College man

“ I was told a college man could succeed better than a man without a trained mind. I found the educated men advancing beyond me in position and salary, even though younger, at the office where I worked. I always looked up to college men and women, as to my elders, with a certain respect and admiration for their superiority—derived as I believed from their college course. ”

“ College isn't the Elysium that it is painted in stories and novels, but I feel sorry for any intelligent man who didn't have the opportunity to go to college. There is something beautiful about one's college days, something that one treasures all his life. As we grow older, we forget the hours of storm and stress, the class-room humiliations, the terror of examinations, the awful periods of doubt of God and man—we forget everything but athletic victories, long discussions with friends, campus sings, fraternity life, moonlight on the campus, and everything that is romantic. ”

“ Probably the man who keeps at work at the business he is going to follow through life, during the years when other men are studying in college, acquires more information that will be "useful" to him in his practical career. But the college man who has not thrown away his college life comes from the training of his alma mater with a mind as highly disciplined as are the wrist and eye of the skilled swordsman. ”

“ At that the old graduate laughed with much amusement: "So you think I have been worrying about the college, do you? You really think that you, little man, are of sufficient consequence to cause anxiety for the university? Princeton certainly is changed in many ways—many things are much better than when I was in college; we did not have that magnificent library, nor such athletic facilities, nor the honor system, nor many advantages that you have. Yes, many things are much better than when I was in college, but you do not happen to be one of them. ”

“ President Wolsey, head of a great university, said that one of the chief purposes of the college is to cultivate the power to think. The college man who neglects to cultivate this valuable power until he enters upon his college career, instead of beginning it in the kindergarten and continuing it unremittingly throughout his entire preparatory course and daily living, will be liable to make sorry work of this part of his cultivation, or any other part, while he is in college. ”

“ 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. ”

“ If a college man has used the opportunities offered by the faculty, he has acquired a wide knowledge of history and a broad view of public affairs. If he has utilized the opportunities offered by his fellow-students, he has acquired the democratic spirit, has gotten a grip upon public opinion, and has had considerable experience in dealing with a large variety of men. ”

“ To the modern era of literary productiveness the college man, at least while in college, seems to be a comparatively small contributor. The best men are needed to make college journalism popular, for deep within most students’ hearts is a love for real literature ”

“ True college spirit is found in the man whose heart has warmed to the love of his college, whose eyes have caught the vision of the ideals that the college possesses, whose brain has thought over and understood these ideals until they have become very fibre of his being. This man will yell not for the selfish pleasure of wallowing in sentimentality, but for the solid glory of his college ”

“ He further estimates that one college man in every forty attains recognition, to one in every ten thousand non-college men; and a college-bred man has 250 times the chance of attaining recognition that the non-college man has. ”

“ Taking a survey of all the college men I know, and have known, I cannot be sure that the addition of a college education makes much difference in the end. The man who succeeds with a college degree would have succeeded without it. It is personality that counts. Character rules the world, be it educated at college or in the gutter.
I passed into my second year in the following spring, and then in turn from sophomore to third year without distinction, without disgrace or notable incident. I learned to smoke and began to shave, and believed myself to be a thoroughly sophisticated youth. ”

“ Moreover, I am inclined to believe that the very difficulties belonging to the triumph of our great cause constitute ground for its closer relationship to the college man. The college man wishes, as well as needs, a hard job. The easy task, the rosy opportunity, makes no appeal. ”

“ There is something in the very atmosphere of a university that seems to engender refined thoughts and noble feelings; and lamentable indeed must be the state of any young man who can pass through the three years of his college residence, and bring away no higher aims, no worthier purposes, no better thoughts, from all the holy associations which have been crowded around him. ”

“ These things, however, are all dependent upon the spirit of the actor, upon his vision, his determination, his ambitious and unflagging attempts. The true modern university contributes to the world a great-minded and a great-hearted man, to whom college [200] life has been a soul’s birth as well as a mind’s awakening. ”

“ Our elders tell us that the work of the college serves to broaden our horizon by changing our perspective; but the college, to the man who has never supported himself, will not mean a revelation to the world’s activities in their most true and real form. After graduating from college a man will find that he has awakened in a real world in which men are bearing responsibilities, and will realize that in every phase of life the world is calling for men who have had the most experience, who have received the strength which comes only from carrying a load. ”

“ A man must live with himself. He must be a good companion for himself. A college graduate, whatever his specialty, should be able to spend an evening apart from the crowd. The theater, the automobile, the lobster-palace, were never intended to be the chief end of collegiate education. A college course should give the undergraduate tastes, temperament, and habits of reading. A graduate who studies to be a specialist in any line needs also the education which will give him depth, background, and the historical [63] significance of civilization and life in general. ”

