Understudy

“ Everybody, from full professors to undergraduate students went down the roster of the schools of psychology and wrecked them so comprehensively that the field was as dead as palmistry in twenty years. ”

“ I felt like a lad having to choose from fifteen nectar flavors of ice cream, only the courses of study from which I had the privilege of choosing went into the hundreds. Almost every theme of my desire was spread before me; explorations into literature, social life, fine arts, science, language, and economics. Old yearnings could be abundantly gratified at last: a formidable list of professors and a more formidable list of studies awaited my option. ”

“ If you have been disappointed in the first three Degrees, as you have received them, and if it has seemed to you that the performance has not come up to the promise, that the lessons of morality are not new, and the scientific instruction is but rudimentary, and the symbols are imperfectly explained, remember that the ceremonies and lessons of those Degrees have been for ages more and more accommodating themselves, by curtailment and sinking into commonplace, to the often limited memory and capacity of the Master and Instructor, and to the intellect and needs of the Pupil and Initiate ”

“ I have often felt, when I was busy with some matter that required concentration of thought and continuity of investigation, that I would rather have broken into my line of work by going and giving a lecture in Euclid or Algebra, than by coming down to an elementary discourse, in which, from the very affinity of the subjects, I should be constantly tempted to revert to the minute point on which my special labours in my study were fixed, to the confusion of the class and to the damage of the subject that I had to treat before them. ”

“ If a conscientious course of study at a University secured no other advantage than that of presenting to youth a picture of the dignified calling of the Scholar as a model for life, and of repelling from this sphere those who are not endowed with the requisite power, such a course would, on account of this advantage alone, be of the utmost importance to the Student. ”

“ Gentlemen Graduates, not only the necessity of bearing in mind the charge given you on receiving your degrees,—namely, that you ever in your lives and conversation show yourselves worthy of the same—but that you bear in mind that when you can place after your names the letters of your degree your education is not finished—in truth, it has but just begun. ”

“ Any course taken by those who are interested in the University, which is contrary to the principle I have laid down, is a course which, I think, cannot but prove deeply injurious to the institution. We know that not only very young men, but men of more advanced years are much more ready to cast their failures and their disappointments on any other cause than the cause which rests within themselves. ”

“ I trust that your early training, with your own sense of propriety, will deter you from anything so ruinous; but I have a word or two of advice in regard to your deportment towards your fellow students and to your instructors. I have been at college myself and know something of what I say. You will, of course, be teased, or ‘devilled,’ as they term it, unmercifully. Every conceivable effort will be made to mortify you, and to present you in most ridiculous attitudes, and every one in the class above you will try his wits at your expense. ”

“ Shall I meet a man who pretends to know more than the whole College, and would overturn the whole method of practice, which is so well established, and from which no one person hath pretended to deviate? ”

“ What are academical degrees so dearly purchased for, but place? and can a professor answer it to his trust or interest, to disparage precedence? For what other reason in nature but precedence, did a great man of my acquaintance lately become a double grand compounder for his degree? and another, undeceive mankind, or rather deceive women, and suffer himself to be pronounced a venerable man in spite of his youthful looks? ”

“ When I note in sundry university registers courses of instruction offered in some of the most evanescent and worthless developments of contemporary literature,—some of them, indeed, worse than worthless,—I think of a remark made to me by a college friend of mine who will be remembered by the Yale men of the fifties for his keen and pithy judgments of men and things. ”

“ In repelling the reproach of narrowness, to which our elective system at Cambridge undoubtedly frequently leads, how often have I urged the self-evident proposition that to arouse a love of study in any subject, I care not how subordinate its importance or how limited its scope, is to take the first step toward making your man a scholar; [Pg 84] while to fail to gain his interest in any study is to lose the whole end of education—and what is true of the man is still more true of the child. ”

“ In this little home, where rigid economy was practised and high aspirations reigned, our future poet entered upon the severe intellectual training which caused her at twenty-one, when the door of scholastic learning was closed upon her by the partial failure of her sight, to be called a scholar, though she sorrowfully resented the title, asking, "How can you speak of one as a scholar whose studies were cut short at twenty-one?" ”

“ Such is the simple creed of the undergraduate. If he satisfies neither of the above requirements, then he recognises, with greater or less sadness, that he is an ordinary man, the "average undergraduate." ”

“ And now the undergraduate will emphasize study. But a sharp line must be drawn between study that looks forward merely to the A.B. degree as the end of schooling and the beginning of business, and study that is a part of professional training, that looks forward to some professional degree at Commencement or to matriculation in a graduate school. ”

“ You have been receiving your tuition. In this academy the study of Household Science begins with the rudiments. Scrubbing is one of the rudiments. As a new scholar you begin with the rudiments, of course. And I must say you are doing very well. You are making excellent progress. Apply yourself earnestly to your lessons and in a short time you will be promoted to another class. ”

“ How long will the extraordinary excesses of a learned funct be suffered to disgrace college? Is Doctor —— to be permitted to exhibit an example of more riotous insubordination than would be endured in an undergraduate? ”

“ I have adduced them only as examples of the kind of study which I would desire to see substituted for that of our modern schools, and of singular success in certain characters, finish of detail, and brilliancy of color. What faculties, higher than imitative, may be in these men, I do not yet venture to say; but I do say, that [Pg 187] if they exist, such faculties will manifest themselves in due time all the more forcibly because they have received training so severe.
186. For it is always to be remembered that no one mind is like another, either in its powers or perceptions ”

