LEARNING AND INVESTIGATION
But while the American undergraduate may consistently look to the college to furnish him with ideals and with the methods of making these ideals effective, the world looks to the college for definite and advanced information. The college, with its accumulated stores of intellect, its apparatus, and its unusual means for observation, owes the world a debt that none but it can pay. And this is the gift which the college has given, and is still giving, to the world so quietly, so unobtrusively, that the world scarcely dreams of the source of its gain. Let one think of the myriad signs of modern progress by which society is being constantly carried forward. Behind the scenes you will find some quiet, hidden worker in a laboratory or library, an unpractical man perhaps, but one through whom a new realm of possibilities in science or industry or letters have been revealed.
What is the world’s interest in these men—men who are so generally underpaid that much of their best work is made impossible by the necessary outside labors to support their families, who, beyond their own personal satisfaction, have as little recognition as perhaps any workers of modern society? When the world demands expert knowledge in industry, science, literature, and art, the college may well reply, “When are you going to show your gratitude for the self-sacrifice and far-reaching labors of thousands of devoted men whose work is both a challenge and an example to the world to-day?”
And this example of the man who learns to devote himself to one thing is not lost upon the undergraduate, to whom example is ever stronger than precept. Indeed, it is this tendency to learn how to do one thing well that is bringing the colleges into the attention of the modern world. The secret of genius is to be able to seize upon some concrete, near-at-hand piece of work, to see it with unobstructed and steady vision, and then, out of the rich treasure of knowing how to do one thing thoroughly, to draw by insight and expression the general principle.
For, after all, the contribution of the college to the world is often one which cannot be fully analyzed. It is not discovered in a thorough knowledge of a curriculum or in the statistics of athletics any more than a foreign country is discovered in a guide-book or in a hasty recital of its industries. There is no master word to express what a college career may mean or should mean to American youth who in years of high impression experience with a multitude of their fellows.
Days that flew swiftly like the band
That in the Grecian games had strife,
And passed from eager hand to hand
The onward-dancing torch of life.
After we have said much concerning the life and the work of the American undergraduate, there is still a valuable thing which the college should impart to him, and through which he should become enabled to present with greater charm and with greater force the message which is in his soul. This valuable thing, at once both idealism and incentive, is the undergraduate’s individual message to the world. It may be composed of knowledge, the ability to think, the faculty of relaxation, and the power to do faithfully and successfully some given task. These things, however, are all dependent upon the spirit of the actor, upon his vision, his determination, his ambitious and unflagging attempts. The true modern university contributes to the world a great-minded and a great-hearted man, to whom college life has been a soul’s birth as well as a mind’s awakening. It gives to its youth that peculiar but indispensable thing which burned in the heart of the young art-student who stood before the masterpiece and said, “I, too, am a painter.”
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