College

“ College sits in excelsis. The topmost turn of the educational system, it sets the standards and defines the ideal both of knowledge and conduct. Secondary-school students consequently prepare for college in a far completer way than is recognized. They emulate and reproduce the whole pattern and structure of “college life,” with its fraternities and other societies, its athletics, its hidden sex interests, and all the rest. ”

“ If the American college is to have a part in that new educational movement which is beginning to make the school not merely a preparation for life but life itself, interested in what has meaning to the student at his particular age and situation, it will have to recast some of its most cherished practices and ideals. ”

“ In the American college that I know most intimately about four hundred students are received annually from the secondary schools and other colleges. About one hundred and fifty are graduated every June. Of the graduates, seventy or seventy-five return as teachers to the schools. The secondary school affords the college, therefore, one of its most important points of social contact. It is largely through the high schools and academies, which in turn influence the grades, that the college makes its culture tell on the lives of the poor and common people, from whom the majority of us are sprung. ”

“ "It is, sir, as I have said, a small college. And yet there are those who love it." ”

“ The term "college" can be properly used only of an institution which offers training in the liberal arts and sciences to youth who have completed a standard secondary school course of study. The purpose of college teaching is to lay the foundation for intelligent and effective specialization later on, to open the mind to new interpretations and new understandings both of man and of nature, and to give instruction in those standards of judgment and appreciation, the possession and application of which are the marks of the truly educated and cultivated man. ”

“ Then pick your college. That is as important a matter as choosing your occupation in life. One college is not as good as another for you. A score of colleges may be equally excellent in the ability of their faculties, in the perfection of their equipment.
But each has its own atmosphere and traditions; each has its personality, if you may apply such a word to an institution. And you want to select the place where your mental roots will strike in the earth most readily, and take from the intellectual soil surrounding you the greatest possible amount of mental force and vigor. ”

“ If, beside opportunity, the college can furnish also the inspiration which shall make opportunity precious and fruitful, its work is accomplished. The college that fulfils these two conditions—opportunity and inspiration—will be a success, will draw to itself the frequency of youth, the patronage of wealth, the consensus of all the good. Such a university, and no other, will be a power in the land. ”

“ In this new American usage, a college is a place where undergraduates are trained, and a university is a place where graduate-students are guided in research. Thus the college gives breadth, and the university adds depth. Thus the college provides general culture and the university provides the opportunity of specialization. If we accept this distinction,—and it has been accepted by all those who discuss the higher education in America,—we are forced to admit that the most of the self-styled universities of this country should be called colleges ”

“ The old New England college: the representative college of olden days, injected a love of books and the wisdom of books in their students: reams of the classic poets and prose writers: encyclopædic furnishings of the mind with the contents of a few good, stimulating books. Those were the hey-days of pure scholarship. They have existed here: but we students, today, are illustrations of an evolution in educational ideals, even if most of us [370] don’t seem to realize it. We represent the changed temper of higher education. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The colleges no longer promote the researches of science, or direct professional study. Here and there college walls may shelter an occasional student, but not in larger proportions than may be found in private life. Elementary teaching of youths under twenty is now the only function performed by the university, and almost the only object of college endowments. Colleges were homes for the life-study of the highest and most abstruse parts of knowledge. ”

“ In order to particularize some of the distinctive features of the American college, we need to understand our educational system as a whole. We start with the public school and impart to the youth a primary education. In the high school or academy the pupil is introduced into a higher circle of thought and life and then passes on to the college, where the aim is to extend general culture and prepare for special work. The educational system culminates in the university, which is devoted chiefly to technical and professional education. ”

“ Neither does the worldly spirit that pervades the gentlemen's college further the university's interest in scholarship, nor do the university's scholarly interests further the college work in gentility. ”

“ Thus the college for ten days: the better students moderately calm, the others cramming information into aching heads, drinking unbelievable quantities of coffee, sitting up, many of them, all night, attending seminars or tutoring sessions, working for long hours in the library, finally taking the examination, only to start a new nerve-racking grind in preparation for the next one. ”

“ It was only natural that the 'gentle natures and studious habits' of a select band of learners should undergo some modification as college after college was founded, and comparative frivolity would from time to time obtain admission to the sacred precincts. The University became the resort of wealth and rank, as well as of mere intellect, and the gradual influx of commoners--still more, of 'gentlemen commoners'--once for all determined the character of colleges as places of serious and uninterrupted study. ”

“ We have seen how the college removes the young man from the parental influences from his eighteenth to twenty-second years, and places him in a new, small, and academic world of special ideals which is centred around some beautiful college yard. We have seen how two things happen in these years; on the one hand, he is prepared for his future occupation, especially if he is to enter a professional faculty of the university, and on the other he receives a broad, humanitarian training. ”

