Why go to College?

by Clayton Sedgwick Cooper

COSMOPOLITAN LIFE AT COLLEGE

Furthermore, the student world has been subdivided until it is a wholly different thing from what it was fifty or even twenty years ago. While in the seventies the college student knew every man in his class, in the large institution to-day an undergraduate will meet in the college yard scores of classmates who are perfect strangers, and to whom he has no more idea of speaking than to persons whom he has never seen before. The student who has been brought up always to dine in a dinner-coat will have for his table-companions men who have never owned a dress-coat and who see no immediate prospect of needing one.

The influx of foreign students has added to the cosmopolitan life of American institutions. So far as they are Orientals, the English departments are specially modified both in the character of the attendance and the instruction by their presence. The professor’s task of adjusting instruction to a mixed assembly of American, Indian, Mohammedan, Porto Rican, Chinese, and Japanese students may be inferred from the answer of a young East Indian student who was asked to describe in English his daily routine:

At the break of day I rises from my own bed, then I employ myself till 8 o’clock, after which I employ myself to bathe, then take for my body some sweetmeat, and just at 9½ I came to school to attend my class duty, then, at 2½ P. M. I return from school and engage myself to do my further duties then I engage for a quarter to take my tiffin, then I study till 5 P. M., after which I began to play anything which comes in my head. After 8½ half pass to eight we are began to sleep, before sleeping I told a constable just 11 o’ he came and rose us from half pass elevan we began to read still morning.

The familiar din of dishes at the commons of Columbia, as well as at the University of California, serves to raise the pitch of a polyglot table-talk that often represents a dozen nationalities. Last year in American colleges there were hundreds of undergraduates of alien speech, customs, ideals, temperaments, and religion. Among these were a specially important delegation of three hundred Chinese young men who were beneficiaries of the Boxer indemnity fund. These students from foreign nations still further subdivide undergraduate life through their race clubs, societies for learning English, special religious conferences, and new studies.

COLLEGE TRADITIONS

College tradition adds its distinctive and forceful factor to the campus life of the undergraduate, particularly in the older seats of learning. A good tradition makes it easy to accomplish things worth while without the spasmodic campaigns that characterize many younger institutions. Students are often more zealous to uphold the ancient customs of their college than anything else connected with it. The annual conflicts between freshmen and sophomores have become a part of the institution. Certain traditional habits, often humorous, sometimes doubtful, in character, have grown up in nearly every North American college. An old account of life at Cambridge tells of the manner in which both occupant and furniture of a freshman’s room were menaced by a missile as big as a cantaloupe that was thrown into it. It was described as a transmittendam (it went with the room), and was handed down in some such forcible manner from one generation of freshmen to another. The desire to link the past with the present at Harvard is also shown in the custom of registering the name of each occupant on the doors of certain old frame buildings long used as lodging-houses by students. The old college pump has been a traditional means of grace to many freshmen, and the customary restriction to upper classmen of caps, canes, and pipes has added pugilistic zest to undergraduate life.

College tradition is not an unmixed blessing when it results in provincialism and the loss of that breadth of mind and appreciative sympathy which should characterize educated men. When any undergraduate body becomes blindly a law unto itself, refusing to learn from other institutions; when faculty and students take the position that because certain ideas have never prevailed at their college, therefore they never should and never shall prevail, they show their unfitness for leadership in an age of vast and varied opportunity.

The students of the Middle West and the Far West are more sensible of their freedom from the past than are our Eastern undergraduates. They realize that they are at least a hundred years behind Eastern colleges in the dignity of their traditions, and they therefore seek to crystallize college spirit about college customs; but their customs do not interfere with progress, as sometimes happens in the East, and a question is decided on its merits quite regardless of precedent or policies. If a proposition seems sensible and right, it is adopted, despite its novelty or its conflict with tradition. Keeping close to modern needs, those colleges have gone ahead and accomplished things while more conservative institutions have been leisurely thinking about them. It is this audacity of spirit, this dash and action, which endear to the undergraduates of the West all men of achievement. When among them one thinks of the old verse: