Bowdoin College

“ The thousand dollars handed to you is a first payment of six thousand that she will give to the college in aid of the fund now in progress of collection; and she directs that the Lawrence Academy, at Groton, may be allowed to send one scholar each year to Bowdoin College, to be carried through the four years without charge for instruction; and that, whenever the trustees of the academy do not supply a pupil, the college may fill the place. ”

“ In addition to these students in the South, Negroes have attended Northern colleges for many years. As early as 1826 one was graduated from Bowdoin College, and from that time till to-day nearly every year has seen elsewhere, other such graduates. They have, of course, met much color prejudice. Fifty years ago very few colleges would admit them at all. Even to-day no Negro has ever been admitted to Princeton, and at some other leading institutions they are rather endured than encouraged. ”

“ Class suppers are given in some colleges at the close of each year; in others, only at the close of the Sophomore and Senior years, or at one of these periods.
CLASS TREES. At Bowdoin College, "immediately after the annual examination of each class," says a correspondent, "the members that compose it are accustomed to form a ring round a tree, and then, not dance, but run around it. So quickly do they revolve, that every individual runner has a tendency 'to go off in a tangent,' which it is difficult to resist for any length of time. ”

“ He was graduated at Bowdoin college in 1822, was tutor there in 1825-'27, and from 1827 to 1833 professor of mathematics and teacher of modern languages in Phillips Exeter academy. He then taught a school for young ladies in Boston, and subsequently became principal of the high school in Beverly, Mass. ”

“ Emerson's "Nature" and Hawthorne's "Mosses" should have been written in the same little room in the Old Manse at Concord. It gives one a sense of how small New England was then, and in how narrow a runway genius went. Bowdoin College in those days was a little country school on the edge of the Maine wilderness, only twenty years old, its few buildings almost literally planted down among the pine stumps. Hawthorne's class—1825—graduated but thirty-seven strong. And yet Hawthorne and Longfellow were not intimate in college but belonged to different sets. ”

“ Pleasant is his memory, and pleasant is the thought of meeting him in a better world." While at Andover he had leisure for reading, and that part of it which he devoted to Ecclesiastical History had an important influence as it turned out, in deciding his future ecclesiastical connection.
At the Commencement of Bowdoin College, in 1820, he was appointed tutor. He taught the Junior class in Natural Philosophy, and Locke's Essay on the Human Understanding, and the Sophomore class in Geometry and some other parts of Mathematics, and in Logic. ”

“ Even if we throw out the figures for 1900—which represent, as explained above, all the available data from the colleges that in 1890-99 furnished over 81 per cent, of all graduates—the trend is still unmistakably upwards.
Concerning the influences that have been instrumental in causing the marked rise in the median or average age of graduation in certain colleges in our list, it is not possible to speak with certainty for all. In the case of one or two, such as New York University and Bowdoin College, it would seem that the rise is due to an increase in the requirements for admission. ”

“ I know young men who worked their way through college who are to-day its benefactors. I worked my way through college with a narrow axe, and when I was hard up for money, I used to set the college fence afire and burn it up, and the treasurer would hire me to build another one. Let the young man who has to help himself thank God, keep his powder dry, and take to his bosom the old motto: “Per angusta ad augusta.”
[Pg 297]
AT CENTENNIAL CELEBRATION OF BOWDOIN COLLEGE, JUNE 28, 1894
My love, Mr. President, for this college was inherited. ”

“ The students at Tech are bitter about the way their athletes are bought or stolen—they haven’t as much money as Princeton. Another all-around athlete was not allowed to run by Tech, but this did not worry him very much—because he had such a handsome offer from Bowdoin!
To get a famous athlete is the only way these little colleges know to “put themselves on the map.” They make desperate efforts, and sometimes the results are comical. For example, in Kentucky is a little religious institution known as Center College. ”

“ Bowdoin (Maine) gets but 47% of its students from the city, but returns 70%; The University of Kansas receives but 44% of its students from cities, yet contributes to cities three-fourths of its graduates; while Whitman (Wn.) [Pg 227] receives but 40% from the city yet returns 80%. Hillsdale (Mich.) , a country college with a fine spirit of service, does better; receiving 95% of its students from small towns and villages, it returns all but 26%. “Practically all” the students at Adelbert College (Ohio) enter city work on graduation, though 30% of them are country bred. ”

“ A university is an assemblage of schools, as our government is an assemblage of states. In England, different corporations, giving substantially similar instruction, are brought together by a common body which confers the degrees. In this country, a group of professional schools—law, medicine, theology, and science—are associated through one governing body with the college proper, that is, with the candidates for the B.A. degree. In this useful sense, Tufts and Bowdoin are universities ”

“ Whittier (1807–1892) stands in decided contrast both in upbringing and in career with the other great New England contemporaries. All the rest were college men, graduates of either Bowdoin or Harvard between 1821 and 1838, and all were familiar from youth with the world of books. Whittier was a farm boy, sprung from untutored farming stock, and in the way of formal schooling had only two terms at Haverhill Academy, paid for with his own hard earnings. ”

“ Bowdoin was a224 little college and Brunswick a village. The young professor was ambitious. In his own phrase, he wanted a stage on which he could ‘take longer strides and speak to a larger audience.’ At one time he thought of buying the Round Hill School, and visited Northampton to look over the ground. Fortune had something better in store for him. Ticknor was about to resign the chair of modern languages at Harvard, and proposed as his successor Longfellow, whose translation of the Coplas of Manrique (1833) had attracted his notice. ”

