TRAINING OF THE INDIVIDUAL
One of the chief functions of the American college is to discover the man in the student, and to train him for citizenship and public service. President Hadley of Yale points out the fact that of the twenty-six presidents of the United States, seventeen were college men, and of these seventeen, fourteen were graduates of the old-fashioned classical colleges. Grant was a West Point man, Monroe and McKinley left college before the end of their junior year, one to go to the army, and one to teach school. This contribution of individual leadership to a nation seems to be proper and fitting, as Dr. Hadley says:
If a college man has used the opportunities offered by the faculty, he has acquired a wide knowledge of history and a broad view of public affairs. If he has utilized the opportunities offered by his fellow-students, he has acquired the democratic spirit, has gotten a grip upon public opinion, and has had considerable experience in dealing with a large variety of men. All these things give him an advantage in the race, and statistics show that he makes good use of this advantage.
This power of the American college to develop individual initiative and leadership has been decidedly enhanced in recent years. The college in the United States has gradually developed from a quasi-family institution for growing school-boys to a small world of wide, voluntary opportunity for young men. There is a decided difference between American undergraduate life to-day and that of a century ago, or even of fifty years ago. Then boys were graduated at eighteen or nineteen years of age, and they were under the watchful eye of presidents, professors, and tutors, who were in loco parentis. The earlier period was a period of flogging and fagging and “freshmen servitude rules.” Indeed, the age was one of black-and-blue memories derived from those educational lictors who with their rods made deeper impressions than all the Roman Cæsars. Freshmen were forbidden to wear hats in the president’s or professors’ dooryards or within ten yards of a president, eight rods of a professor, or five of a tutor. These young men were forbidden to run in the college yard or up or down stairs or to call to any one through a college window. Seniors had the power to regulate the dress and the play of underclass members. In those early days fines and penalties for misdemeanors ran from half a penny up to three shillings, while sophomores had their ears boxed before the assembled college by the president or a member of the faculty. The conclusion of the college prayer indicated the enforced humility of students in those days: “May we perform faithfully our duties to our superiors, our equals, and our inferiors.”
American college life had its rise in New England institutions presided over by rigorous Puritans whose hands were as hard as their heads, who believed in total depravity and original sin, and who held the young sternly to account for any remissness. In those early days student community life differed little from student home life; both failed dismally to develop initiative or individual responsibility. They were characterized by strict authority on the part of the parent and teacher, and ingenious attempts to outwit this authority on the part of the young. It was this conception of the college which led the Massachusetts legislature to give the Harvard faculty authority to inflict corporal punishment upon Harvard students. At that time it was easy for a student to determine his life-work, for the great majority of boys either entered the ministry, or studied law or medicine. The whole college living was simple and homogeneous.