“ If the University is satisfied that they have exposed the humbug, why ask to bring in new proof? Is it because the ladies, instead of leaving town in twenty-four hours, have staid as many days? Is it because the public are more anxious than ever to see and learn more of these mysterious manifestations? Is it because there is more intense interest than ever elicited, the more the subject is investigated? Is it because intelligent men are giving the matter consideration? I ask, what causes so much disquietude in the minds of the professors? Have they shot off their gun too quick? ”

“ The years spent at the University, and his subsequent travels, may have helped to transform the sickly, shy, neglected tutor into a well-bred man, whose pale but winning countenance and low sweet-toned voice impressed every one favourably, and whose timidity alone prevented him from appearing everywhere to advantage. ”

“ Examination, like fire, is a good servant, but a bad master; and there seems to me to be some danger of its becoming our master. I by no means stand alone in this opinion. Experienced friends of mine do not hesitate to say that students whose career they watch, appear to them to become deteriorated by the constant effort to pass this or that examination, just as we hear of men's brains becoming affected by the daily necessity of catching a train. ”

“ Mortified and ashamed at the tones and looks of this representative of Alma Mater and of Science, when addressed to a gentleman stranger, and a man of science, I turned silently away, and was not surprised when, shortly after, Major Rains said to me, ‘There seems no occasion for me to remain here because of any knowledge or skill which my experience in such investigations may have given me; there is no attempt, no purpose, to have an investigation of the general subject. ”

“ Here nothing will overcome but a profound conviction that study—persistent, regular, life-long study—is the solemn, first duty of every man who ventures to stand up in the pulpit as an instructor of the people. ”

“ Among such are to be counted, first of all, the half or two-thirds of those who present themselves for examination—I refer to those who are rejected; and then among those who are successful, who obtain a degree, a certificate, a diploma, there is still a half or two-thirds—I refer to the overworked. Too much has been demanded of them by exacting that on a given day, on a chair or before a board, they should, for two hours in succession, and with respect to a group of sciences, be living repertories of all human knowledge. ”

“ If a college undergraduate is ready to be honest with himself, he must say, "If I am consistent with mediocre work in college, it is likely that the men in my class who graduate with honor will have three times my chances of success in the Law School, and the men who graduate in my class with highest honor will have nearly ten times my chances of success." ”

“ We must admit that the undergraduate’s philosophy of life may be obscure at times, even to himself; that it is as subtle and evasive as the moods of youth; and that its expression is as cosmopolitan as nationality, and as varied as human nature. ”

“ The degree in which the study of certain subjects cultivates certain faculties is a matter on which we are far from agreeing. Nor is it decided—in fact we have scarcely begun to discuss—what faculties most need cultivation. ”

“ As for you, gentlemen, who have this day been created Bachelors of Arts, Mental and moral improvement. I have to call your attention to the fact that your Degree is, in the phraseology of the middle ages, an imperfect one. ”

“ One of the chief of such evidences was the ability to go to a college or university and to take the time to learn a great deal of useless knowledge about dead languages, philosophies, and dry-as-dust sciences. While this is not true to so great an extent to-day, there is still much of the old tradition clinging about colleges and universities, and we are training men and women, not for commercial or industrial or agricultural lines, but rather, for the learned professions. ”

“ On examining the course for the introductory and freshman classes, a feeling of astonishment must fill the mind at the marked want of wisdom by which it was dictated, but which at the same time affords a sufficient explanation for the abandonment of the College by its students. ”

“ Although studying law only that he might have an academic degree, he enjoyed a reputation for diligence, and as a logician in the scholastic way had no cause to envy the most frenzied quibblers of the University faculty. ”

“ They all seem to think, you know, that because we come to college we must be monsters of reason, and they urge us to remember that reason and science are not the only things that count in the world—that feeling is, after all, the main factor ”

“ Each literary examination is a crisis at which one either becomes a graduate or does not; in either case the result, whether appertaining to the student himself, the pupils whom he has coached, or his own sons, is contemplated purely as a personal and an individual matter. ”

“ Turning from the tests of Genius which, in the Progressive Scholar at least, are inscrutable, we have now only to exhaust the indications of Integrity in Study, and we shall then have completed the portraiture of the true follower of learning. The honest Student is to us the only True Student ”

“ Those youths who wished to pass up from the lower to the high-school had to undergo an examination. The student, when he had passed it, could choose a master from among the learned of the higher grades, who undertook to be his philosophical guide, and to whom he remained attached all his life through, as a client to his patron. ”

“ The examinations for degrees are protracted through several days and nights, with all grades of severity, and while most of the candidates experience much inconvenience from such an irrational course, it would be difficult to convince any of them of its inherent absurdity as a test of intellectual attainments. ”

“ Such may, indeed, by their so-called study have bettered the material prospects of their lives, but as children of the light and seekers in profession after truth, they have but degraded themselves to a lower level than that from which they started at the first. ”

“ The examination system, and the fact that instruction is treated mainly as training for a livelihood, leads the young to regard knowledge from a purely utilitarian point of view, as the road to money, not as the gateway to wisdom. ”