“ The social tone of the University was excellent. Many of the tutors and of the undergraduates came of good families, and the struggle for life, or for a college living, or college office, was not, as yet, so fierce as it became afterwards. College tutors toiled on for life, and certainly did their work to the last most conscientiously. ”

“ What the University Can Do.—An increasing number of young people from the country are going to college. The college was founded on the principle of educating American youth in a higher culture than local elementary schools could provide. It is the function of the college and the university to open wider vistas for the individual mind than is otherwise possible, to do on an infinitely larger scale what the teacher is attempting in the elementary grades. These higher schools are passing through a humanizing process; they are making more of the social sciences and the art of living well ”

“ Such, however, has been the growth of the sciences and advancement in the methods of teaching, that in our modern schools for superior instruction the well-equipped college has a decided advantage over those with meager appliances.
Likewise, select a college where the life and esprit de corps is the very best. The college is not an exercising ground for the intellect alone, but a place for inspiring ideas and aims. These are the soul of college life. They are more important than college buildings, endowment or libraries. ”

“ 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. ”

“ When I speak of the College Tutor, it must not be supposed that one man is equal to all this work in a large college,—Trinity, for instance, which usually numbers four hundred Undergraduates in residence. A large college has usually two Tutors,—Trinity has three,—and the students are equally divided among them,—on their sides, the phrase is,—without distinction of year, or, as we should call it, of class. ”

“ No, the college cannot be, should not try to be, a substitute for the hospital, reformatory or kindergarten. To do its best work it should be organized for the strong, not for the weak; for the high-minded, self-controlled, generous, and courageous spirits, not for the indifferent, the dull, the idle, or those who are already forming their characters on the amusement theory of life. ”

“ Undergraduate life is now likewise influenced by the influx of students who are not the sons of college men, but who come from homes the chief ideals of which have been derived from counting-rooms and laboratories, from brokers’ and railroad offices. These students, scions of a property-getting class, in conjunction with the social and the scientific students in college, help to change the classical traditions. They emphasize the campus side of college life more than that of the lecture-room. ”

“ Training for citizenship and the preparation of the scholar are then the twofold function of the college. To furnish professional training for lawyers, doctors, ministers, engineers, librarians, is manifestly the work of the university or the technical school, and not the function of the college. Neither is it, in my opinion, the work of the college to prepare its students specifically to be teachers or even wives and husbands, mothers and fathers. ”

“ A college, on the other hand, in its primitive form, is a foundation erected and endowed by private munificence solely for the lodging and maintenance of deserving students, whose lack of means rendered them unable to pursue the university course without some extraneous assistance.” [20]
It must be remembered, moreover, that when a mediæval benefactor founded a college his intentions were very different from those which would actuate a similar person at the present day. ”

“ While it is the work of science and scholarship, roughly what is known in American usage as graduate work, that gives the university its rank as a seat of learning and keeps it in countenance as such with laymen and scholars, it is the undergraduate school, or college, that still continues to be the larger fact, and that still engages the greater and more immediate attention in university management. ”

“ The undergraduate of to-day, if he reads the magazines, discovers that a great many people are worrying seriously about his condition. College presidents and official investigators are discussing his scholarship, his extra-curricular activities, and his moral stamina. Not content with the surface of the matter, they are going deeper and are investigating the college itself, its curriculum, the scholarship of the instructors, and its adequacy in realizing its high ideal as a preparation for life. ”

“ A COLLEGE-MATE recently indulged in wholesale denunciation of present conditions in American colleges; classes have grown so large that teaching is done mostly by instructors or assistant professors and students are drilled no longer by men of mature intellect; the intimacy between professors and students, which was the glory of the old college, has disappeared and with it has disappeared also the fatherly interest formerly shown by professors; the output of colleges is inferior in quality; there is no hope of improvement except in return to the small college of our youth. ”

“ There are three things that the university would do—represented by the college, the professional schools and the graduate faculty. Through the college it would give men broader interests and wider sympathies, through the professional schools it would teach the routine methods of practise, through the graduate faculty it would improve these methods and enlarge our knowledge. ”

“ Some of these opponents have gone so far as to assert that the customary college degree, Bachelor of Arts, stands as definitely for Latin and Greek as the degree M.D. stands for the study of medicine. Now, inasmuch as the college is the school in which, according to the best authorities, our young people are expected to gain a higher degree of education than the lower schools, academies, and high-schools can give them, the question. What constitutes the basis of higher education? ”

“ The professorial theory of college life is, that the faculties are being exercised and the resources collected with which the battles of life are subsequently to be fought and its victories won. And there is, no doubt, a great deal of truth in this theory. The acquisitions of the class-room will all be found useful in future, and your only regret will be that they have not been more extensive and thorough. The gymnastic of study is suppling faculties which will be indispensable hereafter. ”

“ 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. ”