It is, moreover, time for constructive action on the part of both college and alumni in the matter of directing students to their proper calling. While it is impossible for our colleges to make great men out of indifferent raw material, it is possible to assist undergraduates to discover their inherent bent or capacity. Until the student has made such a discovery, the elective system which is now general in our American institutions is something of a farce. The lazy student, undecided in his vocation, uses it as a barricade through which he wriggles and twists to his degree, or at best is tempted in a dozen various directions, selecting disconnected subjects, in no one of which he finds his chief aptitude. The elective system to such a student is an art-gallery without a key, a catalogue without the pictures. He does not know what he wishes to see.
The Arch between the Dormitory Quadrangle and the Triangle, University of Pennsylvania
This undergraduate ability or inclination is not easily grasped either by himself or by others. It requires study and discriminating sympathy, to extricate a main desire from many incidental likings. Frequently the desire itself must be virtually created. It is a common remark among American undergraduates, “I wish I knew what I was fitted for.” The college is under deep obligation to serve the nation not merely by presenting a great number of excellent subjects, which, if properly selected, will land the young man in positions of leadership and usefulness; but it may and must go beyond this negative education, and assist the student actually to form his life purpose.
American institutions of learning are at present neglecting an opportunity par excellence for presenting different phases of life-work to undergraduates, especially emphasizing the relation of this life-work to the great branches of leadership and modern enterprise. There are hundreds of students being graduated from our institutions to-day who have not decided what they are to do in after life. Even if we assume that these men are prepared in an all-round way for life, it must be realized that they are severely handicapped by the necessity of trying different lines of work for years after graduation before fixing upon their permanent vocation. They not only miss the tremendous advantage of enthusiasm and impulse of the young, but they are also in danger of drifting rather than of moving forward with positive and aggressive activity.
A NEW COLLEGE OFFICER NEEDED
I see no possibility of bringing undergraduates to a decision of their proper life-work without the assistance of a new office in our educational institutions. A man is needed who can treat with students with real human interest, as well as with teaching intelligence. He should not be the college pastor, who is looked upon as a professional religionist, and therefore shunned by many students who need him most, but one definitely and actively responsible for the development of leadership. He should be a close student of college affairs, sympathetic with students, human, high-minded, natural, and keenly alive to humor and social interests. In some institutions this man might hold the leadership in philanthropic, religious, and social-service interests. It might be his privilege to arrange lectures by leading men of the country who were filled with zeal for their callings. The man who could make possible the endowment of such a chair in a great university would be doing a great work for his country.
LEARNING AND INVESTIGATION
But while the American undergraduate may consistently look to the college to furnish him with ideals and with the methods of making these ideals effective, the world looks to the college for definite and advanced information. The college, with its accumulated stores of intellect, its apparatus, and its unusual means for observation, owes the world a debt that none but it can pay. And this is the gift which the college has given, and is still giving, to the world so quietly, so unobtrusively, that the world scarcely dreams of the source of its gain. Let one think of the myriad signs of modern progress by which society is being constantly carried forward. Behind the scenes you will find some quiet, hidden worker in a laboratory or library, an unpractical man perhaps, but one through whom a new realm of possibilities in science or industry or letters have been revealed.
What is the world’s interest in these men—men who are so generally underpaid that much of their best work is made impossible by the necessary outside labors to support their families, who, beyond their own personal satisfaction, have as little recognition as perhaps any workers of modern society? When the world demands expert knowledge in industry, science, literature, and art, the college may well reply, “When are you going to show your gratitude for the self-sacrifice and far-reaching labors of thousands of devoted men whose work is both a challenge and an example to the world to-day?”