College student

“ While in the seventies the college student knew every man in his class, in the large institution to-day an undergraduate will meet in the college yard scores of classmates who are perfect strangers, and to whom he has no more idea of speaking than to persons whom he has never seen before. The student who has been brought up always to dine in a dinner-coat will have for his table-companions men who have never owned a dress-coat and who see no immediate prospect of needing one.
The influx of foreign students has added to the cosmopolitan life of American institutions. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 ”

“ College days are regarded by most educated men as the cream of their lives, sweet with excellent flavor. They are not dull and tame even, to the most devoted student, and this is a volume filled with the pure cream of such existence, and many ‘a college joke to cure the dumps’ is given. ”

“ And until a boy has once had the exhilarating adventure of standing, even with shaking knees, on his own feet intellectually he does not know what college is about. It is no wonder that the incidental amusements seem to him most vital.
You can lead a boy to lectures, but you cannot make him think—at least, not often by this, the easiest of all methods of instruction. It is possible for a student to graduate from almost any college without an original idea in his head. ”

“ It is now fashionable to go to college, at least to some colleges, and the attractions of college life and companionship are powerful motives in leading young men to strive to surmount the barrier of college admission. This new type of college student, whether he knows it or not, goes to college primarily for a social, not for an intellectual, purpose. ”

“ It’s hardly a college since it has no student body nor faculty. Rather, both are one at the haven. Anyone admitted is a scholar or potential scholar anxious to devote himself to learning. I mean for its own sake. ”

“ One other feature of undergraduate life cannot be overlooked; viz., student self-government. The college student today is two or three years older than was his predecessor of fifty or sixty years ago. Moreover, with the great increase in the number of students has come a parallel increase in complexity of administration and in the duties of the college professor. Finally, a sounder psychology has taught the wisdom of placing in the hands of the students the control of many activities which they can supervise better than the faculty. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Their eyes are upon the stadium rather than upon the library; the delights of scholarship influence them less than ambition for leadership and the importance of “making good” in student affairs. They are in college for “popular” reasons, and too often fail to learn how to think. But they are eager, versatile, adaptable, with a ready capacity for social adjustment and modern expression. ”

“ To the college student it serves as a stimulus, an inspiration, an ideal to show him that in his daily routine of class room work he is only laying a foundation on which to build and with which he may begin the higher intellectual life, may start out for himself to read, to investigate and in time reduce to consistent and articulated form the results of his own weeks and months not to say years of patient toil in the great libraries. ”

“ The student who goes to college to become a hermit, not touching elbows with his college mates and developing no interests through hearing music, attending lectures on varied subjects, seeing nothing of the great busy world about him, misses a vital factor of college life. ”

“ Here is the “real thing” in a girl’s college story. Older authors can invent situations and supply excellently written general delineations of character, but all lack the vital touch of this work of a bright young recent graduate of a well-known college for women, who has lost none of the enthusiasm felt as a student. Every activity of a popular girl’s first year is woven into a narrative, photographic in its description of a life that calls into play most attractive qualities, while at the same time severely testing both character and ability. ”

“ While she is still a student a girl's service to her school lies largely in her daily work, the mental muscle she puts into all that she does in the classroom and studies out of it. If because of her and a multiple of many girls like her, the college does not possess that sine qua non of all the higher mental life, an intellectual atmosphere, it is the student's and her multiple's fault. ”

“ A student goes to college not merely in order to cram himself with bare facts, but to be trained in the habit of seeing men and things in the abundance of their relations, of asking for their passports before granting them free passage. ”

“ OF all the influences molding secondary education in the United States at the present time, among the most powerful are the college entrance examinations. To the schoolmaster they seem to embody in tangible form the object of his efforts; to the student they form a barrier that must be cleared, interposed as they are between him and that fascinating interplay of social, athletic and perhaps scholarly activities, called college life. ”

“ In a large university, the demand upon the teacher for more work than he should rightfully undertake, the ever-increasing interest of the student in college affairs, with many other influences, are constantly presented as difficulties in the way of the teacher’s close relationship with the student. ”

