PERSONALITY OF GREAT TEACHERS
President Gilman of Johns Hopkins University took as his motto, “Men before buildings.” The subject of securing great teachers for students is perhaps the most vital topic which can be considered, since from the point of view of undergraduates a professor, whether teaching civil engineering or Greek, is invariably influential because of what he is personally.
In a large university which I recently visited I was told that there were three thousand students and five hundred instructors and professors, an average of a professor to every six students. Upon asking several of the undergraduates how many professors they knew personally, I was somewhat astounded to find that less than a dozen of these six hundred teachers came into personal contact with the students outside of the classes. One graduate told me that he had not been in the home of more than three professors during his college course.
There are undoubtedly reasons for this lack of association between the professors and the undergraduates. In a large university, the demand upon the teacher for more work than he should rightfully undertake, the ever-increasing interest of the student in college affairs, with many other influences, are constantly presented as difficulties in the way of the teacher’s close relationship with the student. But the important point in this association between student and professor is that in many cases the professor has nothing vital and individual to give the undergraduate when he meets him. In too many cases he is a dry and weary man, living his life in books rather than in men. A. C. Benson has described a Cambridge don in terms that at times we fear fit some college professors of our own land. He sits “like a moulting condor in a corner, or wanders seeking a receptacle for his information.” The American college teacher has too often been chosen simply because of his scholarship. Our institutions of learning have been obsessed with the mere value of the degree of doctor of philosophy. As a consequence, many a young professor is scholarly and expert in his knowledge of his subject, but utterly without ability to impart it with interest. He lacks driving force as well as guiding and regulating force. He seems at times without the capacity for real feeling. He is not alive to the issues of the time in which he lives. He starts his subject a century behind the point of view in which his scholars are interested. Too often, alas! he misses the chief opportunity of a college teacher in not becoming friendly with his undergraduates; for there is no comradeship like the comradeship of letters, the comradeship of knowledge, the comradeship of those whose lives are united in the higher aims of serious education.
Letters have never lacked their fascination when they have been embodied in the thought and personalities of great teachers. Albert Harkness, with his face aglow with literary enthusiasm, reading “Prometheus Bound,” in his lecture-room in the old University Hall at Providence, is one of the unfading memories of my undergraduate days. When Tennyson said, “I am sending my son not to Marlborough, but to Bradley, the great teacher,” it was not a subject he had in mind, but a personality. In one institution which I visit, virtually the entire undergraduate body elects botany. A student said to me one day, “We do not care especially for botany, but we would elect anything to be under Dr. ——.” Not long ago, attending a college dinner at the University of Minnesota, I heard a professor at my side lamenting the tendency to irreverence on the part of American college men. While we were speaking, ex-President Northrop came into the room, and the entire crowd of students were on their feet in an instant, cheering their beloved president. One of the undergraduates closed his remarks by saying that the deepest impression of his college days had occurred in the chapel when their honored president prayed; and he quoted the following verse:
When Prexy prays
Our heads all bow,
A sense of peace
Smooths every brow,
Our hearts, deep stirred,
No whisper raise
At chapel time
When Prexy prays.