WHAT IS THE CHIEF END OF AN AMERICAN COLLEGE?
This sudden and enormous advance in the pursuit of technical studies, which have made the State universities formidable rivals to our older, privately endowed institutions, has aroused uncertainty as to the real object of collegiate training. Modern commercialism, which has said that you must touch liberal studies, if at all, in a utilitarian way, has swept in a mighty current through our American universities. The undergraduate is feeling increasingly the pressure of the outside modern world—the world not of values, but of dollars. The sense of strain, of rush, and of anxiety which generally pervades our business, our public and our professional life, has pervaded the atmosphere in which men should be taught first of all to think and to grow.
The present tendency of students is to feel that any form of education that does not associate itself directly with some form of practical and significant action is artificial, unreal, and undesirable. Last winter I visited an institution on the Pacific coast where literary studies were considered, among certain classes of students, as not only unpractical, but almost unmanly. As a result of such drift in educational sentiment, the American undergraduate is in danger of getting prepared for an emergency rather than for life. He is losing,
In action’s dizzying eddy whirled,
The something that infects the world.
The student leads his life noisily and hurriedly. He scarcely takes time to see it all plainly without dust and confusion. There is all about him a blurred sense of motion and duties. His culture lies upon him in lumps. He does not allow it time to impress him. College is a bewildering episode rather than a place of clear vision.