Why go to College?

by Clayton Sedgwick Cooper

We have here one of the early indications of “parallel courses” in one of our institutions of higher learning as a concession to popular demands. But this concession at Columbia was made before the immense extension and development of modern natural, physical, and industrial science. Education or culture in the early fifties was something easy to define. It included logic, literature, oratory, conic sections, and religion. Since that date, however, the American undergraduate has discovered modern research work at the German university. Cecil Rhodes has opened Oxford for American students with his “golden key.” The American student has been called upon to match with his technical ability the enormous and rapid development of a new material civilization, and educational institutions take color from the social and political media in which they exist. In fact, it cannot be easily estimated how real or how comprehensive a factor the college graduate has been in guiding and shaping this practical and progressive awakening.

The American undergraduate is more than ever before contemporaneous with all that is real and important in modern existence. He is filled with enthusiasm for civic and social and religious investigation and improvement. With self-reliant courage he works his way through college, tutoring, waiting on table, and performing other real services. He debates with zeal economics, immigration, and labor questions. Indeed, the modern American university is taking increasingly firmer hold upon the life of the nation. The college graduate of fifty years ago was more or less a thing apart. If he was strong in his literary studies, he was also weak in his attachment to life itself, where education really has its working arena. In comparison with him, the student to-day spends a greater proportion of his time in the study of political science. One feels the limitation of the modern undergraduate especially in the sweep of his literary knowledge, and in his acquaintance with abstract thought, art, and poetry. But when we see student and professor working together on our American farms, bringing about a new and higher type of rural life; when we find our mechanical engineers not only in the mountains and on the Western prairies, but in the heart of India or inland China or South Africa, building there their bridges and railroad tunnels according to the ideas seen in the vision of their new practical educational training, we are bound to ask whether the modern undergraduate is not truly interested in the deep aim of all true scholarship, namely, the spiritual and concrete construction of life by means of ideas made real. Ambassador Bryce’s opinion of the American universities carries weight, and of them he has said:

If I may venture to state the impression which the American universities have made upon me, I will say that while of all the institutions of the country they are those of which the American speaks most modestly, and indeed deprecatingly, they are those which seem to be at this moment making the swiftest progress, and to have the brightest promise for the future. They are supplying exactly those things which European cities have hitherto found lacking to America; and they are contributing to her political as well as to her contemplative life elements of inestimable worth.

But since undergraduate training must deal not simply with the theory of education, but also with the imperative demands and conditions of a new time, there must be discovered practical ways by which our undergraduates may save their literary ideals at the same time that they enlarge their practical and progressive knowledge; means by which they may discover literary, historical, linguistic, and philosophical values without losing their mathematics and their physical and material sciences.

To the end, therefore, of making cultural studies as strong, attractive, and profitable to our undergraduates as practical and scientific training, our institutions should train men of large caliber to teach English and belles-lettres. They should discover great teachers and inspiring personalities.

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.