Harper Memorial Building and the Law Building, University of Chicago
The American college graduate is quite certain to receive early the impression that efficiency is synonymous with hustling; that modern life, in America at least, as G. Lowes Dickinson has said, finds its chief end in “acceleration.” His danger is frequently in his inability to concentrate, to compose himself for real thoughtful leadership. Many a graduate takes years to get over that explosive energy of the sophomore, which spends itself without result. He takes display of energy for real force. His veins are filled with the hot blood of youth. He has not learned to wait. He is inclined to put more energy and nervous force into things than they demand. Like all youth, he is inclined to scatter his energy in all directions. He is therefore in danger sooner or later of breaking down physically or mentally, or both, and in spending the time which should be utilized in serviceableness in repairing the breakages of an uneconomic human machine. The average American graduate rarely needs Emerson’s advice for a lazy boy, which was, “Set a dog on him, send him West, do something to him.”
College training must give a man permanent idealism. Too often the graduate is inclined to fall into the line of march. He begins to worry and to lose his attractive gaiety and buoyancy. His habits of thought and study are soon buried beneath the myriad details of business life or nervous pleasures. He becomes anxious about things that never happen. His anxiety about future happenings or results takes his mind from present efficiency. He becomes tense and tired and irritable. The attitude of composure and self-assurance which for a time he possessed in college is changed to a fearsome, troubled state, the end of which is the sanatorium or something even more baneful. I have sometimes thought that for a month at least I should like to see the office signs, “Do it now,” “This is my busy day,” “Step quickly,” replaced by the old scriptural motto, “In quietness and confidence shall be your strength.”
How shall our colleges assist American youth to secure the art of relaxation and to obtain the ability to relieve the tension of the workaday world by beneficial and delightful relief from business strain? Such gifts will often be the chief assets of a college man’s training. Business men, and professional men, too, frequently reach middle life with no interest outside their specialties. When business is over, life is a blank. There are no eager voices of pleasant pursuits calling them away from the common round and routine tasks. It is too late to form habits. The rich rewards that education may give in leisure hours are lost, swallowed up by a thousand things that are merely on the way to the prizes that count. This is a terrific loss, and for this loss our colleges are in part at least at fault.
In certain institutions, however, we discover teachers who realize that a real part of their vocation consists in giving to at least a few students habits of real and permanent relaxation.
In a New England college recently I found a professor spending two afternoons a week in cross-country walks with students to whom he was teaching at an impressionable age habits that could be continued after college days. These walks occurred on Sunday and Thursday afternoons. With rigid persistence he had followed the plan of walking with his students for six or eight months, a sufficient time in which to form habits. He explained his object by saying that during his own college career he had engaged in certain forms of athletics which he was unable to pursue after graduation. While his college physical training had benefited him physically, he nevertheless found himself quite without habits of bodily relaxation. He was deprived of apparatus and the opportunity for many out-of-door games, but had found an immense value in walking. In passing on to these college boys this inclination for out-of-door relaxation, he was perhaps contributing his chief influence as a teacher.
Why should not habits of this kind be definitely organized and carried out by the physical departments of our colleges? The opportunity to study trees, plants, and animals, and to become watchful for a hundred varying phases of nature, would furnish no small opportunity for projecting the influence of college into later life.
These tendencies toward relaxation take different forms according to individual tastes. One graduate of my acquaintance finds outlet for his nervous energy in a fish-hatchery. To be sure, he bores his friends by talking fish at every conceivable opportunity, and people frequently get the impression that his mind has a piscatorial rather than financial trend, as he loses no opportunity to dilate upon his latest adventure in trout; and yet his physician was doubtless right in saying that this man, the head of one of the largest financial institutions in America, owes his life as well as his success to this special form of relaxation.
A graduate of one of our large Western technical schools who is at the head of a big steel foundry has a private book-bindery, where with two or three of his friends the life of the world is lost evening after evening in the quiet and delightful air of books and book-making. The best treatises upon book-binding line the walls. Old and rare editions of the most famous masters are carefully sheltered in cases of glass. One end of the room is filled with his printing and binding-machines. He showed me a beautifully bound volume which he himself had printed and bound. As he lovingly fingered the soft leather, reading to me his favorite passages from this masterpiece, I discerned in him a different man from the one I had often seen sitting in his grimy office discussing contracts for steel rails for China and bridge girders for South America. A deeper, finer man had been discovered in the hours of recreation. When asked how he happened to become interested in a matter so antipodal to his life-work, I found that the tendency started in college days, when he had been accustomed to browse among the books in the old college library under the faithful and regular guidance of a professor who once every week took his students to the library with the express purpose of inculcating a love for old and beautifully bound books.
The college, moreover, should start the graduate interest in philanthropic and serious enterprises which in themselves furnish suitable as well as pleasing relaxation to hundreds of American university men. Letters received from scores of recent graduates, many of whom are taking a large share in moral, social, and philanthropic endeavors, state that the beginnings of their interest dated with their experience in the Christian associations, settlement houses, boys’ clubs, and charitable organizations of college days. One man of large philanthropic interest received his first view of a field of opportunity and privilege by hearing a lecturer on a social betterment tell of finding a homeless boy hovering over the grating of a newspaper building on a winter night. The story touched a chord deep in the hearer, who saw this vision of a world until then unknown to him—a world of suffering and hunger and cold; and when in later life it was made possible, he devoted his influence and his fortune to the erection of a home for friendless boys.