GOVERNMENT BY UNDERGRADUATES
Existence in the modern American college is quite another thing. In the college itself there has arisen an interminable round of activities which make demands on the talents and abilities of students. Managerial, civic, social, religious, athletic, and financial leadership is exemplified in almost all colleges. Undergraduate leadership is the most impressive thing in college life. One reason for the sway of athletics over students exists in the fact that through these exercises the student body recognizes real leadership. Loyalty to it is repeatedly seen. At a small college the students may elect their best pitcher as the president of the senior class; their best jumper for the secretary; and, regardless of the subtlety of the humor, may choose their best runner for the treasurer of the class. The president of another college has estimated that in his institution the regular college activities outside of the curriculum reached a grand total of twenty-seven, and included everything from the glee-club leader to the chairman of an old-clothes committee. The dean of another institution who felt this overwhelming change in student affairs is quoted as recommending “a lightening of non-academic demands upon the students.”
A college man is surrounded, therefore, with ample opportunity for individual development. His habits and his executive abilities are considered quite as important as his “marks” when the final honors are awarded. In short, the real government of our large North American institutions is to-day in the hands of the students, however much the faculty may think that they wield the scepter. Honor systems, athletics, college journalism, fraternity life, self-support, curriculum, seminars, unrestrained electives, student researches, and laboratory methods—all these are signs of the new day of student individualism. The parental form of government is less popular; the self-government idea is now the slogan in student life. The dogmatic college president whom I met recently in a Western State who insisted that in his college there shall be no fraternities or no athletics is marching among the belated leaders of modern education. Meanwhile embryonic statesmen and railroad managers are discovering themselves and their life-work in the society and politics of undergraduate days. In the ninety per cent. of his time which it is estimated the American undergraduate spends outside of his recitations, there is increasingly the tendency to make the college a practice-ground for the development of personal enterprise, individuality, and efficiency.