Why go to College?

by Clayton Sedgwick Cooper

And grace their revels with a song.

There has probably never been a time in our colleges when such scenes were less popular than they are to-day. Indeed, it is doubtful whether the American college man was ever more seriously interested in the moral, social, and religious uplift of his times. One of his cardinal ambitions is really to serve his generation worthily both in private and in public. In fact, we are inclined to believe that serviceableness is to-day the watchword of American college religion. This religion is not turned so much toward the individual as in former days. It is more socialized ethics. The undergraduate is keenly sensitive to the calls of modern society. Any one who is skeptical on this point may well examine the biographies in social, political, and religious contemporaneous history. In a recent editorial in one of our weeklies it was humorously stated that “Whenever you see an enthusiastic person running nowadays to commit arson in the temple of privilege, trace it back, and ten to one you will come against a college.” President Taft and a majority of the members of his Cabinet are college-trained men. The reform movements, social, political, economic, and religious, not only in the West, but also in the Levant, India, and the Far East, are being led very largely by college graduates, who are not merely reactionaries in these national enterprises, but are in a very true sense “trumpets that sing to battle” in a time of constructive transformation and progress.

THE PLAY LIFE OF THE AMERICAN UNDERGRADUATE

Undoubtedly one of the reasons which helps to account for the lack of knowledge on the part of outsiders concerning the revival in college seriousness is found in the fact that the play life of American undergraduates has become a prominent factor in our educational institutions. Indeed, there is a general impression among certain college teachers and among outside spectators of college life that students have lost their heads in their devotion to intercollegiate athletics. And it is not strange that such opinions should exist.

A dignified father visits his son at college. He is introduced to “the fellows in the house,” and at once is appalled by the awestruck way with which his boy narrates, in such technical terms as still further stagger the fond parent, the miraculous methods and devices practised by a crack short-distance runner or a base-ball star or the famous tackle of the year. When in an impressive silence the father is allowed the unspeakable honor of being introduced to the captain of the foot-ball team, the autocrat of the undergraduate world, the real object of college education becomes increasingly a tangle in the father’s mind. As a plain business man with droll humor expressed his feelings recently, after escaping from a dozen or more collegians who had been talking athletics to him, “I felt like a merchant marine without ammunition, being fired into by a pirate ship until I should surrender.”

Whatever the undergraduate may be, it is certain that to-day he is no “absent-minded, spectacled, slatternly, owlish don.” His interest in the present-day world, and especially the athletic world, is acute and general. Whether he lives on the “Gold Coast” at Harvard or in a college boarding-house in Montana, in his athletic loyalties he belongs to the same fraternity. To the average undergraduates, athletics seem often to have the sanctity of an institution. Artemus Ward said concerning the Civil War that he would willingly sacrifice all his wife’s relatives for the sake of the cause. Some such feeling seems to dominate the American collegian.

CONCERNING ATHLETICS

Because of such athletic tendencies, the college student has been the recipient of the disapprobation of a certain type of onlookers in general, and of many college faculties in particular.

President Lowell of Harvard, in advocating competitive scholarship, in a Phi Beta Kappa address at Columbia University, said, “By free use of competition, athletics has beaten scholarship out of sight in the estimation of the community at large, and in the regard of the student bodies.” Woodrow Wilson pays his respects to student athleticism by sententiously remarking, “So far as colleges go, the side-shows have swallowed up the circus, and we in the main tent do not know what is going on.”