Clayton Sedgwick Cooper

“ Good books give mental and spiritual reserve. They fill the reservoirs of the mind and heart with the kind of knowledge that arouses, sustains, and steadies a man in a crisis. The best books assure power in the right direction. A student whose mind is filled with the best will have neither time nor inclination for the literature that appeals only to a liking for the commonplace and the sensational. It will be unfortunate if Tennyson’s indictment against an English university become true of our American teachers:
Because you do profess to teach, and teach us nothing. ”

“ A real cause of American physical breakdown has been attributed by a famous physician “to those absurd feelings of hurry and having no time, to that breathlessness and tension, that anxiety of feature and that solicitude of results, that lack of inner harmony and ease, in short, by which with us the work is apt to be accompanied, and from which a European who would do the same work would, nine times out of ten, be free. It is your relaxed and easy worker, who is in no hurry, and quite thoughtless most of the while of consequence, who is your most efficient worker. ”

“ But while the American undergraduate may consistently look to the college to furnish him with ideals and with the methods of making [197] these ideals effective, the world looks to the college for definite and advanced information. The college, with its accumulated stores of intellect, its apparatus, and its unusual means for observation, owes the world a debt that none but it can pay. And this is the gift which the college has given, and is still giving, to the world so quietly, so unobtrusively, that the world scarcely dreams of the source of its gain. ”

“ This perversity of the American undergraduate is as fascinating to the student of his real character as it is baffling to a chance beholder, for the American collegian is not the most obvious thing in the world. He is not discovered by a superficial glance, and surely not by the sweeping accusations of uninformed theoretical critics who have never lived on a college campus, but have gained their information in second-hand fashion from question-naires or from newspaper-accounts of the youthful escapades of students. ”

“ The undergraduate’s reading may be made pleasurable instead of being a painful duty. Books ought to open new rooms in his house of thought, start new trains of ideas and action, help him to find his own line, give just views of the nation’s history and destinies, impart a mental tone, and give a real taste for literature, inspired by intellectual curiosity. College reading should also awaken the soul of the student and attach his faith to the loyalties of life. A foot-ball coach said to me recently that his team was defeated in the last half of the game because of a lack of physical reserve. ”

“ After we have said much concerning the life and the work of the American undergraduate, there is still a valuable thing which the college should impart to him, and through which he should become enabled to present with greater charm and with greater force the message which is in his soul. This valuable thing, at once both idealism and incentive, is the undergraduate’s individual message to the world. It may be composed of knowledge, the ability to think, the faculty of relaxation, and the power to do faithfully and successfully some given task. ”

“ The student leads his life noisily and hurriedly. He scarcely takes time to see it all plainly without dust and confusion. There is all about him a blurred sense of motion and duties. His culture lies upon him in lumps. He does not allow it time to impress him. College is a bewildering episode rather than a place of clear vision. ”

“ College tradition is not an unmixed blessing when it results in provincialism and the loss of that breadth of mind and appreciative sympathy which should characterize educated men. When any undergraduate body becomes blindly a law unto itself, refusing to learn from other institutions; when faculty and students take the position that because certain ideas have never prevailed at their college, therefore they never should and never shall prevail, they show their unfitness for leadership in an age of vast and varied opportunity. ”

“ WHAT IS THE CHIEF END OF AN AMERICAN COLLEGE?
This sudden and enormous advance in the pursuit of technical studies, which have made the State universities formidable rivals to our older, privately endowed institutions, has aroused uncertainty as to the real object of collegiate training. Modern commercialism, which has said that you must touch liberal studies, if at all, in a utilitarian way, has swept in a mighty current through our American universities. The undergraduate is feeling increasingly the pressure of the outside modern world—the world not of values, but of dollars. ”

“ Is it not time that we remind the college men of this country that they have no right to any distinctive place in any community unless they can show it by intellectual achievement? that if a university is a place for distinction at all, it must be distinguished by conquest of mind? ”

“ No pulpit in our day is more far-reaching and decisive than the desk of the college teacher. The college professor who does not forget that he is first a man, then a professor, and who can get past the friendship of books and knowledge to a genuine friendship with students, can be the highest force in our present day civilization. But the teacher says: “I am only a teacher of literature, or of chemistry, or of engineering, or of bridge-building. ”

“ He starts his subject a century behind the point of view in which his scholars are interested. Too often, alas! he misses the chief opportunity of a college teacher in not becoming friendly with his undergraduates; for there is no comradeship like the comradeship of letters, the comradeship of knowledge, the comradeship of those whose lives are united in the higher aims of serious education.
Letters have never lacked their fascination when they have been embodied in the thought and personalities of great teachers. ”

“ College training brings with it responsibility and reward. The responsibility is that of leadership—the kind of leadership which comes to the man of advanced knowledge and unusual advantages, who sees the needs of his time and does not flinch from the hardest kind of sacrifice in view of those needs. The reward is not always apparent to the world, but it is more than sufficient for the worker. Indeed, the American undergraduate is becoming more and more aware that his pay is not his reward. ”

“ In short, the real government of our large North American institutions is to-day in the hands of the students, however much the faculty may think that they wield the scepter. Honor systems, athletics, college journalism, fraternity life, self-support, curriculum, seminars, unrestrained electives, student researches, and laboratory methods—all these are signs of the new day of student individualism. The parental form of government is less popular; the self-government idea is now the slogan in student life. ”

