“The other man’s point of view, Doctor,” I laughed, as I mounted my wheel and started off.
A week later, the Doctor came out of the house, when I stopped at the well, and as he drew near he shouted,
“I drove over to the college, last Wednesday. What a lazy set of loafers you’ve got over there, to be sure. I was there in the afternoon and saw them reading papers, strolling around the campus and playing all sorts of games. I don’t think they’ll amount to much in the world if they go on at that rate. They seem so aimless! I heard one fellow, with turned up trousers and purple socks that would have given light at night, say to another student, something about throwing books and professors to the dogs—or some such stuff!”
“Yes,” I admitted, “I hear that every day. I know a good many students who care little about classes and text books.”
The doctor, evidently gratified with that admission grunted,
“Then what’s the good of the college—to them. Why doesn’t it send them into the world to be useful?”
“That’s what a good many people say, about us students,” I replied. “But books and professors and courses of study are only a part of what a student gets in our college, sir. It’s a very peculiar situation. I’m older than most of the students, and have had the advantage of a professional training, and so can look on the college through somewhat serious eyes. You would be astounded, for instance, at the tremendous education that the men receive from purely student affairs.”
“Going into the country, when the football team’s won over Princeton, for instance,” sniffed the Doctor, “and tearing down farm fences! Oh, yes, a wonderful education in student affairs? Like one of your boys that came into this village, and in broad daylight went up to the grocery store, there, on the main street, and deliberately took down and carried off a four-foot, patent-medicine thermometer, the folks all the while thinking him to be an agent fellow, come to mend it, or change it. Oh, yes, a wonderful education those fellows get among themselves!”
After the old man had frightened one of his pullets back into the rear of the house, I replied,
“No, I didn’t refer to isolated acts of mischief, Doctor, but to the student enterprises that create ability. Our college is nothing more than wheels within wheels. There are professors and classroom studies for the big, outside wheels, and for the inner wheels, whirling all the time, are the college newspaper, the college magazine, the athletic business, the writing and staging of plays, the dramatic clubs, the musical clubs, the social service enterprises, the political clubs and the religious work. Why, Doctor, those students conduct all those things practically without help from outsiders. You would be astounded at the amount of executive and administrative ability they demand. The students who run the monthly magazine, for instance, must be good editors, fair writers, and managers of astuteness, for it has to pay for itself, at least, and must express literary power. It is the same with the newspaper. That is a business in itself, yet, it is managed, financed and edited entirely by students, many of whom find it difficult to get interested in the routine of the college curriculum. When you multiply these business and serious activities, you find the students actually doing profitable and character-forming tasks outside of the classrooms which few critics of the college take the trouble to notice. Why, it was only a week ago, that a student came into my room and had a talk with me about a new college enterprise that seemed formidable. He was a student who did not care five toothpicks for his studies. He was in difficulties with his physics course, at the time, having failed in it twice, and seeming to be letting his third and last chance for his degree slip past without giving it a thought. The people on the campus, and the professors in the classrooms appraised this fellow as a ‘loafer’ and an ‘idler.’ Yet, that morning he came to me and said that he proposed to start a comic monthly, at ten cents a copy, himself to be editor-in-chief, and the jokes, poems, pictures, designs, the securing of advertisement and subscribers, to be under his general charge and apportioned to willing students. He went off for two days, at his own expense, secured over a hundred dollars’ worth of advertising, and only last week had newsboys selling on the campus a first-class, neatly printed, well-filled, artistically illustrated comic monthly, which, by this time has its regular staff of student artists, poets, joke writers, business managers, and board of editors; it’s a paper which promises to be one of the features of student life. No, Doctor,” I concluded as I felt of my tires, preparatory to taking up my journey towards home, “students may seem shiftless, indifferent, and unenthusiastic on the campus, but when you get behind the laziest of them you are liable to find that they are giving themselves to some sort of character-making work,—contrary to the posters which lead outsiders to think that college life consists of a place where the student sits in the sun on a fence, smoking a pipe with a leashed bull-pup at his feet!”