HIS PASSION FOR REALITY
Early in this search for the predominant traits of the college man one is sure to find a passion for reality. “We stand for him because he is the real thing,” is the answer which I received from a student at the University of Wisconsin when I asked the reason for the amazing popularity of a certain undergraduate.
The American college man worships at the shrine of reality. He likes elemental things. Titles, conventions, ceremonies, creeds—all these for him are forms of things merely. To him
The rank is but the guinea’s stamp,
The man’s the gowd for a’ that.
The strain of the real, like the red stripe in the official English cordage, runs through the student’s entire existence. His sense of “squareness” is highly developed. To be sure, in the classroom he often tries to conceal the weakness of his defenses with extraordinary genius by “bluffing,” but this attitude is as much for the sake of art as for dishonesty. The hypocrite is an unutterable abomination in his eyes. He would almost prefer outright criminality to pious affectation. Sham heroics and mock sublimity are specially odious to him. The undergraduate is still sufficiently unsophisticated to believe that things should be what they seem to be: at least his entire inclination and desire is to see men and things as they are.
This passion for reality is revealed in the student’s love of brevity and directness. He abhors vagueness and long-windedness. His speeches do not begin with description of natural scenery; he plunges at once into his subject.
A story is told at New Haven concerning a preacher who, shortly before he was to address the students in the chapel, asked the president of the university whether the time for his address would be limited. The president replied, “Oh, no; speak as long as you like, but there is a tradition here at Yale chapel that no souls are saved after twenty minutes.”
The preacher who holds his sermon in an hour’s grip rarely holds students. The college man is a keen discerner between rhetoric and ideas. No decisions are more prompt or more generally correct than his. He knows immediately what he likes. You catch him or you lose him quickly; he never dangles on the hook. The American student is peculiarly inclined to follow living lines. He is not afraid of life. While usually he is free from affectation, he is nevertheless impelled by the urgent enthusiasm of youth, and demands immediate fulfilment of his dreams. His life is not “pitched to some far-off note,” but is based upon the everlasting now. He inhabits a miniature world, in which he helps to form a public opinion, which, though circumscribed, is impartial and sane. No justice is more equal than that meted out by undergraduates at those institutions where a student committee has charge of discipline and honor-systems. A child of reality and modernity, he is economical of his praise, trenchant and often remorseless in his criticisms and censures, for as yet he has not learned to be insincere and socially diplomatic. This penchant for reality emerges in the platform of a successful college athlete in a New England institution who, when he was elected to leadership in one of the college organizations, called together his men and gave them two stern rules:
First, stop apologizing! Second, do a lot of work, and don’t talk much about it!