COSMOPOLITAN LIFE AT COLLEGE
Furthermore, the student world has been subdivided until it is a wholly different thing from what it was fifty or even twenty years ago. 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. So far as they are Orientals, the English departments are specially modified both in the character of the attendance and the instruction by their presence. The professor’s task of adjusting instruction to a mixed assembly of American, Indian, Mohammedan, Porto Rican, Chinese, and Japanese students may be inferred from the answer of a young East Indian student who was asked to describe in English his daily routine:
At the break of day I rises from my own bed, then I employ myself till 8 o’clock, after which I employ myself to bathe, then take for my body some sweetmeat, and just at 9½ I came to school to attend my class duty, then, at 2½ P. M. I return from school and engage myself to do my further duties then I engage for a quarter to take my tiffin, then I study till 5 P. M., after which I began to play anything which comes in my head. After 8½ half pass to eight we are began to sleep, before sleeping I told a constable just 11 o’ he came and rose us from half pass elevan we began to read still morning.
The familiar din of dishes at the commons of Columbia, as well as at the University of California, serves to raise the pitch of a polyglot table-talk that often represents a dozen nationalities. Last year in American colleges there were hundreds of undergraduates of alien speech, customs, ideals, temperaments, and religion. Among these were a specially important delegation of three hundred Chinese young men who were beneficiaries of the Boxer indemnity fund. These students from foreign nations still further subdivide undergraduate life through their race clubs, societies for learning English, special religious conferences, and new studies.