“ Not only upon the shields of our American universities do we find “veritas”; in spirit at least it is also clearly written across the face of the entire college life of our times. Gentlemanliness, open-mindedness, originality, honor, patriotism, truth—these are increasingly found in both the serious pursuits and the play life of our American undergraduates. The department in which these ideals are sought is not so important as the certainty that the student is forming such ideals of thoroughness and perfection. ”

“ It may seem to an outsider that the student usually prefers his heroes to be visible and practical, jumping and fighting about on the athletic field, much as certain persons prefer to hear a big orchestra, the players in which can be seen sawing and blowing and perspiring, rather than to listen to mysterious, sweet, but unseen music. Some day strong college leaders will rise up to champion college journalism and college reading as to-day they fight for athletics. ”

“ How shall our colleges assist American [182] youth to secure the art of relaxation and to obtain the ability to relieve the tension of the workaday world by beneficial and delightful relief from business strain? Such gifts will often be the chief assets of a college man’s training. Business men, and professional men, too, frequently reach middle life with no interest outside their specialties. When business is over, life is a blank. There are no eager voices of pleasant pursuits calling them away from the common round and routine tasks. It is too late to form habits. ”

“ The club-book of an Eastern university, for example, records the existence at that institution of ninety different social organizations, the object of most of them being to bring men together [113-115] sociably. Such intermingling is vital for college friendship. It is true, as former Dean Henry P. Wright of Yale has said, that, to a student, a friend is a “fellow whom you know all about, and still like,” and for that reason the social organizations which bring men together in an intimacy closer than is found anywhere else are indispensable aids in the formation of lasting friendships. ”

“ The average American graduate rarely needs Emerson’s advice for a lazy boy, which was, “Set a dog on him, send him West, do something to him.”
College training must give a man permanent idealism. Too often the graduate is inclined to fall into the line of march. He begins to worry and to lose his attractive gaiety and buoyancy. His habits of thought and study are soon buried beneath the myriad details of business life or nervous pleasures. He becomes anxious about things that never happen. His anxiety about future happenings or results takes his mind from present efficiency. ”

“ When in an impressive silence the father is allowed the unspeakable honor of being introduced to the captain of the foot-ball team, the autocrat of the undergraduate world, the real object of college education becomes increasingly a tangle in the father’s mind. As a plain business man with droll humor expressed his feelings recently, after escaping from a dozen or more collegians who had been talking athletics to him, “I felt like a merchant marine without ammunition, being fired into by a pirate ship until I should surrender.” ”

“ Even in freshman and sophomore years the arrangement of studies is often left to the choice of the immature student. In one of our oldest universities there is at present only one prescribed course of study. For the rest, the students are allowed to choose at their own sweet will, and their choice, while dictated by a variety of motives, is influenced in no small degree by the preponderance of emphasis, both in buildings and faculty, upon technical education. Students are left to flounder about in their selection of courses, guided neither by curriculum nor life purpose. ”

“ The struggle on the athletic-field has meaning not simply to a few men who take part, but to every student on the side-lines, while the pulsating hundreds who sing and cheer their team to victory think only of the real effort of their college to produce successful achievement. ”

“ Every prosperous institution now gives sufficient opportunity for the acquirement of knowledge and training. Apart from the prestige which the name of a large and well-known university or college gives to its graduates in after life, the difference between the values imparted by scores of American institutions is not considerable. There are at least a hundred institutions in America sufficiently well equipped to give a boy the foundation of mental training that a college education is intended to supply. ”

“ When we fail to make the student realize that the best literature of the world is interesting, why should we wonder that the student’s literary realm is invaded by the pseudo-psychological novel, the humanly human though indelicate memoirs which tend frequently to keep the mind in the low and morbid levels? ”

“ They may search for their answer in the lecture-room, on the parade-ground, in the hurlyburly of college comradeships, in the competitive life of college contests, or even in the hard, self-effacing labors [47] of the student who works his way through college. While, indeed, it may seem to many that the highest wisdom and the finest culture still linger, one must believe that the main tendencies in the life of American undergraduates are toward the discovery of and devotion to the highest truth—the truth of nature and the truth of God. ”

“ Student theory operates in a real world—a world where contact is not so marked with creeds and laws as with virile movements and living men. The undergraduate is enamoured of a gospel of action. To him “deeds are mightier things than words” are. His spirit slumbers under sermons and lectures upon dogma and description, but rises with an heroic call to give money, time, and life for vital college or world enterprises. ”

“ For, after all, the contribution of the college to the world is often one which cannot be fully analyzed. It is not discovered in a thorough knowledge of a curriculum or in the statistics of athletics any more than a foreign country is discovered in a guide-book or in a hasty recital of its industries. There is no master word to express what a college career [199] may mean or should mean to American youth who in years of high impression experience with a multitude of their fellows. ”

“ The college undergraduate likewise is often uncertain about what he is to do with his profession beyond making a living with it. Our colleges, with their technical training, should give the conviction that a physician in a [62] community is more than a medical practitioner. His success as a physician brings with it an obligation of interest and leadership in all of the social, civic, and philanthropic movements of the town or city in which he works. He should discover in college that he is to be more than a doctor; that he is to be also a man and a citizen. ”

“ He found “that athletic contests do not promote friendly feeling and mutual respect between the colleges, but quite the contrary; that they attract an undesirable set of students; that they lower the standard of honor and honesty; that they corrupt faculties and officials; that they cultivate the mob mind; that they divert the attention of the students from their proper work; and pervert the ends of education.” And all these cumulative calamities arrive, according to Professor Slosson, because of the grand stand, because people are watching foot-ball games and competitive athletics. ”