Among other gifts, the American college fraternity may justly be expected to bestow upon its members devoted friendship, the ability to live successfully with other men, and such habits of application, industry and sobriety as develop ideas and character.
THE UNDERGRADUATE’S PHILOSOPHY OF LIFE
But this hint at the somewhat free-and-easy life of the fraternity chapter-house should not leave the impression that the American undergraduate is, as a rule, a thoughtless creature or that he fails to formulate a philosophy of life. Gilbert K. Chesterton remarks, “There are some people, and I am one of them, who think that the most practical and important thing about a man is still his view of the universe.” Certain beholders of collegiate conditions have evidently become acquainted with only those students who have thoughtlessly taken their serious views, in second-hand fashion, from their ancestors or from current opinion. These spectators have perhaps justly concluded that the undergraduate has no view of life—no view, at least, which is complimentary to him.
The Main Hall, University of Wisconsin
Such an impression is not general among those who are familiar with the inner working of the undergraduate mind and have watched the result of his philosophy in practical works. Many of the vital movements of the time have originated among these seemingly thoughtless college men. It was in a small room at Princeton, in the year 1876, that Cleveland H. Dodge, W. Earl Dodge, and Luther D. Wishard, after earnest conversation regarding the moral and religious life of the institution, decided to send delegates to the next year’s Convention of the International Committee of Young Men’s Christian Associations, held in Louisville, Kentucky. This delegation presented to the International Committee plans for the Student Young Men’s Christian Association at Princeton. Other groups of undergraduates took similar action both in America and in other countries, until at present the World’s Student Christian Federation includes 148,300 students and professors in its membership. These federated movements represent twenty-one nations. In connection with these societies during the last college season 66,000 students met regularly for Bible study.
These associations at the colleges have given rise to many other organizations which have stimulated the educated life of the world. The Student Volunteer Movement for Foreign Missions, which originated in connection with a student conference at Mount Hermon, Massachusetts, in the year 1886, has been responsible for enlisting thousands of collegians who have been sent by churches and Christian organizations to serve in foreign lands. This student missionary organization is also accomplishing an educational work in familiarizing undergraduates with the social, political, and religious conditions of foreign nations. The college Christian associations now have 163 graduates among their employed officers in the institutions of higher learning in North America.
Undergraduate philosophy of life is an evolution. It consists of three stages: the first is characterized by a sense of calamity or fear as the student leaves behind the observances and conventional creeds of childhood, held with unquestioning and often unthinking assent. He begins to think for himself. He enters an atmosphere of thoughtfulness and scientific discovery, an environment in which facts come before opinions. His first alarm is because he thinks he is losing his religion. He says, like the prophet Micah, when the hostile Danites took away his images, “Ye have taken away my gods ... what have I more?”
In the second period of his thinking he changes his early ceremonial god for breadth of mind. He revels in his impartial view of men and the universe. By turns he calls himself a pantheist, a pragmatist, or an agnostic. His religious position is at times summed up in the description of a young college curate by a bishop who said the young man arose in his pulpit with a self-confidence begotten of fancied wisdom, saying to his expectant hearers: “Dearly beloved, you must repent—as it were; and be converted—in a measure; or be damned—to a certain extent!”