The advantages of contact and the acquirement of experience through the laboratory of a big city institution are frequently more than counterbalanced by the close fellowship and the lack of distractions in a small country college. It is true that the investigators of the Carnegie Foundation found a large variation in the amount of money expended by different institutions to educate a student. It is my belief, after visiting more than five hundred institutions in North America, that the quality of instruction in any one of these institutions of the first grade does not vary sufficiently to render the choice of a college on the ground of educational advantages a matter of great moment. The values which the small college loses from inferior equipment are usually offset by the more direct access of the student to the personality of the teacher, and often by closer friendships with fellow-students.
Indeed, educational results are not always commensurate with material advantages. As President Garfield said, a man like Mark Hopkins on one end of a bench and a student on the other end is still the main essential of a college. Many years ago Henry Clay visited Princeton, and was asked by President McLean (Johnnie, as he was familiarly and popularly called) to sit down in the president’s study. The furniture was not elaborate in those days, nor did it consist of the most solid material. Mr. Clay sat down, and the rickety old chair which was proffered him sank beneath his weight. The statesman, rising from the floor, said solemnly, “Dr. McLean, I hope that the other chairs of this institution are on a more permanent foundation.” Indeed, the foundation of learning in those days was laid upon the personality of great teachers who, like Dr. McLean, had personal contact with the students, making up in individual interest what was lacking in material equipment.
It is important that the student should choose instructors quite as carefully as institutions. What a man selects when he gets to college—his studies, his teachers, and his friends—will prove far more vital to him than the institution he happens to choose.
IDEALS JOINED TO ACTION
Whether in college or out in the world, the important thing is that college gives an opportunity not only for the acquirement of knowledge, but also for the matching of that knowledge against real problems. Something definitely good is derived from new adjustments. Education can never be completed at home. The college boy returns to his old home with new reverence, with a new conception of its meaning. He has secured a vision that enriches and liberates by getting in touch with universal interests. He has gotten out of himself into the life of others.
College brings together ideas and action. It is the practice-ground for honor and square-dealing. A championship base-ball game was played recently between Wesleyan and Williams at Williamstown. This game was the last one of a series, and it was to decide which college should hold the championship for the coming year. The tension was naturally great. At the end of the seventh inning the score stood 1 to 0 in favor of Wesleyan. The last Williams man at the bat knocked a slow “grounder” to the short-stop. In throwing it to first base, he drove it so high that the first baseman, in attempting to get it, stepped about an inch off the base. The umpire called the man out, but the Wesleyan first baseman, going up to the umpire, said, “That man was not out.” Williams finally won that day, but Wesleyan had the satisfaction of knowing that their man had “played the game.”
TRAINING OF THE INDIVIDUAL
One of the chief functions of the American college is to discover the man in the student, and to train him for citizenship and public service. President Hadley of Yale points out the fact that of the twenty-six presidents of the United States, seventeen were college men, and of these seventeen, fourteen were graduates of the old-fashioned classical colleges. Grant was a West Point man, Monroe and McKinley left college before the end of their junior year, one to go to the army, and one to teach school. This contribution of individual leadership to a nation seems to be proper and fitting, as Dr. Hadley says:
If a college man has used the opportunities offered by the faculty, he has acquired a wide knowledge of history and a broad view of public affairs. If he has utilized the opportunities offered by his fellow-students, he has acquired the democratic spirit, has gotten a grip upon public opinion, and has had considerable experience in dealing with a large variety of men. All these things give him an advantage in the race, and statistics show that he makes good use of this advantage.
This power of the American college to develop individual initiative and leadership has been decidedly enhanced in recent years. The college in the United States has gradually developed from a quasi-family institution for growing school-boys to a small world of wide, voluntary opportunity for young men. There is a decided difference between American undergraduate life to-day and that of a century ago, or even of fifty years ago. Then boys were graduated at eighteen or nineteen years of age, and they were under the watchful eye of presidents, professors, and tutors, who were in loco parentis. The earlier period was a period of flogging and fagging and “freshmen servitude rules.” Indeed, the age was one of black-and-blue memories derived from those educational lictors who with their rods made deeper impressions than all the Roman Cæsars. Freshmen were forbidden to wear hats in the president’s or professors’ dooryards or within ten yards of a president, eight rods of a professor, or five of a tutor. These young men were forbidden to run in the college yard or up or down stairs or to call to any one through a college window. Seniors had the power to regulate the dress and the play of underclass members. In those early days fines and penalties for misdemeanors ran from half a penny up to three shillings, while sophomores had their ears boxed before the assembled college by the president or a member of the faculty. The conclusion of the college prayer indicated the enforced humility of students in those days: “May we perform faithfully our duties to our superiors, our equals, and our inferiors.”