“ For I have heard it said by those who have to do with college discipline that their alumni are no longer invariably distinguished by 'a gentle nature and studious habits'--qualities for which, as the Warden of Merton says, colleges were originally intended to provide a welcome haven of rest, and which are now the especial and gratifying characteristics of that whilom roisterer and boon companion, the Unattached Student. ”

“ A story by an anonymous writer which “gives us a singularly intimate view of what we think must be a unique element in American college life. It presents the life of the small college from the standpoint, not of the student, nor of the professor, nor of the graduate, nor of the outsider, but of the Faculty family that has lived all its days on the college campus.” (Bookm.) “The plot is simple, the incidents 177those of the narrow round of life in a small college, the theme the old-fashioned one of love, but the book is saturated with life.” (Outlook.) ”

“ If the student got little from his mates, he got little more from his masters. The four years passed at college were, for his purposes, wasted. Harvard College was a good school, but at bottom what the boy disliked most was any school at all. He did not want to be one in a hundred--one per cent of an education. He regarded himself as the only person for whom his education had value, and he wanted the whole of it. ”

“ 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. ”

“ To put it bluntly, the Working Men’s College was founded to turn out gentlemen in the truest and best sense of the term, and it is turning them out, according to the original sample, to the present time.
To take one among numberless examples which might be given of the College spirit, I call to mind an old student who was a very great favourite with us all and a constant attendant at the College, until age and infirmity limited the number of his visits. ”

“ College students have always shown a more or less marked tendency to form themselves into societies. ”

“ College man and the college woman. **$1.50. Houghton.
“A book especially for “people” who are concerned, either as parents or teachers or simply as good citizens, with college students. It provokes sympathy with the undergraduate’s point of view; it explains persuasively what it is in college life that makes it worth while; it subjects the college to the tests that the man of plain mind applies without sophistry, and shows how the college does, or ought to, meet those tests; it puts into intelligible language the educational ideals of the enlightened college teacher and administrator ”

“ Higher in the social and intellectual scale, and infinitely more serious in their ambitions, are the girl students of our various colleges. As their numbers increase, and their superior training becomes less and less a matter of theory, and more and more a matter of course, these students will combine at least a portion of their present earnestness with the healthy commonplace rationality of college men. ”

“ Yet in spite of this I have sometimes thought that in college more than elsewhere the old law holds, "To him that hath shall be given and he shall have abundance, but from him who hath not shall be taken away even that which he seemeth to have." For it is the young life which is open and prepared to receive which obtains the gracious and uplifting influences of college days. What, then, for such persons are the rich and abiding rewards of study in college or university? ”

“ I'm only telling you kid stories, for you are still a good deal of a kid, though a pseudo-college man. You can draw morals from them or not as best meets your requirements. You know your requirements better than I do. You aren't so bad—in fact, you have behaved yourself pretty well—for a Freshman—better than I anticipated in some respects. But you still have a lot to learn about being a college man. So I am just telling you about college men and college kids I have known. ”

“ The students have given us their own word for it that College Life is more important that college studies; but Professor Gayley of the University of California calls this worshiping the idol of Incidental Issues. ”

“ Leaders in the stirring world of to-day return at each commencement to share the fresh life of the new class. Books, pictures, music, collections, appliances in every field, learned teachers, mirthful friends, athletics for holidays, the best words of the best men for holy days,—all are here. No wonder that men look back upon their college life as upon halcyon days, the romantic period of youth. ”

“ It may be that for many men four years of undergraduate life are not sufficient to make a college impress deep, or, to appearances, lasting; but if in any measure it is real, that influence must tell, not only on the years immediately succeeding, but through the whole of life. ”

“ If I took one of these college positions and proved efficient, and had good luck, I should keep on knowing all the rest of my life about the same sort of people, for the girls who go to college are from the more fortunate classes. ”

“ 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. ”

“ A hint of friendly patronage crept into the manner of the junior. “My dear chap, college isn't worth doing at all unless you do it right. You're here to get in with the best fellows and to make connections that will help you later. ”