Another professor was a teacher of English. He was not interested in athletics or in the religious life of the students so much as in revealing to students in the classroom as well as outside the classroom the charm of literary things. That was his message—his individual message to his college. His life-work was more than presenting the evolution of the English novel: it was a mission to students to secure on their part habits of reading and a taste for genuine literature which in after years would be to many the most priceless reward of their college days. It is not necessary that two college teachers should present the same truth in the same way, but when college professors and instructors, presidents, deans, and tutors, realize that teaching to-day as in former days is a calling, not simply a means of livelihood, and that every man who holds any such position must somehow discover how to reach personally at least a small circle of students, then our colleges will not longer be defined as “knowledge shops,” but as the homes of those inspirations and friendships, those ideals and incitements, which make life more than meat and the body than raiment.
While the drift of our modern life in the outside world may be toward technical and scientific education, the drift in college is still toward the great teacher—the man of thought-provoking power and of spiritual capacity; sincere and genuine both in scholarship and manhood, of whom one can speak, as Carlyle spoke of Schiller, “a high ministering servant at Truth’s altar, and bore him worthily of the office he held.”
THE COLLEGE CAMPUS
III
THE COLLEGE CAMPUS
Rudyard Kipling speaks of four street corners of four great cities where a man may stand and see pass everybody of note in the world. There are likewise vantage-points in our American colleges from which one may discover not only the influential undergraduate types, but also the real life of their environment. One of these places is the college campus.
Undergraduate life falls into two broad divisions: college work, pertaining to the study and the classroom; and college relaxation, centering upon the campus. The latter includes social life, amusements, athletics, and the other voluntary exercises in which students meet for fellowship and competition. The close tie between college work and college play is often shown. A change in student sentiment has instant effect on student work, while no rules of the faculty can nullify those deeply rooted principles of student life which make all college men akin.