“ Very soon I saw the trouble was not with Yale, the trouble was with the young man. He had mentally dwelt on some trivial slights until he had gotten so out of harmony with the place that he had lost the power to derive any benefit from it. Yale college is not a perfect institution—a fact, I suppose, that President Hadley and most Yale men are quite willing to admit; but Yale does supply young men certain advantages, and it depends upon the students whether they will avail themselves of these advantages or not. If you are a student in college, seize upon the good that is there. ”

“ The young boy received his first instruction at the hands of the mother of the well-known John Neal, of Portland, and after passing beyond her skill in teaching, attended the public schools. Being unusually bright, he learned with great rapidity, entered Bowdoin when less than fifteen, and graduated in the class of 1829. ”

“ The multiplication of such institutions, the increase in number of students, and the confusion of professional and trade schools have robbed the familiar phrases of their meanings. To a far greater degree than we realize, the liberal arts and sciences have themselves disappeared and what remains of them has been confused in the minds of administrators and teachers as well as in the minds of the people, all of whom now need the education that the liberal college should provide. ”

“ He never spared himself. He forgot himself, but he never forgot the college. His works do follow him. These works which remain with us are the strong and united faculty which he organized, and which he inspired with his own high ideals, the noble standard of scholarship to which he elevated the curriculum, the beautiful campus, which is a wonder of improvement when we contrast it with what it was when his hands first touched it, and the example of industry and energy which his life has furnished. ”

“ Boynton, chaplain of the House of Representatives, is President of the Board of Trustees.
St. Lawrence University, Canton, N.Y., a university still very young, graduates both men and women, on precisely the same conditions. Civil engineering [381] and political economy are the only optional studies with the women. It reports one theological student. Lombard University, Galesburg, Ill., does the same; but I know nothing of its standard of scholarship. It is only within the last year that I have been able to visit the most conspicuous colleges in this country in which women are taught with men. ”

“ After having held so long without a rival the sceptre of the sciences and literature, it was grating to its members to relinquish it. They could ill bear to see set above it an establishment evidently intended to direct and guide it. Self-love offended seldom forgives, especially when it is animated by the esprit de corps. The University depreciated the new college, and endeavoured to fetter it in a thousand ways. At last, those dark intrigues being constantly smothered by the applause which the professors received, the University finished by bringing them before a court of justice. ”

“ In some cases they take the student into the graduate school before he has graduated from college, and in some engineering schools, graduate physics, chemistry, biology, and medicine, they have imposed heavy pre-professional requirements on the liberal college. In effect, they ask the liberal college to anticipate professional work. ”

“ The first ten years of the institution were marked by a singularly rapid growth, considering the fact that they included the darkest days of the Civil war, when nearly every male student was drawn from the college halls to the service of his country. At the end of the decade the faculty numbered eight professors and instructors, and 375 students were enrolled, fifty-one of whom were in college classes, the largest enrollment of collegiate students in the state, unless at the State University. ”

“ It should be recalled that it was for the purpose of introducing and assimilating the laboratory that Eliot of Harvard opened the liberal college to the elective system. The hope was that the college would provide the conditions and the techniques for the liberalizing and humanizing of science. The present disorganization of our colleges is evidence that the problem is not yet solved. It is of utmost importance that it be solved. ”

“ A great number hold the degrees of other Universities—of those older Universities from which our own has received so many signs of kindly and ready sympathy, or of that great examining University without which much of the educational progress of the last half-century—without which such progress as was made within the walls of Owens College, would itself have lacked its trustworthiest tests. ”

“ We have not all of a university when we have men and buildings, money, students, brains. Back of a university there lies its foundation-idea, that of academic control.
What is academic rule? It is rule over the pride of man. A college is a place whose chief power is to inculcate humility by the means of true learning; to establish intellectual honor and integrity by searching out the ways of God in nature, science, and philosophy, and in letters and in art.
It is the primary work of a university to make men humble. The Freshman is not teachable. The Sophomore is an intellectual upstart. ”

“ But it seems to me that Yale College has been fortunate in having had, during the last forty years, three men singularly great in special scholarship, yet all very wide in their attainments, and all notably simple and unaffected. I mean President Woolsey, Professor Hadley, and Professor Whitney. It is a great thing for the traditions of a college, for the influence exerted on its successive classes of students, to have such men as their models, as the objects of their admiration. ”

“ For thirty years I have been Warden; and in that charge has been all my pride. I have had no thought but for this great College, its honour and prosperity. More than once lately have I asked myself whether my eyes were growing dim, my hand less steady. ‘No’ was my answer, and again ‘No.’ And thus it is that I have lingered on to let Judas be struck down from its high eminence, shamed in the eyes of England—a College for ever tainted, and of evil omen.” He raised his head. “The disgrace to myself is nothing. ”

“ The result is that the student now must make a vocational choice at some point in his secondary education and changes it later only at great educational risk. One thing he cannot choose because it does not exist in our educational system: that is a balanced liberal education.
This situation, as soon as it is recognized, constitutes a crisis, a point where judgment and decision can be made. We can choose to restore the liberal arts, not necessarily the old curriculum, but a modern equivalent. That is what St. John's College decided to do in 1937. ”

“ With parents and relatives making sacrifices and determined to give my sister and me the opportunity to gain a higher education, and with the encouragement of friends, I have attained, and my sister will attain next June, a college education.
It is worth the effort a thousand times. The spirit 193 of the University of Wyoming is greatly in favor of students helping themselves. The leaders in social life, athletics, and in every phase of the life of the University are wide-awake young men and women who are willing to help themselves. ”