The Cap and Gown

by Charles Reynolds Brown

The habits you select and exhibit during the first year will almost inevitably determine your standing with the faculty and with the students. When you enter you are what cattlemen call a “maverick”—there is no brand on you. Your associates will wait to see where you belong. By your own choices you will brand yourself as studious or trifling, as thorough or a dabbler, as honest or a cheat, as clean and sound in your moral life or as shady. The habits of the first year will brand you and in the award of college honors at the hands of the faculty or of the students, and in the operation of university influences upon your career after you graduate, the brand you wear will be well-nigh determinative. Look at it carefully, then, before you apply it to yourself, for its mark will stay.

You cannot afford to shilly-shally. The man who spends his time in high school or college mainly for his own amusement is a sham and a sneak. He is there at considerable cost to somebody—parents, tax-payers, professors who are doing educational work out of love for it when they might be doing something much more remunerative—and when he merely puts up a bluff at studying he stamps himself as a sneak.

The men who undertake to get through their examinations by a kind of death-bed repentance become cheap men. In the moral world a man is judged not by the few holy emotions he can scramble together in the last fifteen minutes of earthly existence; he is judged by the whole trend and drift of his life, by the deeds done in the body, by the entire accumulation and net result of his living as deposited in the character formed. This is sound theology in any branch of the Christian Church and the principle involved is also sound in pedagogy. The real test of the student’s work is not to be found in what he did last night or in what he can show upon occasion as the result of a hasty cramming, but in what he has been doing through all the days and nights preceding the examination and in that net result which stands revealed in his mental grasp and effectiveness. Whether he becomes a man who will stand the hard tests the world puts upon every one who undertakes to do important work, will depend largely upon the habits he forms in the first year. He may take low ideals and live down to them; or he may set high ideals and then direct his energy and shape the methods of his life unceasingly to the hard task of living up to them.

There will also come the choice of intimates. You will have acquaintances many—the more the better. You will have, I hope, a large circle of friends and you will discover that college friendships are the most lasting and perhaps the most rewarding of any you form. But of lives so close as to give shape and color and odor to your life, there will not be many; and for that reason the intimates are to be chosen with the greater care.

You can know all sorts and conditions of men. You can be on good terms with many whose prevailing attitudes toward life do not meet your wish. You cannot afford to be on intimate terms with a man lacking in those fundamental qualities of every-day rectitude which are legal tender the world over. The man you admit to your heart and life as an intimate ought to be “hall marked” as they say in England; he ought to have the word “sterling” stamped upon him, indicating that in the great melting-pot of human experience he will meet the test and show full face value.

It will be good to have a few close friends who are not students. There are townspeople whose main interest is in the larger life outside the university whose friendship you need. There is some member of the faculty whom you ought to know well. In many colleges every student has a “personal adviser” in the faculty. It is a foolish mistake to look upon the professors as your enemies or as being indifferent to you, lacking in any genuine interest in your problems. They covet a closer touch with their students than the young men in their mistaken reserve are ready to accord them. The closer friendship of some one, wise, mature, sympathetic man in the faculty will be an influence wholesome and abiding, making always for your best development. The mere fact that some weak man may undertake to “cultivate” a professor in the spirit of the sycophant need not deter strong men from the enjoyment of such friendships in straightforward, manly fashion.

Let me congratulate you that you are in college! It is a jolly thing to be alive at all, these days, and to be alive and young and at school—why, the whole world is yours! The world is yours potentially, and wise, right decisions during that first year will aid mightily in making a generous measure of it actually yours. You may, if you will, score a good number of runs off your own batting by the way you play the game in the first inning.

II
ATHLETICS

All the human beings we know anything about have the cheerful habit of living in bodies; there is a physical basis underlying and conditioning all earthly activity. Physical vitality, therefore, has a direct bearing on possible achievement. A rousing stomach ready to take what you give it and rejoice over it; lungs large, sound, and unspoiled by inhaling what was never meant for them; heart action reliable because never tampered with by drugs or hurtful indulgences; nerves prompt and accurate as telegraph instruments, but ready to sleep when put to bed because never abused; muscles which take up hard work and laugh over it as those who find great spoil—all these are useful items in that physical excellence to be gained and guarded as a priceless heritage. In all intellectual work where men undertake to think, write, or speak there is a demand for red blood, which is better ten times over than the blue blood of any fancied aristocracy! And in moral life, if you are to put down evil under your feet and be vigorously, joyously, winsomely good, a sound physique for your moral nature to ride in all weathers will be a perpetual advantage.

In making young men physically competent, high school and college athletics, provided they are not tacked on from the outside as a frill or held as a mere aside to which the students carelessly turn in hours of leisure, may possess high value. They can be made a genuine, vital expression of the life of the school and be related in some wise way to the larger purpose of education. Rightly ordered they aid mightily in keeping the tools sharp, in developing a full stock of vital force, in giving the poise, self-mastery, endurance needed for the work of life. The boy who learns to play with zest will be better able to do the work of a man with his own full sense of joy in it.