attitudinizing. We must find out what he is thinking about, what he reads, what he admires. He seems to live in two distinct worlds, and his inner life is securely shut off from his outer life. If we would learn the college student, we must catch him off guard, away from the "fellows," with his intimate friend, in the chapter-house, or in his own quiet room, where he has no reputation for devilment to live up to. For college life is not epitomized in a story of athletic records or curriculum catalogues. The actual student is not read up in a Baedeker. His spirit is caught by hints and flashes; it is felt as an inspiration, a commingled and mystic intimacy of work and play, not fixed, but passing quickly through hours unsaddened by the cares and burdens of the world--

No fears to beat away--no strife to heal, The past unsighed for, and the future sure.

It is with such sympathetic imagination that the most profitable approach can be made to the American undergraduate. To see him as he really is, one needs to follow him into his laboratory or lecture-room, where he engages with genuine enthusiasm in those labors through which he expresses his temperament, his inmost ideals, his life's choice. Indeed, to one who knows that to sympathize is to learn, the soul windows of this inarticulate, immature, and intangible personality will sometimes be flung wide. On some long, vague walk at night beneath the stars, when the great deeps of his life's loyalties are suddenly broken up, one will discover the motive of the undergraduate, and below specious attempts at concealment, the self-absorbed, graceful, winsome spirit. Here one is held by the subtle charm of youth lost in a sense of its own significance, moving about in a mysterious paradise all his own, "full of dumb emotion, undefined longing, and with a deep sense of the romantic possibilities of life."

In this portrait one sees the real drift of American undergraduate life--the life that engaged last year in North American institutions of higher learning 349,566 young men, among whom were many of America's choicest sons. Thousands of American and Canadian fathers and mothers, some for reasons of culture, others for social prestige, still others for revenue only, are ambitious to keep these students in the college world. Many of these parents, whose hard-working lives have always spelled duty, choose each year to beat their way against rigid economy, penury, and bitter loss, that their sons may possess what they themselves never had, a college education. And when we have found, below all his boyish pranks, dissimulations, and masqueradings, the true undergraduate, we may also discern some of the pervasive influences which are to-day shaping life upon this Western Continent; for the undergraduate is a true glass to give back to the nation its own image.

HIS PASSION FOR REALITY

Early in this search for the predominant traits of the college man one is sure to find a passion for reality. "We stand for him because he is the real thing," is the answer which I received from a student at the University of Wisconsin when I asked the reason for the amazing popularity of a certain undergraduate.

The American college man worships at the shrine of reality. He likes elemental things. Titles, conventions, ceremonies, creeds--all these for him are forms of things merely. To him

The rank is but the guinea's stamp, The man's the gowd for a' that.

The strain of the real, like the red stripe in the official English cordage, runs through the student's entire existence. His sense of "squareness" is highly developed. To be sure, in the classroom he often tries to conceal the weakness of his defenses with extraordinary genius by "bluffing," but this attitude is as much for the sake of art as for dishonesty. The hypocrite is an unutterable abomination in his eyes. He would almost prefer outright criminality to pious affectation. Sham heroics and mock sublimity are specially odious to him. The undergraduate is still sufficiently unsophisticated to believe that things should be what they seem to be: at least his entire inclination and desire is to see men and things as they are.

This passion for reality is revealed in the student's love of brevity and directness. He abhors vagueness and long-windedness. His speeches do not begin with description of natural scenery; he plunges at once into his subject.

A story is told at New Haven concerning a preacher who, shortly before he was to address the students in the chapel, asked the president of the university whether the time for his address would be limited. The president replied, "Oh, no; speak as long as you like, but there is a tradition here at Yale chapel that no souls are saved after twenty minutes."

The preacher who holds his sermon in an hour's grip rarely holds students. The college man is a keen discerner between rhetoric and ideas. No decisions are more prompt or more generally correct than his. He knows immediately what he likes. You catch him or you lose him quickly; he never dangles on the hook. The American student is peculiarly inclined to follow living lines. He is not afraid of life. While usually he is free from affectation, he is nevertheless impelled by the urgent enthusiasm of youth, and demands immediate fulfilment of his dreams. His life is not "pitched to some far-off note," but is based upon the everlasting now. He inhabits a miniature world, in which he helps to form a public opinion, which, though circumscribed, is impartial and sane. No justice is more equal than that meted out by undergraduates at those institutions where a student committee has charge of discipline and honor-systems. A child of reality and modernity, he is economical of his praise, trenchant and often remorseless in his criticisms and censures, for as yet he has not learned to be insincere and socially diplomatic. This penchant for reality emerges in the platform of a successful college athlete in a New England institution who, when he was elected to leadership in one of the college organizations, called together his men and gave them two stern rules:

First, stop apologizing! Second, do a lot of work, and don't talk much about it!

HIS NATURALNESS

The undergraduate's worship of reality is also shown in his admiration of naturalness. The modern student has relegated into the background the stilted elocutionary and oratorical contests of forty years ago because those exercises were unnatural. The chair of elocution in an American college of to-day is a declining institution. Last year in one of our universities of one thousand students the course in oratory was regularly attended by three.

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