“ The problem of who is to blame, the president or the alumni, is like the ancient question: “Which comes first, the hen or the egg?” The president makes the alumni, and the alumni make the president, and the vicious circle continues ad infinitum. The alumnus who counts is the “successful son,” and he values in his college those qualities which have enabled him to succeed. The college is to him a place where he can be sure of having his son made into the same admirable thing he knows himself to be. The college is an insurance agency for the business and social prosperity of his progeny. ”

“ I know it, but the average college graduate, I repeat, has loftier ideals and is less materialistic than the average man who has not gone to college. I wish that I could believe that the college gives him those ideals. I can't, however. The colleges draw the best that society has to offer; therefore, they graduate the best. ”

“ The business man who never enjoyed the advantage of going to college, is puzzled as he witnesses the demonstration of undergraduate life, and he fails to catch the meaning; he does not understand; it has played no part in his own experience; college customs seem absurd to him, and he fails to appreciate that in these traditions our American college spirit finds expression. ”

“ The student through college is a traveler, sometimes examining in detail, sometimes superficially. He gives a glance and remembers; he takes notes and thinks closely. He sees the all-surrounding regions of knowledge, and although he may make but slight researches in particular lines, he knows where to return in the after years for deeper research and ampler knowledge.
7. College life leads to self-discovery. It tests a man’s powers, and reveals to him his weakness. ”

“ While the academic sideshow of lectures and recitations is getting itself started in halting fashion, the freshman is in the fierce struggle and joy of real college life. As free of conventional wrappings as nature made him, he is paraded and tubbed in open daylight around faculty lawns and by campus houses, and whiles away the forenoon in stunts which teach him his place some more and further his initiation into that innermost, sacredest circle, the knights of the college tradition. Since nothing can be done unless you get student sentiment behind it, the faculty sits in helpless inactivity ”

“ He's from a large prep. school near by, and has learned a great many things about college life, a course which is not taught by the masters or laid down in the curriculum. He is an athlete and a promising career for him is already outlined, in theory, but look out! A little prominence is a dangerous thing. In Freshman year a man's position is given to him by his reputation; in Senior year he takes his proper place with his character. What a man seems to be cuts lots of ice at first; but what he really is wins out at the finish.
Ah, here is an upper-classman—of a certain sort. ”

“ He wishes to see the college boards ornamented with long lists of men distinguished in their later career; to turn out men whose portraits may be hung in the college hall; and naturally thinks of it as a personal injury, or, which is the same thing, as an injury to the college, if some man of genius fails to obtain tangible honours. ”

“ A young man who came to Harvard with eighty cents in his pocket, and worked his way through, never a high scholar, and now in a business which looks very commonplace, told me the other day that he would not care to be alive if he had not gone to college. ”

“ Let the foundation which precedes your special or professional training be as broad as it lies within your power to make it.
If you specialize rigidly in the early years, you may a little later change your purpose in life and find yourself handicapped by the former narrow outlook. The college is a place where many a fellow finds himself for the first time, and the fellow he finds is oftentimes another and perhaps a better man than the one he had planned for in the earlier years. ”

“ The college-trained man, who enters hisPage 192 vocation in life as a vigorous, virtuous and capable being, equipped with facts and principles as the propelling power of life, will wield the greatest influence for good. He will be fortified for the battles of life, and able to maintain himself in honest independence.
The college offers another safeguard to the student by conserving scholarly tastes and habits. The student who acquires a literary taste is never at a loss to know how he may best employ his time. ”

“ The favorite gibe of the self-made man is directed against the college graduate. Let there be a young fellow present who is fresh from college, and let him mention any subject connected with college life, from honors to athletics, and then, if you are hostess, sit still and let the icy waves of misery creep over your sensitive soul, for this is the opportunity of his life to the self-made man. ”

“ And then on Commencement Day when the seniors plant their class ivy—that is a token to remain behind them and flourish long after they are out in the wide, wide world.
College tradition makes it possible for a poor boy to get an education. The poor fellow may wait on the table, where sit many rich men's sons, but they may be all chums with him; they are on the same footing; the campus of one is the campus of the other, and all you can say is "It is just the way of things—just the way it must be." More power to the man who works his way through college. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Other men are soon shaken into place. Their personal traits continually undergo a process of chiselling and adjustment. They are told uncomfortable things how quickly! At the club, in the university, in the market, the ploughing-field, the counting-room, they rub up against each other, and no mercy is shown by man to man until primary signs of crudeness are worn off. Let a conceited professor get in a college chair! Watch a hundred students begin their delightful and salutary process of "taking him down" by the sort of mirth in which college boys excel! ”

“ Whatever degrees you carry from school or college, whatever distinction you may acquire in your career, no title will ever mean quite so much, will ever be quite so noble, as that of gentleman.
"A keen and sure sense of honor," says Ex-President Eliot, of Harvard University, "is the finest result of college life." The graduate who has not acquired this keen and sure sense of honor, this thing that stamps the gentleman, misses the best thing that a college education can impart. ”